Melissa Jones | |
|---|---|
| Born | Melissa Lucy Jones 22 March 1965 London, England |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Exeter College, Oxford |
| Occupation(s) | Novelist, journalist and non-fiction writer |
| Years active | 1998– |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Parents |
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| Relatives |
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| Website | melissajoneswriter |
Melissa Lucy Jones (born 22 March 1965) is an English writer based in East Sussex, best known for her third novel, The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson (2010).
Jones was born and raised in London, growing up with her sister, Sadie Jones, in World's End, Chelsea. Her father was the Jamaican screenwriter and poet Evan Jones and her mother was Joanna Jones (née Napper), [1] an English actress. [2] [3]
Jones recalls her childhood home as "lively but bookish"; [4] reading Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) at eight and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) at 11. She expressed that 19th-century novels "form[ed] the backbone" of her literary education. Jones also wrote and illustrated screenplays aged seven. [5]
Jones was educated at Putney High School until her O-Levels before attending Westminster School for sixth form. She subsequently won an exhibition to Exeter College, Oxford, [4] where she read for an MA degree in English Language and Literature. [1]
In 1996, Jones began work on her first novel, Cold in Earth, [4] which follows the television personality Zoë Warren who, at 46, unexpectedly becomes pregnant with a daughter, Beth. When Beth dies, Zoë is emotionally devastated. The novel, told from the perspectives of three journals belonging to different members of the Warren family, depicts Zoë's descent into madness, slowly revealing the true circumstances of Beth's death as it does so. Kirkus Reviews described this descent as "meticulous: bleakness embraced and transmuted into drama by a writer at the top of her craft", deeming the novel "a remarkably well-done first effort" and "near-brilliant". [6] The novel also received favourable reviews from the writers Frances Fyfield and Lottie Moggach, the latter writing for The Sunday Times , as well as being praised in The Sunday Telegraph . [7]
Cold in Earth was published on 30 September 1998 in the United Kingdom by Orion and in the United States by St. Martin's Press. Translations of the novel were published in Germany by Droemer Knaur and Italy by Arnoldo Mondadori. [1] A second edition of the novel was released by Orion on 6 May 1999. [7]
Jones's second book, Sick at Heart, follows the charismatic Alex, describing his unhealthy relationship with his mother during his cildhood in the South of France; cruel treatment of his wife, Susanna; and affair with a 17-year-old girl, Kitty. The novel is told through letters written to the three women. The novel was described as "grimly compulsive" by Helen Rumbelow writing for The Times Metro . [8]
Sick at Heart was published by Orion in 1999 with a second edition of the novel was released on 5 October 2000. A German edition was published by Droemer Knaur in 2003 as Drei grausame Frauen [Three Cruel Women]. [8]
While residing in Castle Hedingham, Essex, Jones wrote her third novel,The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson, published as Emily Hudson in the United States and Canada. The narrative follows Emily Hudson, orphaned by tuberculosis and sent to live with an uncle in Newport, Rhode Island, at the outbreak of the American Civil War. The sensitive Emily, with her pretensions of being an artist, is dismissed by her uncle who wishes to rid himself of her through marriage. When her engagement to the eligible Captain Lindsey falls through, Emily's aesthete cousin William offers her an escape to England. However, William becomes an obsessively controlling patron of Emily's and she plans to set out on her own for Rome. The relationship between Emily and William is modelled after that of Henry James and his Muse, Mary "Minny" Temple. Jones was inspired by Lyndall Gordon's text A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998). Gordon's book quotes Temple's correspondences at length, inspiring the epistolary style of Jones's novel. [5]
Jones's novel was described in the press as "a wonderful book" by The Independent [9] and "no ordinary piece of Victoriana" by The Times . [10] The novel was also reviewed favourably by the Daily Mail , who described it as "[a]bsorbing, thoughtful, romantic" and by Glamour , who called it "a beguillingly erotic read". The writer Fay Weldon praised the work as "elegant, persuasive and engrossing" and Julia Gregson called it her "favourite book in a long while: a spellbinding tale [...] both literary and romantic". [10]
The novel was published on 7 January 2010 by Sphere in the United Kingdom, by Viking and Penguin in the United States, and by HarperCollins in Canada. [11]
| Year | Title | Publisher | Identifier | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | Cold in Earth | Orion | ISBN 978-0-7528-1336-3 | 224 |
| 1999 | Sick and Heart | ISBN 978-0-7528-1415-5 | 232 | |
| 2005 | Interiors for Under 5s | Wiley | ISBN 978-0-470-09333-7 | 216 |
| 2010 | The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson | Sphere | ISBN 978-0-7515-4280-6 | 360 |
Before the publication of her first novel, Jones worked as a script editor and television producer for SelecTV—makers of Birds of a Feather and Lovejoy . [1] She also worked as Sir Peter Cook and Christine Hawley's personal assistant at The Bartlett, University College London (UCL), where she met professor Neil Spiller. [12] The two were married in 1997, have two children and divorced in 2012.
Jones also worked for the consultancy firm KPMG as a proposal writer and as a journalist, writing for The Independent newspaper and the architectural press. [1] [13]