Livi Michael (1960-*)
Livi Michael was born in Manchester in 1960, and she grew up in the suburbs on a council estate in Ashton-Under-Lyne. She studied English literature at the University of Leeds as a mature student, and in 1997 she achieved a PhD in early working-class writing. Michael has written four adult novels: Under a Thin Moon (1992), Their Angel Reach (1995), All the Dark Air (1997) and Inheritance (2001), all of which have won or have been short-listed for various awards including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the 1997 MIND book of the year/ Allen Lane Award. It can be said that Michael is a novelist in the working-class tradition as her novels are defined by a gritty and stark realism in the depiction of material deprivation, unemployment and social devastation, and all her novels are set in the North of England; among the council estates of urban Manchester where she grew up. However, Michael subverts the androcentric aspect of the working-class tradition as her protagonists are all women, and her novels foreground women whose lives are dominated by poverty, isolation and powerlessness. Two of her novels, Under A Thin Moon (1992) and All the Dark Air (1997), are set in the socio-historical context of the 1980s where the young female protagonists are seen to be subject to a particular virulent form of capitalism: Thatcherism, where economic forces shape and confine their lives; ultimately denying them an identity or a place in the world.
What I find particularly relevant and valuable about Michael’s fiction are her interests in language and history. In an interview with the journal Critical Survey Michael articulates her interest in language when she asks: ‘What happens when people lose their voices in society, either literally, in the sense of the Manchester dialect no longer being spoken, or just in the sense of the language? I am very much interested in language and identity’. This interest in language and identity is evident in Inheritance where a whole chapter is written in Mancunian dialect; and in Under a Thin Moon where dialect is not so much of an issue as is silence, or being inarticulate within the discursive structures of capitalist society. Michael’s work can be seen to be informed by the precepts of historical materialism which illuminates the present through the penetrating lens of the past, and the structure of all her novels usually involves some kind of a temporal juxtaposition. In Under a Thin Moon the narrative alternates, sometimes unnoticeable, between the ten years which separate the mother and daughter characters of Wanda and Coral, and I argue that this historical perspective serves to illustrate the generational reproduction of material deprivation, and that social inequality is inherent in and is reproduced by the capitalist system. In another of the novels, Inheritance, the chronological juxtaposition spans more than one hundred years where the narrative structure alternates between the last two centuries, and this affords an examination of how working-class women’s subject-positions within the social order have changed with the development of capitalism, and how these changes have impacted on their identity.
What I find particularly relevant and valuable about Michael’s fiction are her interests in language and history. In an interview with the journal Critical Survey Michael articulates her interest in language when she asks: ‘What happens when people lose their voices in society, either literally, in the sense of the Manchester dialect no longer being spoken, or just in the sense of the language? I am very much interested in language and identity’. This interest in language and identity is evident in Inheritance where a whole chapter is written in Mancunian dialect; and in Under a Thin Moon where dialect is not so much of an issue as is silence, or being inarticulate within the discursive structures of capitalist society. Michael’s work can be seen to be informed by the precepts of historical materialism which illuminates the present through the penetrating lens of the past, and the structure of all her novels usually involves some kind of a temporal juxtaposition. In Under a Thin Moon the narrative alternates, sometimes unnoticeable, between the ten years which separate the mother and daughter characters of Wanda and Coral, and I argue that this historical perspective serves to illustrate the generational reproduction of material deprivation, and that social inequality is inherent in and is reproduced by the capitalist system. In another of the novels, Inheritance, the chronological juxtaposition spans more than one hundred years where the narrative structure alternates between the last two centuries, and this affords an examination of how working-class women’s subject-positions within the social order have changed with the development of capitalism, and how these changes have impacted on their identity.
