Muriel Hine #NottsWriters

To celebrate the launch of Follow the Moon and Stars here's a new series on #NottsWriters: 

Muriel Hine (1874-1949)

"[Muriel] Hine has won fame and made friends wherever the English language is spoken, through the truth of her characterisations, her ability to see the comedy of life – as well as its tragedy – and her genuine humanity.”

Want an example this ‘comedy of life’? How about this, from A Different Woman (1936):

Mrs Jeremy Waldo had been told that after the operation she would be a “different woman,” but this morning the surgeon had said kindly: “You will soon be feeling yourself.”

After Muriel’s grandfather - the great Nottingham architect TC Hine - retired in 1890, her father George started his own practice in Westminster moving the family to London. But Muriel’s time in Nottingham, where she was born and raised, shaped much of her writing. Several of her novels are set in 1880s Nottingham – or, as she calls it, Lacingham – and they provide insight into life here at that time.

Hine’s semi-autobiographical A Great Adventure (1939) covers the period up to her family’s move to the capital. In the author’s Nottingham, The Park is named The Chase. On The Park/Chase she writes:

All the roads and circles were lined with trees, and the houses backed by irregular gardens that gave the illusion of the country, the result so different from the normal dull rows of the period that Lacingham had cause to be proud of “The Chase”.

The Hine’s Regent Street house, on the corner of Oxford Street near the Playhouse, is also described accurately in the book.

In the novel, Frances is the ruling passion of George Henty’s life, and for her sake he embarks on a get rich scheme. How can a man, handicapped as a junior partner in his grudging old father’s firm and forbidden any initiative, satisfy his wife’s ambition?

Their fine home also features in Hine’s Wild Rye (1931), in which a young woman breaks with expectations.

And in its sequel Jenny Rorke (1932).

Hine had a “gift of infusing life into the characters and an equally striking gift for description.” The Times.

In A Man’s Way (1933) Hine has an author and his unsuitable wife spend most of the year, over which the book’s drama takes place, in Lincolnshire, giving the writer the chance to take us on journeys to Lincoln Cathedral, Tattershall Castle and various other places.

In many of her thirty-five novels, Muriel Hine explored the challenges faced by women, including the fight for the vote.

One of her books, The Best in Life (1918), was made into the silent film Fifth Avenue Models, produced by Universal Pictures in 1924. She also wrote plays and song lyrics.

A Different Woman (1936) is a romance novel about a woman married to an older man ("a rounder and extremely selfish"), who finds herself falling in love with a scientist.

Muriel Hine’s architect father and grandfather worked together on many projects in Nottingham, such as the renovations of the burnt-out Nottingham Castle, which they turned into the first municipal museum of art outside of London.