1959 English novel by Malcolm Bradbury
Eating People is Wrong is the debut novel by English author Malcolm Bradbury first published in 1959.
Plot introduction.
Set in provincial academia (as were many of his novels which followed) forty-year-old professor Stuart Treece grew up in a bygone era of the 1930s but now finds it difficult to adapt to the changing attitudes of the 1950s. He then falls in love with post graduate Emma Fielding as he struggles to connect with her, agonising on his morals and his relationship to her. Also in love with Emma is an African Eborebelosa (who already has four wives) and adult working-class student Louis Bates, who is obsessed with her.
Inspiration.
In an unpublished afterword, Bradbury explains ""Eating People Is Wrong" was a novel I had worked on right through the Fifties – indeed from the moment, in 1950, when I went to a redbrick university, a first generation student, and looked in wonderment at what I saw ... If the central character, the 40-year old Stuart Treece, is based on anyone, it is simply a projection of my 20-year old self – though the last thing I intended, when I wrote the book, was to become a professor of literature like him, which either says a lot for the power of fantasy, or the ironic workings of fate."
References.
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