Talking to Marilyn

Talking to Marilyn is a hybrid novel, deliberately crossing genres, combining the Gothic, a tiny dash of historical novel, mystery and biography. It began as a creative response to the life and work of Elisabeth Inglis-Jones – a Welsh woman writer who, until recently, has long been out of print. However, it is also a fictional examination of the lives of three women, years apart, highlighting the expectations of gender, and the ways they fight to overcome those expectations. My essay explores the role gender played in the lives of Elisabeth Inglis-Jones and Marilyn Monroe. It is a fictional account of their lives, based on some four years of research undertaken into the personal and professional aspects of the women they were. The third protagonist, Beth Jordan, is a fictional character, partly based on my own memoir. Fiction is only made stronger by the use of real people, real life, real events. The resulting hybrid genre represents an original contribution to knowledge, both in terms of the years of original research conducted and the form the novel takes.