Writing Career
Vansittart’s novels span eras from 2000 BC to AD 1986. For several decades he was acclaimed as England’s greatest living historical novelist. He said of his work, “My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all. This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others.”
In his works, Vansittart expressed his fascination with how time transforms historical facts into fantasy and myth. He said, “I was long impressed by the woeful distinction between the historical Macbeth and Shakespeare's: by the swift transformation of E.M. Forster's very English Mrs. Moore into an Indian goddess. Such phenomena relate very immediately to my own work, in which myth can be all too real, and the real degenerate into fantasy.”
Secret Protocols, his last novel (and planned as such), is set in World War II and was published in 2007.
Read more about this topic: Peter Vansittart
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or career:
“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)