I only discovered the novels of Danielle Steel comparatively recently. I had seen few of her novels transferred to Hollywood and I was not impressed. Far too formulaic and vulgar for me so I dismissed her as like I did Dorothy L Sayers many years ago, but because of the Covid Pandemic and hours of isolation I became addicted to audio books and I happened upon one entitled The Mistress. I had no idea who had written it but it took me into a world that I knew not of to quote the Bard.
The Mistress tells the story of one of those exotic creatures that become the toys of rich and powerful men who cruise the Mediterranean in luxurious liners. Money being no object. It tells in detail what happened to this Mistress of three years when she was summarily and unexpectedly dumped one night by her lover and how she survived without him. The writing had that feeling of verisimilitude that only someone who had known how these rare creatures live could bring so vividly to life. I was impressed.
I listened over the months to many of Ms Steel books and each one surprised me. Steel is is no formulaic writer. Unlike Agatha Christie who gives variations on a theme each of Steele's novels is highly original and well researched. Zoya a novel based on a Russian Countess and the Diaghilev Ballet was astonishingly accurate. The novels are not about ordinary people but strange elusive heroines who like the rest of us have to find a way through life and have wonderful ups and horrific downs. The ending is not always happy.
It took a few books for me to take the simple step of looking Danielle Steel up in Wikipedia. I found this author is a exotic as her heroines and she could well be a character in one of her romances. No half measures for her. She has written over 179 books selling 800 million to a resounding lack of critical acclaim. She has 9 children and 5 husbands, one of which she met while he was in jail. She is fabulously wealthy and so can describe that life style that seems out of reach to many of us. Her heroines run the gamut from rags to riches and back. She knows how the world she describes ticks. Few of us do.
At first I was a bit annoyed at the heroines as I felt that the situations they faced and they way they lurched from fame and fortune to the daily grind of abject poverty unreal but I enjoyed every one. Steel is very good with dialogue and is not afraid to face the realties of life head on. The last book I have listened to was called Remembrance and had the most dramatic description of birth and a murder I have ever come across. Both were alarmingly real and rang very true.
The question is why do I relate to these unusual creatures? Why do I empathise with them? No one could possibly live like that going from a princess to a refugee and back to a place in the highest society could they? Then it hit me, yes they do. This type of woman is around only unrecognised but Steel being one herself, having known riches to rags and back can write about their lives. Writers write about what they know. Steel can describe this life style in detail for those who would like to understand it but will never experience it for themselves.
Today it struck me that my own life would make a magnificent Steel novel. My strange life, and believe me it has been strange, is the stuff that Steel novels are made of. I could be a Steel heroine. I think my life is perfectly ordinary like those around me but it isn't. No wonder I have problems fitting in.
The novel begins with the birth of a daughter in Windsor UK in the middle of the Second World War to a young war bride. The city and surrounds of the Slough trading estate are being heavily bombed. Because her father is away fighting the Germans in North Africa our heroine called Honey lives with her grandparents in Taplow. Honey's father born into the slums of Manchester where his father made coal wagons rose from a ticket clerk at the age of 13 to becoming the Manager of Wembley Stadium, along the way becoming one of the first working class graduates of the London School of Economics and passing out in the top grade in the British Civil Service Exams.
After a 22 year stint in Ceylon Pop returned in to run the British Empire Exhibition 1923 -24 for which the Empire Stadium was built. In 1925 Pop tried to buy the empty unwanted Stadium but missed out to a young Jewish entrepreneur who beat hm to i.t Instead of raising the money through the City the young man just went around the working class areas of Wembley knocking on doors and selling shares at £2 each until he raised the £10,000 required to buy the stadium. However the young entrepreneur was wise and asked Pop to join him in running the Stadium. For 2 years they ran it as a scrap metal yard with the pitch piled high with scrap metal but in the next years they gave the world, the FA Cup, Speedway, the Dogs and in 1948 The Olympic Games.
Pop had four beautiful daughters, Honey's mother being the youngest and Honey was brought up in the most beautiful house,
Thamesway which was packed with glorious works of art of the finest quality. One was an exotic Indian Room which Pop bought from at the end of the Empire Exhibition and had built on to his house.The house had a large designed garden with roses, orchards and tennis court which Pop tended at weekends. Other than the war, the bombs and the tanks outside the gates preparing for D Day one would never guess there was a war on. Honey had three mothers, the three sisters, a grandmother and Pop who stood in for her absent father.
What happens to this privileged child? Her father returns when she was four, not the man that married her mother but a completely different man who had spent his life burying the dead of the war including the German's dead horses which Honey's father thought was the worst. Her father was demobbed but could get no work.
Honey was wrested from the comforts and luxury of her grandfather's home and taken to live in an unfurnished semi detached in Stanmore. A house with no furniture, coupons were needed for the very basic items, you could have a dining table but no chairs or a bed but no curtains. There was little food, little money and 1947 was the hardest winter in centuries. There was no coal only bags of wet slake if you could get it. Honey once doted upon by a loving family was left totally alone as was her mother. Her working class neighbour a Mrs Rutter made it clear that her two sons would not be allowed to play with Honey and she and Honey would never be friends. For the next 9 years Mrs Rutter kept her word. Mrs Rutter died of cancer in the next door house separated by a wall. Honey only once se t foot in the house to gt a ball that had landed on the wrong side of the fence!
As you can see already Honey fits very well into the Steel class of heroines. So what happens to our heroine, she gets abused by a young nun at her Convent School for 5 years but at the age of 12 is rescued by her father who censing her lack of education sends her to a London ballet school where she becomes the pet of the ballet at Covent Garden. Her debut is at a Gala Performance in front of The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.
Because of her attractive speaking voice Honey quickly becomes the voice of Mandy for one of the biggest biscuit firms in UK who exploit her paying just £10 for 5 years of use of her voice on radio and TV.
Next she meets a famous supposedly very gay composer who needs her for an opera he has written and who falls under her spell. She meets and gets to know members of the Royal Family.this relationship carries on over the course of 5 years with unfortunate consequences for both of them. Honey wants to direct in the theatre on on TV but although winning the most prestigious prize in UK for this discipline the is rejected by BBC for being a woman. Two years of unemployment follow until Honey is taken on as a ballet mistress for a London Musical and in a flu epidemic is forced to take over a major role in a revue. She takes London by storm and is the IT girl of London West End Musicals where she it said to be "The best thing in London" Men love her and women would love to be her. She is enchanting.
She is invited by an Australian aboriginal theatre director to accompany him to Apartheid South Africa. Here again she is treated like a goddess while witnessing the horrors of extreme racism all around her especially her visits to the Catholic Cathedral in Johannesburg, the only place in SA where there is no apartheid where she is spat upon by the White boar inhabitants for attending Mass.
Well you get the picture! Honey ends up marrying a brilliant Oxford educated doctor who has mixed race practise in Auckland NZ, She runs a small professional opera ballet company in Auckland New Zealand where she becomes a Woman of the Year for her services to The Arts, gives birth to a brilliant daughter who goes on to be a senior scholar at her University, becomes an international Rhythmic gymnast and goes to live in Italy to get away from her mother. Honey's ballet shows for Children in the school holidays rival audiences for rugby and cricket.
Meanwhile Honey trains the NZ team which wins a Gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. But her husband dies young and Honey catches a super bug in the local hospital that nearly kills her. Her physical illness is mistaken for grief and the drugs given for depression nearly kill her. Left alone and with a highly compromised immune system and a cold turkey withdrawal she slowly recovers and makes and sells DVDs on Amazon.com and now write novels like Danielle Steel.
The above is a précis of my life and is only a tiny part of it. I left out the bit where I escaped being raped by a white South African policeman by climbing out of a second floor window and inching along an edge to another bedroom and much more.
My life has been just as unbelievable as any Steel heroine. I suppose the is why I bond with her heroines as they remind me of me and my life's experience. No wonder I find it hard to fit it. I am the consummate outsider!
DorothyL Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsy reminded me of my husband but Danielle Steel is me! I admire Danielle Steel who wrote The Mistress when in her 70's. The world needs more women like her and dare I say it me who are larger than life, take what life throws at them, struggles against the odds and sometimes, just sometimes succeed!
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