PATRICIA DUNCKER

‍Patricia Duncker is the author of Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in 1996), The Deadly Space Between, James Miranda Barry and Miss Webster and Chérif (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2007). She has written two books of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees (shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1997) and Seven Tales of Sex and Death, and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall. In 2010 she published The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award 2010 and the Green Carnation Prize 2011). Her most recent novel, the critically acclaimed Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), was also shortlisted for the Green Carnation Award 2015. 

‍Soulmining

‍Back in April 2026 I received a delightful invitation from my former colleague at Aberystwyth University, David Ian Rabey, an admired playwright and critic. I live on the side of the mountain above Machynlleth; he lives close to the Dyfi valley estuary. He has a regular music-and-conversation show on our local radio station.

‍This morning I've recorded a new episode of my Radio Dyfi chat show.

‍Patricia, would you be willing to be my guest sometime on this? An hour of conversation and your music choices, prerecorded at a mutually convenient time, before transmission.

‍cariad mawr!

‍So of course the answer was yes, and here comes the show, originally broadcast live on 23rd June 2026. I took the opportunity to talk about the novel I am writing now: The English Girl and the Undertaker. It’s a story of the lover and the loved in many different ways. I based the figure of the undertaker on my memories of my father and the effect he had on other people. For the radio show, “Soulmining,” I chose the music he loved. It felt like a miracle to hear those wonderful voices from the past again.

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‍Listen to the radio show (Mixcloud website) 

‍Resurrecting the Ghost – Victorian Fictions of Revolution:

‍Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & George Eliot, Romola

‍‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa […]’ (Marx & Engels 1848, 2). This arresting

‍statement opens The Communist Manifesto, first published in February 1848,

‍and is usually translated as ‘A spectre is haunting Europe […]’ (Marx &

‍Engels, 1967, 218). ‘Gespenst’ is clearly related to ‘ghost’, and also to ‘Geist.’

‍The initial English translation however, written by a Chartist and Communist

‍revolutionary, Helen Macfarlane, and published in The Red Republican,

‍November 1850, begins with an even more startling statement: ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe’ (Black, 2004,138). This is not as extraordinary as it sounds. Hobgoblins are often represented as helpful but troublesome household sprites, and sometimes in more modern comics and 1980s cinematic versions they belong to the dark creatures, and the shades of the undead. In John Bunyan’s famous hymn, To Be a Pilgrim, originally included in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), the hobgoblin is associated with the satanic. Bunyan’s third verse reads: ‘Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend | Can daunt his spirit | He knows he at the end | Shall life inherit’ (Bunyan, 2009, 231). The hobgoblin, like the Revolution, is double-edged: a dangerous antagonist, but one that must be faced. Hobgoblins are still part of our Marxist-Communist heritage. The Hobgoblin is the paper published by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.  

‍Stalking the Ghost 

‍Charles Dickens and George Eliot in their respective fictions are resurrecting the ghost of Revolution. But do ghosts need to be resurrected? Ghosts are vengeance figures: they deal in justice and warnings. They are always engaged in unfinished  business. Why, if you were dead, would you want to walk the earth again? Only if the dangerous fate of the living or their past deeds required you to act. According to Marx and Engels, that wandering spectre is Communism – the once and future ghost of the Revolution that is still to come, the new order that rises from the overthrow of unequal, oppressive social hierarchies, the unfinished business of the French Revolution. The ghost that still stalks Europe in The Communist Manifesto is the source of terror among those who live comfortably in large houses and behind locked doors. The Revolution embodies their fear of loss and radical change. And those fears were built upon a solid foundation.

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‍Visit the George Eliot Review website

All Rights Reserved. Patricia Duncker 2026