Output details

The Visitor (novel)

The Visitor is an historical novel that explores the economic and cultural impact on Cornwall’s fishing communities when fishing was replaced by tourism as the dominant industry. Spanning the years 1880 to 1936, the novel sheds light on the female workforce of the pilchard industry. These women, and the industry itself, have been consistently ignored by academic enquiry and fiction alike in favour of Cornwall’s mining heritage. The novel is the result of three years of doctoral research into the fishing industry, the growth of tourism and related advertising material, and the ways in which fictional depictions of these themes, by writers including Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier, engage with history. In response to these investigations, The Visitor is a creative exploration of a turbulent period in Cornish history and the ways in which fiction is in dialogue with other depictions – both textual and pictorial - of a geographical area. This is achieved through experiments in narrative structure. The protagonist, an elderly woman displaced by building work, is suffering from worsening dementia; the novel’s structure reflects this, making radical use of narrative time and deliberately blurring the past and the present. The non-linear narrative is used to 'voice' the displaced Cornish woman, and to physically render the effects of 'the timeless land' identity of Cornwall: a key advertising slogan used by the Great Western Railway in the early decades of the twentieth century that continues to shape perceptions of Cornwall in the public imagination today. In this regard, the novel’s main investigative contribution lies in using narrative form to depict previously under-represented experiences of change