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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

THE KITE C 1755   One doctor of lightning, floating on his back down a river held his kite high, a sail in the sky of silk (B Franklin once let a kite tow him across a sizeable lake) Sail of wind and rain in diamond-shape at the end of which a child was, too, a kind of lightning sitting on the sill of a window or standing just inside a door will emit a luminous liquid, slightly viscous, which flashed an instant above the gathered crowd honing down into a long string that held a single hand well in place forcing the connected person to quickly learn the rigour that rules over such childish things once mixed with copper, oiled paper, and an impending storm     BENJAMIN FRANKLIN   used books, people, wires, and wax – it was really quite simple –   Franklin wandering lost between it all could nonetheless feel the tiniest sparkling parts alive inside the glass,   and of something given off deep within that somehow let Isaac Newton live Yet Franklin never quite met him and was left to make a meticulous record of the weather, the water, and the stars in the skies ajar from the deck of the ship heading home again, c 1725 It was he who first asserted that all electricity is a single thing and who solved the mystery of the Leyden jar   So, back to the books, the corks, and the wax, while the fresh water from a tea kettle came as a shock or maybe as a memory – a librarian in Latin opening the windows during thunderstorms so that all could read by the lightning     THE ELECTRIC FORTUNE-TELLER   made and marketed by Georg Heinrich Seiferheld, 1757-1818, was just one among a series of ghostly devices made of lights, buttons, boxes, and small Leyden jars all hidden in a miniature temple made of shook-foil shaken and in the hand, a book on which was written in sparks: “This darkness is permissible” So, off went

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

Interview

August 2016

Interview with Daniel Sinsel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Interview

August 2016

In the decade after leaving Chelsea School of Art in 2002, Daniel Sinsel made a name for himself with...

feature

Issue No. 7

Bracketing the World: Reading Poetry through Neuroscience

James Wilkes

feature

Issue No. 7

The anechoic chamber at University College London has the clutter of a space shared by many people: styrofoam cups,...

poetry

January 2015

My Beloved Uncles

Tove Jansson

TR. Thomas Teal

poetry

January 2015

However tired of each other they must have grown from time to time, there was always great solidarity among...

 

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