About
I was born, ostensibly, the daughter of Alex and Connie Tudor Hart. When I was seventeen my mother told me that,in fact, my real father was Ewan Phillips the art dealer with whom she had had a brief affair in the wartime. Alex kindly allowed his name, Tudor Hart, to be used on my birth certificate.
I went to a boring local grammar school where the only thing I did of note was to get pregnant at the age of seventeen. I lived with my boyfriend in Oxford where I helped him write his essays. I subsequently read French at Kings College, London. Here, the style I had acquired at Oxford was dismissed as pretentious, verbose and obscure. I soon changed my ways and enormously enjoyed the course. After graduating I started doing research in the 16th century and went on to a lectureship at Leeds University. My next appointment was at Birmingham University. I also lectured part-time at Warwick. I very much enjoyed teaching and lecturing. I stopped reading from notes and invited questions. I found the students very responsive and couldn’t understand why most of my colleagues seemed to regard them as too time consuming. I published widely on French and English writers including Muriel Spark. I also had two more children.
The Acting Head is my first work of fiction. It reflects the egocentricity of many university lecturers and the prevalent vindictiveness between colleagues. In the 1990s the focus of universities began to change as they became obsessed with making money and enhancing their prestige through research. Students mattered less although the money they generated mattered more.