Patricia Saville: (B.1933) Researching Writing Lives

Unfortunately I have come to the end of my collaborative project. It has been amazing to delve so deeply into the life of an individual that I never knew before this project began, but now feel confident in talking about to anyone who cares to listen. I felt that for this last blog post I’ll add as many of the remaining images from the memoir as possible as well as a few memorable quotes that Patricia has left with me.

First and foremost, when I began this research project I was a bit apprehensive thinking if it was for me or not. I am so glad that I chose it come the end of my academic studies at LJMU. Patricia now feels like a part of my life and although sadly I could not track her ancestry, I feel that I did her justice in the writing of my blogs. It was a great shame that I was not able to meet Patricia in person nor track her down but nonetheless it’s been a pleasure to work with such excellent students and collaborate with them to create a project which will no doubt expand. (Might I add it is still in its early stages with many memoirs still to be uncovered).

The most rewarding part of researching writing lives had to have been using social media and the writing lives site in order to spread awareness of this fantastic collaborative project. To my advantage I enrolled in ‘Prison Voices’ a project supervised by both Helen Rodgers and Emily Cuming in my second year at LJMU. This project helped me to really develop my writing skills and use social media to great effect in not only promoting my own blogs but also reading other blogs and commenting on how they compared to my own. I felt it only fitting, as I have done in my previous blog, to finish off this set of blog posts with the few remaining pictures of Patricia in her 40 page memoir and also a few pictures of my own research and the countless hours I spent condensing, proofreading and editing my work. (See below). I’ll finish now with a few images that hadn’t been included in my previous blog posts to an end.

Proofread by Tom Dinsdale.

Written and Published by LJMU Student Brian McCloskey.

Bibliography

Saville, Patricia. “The Daughter I Never Had”, Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies, University of Brunel Library, Special Collection Library, vol. 4.