''Hemlock and After'' is a 1952

novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...

British writer British literature is literature from the United Kingdom, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. This article covers British literature in the English language. Anglo-Saxon (Old English) l ...

Angus Wilson Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson, CBE (11 August 191331 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was one of England's first openly gay authors. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ''The Middle Age of ...

; it was his first published novel after a series of short stories. The novel offers a candid portrayal of

gay life Gay Life was a weekly newspaper about LGBT culture, gay culture published by the LGBT Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland. It was distributed in Baltimore, Maryland and throughout the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic re ...

in post-

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

England.

Plot introduction

Bernard Sands, a prominent writer who has been given financial aid to start a writer's colony at Vardon Hall, faces a failing marriage, attempts to come to grips with his homosexuality and lives next door to a

procuress Procuring or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute or other sex worker in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer. A procurer, colloquially called a pimp (if male) or a madam (if female, though the term pimp has still ...

for

paedophile Pedophilia ( alternatively spelt paedophilia) is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Although girls typically begin the process of puberty a ...

Characters in ''Hemlock and After''

* Bernard Sands, the protagonist; a homosexual * Ella, Bernard's wife * Elizabeth, the Sandses' daughter * James, the Sandses' son * Charles, a friend of Bernard; a senior civil servant * Mrs Curry, the Sands's neighbour; a procuress for pedophiles * Hubert Rose, an architect and a pedophile

References to other works

* Angus Wilson said in an interview that the ending of the novel was

Dickensian Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian er ...

.Michael Millgate
"Angus Wilson, The Art of Fiction No. 20"
''The Paris Review'', Autumn-Winter 1957, No. 17.

Trivia

The novel was written in only four weeks.

References

External links

29 September 1952. 1952 British novels Novels by Angus Wilson British LGBT novels Secker & Warburg books Novels with gay themes 1950s LGBT novels 1952 debut novels {{1950s-LGBT-novel-stub