We Five

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I fell in love with Elizabeth Gaskell’s secret back-drawer novel We Five in the early nineties when I was looking for a work of Victorian fiction to adapt to the musical stage in partnership with a composer and a lyricist, who have since left the theatre and now raise Jerusalem artichokes. In the course of my investigation into what has happened to Gaskell’s story of five young female friends who fall prey to five young men of predatory purpose, I discovered that since the posthumous publication of Gaskell’s book in 1867, it has — over the succeeding decades — been adapted by three other novelists of some literary stature:

Grady Larson—We Happy Five, published in 1910.

Gail Lowery—Five Saints, Five Sinners, published in 1930.

Daphne Rourke—Songs and Sirens, published in 1952.

Swift upon the heels of the publication of my first novel I Am a Time Bomb in 2000, I tried my own hand at retelling Gaskell’s story (set outside of Manchester, England, in 1859); I placed my version of this story, Five Came Running, in north Mississippi in 1997. It sold respectably well — not quite as well as my first novel, but better than my third, published in 2009, The Dithering Heart.

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