an appetite for violets - suggested questions for reading groups
If you belong to a Reading Group and want to ask questions it may be possible for me to email you a reply:
Contact: [email protected]
Contact: [email protected]
In the class system of the time, Biddy is socially inferior to Lady Carinna. Yet how does Biddy reveal her differing qualities in other ways?
Biddy recognises that recipes are passed on by women as ‘gifts of love’. Do you agree? Do you cherish any special recipes passed down in your family or associated with certain people or times?
Did the novel make you reconsider the lives your ancestors experienced? Not only the food but the social conditions, transport and work opportunities?
“I didn’t see the influence of Cinderella on An Appetite for Violets until it was nearly finished and then suddenly it was everywhere,” said Martine Bailey in an interview for History Lives. Did you pick up any echoes to the fairy tale in Biddy’s relationship to the cooking fire or Mrs Garland as a gift-giving ‘fairy godmother’?
Biddy’s storytelling ‘voice’ has been praised as authentic to her time and place. Do you think a novel about the past can ever be authentic?
In Paris, Biddy experiences one of the first restaurants in the world. Why do you think this new style of dining (fashionable surroundings, separate tables, a menu, a written bill) revolutionized our way of eating?
Mr Loveday (Keraf) has been torn away from a completely different culture on his island home in Indonesia. Do you feel his non-European way of thinking enriches the book?
Biddy is almost alone in valuing foreign food and culture on the journey. Now that today's food and travel have become far more internationalised, do you think people's minds have opened at a similar pace?
How would you compare the final fates of the characters – Biddy and Carinna, Kitt, Miss Jesmire, Loveday and Mr Pars?
Biddy recognises that recipes are passed on by women as ‘gifts of love’. Do you agree? Do you cherish any special recipes passed down in your family or associated with certain people or times?
Did the novel make you reconsider the lives your ancestors experienced? Not only the food but the social conditions, transport and work opportunities?
“I didn’t see the influence of Cinderella on An Appetite for Violets until it was nearly finished and then suddenly it was everywhere,” said Martine Bailey in an interview for History Lives. Did you pick up any echoes to the fairy tale in Biddy’s relationship to the cooking fire or Mrs Garland as a gift-giving ‘fairy godmother’?
Biddy’s storytelling ‘voice’ has been praised as authentic to her time and place. Do you think a novel about the past can ever be authentic?
In Paris, Biddy experiences one of the first restaurants in the world. Why do you think this new style of dining (fashionable surroundings, separate tables, a menu, a written bill) revolutionized our way of eating?
Mr Loveday (Keraf) has been torn away from a completely different culture on his island home in Indonesia. Do you feel his non-European way of thinking enriches the book?
Biddy is almost alone in valuing foreign food and culture on the journey. Now that today's food and travel have become far more internationalised, do you think people's minds have opened at a similar pace?
How would you compare the final fates of the characters – Biddy and Carinna, Kitt, Miss Jesmire, Loveday and Mr Pars?
the penny heart (a taste for nightshade) - suggested questions for reading groups
1. The Penny Heart token and hair jewellery both embody our need for remembrance. Why do both Grace and Mary feel a special need to cherish these objects? Do we have modern 'memorial objects ' today?
2. Like a quarter of all women convicts Mary had tattoos. This has been described as an attempt to re-claim their bodies from the State. Why do you think convict women wore tattoos?
3. Mary's decision to follow The Life takes her into a lively criminal subculture with a secret language and code of behaviour. How would you compare this to the modern criminal world and those who carry out identity theft today?
4. In the 1790s the French Revolution cast a dark shadow over Britain's class system. Do you agree that Mary (Peg) might have had a completely different life if she had been born into better circumstances?
5. The law of the time meant that only Grace's husband could manage her inheritance. Has this attitude entirely disappeared today?
6. The book's recipes include foods that are adulterated, intoxicating and dangerous. Grace warns the reader that we should be careful what we eat. Is this still the case today?
7. Mary encounters a very different culture when she lives with the Maori in New Zealand and appears to adapt and even admire them. Nevertheless, how do you feel the experience changes her?
8. Mary's insatiable hunger and fantasies about recipes are based on true accounts of starving prisoners. Do you think she was right to eat anything to survive?
9. How much did your sympathies move between Grace and Mary? How did you feel about the ending?
10. Imagine that Mary, Michael and Nan had to stand trial for the crimes (if any) they committed. If you were on the jury what would your verdict be? Do you think a judge would agree?