Books
The Bloody Branch
Man is cruel, but the flowers will take revenge.
'When an awkward young magician is rejected by his more accomplished sister, he declares war upon her whole sex – and even Mother Earth herself – in a campaign of dark magic, sexual violence and humiliation. But as he grows in shapeshifting power, so do his adversaries: Goewin the enslaved footholder, Blodeuwedd, the perfect bride made from flowers, and Arianrhod, the sorceress of the moon. At last trees, beasts, land and water join the epic struggle for life itself.
Filling out the feminist, ecological spirit of these ancient Celtic myths for the first time, The Bloody Branch leads the weird spirits of prehistory through the flower-spangled forest of mediaeval romance – and lets them loose upon the fears and obsessions of the present.
"...boars who gore and more, hounds made to deceive, a hunt for ghosts, a public miracle birth, a royal curse for the ages, the nursing of foals, a bright ring of floral sex and a woman made of flowers, all cracking against the flagstones of castles and whirling on the slopes of densely wooded hills, in a tale crimson with violence, urgent with peril, shining with light, pulsing with magic.
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Like John Cowper Powys, JRR Tolkien and Alan Garner before her, Brigid Lowe finds in the oldest prose stories in British Literature, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a fountain of mystery and meaning, and reanimates one branch here with bewitching energy, dexterity and resonance. Literature licks and nuzzles, and a new old story springs into life."'
(Greyhound Literary)
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Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy
An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
My first and only full-length academic book is a defence of Victorian fiction and the imaginative and moral good it can do. It is also a critique of the academic study of culture, which is increasingly little more than patronising, censorious and futile political grandstanding against the art of times past.
Like David Hume's first book, it "fell dead-born from the press." OUP would not publish it, as they do most books based on successful Oxford doctoral theses, because the reviewers were offended by its assaults on academic orthodoxy. It was angrily attacked and belittled in the TLS, and then fiercely defended in the letters pages. People emailed me with anonymous messages of support and fury. Though it was quoted extensively by James Wood in How Fiction Works, attention soon died down, and it is now barely available. It is politically and aesthetically radical, angry, geeky, and full of an ardent twenty-something's love of fictional craft. You can pay an arm and a leg for it or find it in a library, or I can send you copy until someone gets round to re-issuing it.
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"No light treading here: it would be hard to overstate the exuberance and the scope of Lowe’s indictment... It’s impossible to read this book without wondering what other readers’ reactions will be. Lowe expects little sympathy from her critical opponents: “I confirm their
worst suspicions,” she speculates, “as to my confusion and naivety” (15). Whether her argument is naive I really can’t say, but it isn’t facile; Lowe chases theorists down winding alleys and into fairly remote corners, where the best escape is in the belief that her premises are
all wrong. Many readers will be frustrated with this book that wants to turn the hermeneutics of suspicion back upon the critic, a book that says what seems like the novel’s failure is only a mirror of our own political despair. But if there happen to be any readers waiting for
a critic to take on the theoretical establishment tout court, they’ve found their book."
Daniel Siegel, Victorian Studies
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