I am thrilled to share the news that, in mid-May, my debut book is due to be published. It’s called Writers in Whites: How a group of literary cricketers changed English culture. Based on my three years of PhD research, it’s a nonfiction book about a network of London-based writers who played cricket together for eighty years. It’s available for preorder here!
The cricket clique lasted from the 1880s to the 1960s and included some of the most famous names in English literature: J.M. Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, A.A. Milne, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh, J.B. Priestley, Harold Pinter, and even Michael Morpurgo, who featured in the 1960s as the youngest player. Other key members of the group were major figures in their time and deserve to be better remembered: people like E.W. Hornung, J.C. Squire and A.G. Macdonell.
When I began my PhD, I nervously hoped that my hunch was right and the shared cricket was actually important to these writers. Luckily for me, the evidence far exceeded my expectations. The friendships that they made through playing cricket together were a major part of their lives. And not only did these writers shamelessly use their cricket connections to network and advance each other’s careers, but their shared identity as literary cricketers turned out to be very important to their self-image and their public positions. This mattered because they were, collectively, a very powerful force in the cultural debates of their day.
I realised I’d uncovered a whole new perspective on the English literary world, and English culture more broadly, which had been more or less totally forgotten. In the 1890s, for example, the literary cricketers were at the heart of the thrusting new generation of writers who made literature more accessible through bestsellers such as the Sherlock Holmes stories. And in the 1920s, they were Britain’s dominant literary faction – to the fury of the up-and-coming Modernists, who hated them. (The Modernists’ ultimate victory is one reason why the literary cricketers were forgotten.) The whole story is in Writers in Whites.
Cricket was a symbol of the idealised English gentleman – but it was a symbol that ordinary people could access, if they had enough likeminded friends. Many of the literary cricketers were aspirational writers from the lower-middle classes, who used cricket to help advance themselves socially. But the literary cricket network, by being so meaningful for its participants, could be unfair on writers who weren’t involved – particularly women.
All of the main participants absolutely loved their literary cricket teams. Dozens of them wrote lovingly about literary cricket in their memoirs. The result is that I’ve assembled a huge cache of in-jokes, hilarious anecdotes, human stories, and testimonies of deep and lasting cricket-inspired friendships.
Now I’ve woven them all into a book! It’s been tremendous fun, and I’m very pleased with how Writers in Whites has come together. I very much hope that some of you will enjoy it.
There’s more information on the publisher’s website.