Hilary Bailey – författare

Exploring a host of female parts, rites of passage, love, loss, danger, revelations, strange relationships, the pleasures and pains of growing up female, a fantastic collection of short stories from some of the best women writers today dealing with all aspects of female life from youth to old age.Includes stories from: Hilary Bailey, Sally Cameron, Betzy Dinesen, Souad Faress, Chrissie Gittins, Bonnie Greer, Vicky Grut, Kirsty Gunn, Brigid Howarth, Mizzy Hussain, Geraldine Kaye, Carolyn Patrick, Ellen Phethean, Kate Pullinger, Stella Rafferty, Ravinder Randhawa, Máire Ní Réagáin, Michéle Roberts, Daphne Rock, Elisa Segrave, Kirsty Seymour-Ure, Susanna Steele & Karen Whiteson.

Have you ever wondered what happened after Jane found Mr Rochester, blinded and crippled by the fire that destroyed Thornfield Hall? After the death of his wife freed him to marry his young love, and the destruction of his home and estate forced the two of them to start life anew?Hilary Bailey answers these questions and brings in a plot of her own with this sequel to the Bronte classic. She builds a new world for the new Mrs Rochester, centred on her husband, whose sight is slowly healing and whose attitude is forever changed by being happy in love, and her young son, the joy of both his parents. For ten years after Thornfield Hall and all it stood for crumbled, Jane and Mr Rochester live in wedded bliss, spending their days in an idyllic family unit at the small manor of Ferndean. But when Mr Rochester decides to rebuild Thornfield Hall, Jane fears the ghosts that might be brought back with it, and her fears are not unfounded.Mrs Rochester rewrites Jane's 'Happily Ever After' as a twisted tale of interrupted bliss, haunting pasts, and frightening vendettas that follow the Rochesters to their newly rebuilt home. Old wounds are re-opened, grudges once thought buried resurface, and accusations abound, resulting in a mysterious, fast-paced re-imagining of a timeless favourite.

Spanning 30 years from 1886 to 1917, this novel, first published in 1997, follows the lives of two women from different ends of the social scale. They are reunited as adults and find that their friendship helps them through the bitterness and cruelty of war, and the legacies of their own childhoods.Somewhere between Sarah's Water's The Night Watch and William Boyd's Any Human Heart, friendship transcends class divides and the cruelty of war.

Melanie, Vanessa and Annie have all been betrayed by men - and Melanie is only 13. One day the two abandoned wives and the runaway girl vow the future will bring them love, money and revenge. This is a novel of the '90s, in which deceit, comedy and tragedy intermingle in modern London.

Hannie leads a double life, one as a wife and mother in a Devon manor house, and the other as an International smuggler.In this sharp and witty pastiche of the worlds of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, our heroine brings back cures for cancer from the Brazilian jungle, takes a small child across war-torn Chad, and steals the vital papers which restores a Black family's rights to their Caribbean island.Still, it's not all glitz and glamour for our heroine; all it takes is one wrong move and Hannie risks losing everything: her family, her country home, her lover, and even her life.

Hilary Bailey re-invents the history of the Trojan Wars and tells a new story of Cassandra. Legend has it that Cassandra died at the hand of Clytemnestra, but in this novel she escapes to a farm in Thessaly, and writes her own account of the fall of Troy.On a quiet farm in ancient Greece, an aging widow sits down to write her story. Now that the war is over, and has been for years, and her husband has passed away, and her daughter has married and moved on, she believes it is finally safe to write down the truth of who she is: not Iphianissa of Tolos, a Greek, but rather Princess Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, of Troy.Cassandra's story is a retelling of the Trojan War, from the viewpoint of a young girl, sister of Hector and Paris. In her imaginative and vivid novel, Hilary Bailey recounts the tale of the young prophetess whom legend assumed dead: her childhood tutelage by the Oracle at Delphi; her adoration for her handsome older brothers; and, finally, her escape from embattled Troy. Now, ensconced in the Greek countryside under an assumed identity, Cassandra thinks she's safe to tell her story; little does she know, someone from her fraught past has tracked her down, and she discovers that her story is far from over.First published in 1993 and effortlessly weaving together Cassandra's memories of the war with her present life and the secrets she uncovers, Bailey tells the reader a gripping story of war, love, and human sacrifice.

It is the year 2013. Britain is in a severe recession and poverty is causing mayhem. There has been a sequence of short-lived hung parliaments and, due to terrorist bombs, repressive measures have been brought in by the power-hungry Government which fall especially hard on British Muslims. Global security is also at risk when an election in Iraq brings in a fundamentalist government and it threatens to nationalize its oil. And the friendly partnership between the US and UK is over - destroyed by mistrust.After a new election is called, Lord Gott, Treasurer of the Conservative Party, receives large sums of money from supposedly legitimate sources. This helps secure a majority for his party and Alan Petherbridge becomes Prime Minister. Gott steps in to investigate despite a scandalous personal secret that might get in the way...

Polly Kops is living with her husband, a hero of the alternative society and her twin daughters in a run-down house in the then-seedy area near Portobello Road. Her older, illegitimate son is being reared by her mother. She does not know who her father was. An old lover returns -. In an atmosphere of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, secrets are revealed.

Christmas at the Trents would demonstrate, not by design of course, for me, the outlander, loutish fellow from the North, what life could be like, should be like and, for friends and connections of the Trents, always would be like.

"They call London the Great Whore, and no wonder, seeing so many of her daughters are practising her trade there", says Mary Kelly, who returns to London in the summer of 1888. This is a story of London's Victorian underworld and of the Ripper's last victim - Mary Kelly.

Two stories about romance on the rocks, served with a twist of intrigue. Connections, first published in 2000, follows Fleur Stockley's fight to rebuild her life and business after her boyfriend bankrupts her company and dumps her. Her success comes at a high price as she is drawn into a world of deceit and corruption.Coulter borrows from the Montagues and the Capulets as English heiress Chauncey Fitzhugh travels to the United States to take revenge on the scoundrel who ruined her father financially but instead finds herself falling for him.

First published in 1984, this is the tale of a child of the slums, a murderer's widow, and a convicted prostitute. The tale of Mary Waterhouse who rises from her sordid beginnings in London's underworld to become the wife of a liberal politician - with a shocking secret of his own.

In 1940, Sally Bowles, that spirited character from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, decides to leave her baby daughter with her parents in the country and return to London. There, despite the Blitz, she is determined to live life to the full. Moreover, she wants to find the love of her life, the elusive Theo.Despite Theo's absence, Sally cuts swathes across the cold, charmless, and secretive trio of Briggs, Pym, and Bruno. In the late 1990s, young American academic Greg Peters is trying to piece together the missing links of Sally's life for a new biography.He contacts Bruno in London and finds a man tauntingly evasive, knowledgeable but unwilling to comment. But eventually Bruno thaws, leading Greg on a fascinating and tantalizing trail of snippets, facts, and fantasies about the real Sally Bowles.

First published in 1988, this is the story of Polly Kops, who lives in a charming part of West London, in a big house on a lovely garden square, with her lover and three daughters. From the outside, she looks to be living an ideal life, but upon closer inspection, it's easy to see that Polly's life is far from perfection: the bills haven't been paid in months; the phone has been cut off; her lover is a useless cad; and her house is falling apart. Polly can barely keep it together. It's a marked contrast to her earlier life, married to a wealthy man, and living in financial comfort - that life fell apart the day her husband discovered her affair with Clancy, her cousin and current lover, who would rather buy himself a new suit than pay for electricity or food for the slapdash family.Next door it's a much more civilised arrangement - at least, upstairs, where Anna lives with her husband Geoffrey in quiet, comfortable wedded bliss. Too bad about the downstairs tenant, a single mother of three who rents for a paltry £20 per week and will never leave. Why would she, after all? She has a garden flat, in a lovely area, for next to nothing, and no lump sum of money - no matter how much Anna scrapes together to offer her - will be enough to bribe her to go.As Time Goes By is a look into the lives of two women who, despite living mere metres away from each other, are as different as night and day. Their ambitions may not be the same - Anna wishes desperately for a quiet life with her increasingly distant husband, while Polly grasps at security for herself and her children - but their struggles are surprisingly parallel in certain ways. After all, what's more important to any of us than the people we love most?

London 1991. Journalist Kate Higgins is researching the life of Violet Levine, a woman who dragged herself up from shop girl to MP. Kate's own life becomes entangled with her subject, but as she begins to find the real Violet behind the legend, violent threats and danger emerge.

In this sequel to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, as Flora prepares herself for a ball held by the parents of her fiancé, she's startled to see in the mirror a young man standing behind her. She is alarmed to learn that no one else had seen the man, and after several more sightings, she realizes that it is the ghost of her dead brother, Miles.