Valerie Doulton

Valerie’s Lockdown Project

‘This is a play script I wrote for the annual conference of the Martineau Society in London in 2018. It was performed by Matilda Thorpe as Harriet Martineau and Catherine Harvey as Charlotte Bronte, as an after dinner entertainment for the society.

The script is letters and articles written by both of these remarkable women, and my own writing of their relationship. The title describes what it is, – ‘Harriet Martineau & Charlotte Bronte a Sketch of Their Relationship’.

I chose to self-publish this in lockdown, so that I would complete the whole process by seeing my script in print.

I got a great feeling of accomplishment when it was finally published.

Lockdown enabled me to concentrate on myself and get things done that I needed to accomplish, achieve, and finalise. This was possible because it threw me into so much time on my own. This was very strange, as normally I am in the company of other people a lot.

My G.P.’s phoned me just at the right time. I realised in the conversation I had with them that I wasn’t taking enough exercise. So I then built a considerable programme of walking, swimming when it was allowed, and yoga into my daily routine. So this meant there was not a negative impact for me in terms of mental health and wellbeing.

My creative project definitely has helped me to improve my mental health and wellbeing, both in general and during the pandemic. As I mentioned above, I gained a huge sense of achievement from publishing this script. Then when people started to buy it I gained an even bigger sense of achievement. This was then augmented by the extremely good feedback I have received from those who have now read my script.

I developed my Live Literature Company into Podcasts. This has been an extremely successful development for my company. We have had a very wide range of audience listening to The Live Literature Company podcasts, and the feedback from those listening has been terrific. We publish LLC podcasts through Podbeam.’

If you would like to read Harriet Martineau & Charlotte Bronte for yourself, it can be found here.