Courtney Collins

Stories about women from disparate times and places leading parallel lives are almost a genre unto themselves. In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a well-known literary example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, connects the lives of three twentieth- century women (one of them Woolf herself) in an intergenerational portrait of queerness and mental illness. In Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, a trio on the Scottish coast are linked over several centuries through themes of violence against women. In Tracey Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, an American woman living in France noses out the story of a persecuted ancestor.

In the cheeky biographical note on the press release for her first novel, The Burial, Courtney Collins expresses a wish that she might one day be ‘a “lady” poet’. If I had read that before reading the novel, I would have been slightly alarmed: with many notable exceptions, poets tend not to make good novelists. It is true that The Burial is finely written, with a lovely ear for the cadences of language, but it also has an urgent narrative drive, along with a strong awareness of place, compelling characters, and a whiff of magic realism to enliven the mixture.