Jane Austen comments on the instability of language in Northanger Abbey (1819). Henry Tilney queries Catherine Morland’s meaning when she uses the word ‘nice’ to describe the book she has been reading, and he subsequently lists the varied and evolving uses of the term, saying, ‘Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! – it does for every thing. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; – people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice’. ^[1]

Jane Austen makes it very clear that she is aware that a single word may possess many different meanings in turn – drawing on past and current meanings. Henry Tilney is referring to historic uses of the word ‘nice’ while to Catherine it simply means good or enjoyable. Although he (and we) can understand both past and present meanings, he also illustrates how it is only the word’s context that indicates which meaning might be applied at any given time. Words are in effect time travellers. It is through context that the author begins to get a chance of embedding the meaning that is specific to them at the given moment.

As a reader, the meaning of a word is impacted by our own age and experiences. Nice might mean polite. Or only be used in the negative, when something is very far indeed from being, well, nice. Quite a lot has been written about the role of the reader in applying meaning. There was a certain school of thought during the early to mid twentieth century that questioned whether a text even has an author until the reader establishes both the meaning of the text and the identity of its creator. Virginia Woolf, writing in 1926, enigmatically suggests that ‘one should read it as if one were writing it’.^[2] This perhaps implies that reading is an act of creation that has almost as significant a role to play as the craft of setting down the sequence of symbols on the page in the first place. And as an author, it’s possible to spiral into fear. If a word’s meaning isn’t fixed and whatever meaning it is given is applied by the reader, how can I, as the author, be certain that my meaning will be conveyed at all? Are you even reading this now as I intended it to be read?

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As an editor, it is my job to closely read an author’s manuscript from the future reader’s perspective. I go through the text line by line asking: does this line say precisely what the author means it to say? Or will the reader confuse that meaning with the ten or so other possibilities?

This is particularly pertinent in historical fiction where a contemporary author is working with material from a bygone age. I have worked with Georgia Piggott on her seventeenth century mystery series for a number of years. Georgia’s setting is always meticulously researched and the mystery is deeply interwoven with the protagonist Alice’s domestic details. This means that as well as writing for a contemporary reader, Georgia is also mindful of the historic terms which bring her character’s early modern era to life. Georgia’s passion is food and domestic history and she’s incredibly experienced at both, so I get the impression she loves quietly seeding in details about food and drink; small ale and medlar tart. Did you know that medlars were a popular fruit in the seventeenth century? They’re very rare now. Inspired by Georgia Piggott’s debut novel Just Causes, I had to travel to a heritage garden to find one.

The words in a historical novel then have a dual role. They must function for a twenty-first century reader, but also encapsulate the past and carry it forwards through time.

Extract from Just Causes:

Catching sight of Daniel in the barn Alice pauses. ‘I hear you’ve brought in the medlar crop?’ She isn’t planning to tell Daniel she has seen his brother’s list. Daniel hardly needs telling, he was there by his side every time David added a name. And for her, the second name down hit her like a judgment. The memory of what might have been is still raw. Thoughts of him frequently haunt her sleep. Forget-me-not.

‘You said the medlars should have been picked long since,’ Daniel is saying, ‘so we made ourselves useful. They’re in the kitchen.’

Alice smiles her thanks. ‘Gramercy, Daniel, we’ll have some in a spiced tart this evening.’

Sam pulls her by the hand into the kitchen and proudly points to the box on the table.

‘You’ve been busy,’ she says, eyeing the heaped fruits. Sam starts pointing out the biggest ones. Vicar Rutland suggests that Sam’s father deliberately chose remote Hillbury because it was cheaper than Sherborne or Dorchester, and probably all he could afford. For her part she wonders if he placed his family where they couldn’t easily raise a hue and cry at his disappearance.

Having discussed how words travel, have you ever thought about how writing in itself is a process of time travel as well? I have written this text in the past, and you as the reader are giving it its final meaning in the future, which is your present. Conceptually, it’s quite a feat. But perhaps after all my original question isn’t quite as big as it seems. The author has their meaning and the reader will find their own. But when asking what precisely does it mean? Out of all the possibilities, there is also a perfect chance that both the author’s and the reader’s will be the same.

Thank you to Georgia Piggott for the use of an extract from Just Causes. JUST CAUSES is published by Crumps Barn Studio and in bookshops now, with the fifth book in the series A Blind Certainty set for release in October. I am the editor of this series.

^[1] Jane Austen, ‘Northanger Abbey’ in The Complete Novels of Jane Austen, first published 1819 (Penguin Books, 1996), p. 1061.

^[2] Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ in Selected Essays, (Oxford University Press, 2008, reissued 2009), p. 64.

At what point does a poem become an artwork, and at what point does an image become text? The concrete poem asks precisely this question.

The Poetry Foundation describes this form of poetry as:

This means that commonly, a poem about a butterfly, for example, might be shaped like a butterfly, creating a cyclical resonance within the work which both calls upon the idea of a butterfly through the use of the written word, but also reduces those words to their core values as marks upon a page to immediately evoke the image of a butterfly. The original concept of the term ‘concrete’ was the application of visual clues which would double the poem’s meaning and give it solidity.

There is a paradox here though. Just poetry can be abstract or allegorical, the meaning of an image can often be dual layered, containing both the manifest meaning (what the work claims to be about) and its latent meaning, which may be hidden or ephemeral. Am I assuming that the poem is about a butterfly simply because the text is shaped like a butterfly in true imitative form?

What would happen if the poem’s words evoked the concept of a butterfly, but the shape those words formed was a flower? Or something else – something that was antithetical to a butterfly?

In Sayta Bosman’s recent collection DREAM LOGIC (Crumps Barn Studio, 2026), she includes several concrete poems. Geometry of Morning is shaped in the form of an egg – an incomplete one made of unruly words which have not quite taken their place. Or perhaps it looks like the contents of the egg on a teaspoon, in the moment before they are consumed. Or does it evoke the ‘dome shape of a kettle’ referenced in line 3? Either way, the words of the poem encompass more than the immediate visual properties of the image. The lines convey the flow of a daily ritual as each stage is completed before the person sets off to begin their day, just as the poem drifts off ‘in | search | of | something’.

Those final lines also breach the standard flow of the western written word which runs from top to bottom. Instead, the final words of this poem are floating away, perhaps released by the completion of the morning ritual, or ultimately untethered from their anchor of meaning because the rigid geometry of routine has been broken. The egg, that symbol of the birth of new day, is left incomplete.

Visually, the idea of an egg conjures images of ideal mornings, perhaps a memory of childhood cracking the lid on a perfectly boiled egg – I have several of these. Or perhaps the harder knowledge that my association between these moments and breakfast are largely shaped by modern TV shows which stream idealised family moments in high definition. After all, my childhood breakfasts were cereal. Boiled egg and toast was a teatime treat.

Recognising the doubling within the poem as both a work of text and image, at this stage the poem transcends the immediate properties of either medium and instead becomes an ideogram. The written word (in western script) is based on the phonetics of the language we speak, but an ideogram bypasses verbal communication to communicate its meaning by imitating the target object in real life. Plato has a lot to say about poetry being an imitation of an imitation – here the principle is taken to the extreme.

But do I truly see Bosman’s poem as a picture of an egg? Or have the opening lines of the poem which begin with the ‘Arch-like | curve of an egg’ planted that image in my mind? Which has the dominant role in affixing meaning – text or image?

And has my statement that this is an egg shaped what you see?

Another form of image-inspired text is ekphrastic poetry, where the poem is a written response to a visual work, commonly a work of art. Reverse-ekphrasis is where an artist takes a poem and responds to it in a visual form, and sometimes the cycle continues, converting into a new poem which is then converted into an artwork and so on. Usually, the text and image are separate works. The Pre-Raphaelites loved doing this, sometimes with their own work and sometimes with each other’s.[2] In Bosman’s concrete poem Geometry of Morning, it is an on-the-page form of ekphrasis where both elements are in a continual process of transformation. The words transform into an image, but the image also deconstructs back into text.

It is both beautiful and destabilising. Just as the words trail off the base of the egg or transform into the stem of a spoon, the meaning of a concrete poem – seemingly so solid and self-evident – can be anything but fixed.

Thank you to Satya Bosman for the use of her poem Geometry of Morning. DREAM LOGIC is published by Crumps Barn Studio and in bookshops now. I am the editor of this collection.

[1] see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/concrete-poetry

[2] I’ve edited several collections which include ekphrastic poetry and I will write more about the relationship between poetry and the visual arts in another article.

"The book's central theme is growing up in the Forest ... of talking about belonging, and growing up in spaces which have changed a lot over time" - Rose Day

Gloucestershire poet Rose Day was on BBC Radio Gloucestershire this weekend talking to Caroline Martin (7 June at about 1hr20 on Listen Again) about finding inspiration in her childhood Forest of Dean, and it set me thinking about how performative reading once was.

In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer describes a woman and her household gathering to listen as one of their group reads aloud from a history of Thebes.

“Withinne a paved parlour, and they thre

Herden a mayden reden hem the geste

Of the siege of Thebes, while hem leste

[Within a paved parlour, they there heard a maiden reading them the story of the classical Greek siege of Thebes, while they listened]

This is not a casual scene. This is a record of an everyday practice before books became a mass produced entity through the print revolution of the late fifteenth century and each person could increasingly read to themselves.

Listening to Rose Day, I was reminded of the same quality, particularly when she read from her poem Boar within her debut collection VOREST:

Down in the dusty depths of Beeches Hurst, the pigs are feeding.

Mooting into the leaves, the sow tends and sniffs her young,

unaware of encroaching commissioners, touting rifles exhibiting the privilege of Vorest law.

She writes and reads, and we listen, sharing her passion for the ‘language and traditions’ of the Forest in its landscape and people, celebrating its nature but not forgetting how people shape the forest too, and understanding in that moment what she means when she says:

I wanted a bitter sweetness to come out of it”

VOREST by Rose Day is published by Crumps Barn Studio, illustrated with woodcut style illustrations by Jeremy Brookes

I have seen Patrick Stewart as Prospero (spellbinding), Simon Russel Beale as a portly and slow-moving Ariel (magnificent) and then later as Prospero, and more recently Sigourney Weaver as Prospero while Mara Huf and Mason Alexander Park stole the show as Miranda and Ariel respectively. In this new production, directed by Richard Eyre, the playtext seems to have been substantially pruned and by doing so, the narrative becomes tighter and gains clarity. Each of the characters have the space to deliver their decisive lines and Kenneth Branagh’s Prospero is no longer a musing tyrant with a dubious habit of sending his daughter to sleep whenever she expresses an inconvenient opinion. Instead he is a devoted father, a puppet master and a man with immense power and the capacity to cause harm to both his enslaved islanders and his old foes, who, surprisingly, makes the right choice.

Shakespeare’s plays frequently explore the expression and abuse of power – from the literal bloodiness of Macbeth to the subtle conniving of Twelfth Night – and The Tempest is perhaps the most enjoyable of all these narratives. It has magic and mystery, peril and escape, and the redemption of an old and bitter enmity in the form of the new love between Miranda and Ferdinand.

Ruby Stokes’s Miranda is the perfect balance of boldness and naivety. I have never before noticed the lines from Prospero: “Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit | Than other princes can, that have more time | For vainer hours and tutors not so careful” (Act 1, Scene 2). In this production, these lines have a double meaning – of conscientious schooling indicating that Prospero has ensured that Miranda is literate, and of the hard reality of her daily toil for survival on their island existence. This moment yields huge meaning for Miranda’s strength and intelligence. She is beset by no girlish innocence. She is young and inexperienced certainly, having previously only shared the limited social circle of her father, Caliban and Ariel, but this has not made her foolish. She questions her father closely and with the bravery of a young woman who has a strong and humorous relationship with her father – steady enough to call out his habit of frequently arriving at the cusp of telling her the story of their origins, and yet wise enough to ask him – why now? What has changed? Her strength gives depth to him, and Prospero grows in sympathy through the mirror Miranda holds up to his parenting.

Amara Okereke is the first female Ariel I have seen, although not the first time I have seen the actor on stage having previously enjoyed her performance as Eliza in My Fair Lady at the Coliseum (2022). After an increasing tradition of Ariels being supported by special effects on stage, ranging from prosthetic wings (Theatre Royal, 2024) to digital doubles (RSC, 2016), Amara Okereke’s Ariel is a return to the relatively traditional staging of a flighty sprite. Otherworldly, she seems subtly inhuman as she watches and manipulates the schemes of the various shipwrecked lords from Milan and Naples, cocking her head curiously, until at the last she is released from Prospero’s magic and becomes painfully but poignantly grounded.

Ultimately, this performance reveals how Shakespeare’s last solo-authored play (he went on to collaborate with a number of the foremost playwrights of his day) becomes a spectacle of release. Prospero is released from his exile and the risk of dying a tyrant; Caliban is released from the monstrous characterisation of previous productions to become the dignified heir to his own island; Ariel is released from the air to become unexpectedly human. And for Miranda and Ferdinand, Prospero has ensured their union is more than a simple marriage between new loves. It is a dynastic marriage between the ruling houses of Milan and Naples on the scale of a royal union for the sake of future peace – something Shakespeare’s early modern audience will have been thoroughly familiar with, having witnessed the union of England and Scotland in 1603 with the death of Elizabeth I and the passing of the throne to her heir, King James VI of Scotland and I of England – and yet prior to this production, not a detail I had fully understood. In this performance, loveable, likable Miranda, with her education and established strength, is fit to rule.

In this play of storms, the final tempest settles and the women are at the heart of it. I can honestly say that watching these transformations on the stage at the RSC in Stratford has been magical.

This article has been written by human hands. I operate a zero AI policy.

Although art historians often portray Gwen as the forgotten woman artist, working in isolation in her rustic house on the edge of Paris, not quite French but not quite British anymore either, this is not strictly true. Firstly, Gwen was not overlooked in her lifetime. The opening piece in the exhibition really brings this home, and I have no doubt the curator of this show, Lucy Wood, was fully conscious of the impact of the piece she had selected. Girl in a Blue Dress (c. 1915) was bought by the National Museum Cardiff during Gwen John’s lifetime, and they have a handwritten letter from her to the Assistant Keeper to prove it. Furthermore, the Tate had already purchased two paintings. For me, this information was particularly impactful. I had always thought of her as an overlooked talent – profoundly inspiring to me personally but neglected by others – but it turns out she wasn’t overlooked, just misdescribed by historians. There’s something quite empowering in learning that.

Gwen was also not working in isolation. Instead, her work forms part of a larger conversation which was coursing through art and literature in the early 20^th century. The art theorist Vernon Lee (1856–1935), writing at a similar time, was likewise fascinated by the challenge of understanding the origins and basis of her own perspective of beauty. Observing how things which are not perfect can yet become beautiful, Vernon concluded that the Keats quote ‘“beauty is truth, truth beauty” – either limits the meaning of truth or extends the meaning of beauty to include a great many unbeautiful items’ (Vernon Lee & Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 1912). For these women, therefore, beauty is not limited to the symmetrical perfection espoused earlier in the Victorian period by critics such as John Ruskin or those artists who form part of the Gwen John story – her brother Augustus John and the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Running deeper than the concept of beauty in Gwen John’s work, however, is the concept of seeing. In considering herself a person who sees beauty where others see strangeness, Gwen is immersing herself deep in the conversation about the empirical nature of looking. The power of the artist’s gaze is never more evident than in the many previously unseen works from Gwen’s sketchbooks. And it is through her sketchbook work that Gwen begins to reveal the profound reach of her investigation into the act of looking itself.

Sitting behind the congregation at her local Parisian church, Gwen’s sketches and studies of fellow parishioners are a collection of beautifully coloured (there’s that word again, but there’s no better way to describe the range of burgundies and lavenders in gouache) observations of people who share a space and an emotional common ground at a church service and yet are contained within their own inner thoughts. They are focused upon what Gwen would term their ‘interior life’, and she, positioned just behind the subjects who are all wearing the hats of a civilian or the headwear of a nun, watches them. These people who are not artist’s models and are not there for her sake reveal something in their self-contained interiority. In her sketches, Gwen finds beauty in her exclusion and reveals beauty in their presence. It is the artist’s gaze manifest on the page, and as such becomes a portrait of the artist herself in this space, attending a church service, finding her own interior life by watching those people and drawing their outlines.

It is no wonder the exhibition curator was particularly keen to hang these sketchbook works alongside Gwen’s more famous oil paintings for the first time. And it is in her sketchbooks that Gwen would also write about her creative process. In one, written towards the end of her life, a series of notes record her exploration of the process of thought. She asks herself ‘What is the question?’ and then notes her struggle with concentration – the challenge of keeping her mind from growing weary and wandering off. She reminds herself: ‘If I find my thoughts straying, bring them back to the point with the question: ‘what is my subject?’ [paraphrased, I wish I’d copied the page and I need to revisit to do that]

These are not idle questions. These are the crux of her practice – the questioning of her mind and its functions as she strives to capture her vision. The subject is both the philosophy of thought and the object of study. For her, painting is not simply a means of imitating what is termed ‘reality’. It is an imitation of the act of looking in itself, and the concept of what it is to be a ‘seer of strange beauties’.

Gwen John: Strange Beauties is at the National Gallery Cardiff until 28 June 2026

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