Linda Appleby is a native of Cambridge with Welsh roots. She was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge, where she was awarded both 6th Form prizes for English Literature and went on to gain a top Philosophy first of her year at Somerville College, Oxford. She taught English at North Warwickshire College and ran the college’s language policy. Retiring on the diagnosis of a psychotic illness, she has devoted herself to her writing. She has written two novels and three poetry collections, as well as short stories and articles. Linda was married to Professor John Appleby. They have two sons.
Harvest was forged in an emotional melting-pot. The author was walking one morning in the grounds of Fulbourn Psychiatric Hospital near Cambridge, having been held under a section of the Mental Health Act. This meant that she could not leave the hospital grounds. But the grounds were extensive and from the edge of the gardens she could see Fulbourn windmill standing on the brow of Fulbourn Hill. She reached deeply inside herself and came up with a poem which, though she had always written, came from a place more serious and resonant than ever before.Gradually, other poems followed, detailing her interaction with the mental health system and the consoling connection she felt with the natural world. On her release, she finished the collection: songs, sonnets, hymns and ballads, a readable variety of responses to harsh experience.
‘I’ve still got the diaries somewhere, scruffy from stuffing them in my handbag and covered with something just short of scribble. Five or six diaries. What was happening was earth-changing. I felt compelled to record it as faithfully as I could…’
Linda Appleby
During the 1990s, Linda Appleby, a brilliant university academic, kept a journal that combined a sharp sense of what was happening in – and in some ways, to – the world with an unintentional timeline of her own mental breakdown, which culminated in a stay at Cambridge’s Fulbourn Hospital in the early 2000s. Current events from the period – the long war in the former Yugoslavia, the hostages in Lebanon, the Good Friday Agreement, the rise of Tony Blair – are intertwined with Linda’s professional, domestic and romantic concerns. The result is an honest and unapologetic record of a keen mind gradually broken by a combination of external and internal pressures.
Through it all, Linda’s care for her children, her strong religious faith – which, though Christian, extends to a more than passing interest in both Muslim and Hindu beliefs – and academic grounding in philosophy somehow saved her from total disaster, and the book ends with a few entries in the mid-2000s, when Linda, having left Fulbourn, had been able to make a new life for herself in Cambridge. A few of the poems she was writing at the time are included in the book.
I will be selling ‘Harvest’ to my beloved church comrades I am holding a ‘sign and sell’ session after the 8.00 clock and 10 o’clock services, that is, at 9.00 and 11.00am.Venue: St. James’ church, ........
You may be interested to know that the front cover of ‘Harvest’ was based on a design by my father, Howell Jones. It shows the view from my window across Lime Kiln Hill on the edge of Cambridge. So ........
my latest publication is ‘the good breast’ in ‘literature today’, june 2022 edition. it is available from Lulu.my poem takes the idea of the earth mother’s relation to the universe. it is a feeding ........
for Desmond Tutuso that, moral philosophers, is what happiness is a place of value, equality and respect free from pain and tension Tutu’s virtues relaxed but circumspect no disadvantages, no cat ........
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