Lorna Sage’s memoir begins with a vivid image of her and her grandfather: ‘Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on’. Theirs was a relationship that, despite his self-absorption, his drunkenness and his womanizing, would be the most formative influence in Sage’s life. Shortly before she died she wrote of him as ‘my great familiar and mentor, the making of me’. It was her grandfather who named her after R.D. Blackmore’s heroine Lorna Doone, and it was her grandfather who taught his precocious three-year-old granddaughter how to read, sparking a relationship with literature that would last a life time.

The time and place of Sage’s upbringing were also potent forces in forming her character. Hanmer in the 1940s and 1950s was a claustrophobic place where all were supposedly born into their station in the world and expected to remain there, especially women. Sage’s memoir is infused with a wry remembrance of 1950s attitudes to women, a remembrance that is tinged with fury when she recounts her experience as a sixteen-year-old determined to continue her education after the birth of her daughter. Despite her frequent references to her timidity Sage proves herself to be marvelously courageous, insisting in the face of outraged and affronted nursing staff that she be discharged from hospital so that she can take her A-levels, a courage that is quietly supported by her unmarried female teachers. Sage’s feminism continued to inform her work as an academic, leading her to specialize in the work of women writers.

Her death met with great sadness, not simply the grief of family and friends morning the passing of a woman with tremendous wit and joie de vivre, but also for what might have been.