After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

Recounts the entertaining, shocking story of the involvement of Thea Morton, an unconventional woman, with both sex and the Roman Catholic Church

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

Reviews

[Tracy Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy British novel I read in college. Starts out with the main character makes a dinner and all the food items are purple, then her main man calls to say he's eating out! It's a weird, but very interesting book is what I remember. I would read it again.