For the last couple of years, the end-of-the-year posts about the best books and the reading year in review have been one of my favorite things about blogging. I've seen some wonderful lists in the last week, which have added to my TBR lists and reminded me of books I already own (too many still unread). Such an amazingly rich variety of books and blogs and readers!
Of course I can't resist adding my own. So here is my list of favorite books for the year, in the order in which I read them:
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas. Dumas' masterpiece, the story of Edmund Dantès' escape from the notorious Chateau d'Ilf, to claim a fortune and seek retribution from those who imprisoned him unjustly and stole more than his freedom.
Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton. A story of dragons, in a setting that evokes Anthony Trollope's novels - who could ask for anything better? I've enjoyed Jo Walton's "Small Change" series, but this is far & away my favorite of her books.
Miss Cayley's Adventures, Grant Allen. A recent graduate of Girton, but with no money and no prospects, Lois Cayley decides on a whim to travel around the world. She shows great skill and determination in making her way, with each successful adventure funding the next. A charming and surprising novel from 1899.
Hot Water, P.G. Wodehouse. I still think this 1932 story, set mainly in a seaside town in Brittany, is the quintessential Wodehouse - without a doubt one of his best.
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson. I am not surprised that this book has shown up on so many people's lists. It's an amazing book, a chronicle of a series of lives - of a single person - that take many different courses, all of which end in death and then a return to the moment of birth, setting in train another life. Hard to describe, impossible to put down.
An Open Book, Monica Dickens. This was the year I discovered her books, thanks to blog reviews. My favorite so far is her autobiography, which has at its heart her loving, eccentric family and their home in Bayswater.
The Clever Woman, Charlotte M. Yonge. This novel addresses the issue of "surplus women" in Victorian society, and while presenting traditional ideas about woman's place, it is surprisingly progressive in other ways, particularly in the inclusion of characters with physical disabilities.
Eighty Days, Matthew Goodman. Bucking traditional ideas about women's place, not to mention their capabilities, two women set out in 1889, in a race to be the first to circumnavigate the globe. Goodman's book is not just an account of their different travels, but also a social history of the America they left, and an overview of the world they rushed through. It inspired me to read Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and I'm also looking forward to reading the books the travelers themselves published after their race ended.
The Three Miss Kings, Ada Cambridge. Three sisters in 1880, orphaned at their father's death, use their scant inheritance to travel from their small seaside town to Melbourne. There they meet a fairy godmother who brings them into society, and each finds love. I have more of Ada Cambridge's many books lined up for 2014.
Lucy Carmichael, Margaret Kennedy. A young woman left at the altar finds work and solace for her heart-break at an eccentric art institute. There is a loving friendship at the heart of this story, and a happy romance at the end. I also have more of Kennedy's books lined up for the new year.
Raw Material, Dorothy Canfield (Fisher). A series of vignettes, an interesting and entertaining mixture, from her own life and those of friends and family, set mainly in Vermont and France. Canfield Fisher wanted to give her readers "a score of instances out of human life, which have long served me as
pegs on which to hang the meditations of many different moods."
Book of Ages, Jill Lepore. This biography of Jane Franklin Mecom, the sister of the great Benjamin, is also a social history of colonial and revolutionary America, particularly the place and roles of women. And it's an exploration of how fragmentary the historical record - the archives - can be for women, children, people of color, the poor, the uneducated, the marginalized, whose stories are all too easily lost to history.
The Vicar of Bullhampton, Anthony Trollope. In this under-appreciated novel, Trollope takes on the question of "fallen" women, in a typically complicated plot that also involves a murder trial, a clash over a new Methodist chapel, and a woman who doesn't want to marry the man everyone else keeps telling her she should.
Right now I am reading (for approximately the 43rd time) Jane Austen's Emma, which I probably won't finish this year (Frank Churchill has just oozed into Highbury), but I am going to include it as one of my favorite books, not just of 2013 but of all time.
This has been a rich year of reading, and of sharing books here and on the excellent blogs listed over on the right. I wish you a Happy New Year - one filled with wonderful books and friends to share them with.
Monday, December 30, 2013
Friday, December 27, 2013
Returning to Thornyhold
Thornyhold, Mary Stewart
We had a holiday from work on the day after Christmas, and I spent much of it reading this book. Technically, I was re-reading it, though it felt like a new book. I had no memory of the story, which I first read 20 years ago. At the time, all I knew of Mary Stewart was her Merlin books. I have a vague memory of coming across this at the library and deciding to try something different. I also vaguely remember thinking "Meh" and reading nothing further. Over the last couple of years, inspired by blog reviews, I have finally tried her suspense novels again, and enjoyed them very much. Though I already have several on the TBR stacks, the posts I read about Thornyhold moved it to the top of the list. I was lucky enough to find a copy through Paperback Swap, which arrived on Christmas Eve - perfect timing.
Reading this book now, I can't imagine why I was originally so unimpressed with it. Maybe it's just that reading tastes change over the years. It is certainly a quieter story than her earlier books. But then it has so many things I like in a story. There is white magic, practical magic, based partly in herbals. There is a lovely old house, full of books (though few biographies), to be explored and claimed. There is a black cat with a white chest and paws, to be called home, and a collie to be rescued. There is even a touch of Merlin, not just in the quiet magic, but in a visit to Stonehenge, the monument raised to Ambrosius (not his brother Uther, as someone says here). And as soon as I met William, a young motherless boy, I had a good idea where this story was going to go. But as always, the fun was in getting there.
The narrator here is Geillis Ramsey, whose mother's family has witching lines."I suppose that my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out." Gilly is named for her godmother, Geillis Saxon, her mother's cousin. Her childhood is bleak, growing up with a cold, reserved mother in a dreary coal-mining village. Gilly is hungry for love, for beauty, for friends. Only rarely does she see the elder Geillis, who brings her all that. When her mother dies, Gilly gives up her place at university, returning to the village to care for her father. It is only after his death, facing a life with no money and few prospects, that she learns of her cousin's death, and of her will. Geillis has left Gilly her home in the Wiltshire countryside, Thornyhold, and all its contents.
When she arrives at her new home, Gilly finds that her cousin was well-known in the community as an herbalist, even some say a witch. Exploring the house, she finds a locked room, the stillroom, with plants, medicines, and even poisons (carefully labeled and locked away). A neighbor, Agnes Trapp, asks urgently about a recipe book that Miss Saxon promised her. She is equally urgent in pressing her company and her cooking on Gilly, who begins to resist both. A more welcome visitor is William, who helped the older Geillis with her gardens in exchange for medical care of his ferrets. His visits become daily, and Gilly learns that he is usually left to his own devices while his father, a novelist, is working.
As Gilly spends her days exploring and then organizing her new home, there are unsettling events - vivid dreams, surprising messages, unexpected encounters, flashes of knowledge - that seem to be leading her toward something (even at times, driving her). I found myself trying as she was to put the pieces together, to figure out what was happening, wondering what was real, what might be illusion. This is a gentle story, with a quiet romance, winding to a very satisfying resolution (with even a touch of farce at the end). It's one I know I'll be reading again - I think it is a perfect example of "comfort reading."
We had a holiday from work on the day after Christmas, and I spent much of it reading this book. Technically, I was re-reading it, though it felt like a new book. I had no memory of the story, which I first read 20 years ago. At the time, all I knew of Mary Stewart was her Merlin books. I have a vague memory of coming across this at the library and deciding to try something different. I also vaguely remember thinking "Meh" and reading nothing further. Over the last couple of years, inspired by blog reviews, I have finally tried her suspense novels again, and enjoyed them very much. Though I already have several on the TBR stacks, the posts I read about Thornyhold moved it to the top of the list. I was lucky enough to find a copy through Paperback Swap, which arrived on Christmas Eve - perfect timing.
Reading this book now, I can't imagine why I was originally so unimpressed with it. Maybe it's just that reading tastes change over the years. It is certainly a quieter story than her earlier books. But then it has so many things I like in a story. There is white magic, practical magic, based partly in herbals. There is a lovely old house, full of books (though few biographies), to be explored and claimed. There is a black cat with a white chest and paws, to be called home, and a collie to be rescued. There is even a touch of Merlin, not just in the quiet magic, but in a visit to Stonehenge, the monument raised to Ambrosius (not his brother Uther, as someone says here). And as soon as I met William, a young motherless boy, I had a good idea where this story was going to go. But as always, the fun was in getting there.
The narrator here is Geillis Ramsey, whose mother's family has witching lines."I suppose that my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out." Gilly is named for her godmother, Geillis Saxon, her mother's cousin. Her childhood is bleak, growing up with a cold, reserved mother in a dreary coal-mining village. Gilly is hungry for love, for beauty, for friends. Only rarely does she see the elder Geillis, who brings her all that. When her mother dies, Gilly gives up her place at university, returning to the village to care for her father. It is only after his death, facing a life with no money and few prospects, that she learns of her cousin's death, and of her will. Geillis has left Gilly her home in the Wiltshire countryside, Thornyhold, and all its contents.
When she arrives at her new home, Gilly finds that her cousin was well-known in the community as an herbalist, even some say a witch. Exploring the house, she finds a locked room, the stillroom, with plants, medicines, and even poisons (carefully labeled and locked away). A neighbor, Agnes Trapp, asks urgently about a recipe book that Miss Saxon promised her. She is equally urgent in pressing her company and her cooking on Gilly, who begins to resist both. A more welcome visitor is William, who helped the older Geillis with her gardens in exchange for medical care of his ferrets. His visits become daily, and Gilly learns that he is usually left to his own devices while his father, a novelist, is working.
As Gilly spends her days exploring and then organizing her new home, there are unsettling events - vivid dreams, surprising messages, unexpected encounters, flashes of knowledge - that seem to be leading her toward something (even at times, driving her). I found myself trying as she was to put the pieces together, to figure out what was happening, wondering what was real, what might be illusion. This is a gentle story, with a quiet romance, winding to a very satisfying resolution (with even a touch of farce at the end). It's one I know I'll be reading again - I think it is a perfect example of "comfort reading."
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Two volumes of Christmas stories
Angela Thirkell, Christmas at High Rising
Anthony Trollope, The Christmas Stories
I had my heart set on the new Virago collection of Angela Thirkell's short stories as soon as I first read about it. I was lucky enough to get my copy last month, and I've been saving it for Christmas reading. The volume of Anthony Trollope's Christmas stories was part of a trove of Trollopes I found last year at a used-book store. I had set it aside for holiday reading as well, but though I did read some of the stories, in the hustle and bustle of packing for the unexpected move a year ago, I never finished it. Given the overlap in their stories of Barsetshire, it seemed right to be reading these two together for Christmas this year.
The Thirkell stories were not, contrary to my expectations, all Christmas stories. Nor are they all set in High Rising, the village that gives its name to the first of Thirkell's Barsetshire novels. Those that are set there feature Laura Morland, one of my favorite characters in the series. With Laura comes her school-boy son Tony. I know he is a favorite of many Thirkell fans, but I find him really exhausting - much as his mother and her friends do. At least here he comes in smaller doses than in the novels. Among the stories, I particularly enjoyed "Christmas at Mulberry Lodge," an account of a late-Victorian Christmas, which is probably autobiographical. It reminded me of Thirkell's memoir Three Houses. I also enjoyed the last, "A Nice Day in Town," published in 1942, which describes a day Laura Morland spends in war-time London, coping with crowds and the shortages of practically everything she hopes to buy.
The Trollope stories are one volume of five published by The Trollope Society, collecting all his short stories. This volume includes a forward by Joanna Trollope, and an Introduction by Betty Breyer. Both make it clear that Trollope was ambivalent about the kind of Christmas stories that came out every year in special holiday editions of magazines and papers. He refused to write "humbug" stories with just "a relish of Christmas." As he wrote in his Autobiography (which I seem to quote a lot), he wanted his stories "to instil others with a desire for Christmas religious thought or Christmas festivities - or, better still, Christmas charity." But there would be no Ghosts of Christmas, nor any Tiny Tims, in his stories. Actually, sometimes there isn't all that much of Christmas itself in his "Christmas" stories. "Catherine Carmichael: or, Three Years Running" is a very bleak story set in New Zealand, where the holiday marks the years a miserable, mistreated wife passes in what really amounts to a forced marriage. "Christmas at Thompson Hall" is about a wife dragging her husband home from France for a good old-fashioned family Christmas with her family at the Hall, but it's set mostly in a Paris hotel, where the wife is trying to get a mustard-plaster for her hypochondriac husband. "Not If I Know It:" concerns a brother spending the holiday with his sister and her husband; a casual question sets off a tiff that threatens to ruin Christmas for everyone. I could think of a couple of similar scenarios in past family Christmases. This volume also includes Trollope's only short story set in Barsetshire, "The Two Heroines of Plumplington."
I found one of the stories particularly interesting, because of its setting and its theme. In "The Widow's Mite," published in 1863, Nora Field is preparing for her marriage to a young American, Frederic Frew, who will take her home with him to Philadelphia and an America torn by the Civil War. (Frederic is apparently exempt from the Army.) Nora sees the effects of war daily, from her uncle's rectory in Cheshire, where mills are standing empty because no cotton is coming from the southern states. Her aunt and uncle are absorbed in relief work, raising funds simply to keep the mill hands in food and clothing. Nora has done what she can to help, out of her limited means, but she feels that she must do more, before she can leave her home for a new life in America. It is a serious consideration of true charity, of obeying the Scriptural commands to be generous in caring for those in need, particularly at Christmas. I liked and admired Nora for what she was trying to do. The story also of course allowed Trollope a few digs at America and Americans. He set another story in Civil War America, "The Two Generals," about a family in Kentucky divided over the war. This undoubtedly drew on his experiences touring the United States in 1861, which he chronicled in North America.
These two books made perfect Christmas reading, and I know I'll come back to them again, particularly to Trollope, for his slightly acidic perspective on the holidays.
Anthony Trollope, The Christmas Stories
I had my heart set on the new Virago collection of Angela Thirkell's short stories as soon as I first read about it. I was lucky enough to get my copy last month, and I've been saving it for Christmas reading. The volume of Anthony Trollope's Christmas stories was part of a trove of Trollopes I found last year at a used-book store. I had set it aside for holiday reading as well, but though I did read some of the stories, in the hustle and bustle of packing for the unexpected move a year ago, I never finished it. Given the overlap in their stories of Barsetshire, it seemed right to be reading these two together for Christmas this year.
The Thirkell stories were not, contrary to my expectations, all Christmas stories. Nor are they all set in High Rising, the village that gives its name to the first of Thirkell's Barsetshire novels. Those that are set there feature Laura Morland, one of my favorite characters in the series. With Laura comes her school-boy son Tony. I know he is a favorite of many Thirkell fans, but I find him really exhausting - much as his mother and her friends do. At least here he comes in smaller doses than in the novels. Among the stories, I particularly enjoyed "Christmas at Mulberry Lodge," an account of a late-Victorian Christmas, which is probably autobiographical. It reminded me of Thirkell's memoir Three Houses. I also enjoyed the last, "A Nice Day in Town," published in 1942, which describes a day Laura Morland spends in war-time London, coping with crowds and the shortages of practically everything she hopes to buy.
The Trollope stories are one volume of five published by The Trollope Society, collecting all his short stories. This volume includes a forward by Joanna Trollope, and an Introduction by Betty Breyer. Both make it clear that Trollope was ambivalent about the kind of Christmas stories that came out every year in special holiday editions of magazines and papers. He refused to write "humbug" stories with just "a relish of Christmas." As he wrote in his Autobiography (which I seem to quote a lot), he wanted his stories "to instil others with a desire for Christmas religious thought or Christmas festivities - or, better still, Christmas charity." But there would be no Ghosts of Christmas, nor any Tiny Tims, in his stories. Actually, sometimes there isn't all that much of Christmas itself in his "Christmas" stories. "Catherine Carmichael: or, Three Years Running" is a very bleak story set in New Zealand, where the holiday marks the years a miserable, mistreated wife passes in what really amounts to a forced marriage. "Christmas at Thompson Hall" is about a wife dragging her husband home from France for a good old-fashioned family Christmas with her family at the Hall, but it's set mostly in a Paris hotel, where the wife is trying to get a mustard-plaster for her hypochondriac husband. "Not If I Know It:" concerns a brother spending the holiday with his sister and her husband; a casual question sets off a tiff that threatens to ruin Christmas for everyone. I could think of a couple of similar scenarios in past family Christmases. This volume also includes Trollope's only short story set in Barsetshire, "The Two Heroines of Plumplington."
I found one of the stories particularly interesting, because of its setting and its theme. In "The Widow's Mite," published in 1863, Nora Field is preparing for her marriage to a young American, Frederic Frew, who will take her home with him to Philadelphia and an America torn by the Civil War. (Frederic is apparently exempt from the Army.) Nora sees the effects of war daily, from her uncle's rectory in Cheshire, where mills are standing empty because no cotton is coming from the southern states. Her aunt and uncle are absorbed in relief work, raising funds simply to keep the mill hands in food and clothing. Nora has done what she can to help, out of her limited means, but she feels that she must do more, before she can leave her home for a new life in America. It is a serious consideration of true charity, of obeying the Scriptural commands to be generous in caring for those in need, particularly at Christmas. I liked and admired Nora for what she was trying to do. The story also of course allowed Trollope a few digs at America and Americans. He set another story in Civil War America, "The Two Generals," about a family in Kentucky divided over the war. This undoubtedly drew on his experiences touring the United States in 1861, which he chronicled in North America.
These two books made perfect Christmas reading, and I know I'll come back to them again, particularly to Trollope, for his slightly acidic perspective on the holidays.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
The bells of Fenchurch St. Paul
The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers
I have had a re-reading of this book in mind for a while, and when I remembered that it opens on New Year's Eve, I added to my Christmas reading list. I had forgotten, though, that it ends in the Christmas season, a year later, so it fits in even better than I expected. I don't know that I could ever pick a single favorite among the Peter Wimsey novels, but this would definitely be at the top of the list, with Strong Poison and Gaudy Night.
I expect that this is a familiar story to many people, so I won't say too much about the plot, which revolves around a stolen emerald necklace and a body that turns up in someone else's grave. The story takes Peter to the Fen Country - which is actually familiar territory not just to Peter, raised in Norfolk, but also to his creator. Catherine Kenney in her book The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers argues that this is one of the books where Sayers drew on her own background, as she did in Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night. Sayers grew up in the East Anglia village of Bluntisham, where her father was the rector of a church much like Fenchurch St. Paul, in this book. Kenney notes that buried in the churchyard there are members of the Thoday family, a name Sayers borrowed for important characters in her story.
One reason I enjoy this book so much is that it's the last of Peter's adventures on his own, with Bunter. It takes place presumably while Peter is involved with Harriet Vane, but she doesn't play any part in the story (even in a throwaway line, as in Murder Must Advertise). Nor does it have the other familiar characters from the series, except Peter's brother-in-law Charles Parker, Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard, who appears later to help on the London end. (I always miss Peter's wifty mother the Dowager Duchess). Instead we get a vivid cast of local characters and criminal outsiders. I am particularly fond of the Venables, the Rector and his wife, who offer Peter hospitality at the Rectory after an accident to his car leaves him stranded with Bunter late on a snowy afternoon. While the Rector is a true shepherd to his small country flock, if a rather woolly-minded one at times, Mrs. Venables plays an equally important part in parish affairs and in their marriage. It's a lovely partnership,
This book also shows Peter at his best. On the very evening of his arrival, after a long and tiring day, he agrees to spend all night helping to ring in the New Year with the parish ringers, who have been left short-handed, rather than see the Rector disappointed. He is a perfect guest, polite, unobtrusive, undemanding. When a body is discovered improperly buried in the churchyard, he happily returns to the village to help investigate. He is equally at home in the Rectory and the village. He makes friends with Hilary Thorpe, recently orphaned and left impoverished after a magnificent emerald necklace was stolen many years ago from a guest at her family's home. (She wants to be a writer, and I did wonder if perhaps later Peter introduced her to Harriet.) When floods overwhelm the Fens, he and Bunter stay to help care for the villages taking refuge in the church, for more than two weeks. Peter even tries to go to the rescue of a man caught in the flood waters; he has to be restrained at the water's edge. True, he does spend a couple of days that Christmas home at Duke's Denver, irritating his sister-in-law the Duchess and her guests, but given how annoying Helen Denver is, I can hardly blame him for that. We also get glimpses into the lighter side of the ever-correct Jeevesish Bunter, whose music-hall impersonations are popular in the Rectory kitchen, and who helps Peter defraud the Royal Mail to acquire a vital letter.
This story takes place over the course of a year, with crucial events occurring at New Year's, Easter, and Christmas. I think that makes it unique among the Wimsey stories, which generally cover a shorter period. It is also unique of course because of the role the church bells play in the story. Like many readers, I knew nothing about change-ringing before reading this book. I had no idea that there are people who believe "the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations." I have to admit that I don't fully understand all the details of the bell-ringing, and as many times as I've read this book, I am still sometimes as lost as Wally Pratt. But in the end Dorothy L. Sayers makes their role in the central mystery as clear as the proverbial bell.
I have had a re-reading of this book in mind for a while, and when I remembered that it opens on New Year's Eve, I added to my Christmas reading list. I had forgotten, though, that it ends in the Christmas season, a year later, so it fits in even better than I expected. I don't know that I could ever pick a single favorite among the Peter Wimsey novels, but this would definitely be at the top of the list, with Strong Poison and Gaudy Night.
I expect that this is a familiar story to many people, so I won't say too much about the plot, which revolves around a stolen emerald necklace and a body that turns up in someone else's grave. The story takes Peter to the Fen Country - which is actually familiar territory not just to Peter, raised in Norfolk, but also to his creator. Catherine Kenney in her book The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers argues that this is one of the books where Sayers drew on her own background, as she did in Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night. Sayers grew up in the East Anglia village of Bluntisham, where her father was the rector of a church much like Fenchurch St. Paul, in this book. Kenney notes that buried in the churchyard there are members of the Thoday family, a name Sayers borrowed for important characters in her story.
One reason I enjoy this book so much is that it's the last of Peter's adventures on his own, with Bunter. It takes place presumably while Peter is involved with Harriet Vane, but she doesn't play any part in the story (even in a throwaway line, as in Murder Must Advertise). Nor does it have the other familiar characters from the series, except Peter's brother-in-law Charles Parker, Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard, who appears later to help on the London end. (I always miss Peter's wifty mother the Dowager Duchess). Instead we get a vivid cast of local characters and criminal outsiders. I am particularly fond of the Venables, the Rector and his wife, who offer Peter hospitality at the Rectory after an accident to his car leaves him stranded with Bunter late on a snowy afternoon. While the Rector is a true shepherd to his small country flock, if a rather woolly-minded one at times, Mrs. Venables plays an equally important part in parish affairs and in their marriage. It's a lovely partnership,
This book also shows Peter at his best. On the very evening of his arrival, after a long and tiring day, he agrees to spend all night helping to ring in the New Year with the parish ringers, who have been left short-handed, rather than see the Rector disappointed. He is a perfect guest, polite, unobtrusive, undemanding. When a body is discovered improperly buried in the churchyard, he happily returns to the village to help investigate. He is equally at home in the Rectory and the village. He makes friends with Hilary Thorpe, recently orphaned and left impoverished after a magnificent emerald necklace was stolen many years ago from a guest at her family's home. (She wants to be a writer, and I did wonder if perhaps later Peter introduced her to Harriet.) When floods overwhelm the Fens, he and Bunter stay to help care for the villages taking refuge in the church, for more than two weeks. Peter even tries to go to the rescue of a man caught in the flood waters; he has to be restrained at the water's edge. True, he does spend a couple of days that Christmas home at Duke's Denver, irritating his sister-in-law the Duchess and her guests, but given how annoying Helen Denver is, I can hardly blame him for that. We also get glimpses into the lighter side of the ever-correct Jeevesish Bunter, whose music-hall impersonations are popular in the Rectory kitchen, and who helps Peter defraud the Royal Mail to acquire a vital letter.
This story takes place over the course of a year, with crucial events occurring at New Year's, Easter, and Christmas. I think that makes it unique among the Wimsey stories, which generally cover a shorter period. It is also unique of course because of the role the church bells play in the story. Like many readers, I knew nothing about change-ringing before reading this book. I had no idea that there are people who believe "the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations." I have to admit that I don't fully understand all the details of the bell-ringing, and as many times as I've read this book, I am still sometimes as lost as Wally Pratt. But in the end Dorothy L. Sayers makes their role in the central mystery as clear as the proverbial bell.
Friday, December 20, 2013
Murder in Colleton County
Christmas Mourning, Margaret Maron
I always enjoy picking out some Christmas-themed reading around this time of year. Somehow I often end up reading mysteries, whose violent themes might seem a bit at odds with the season. Many of my favorite mystery authors have set books around the holidays. Is there a connection, I wonder, with the old tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas? Or maybe it's a recognition of the stresses that can come with the holidays, among family and friends as well as complete strangers. I hope it's not just to market the books as Christmas presents.
Margaret Maron has set two of her books featuring Deborah Knott, a district court judge in North Carolina, at Christmas. The first, Rituals of the Season, takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas, as Deborah is preparing for her wedding to Major Dwight Bryant, the chief deputy in the Colleton County Sheriff's Department. This second book is set a year later, just before their first wedding anniversary. As the book opens, word spreads through the community that Mallory Johnson, a high school senior, has been killed in a car wreck. She is the latest of several teens to die in such accidents, some caused by underage drinking. But Mallory's death hits especially hard: she was a cheerleader, beautiful and popular, the Homecoming Queen, heading off to college and a bright future after graduation. Mallory was on her way home from a party when she died, and the autopsy shows alcohol and drugs in her system, No one can believe it; her grief-stricken father insists that someone must have spiked her drink. Then two young men are found shot outside their trailer home, one a fellow student of Mallory's at the high school. Is there a connection between these deaths?
Deborah is a lower-court judge who does not handle serious crimes like murder, but she usually finds a way into Dwight's investigations. In this case, her entrée is her family. She is the youngest of twelve children, and the only daughter. Several of her nieces and nephews attend the local high schools and knew Mallory. Through them she learns more about the girl, her family and friends, and about the accident itself. Meanwhile Dwight and his team are investigating the two shooting victims.
Woven through the investigations are the family's preparations to celebrate not just Christmas but also the couple's first wedding anniversary. Deborah initially collects much of her information during a morning spent baking Christmas cookies with her nieces, a long-standing family tradition. The Knott family, headed by the 81-year-old patriarch Kezzie, is a close-knit one, with farms and homes clustered together on family-held land. Dwight's family also lives nearby, and there is a lovely sense of family in these stories. Though the murder cases (and the victims) are never completely forgotten, they are balanced with the fun of choosing presents, bringing in a tree and mistletoe, watching Christmas movies with the nieces and nephews, and eating fruitcake soaked in the moonshine that Mr. Kezzie has supposedly stopping bootlegging. There is also a touch of romance, with the anniversary coming up. To borrow a phrase from Dorothy L. Sayers, this might qualify as a Christmas story with detective interruptions, one I thoroughly enjoy. I like the settings of these stories so much, both the fictional Colleton County and the Knott and Bryant families. I was hoping for a new one this year, which, yes, would have made a wonderful Christmas present, but it looks like I'll have to wait.
I always enjoy picking out some Christmas-themed reading around this time of year. Somehow I often end up reading mysteries, whose violent themes might seem a bit at odds with the season. Many of my favorite mystery authors have set books around the holidays. Is there a connection, I wonder, with the old tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas? Or maybe it's a recognition of the stresses that can come with the holidays, among family and friends as well as complete strangers. I hope it's not just to market the books as Christmas presents.
Margaret Maron has set two of her books featuring Deborah Knott, a district court judge in North Carolina, at Christmas. The first, Rituals of the Season, takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas, as Deborah is preparing for her wedding to Major Dwight Bryant, the chief deputy in the Colleton County Sheriff's Department. This second book is set a year later, just before their first wedding anniversary. As the book opens, word spreads through the community that Mallory Johnson, a high school senior, has been killed in a car wreck. She is the latest of several teens to die in such accidents, some caused by underage drinking. But Mallory's death hits especially hard: she was a cheerleader, beautiful and popular, the Homecoming Queen, heading off to college and a bright future after graduation. Mallory was on her way home from a party when she died, and the autopsy shows alcohol and drugs in her system, No one can believe it; her grief-stricken father insists that someone must have spiked her drink. Then two young men are found shot outside their trailer home, one a fellow student of Mallory's at the high school. Is there a connection between these deaths?
Deborah is a lower-court judge who does not handle serious crimes like murder, but she usually finds a way into Dwight's investigations. In this case, her entrée is her family. She is the youngest of twelve children, and the only daughter. Several of her nieces and nephews attend the local high schools and knew Mallory. Through them she learns more about the girl, her family and friends, and about the accident itself. Meanwhile Dwight and his team are investigating the two shooting victims.
Woven through the investigations are the family's preparations to celebrate not just Christmas but also the couple's first wedding anniversary. Deborah initially collects much of her information during a morning spent baking Christmas cookies with her nieces, a long-standing family tradition. The Knott family, headed by the 81-year-old patriarch Kezzie, is a close-knit one, with farms and homes clustered together on family-held land. Dwight's family also lives nearby, and there is a lovely sense of family in these stories. Though the murder cases (and the victims) are never completely forgotten, they are balanced with the fun of choosing presents, bringing in a tree and mistletoe, watching Christmas movies with the nieces and nephews, and eating fruitcake soaked in the moonshine that Mr. Kezzie has supposedly stopping bootlegging. There is also a touch of romance, with the anniversary coming up. To borrow a phrase from Dorothy L. Sayers, this might qualify as a Christmas story with detective interruptions, one I thoroughly enjoy. I like the settings of these stories so much, both the fictional Colleton County and the Knott and Bryant families. I was hoping for a new one this year, which, yes, would have made a wonderful Christmas present, but it looks like I'll have to wait.
Monday, December 16, 2013
The Vicar of Bullhampton
The Vicar of Bullhampton, Anthony Trollope
Somehow in a year rich with reading the Victorians, I nearly missed my favorite. I've read his friends (William Thackeray and George Eliot), a fellow author he commended (Rhoda Broughton), one who admired his books (Henry James), and other contemporaries (Charlotte Yonge, Ada Cambridge and Mary Elizabeth Braddon), not to mention modern authors whom he inspired (Jo Walton and Angela Thirkell). And I've managed this year to collect a biography of him and several of his books, including two titles that I didn't immediately recognize: The West Indies and the Spanish Main, which Paul Theroux calls "one of the ten essential travel books," and Marion Fay.
I have been keeping an eye out for this book ever since I read Trollope's autobiography. He devoted several pages to it, first to a complaint that its publication as a serial was transferred to a second-rate magazine because Victor Hugo was behind on a serial that he was writing, which took precedence. Trollope was not happy to be displaced, because he considered Hugo's later works "pretentious and untrue to nature," and because "I should be asked to give way to a Frenchman." He also spent several pages explaining - defending really - his story, which has as a central character a fallen woman, a "castaway," to use his term. He even reprinted his preface to the novel, where he excused bringing "the condition of such unfortunates" to the attention of "the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us." But then he went on to write, "For the rest of the book I have little to say. It is not very bad and it certainly is not very good." He even claimed to have forgotten much of the plot! All of this made me curious to read it, and I was happy to finally come across a copy this summer.
I am so glad that I chose this one off the Trollope section of the TBR stacks. I completely disagree with his assessment of it - it's actually really good. He sets his story very precisely in Wiltshire, in a small town "seventeen miles from Salisbury, eleven from Marlborough, nine from Westbury, seven from Haylesbury, and five from the nearest railroad station . . ." The Vicar of the title is Frank Fenwick, and he's a peach. So is his wife Janet, the mother of their four children, "gay, good-looking, fond of the society around her, with a little dash of fun, knowing in blankets and corduroys and coals and tea . . ." The Fenwicks have as their nearest neighbor the local squire, Harry Gilmore, the Vicar's dearest friend from college days. Neither the Vicar nor the Squire is popular with the Marquis of Trowbridge, who owns most of the parish. He considers Gilmore a mere squatter, and the Vicar next door to an infidel who preaches Divine forgiveness rather than wrath (and lacks proper respect for the aristocracy). It is a matter of grief to the Marquis and his daughters that the living in their town is not in their hands, but belongs to Mr. Fenwick's Oxford college. They have turned their faces away from the Vicar and his church, to favor the local Methodist minister, Mr. Puddleham, with whom the Vicar is carrying on polite clerical war.
The Vicar is the link between three different stories that Trollope weaves together in this novel. The first concerns Harry Gilmore, who has fallen in love with Mary Lowther, a friend of Mrs. Fenwick staying at the vicarage. Mary doesn't love him, but she is being pressured to marry him not just by the Fenwicks but also by her Aunt Sarah, back home in Loring. Trollope is at pains to point out many, many times that women are made for marriage, it is their only possible career, and a spinster like Aunt Sarah has a "starved, thin, poor life," compared with married women like Mrs. Fenwick. Mary finds this concerted pressure very difficult to resist, but she does not love Harry Gilmore.
The second story concerns the Fenwicks' neighbor, a farmer named Trumbull, who is murdered in the course of a robbery. Sam Brattle, the son of the local miller, comes under suspicion, because he has been hanging around with two trouble-makers, strangers in the parish, one ominously nicknamed "The Grinder." The Brattle family is already under a cloud, because their daughter Carry was seduced by a soldier and now, cast off by her furious father, is generally known to be a prostitute. Trollope writes about this in rather veiled terms, never saying that she actually works the streets. As the murder investigation proceeds, a bit like "CSI: Bullhampton," the Vicar discovers that Carrie has returned to the area. She has even become engaged, unfortunately to the second suspect in the murder. Mr. Fenwick takes it upon himself to rescue Carry from her life of shame, even as she is implicated in the murder. Still, he hopes to reconcile her with her family. Both he and his creator argue that her sin is small in comparison to other sins, committed more frequently and more openly, which are easily passed over. They also note that the shame and guilt fall on the woman in such cases, not on her partner. There are frequent allusions to Mary Magdalene and other sinful women in the Bible. Both Trollope and his Vicar express their concern about "How is the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened?" Mr. Fenwick struggles to open that door for Carry, as the murder case plays out.
The third story is the most fun, to my mind. The Marquis is so disgusted with the Vicar, particularly after he takes up Carrie Brattle's cause, that he gives the Methodist minister a plot of land on which to build a new chapel. And that plot of land is smack in front of the Vicarage gates. Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick are horrified and outraged as the new brick Salem rises practically in their garden. They have no recourse, though, until Mrs. Fenwick's brother-in-law, a brilliant London barrister, takes a hand. The solution is found through research in the bishop's chancery archives, which delighted me!
Trollope as usual balances these three interweaving stories perfectly. In fact, sometimes the change between them caught me off-guard, when I wanted to stay with Mary, or with Carry, to find out what happened next. On the whole, though, this isn't one of Trollope's sunniest books. There is a lot of unhappiness and suffering, with Harry Gilmore's pursuit of Mary Lowther dragging on and on, and with the Brattle family, not to mention poor Farmer Trumbull murdered. But there is also much to like here, starting with the Vicar. His preaching so offends the Marquis by proclaiming that since all are sinners - even marquises, not to mention vicars - all stand in need of grace and forgiveness. There is much consideration of faith and observance in this book, as well as what I think is Trollope's only depiction of Holy Week services. The Vicar practices what he preaches, but he isn't a plaster saint. His interest in Carry is not in fact completely pastoral, he is very aware of her physically, though he doesn't admit that to himself. His wife points out that he enjoys picking fights a little too much, and he is as much to blame as the Marquis for their conflict. I admire what Trollope was trying to do through him, to address a real problem in society, by emphasizing the humanity of the outcasts, and asking what in practical terms could be done to help them.
The edition I read is a Dover reprint of the 1870 first edition, with lovely engravings but no notes or supplementary materials. I learned from the Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope that this was one of his least-successful books. The Saturday Review actually called it "third-rate"! According to the editor of the Companion, this book has "never been much read or appreciated." That's a shame. In my opinion, this isn't one to miss.
Somehow in a year rich with reading the Victorians, I nearly missed my favorite. I've read his friends (William Thackeray and George Eliot), a fellow author he commended (Rhoda Broughton), one who admired his books (Henry James), and other contemporaries (Charlotte Yonge, Ada Cambridge and Mary Elizabeth Braddon), not to mention modern authors whom he inspired (Jo Walton and Angela Thirkell). And I've managed this year to collect a biography of him and several of his books, including two titles that I didn't immediately recognize: The West Indies and the Spanish Main, which Paul Theroux calls "one of the ten essential travel books," and Marion Fay.
I have been keeping an eye out for this book ever since I read Trollope's autobiography. He devoted several pages to it, first to a complaint that its publication as a serial was transferred to a second-rate magazine because Victor Hugo was behind on a serial that he was writing, which took precedence. Trollope was not happy to be displaced, because he considered Hugo's later works "pretentious and untrue to nature," and because "I should be asked to give way to a Frenchman." He also spent several pages explaining - defending really - his story, which has as a central character a fallen woman, a "castaway," to use his term. He even reprinted his preface to the novel, where he excused bringing "the condition of such unfortunates" to the attention of "the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us." But then he went on to write, "For the rest of the book I have little to say. It is not very bad and it certainly is not very good." He even claimed to have forgotten much of the plot! All of this made me curious to read it, and I was happy to finally come across a copy this summer.
I am so glad that I chose this one off the Trollope section of the TBR stacks. I completely disagree with his assessment of it - it's actually really good. He sets his story very precisely in Wiltshire, in a small town "seventeen miles from Salisbury, eleven from Marlborough, nine from Westbury, seven from Haylesbury, and five from the nearest railroad station . . ." The Vicar of the title is Frank Fenwick, and he's a peach. So is his wife Janet, the mother of their four children, "gay, good-looking, fond of the society around her, with a little dash of fun, knowing in blankets and corduroys and coals and tea . . ." The Fenwicks have as their nearest neighbor the local squire, Harry Gilmore, the Vicar's dearest friend from college days. Neither the Vicar nor the Squire is popular with the Marquis of Trowbridge, who owns most of the parish. He considers Gilmore a mere squatter, and the Vicar next door to an infidel who preaches Divine forgiveness rather than wrath (and lacks proper respect for the aristocracy). It is a matter of grief to the Marquis and his daughters that the living in their town is not in their hands, but belongs to Mr. Fenwick's Oxford college. They have turned their faces away from the Vicar and his church, to favor the local Methodist minister, Mr. Puddleham, with whom the Vicar is carrying on polite clerical war.
The Vicar is the link between three different stories that Trollope weaves together in this novel. The first concerns Harry Gilmore, who has fallen in love with Mary Lowther, a friend of Mrs. Fenwick staying at the vicarage. Mary doesn't love him, but she is being pressured to marry him not just by the Fenwicks but also by her Aunt Sarah, back home in Loring. Trollope is at pains to point out many, many times that women are made for marriage, it is their only possible career, and a spinster like Aunt Sarah has a "starved, thin, poor life," compared with married women like Mrs. Fenwick. Mary finds this concerted pressure very difficult to resist, but she does not love Harry Gilmore.
The second story concerns the Fenwicks' neighbor, a farmer named Trumbull, who is murdered in the course of a robbery. Sam Brattle, the son of the local miller, comes under suspicion, because he has been hanging around with two trouble-makers, strangers in the parish, one ominously nicknamed "The Grinder." The Brattle family is already under a cloud, because their daughter Carry was seduced by a soldier and now, cast off by her furious father, is generally known to be a prostitute. Trollope writes about this in rather veiled terms, never saying that she actually works the streets. As the murder investigation proceeds, a bit like "CSI: Bullhampton," the Vicar discovers that Carrie has returned to the area. She has even become engaged, unfortunately to the second suspect in the murder. Mr. Fenwick takes it upon himself to rescue Carry from her life of shame, even as she is implicated in the murder. Still, he hopes to reconcile her with her family. Both he and his creator argue that her sin is small in comparison to other sins, committed more frequently and more openly, which are easily passed over. They also note that the shame and guilt fall on the woman in such cases, not on her partner. There are frequent allusions to Mary Magdalene and other sinful women in the Bible. Both Trollope and his Vicar express their concern about "How is the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened?" Mr. Fenwick struggles to open that door for Carry, as the murder case plays out.
The third story is the most fun, to my mind. The Marquis is so disgusted with the Vicar, particularly after he takes up Carrie Brattle's cause, that he gives the Methodist minister a plot of land on which to build a new chapel. And that plot of land is smack in front of the Vicarage gates. Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick are horrified and outraged as the new brick Salem rises practically in their garden. They have no recourse, though, until Mrs. Fenwick's brother-in-law, a brilliant London barrister, takes a hand. The solution is found through research in the bishop's chancery archives, which delighted me!
Trollope as usual balances these three interweaving stories perfectly. In fact, sometimes the change between them caught me off-guard, when I wanted to stay with Mary, or with Carry, to find out what happened next. On the whole, though, this isn't one of Trollope's sunniest books. There is a lot of unhappiness and suffering, with Harry Gilmore's pursuit of Mary Lowther dragging on and on, and with the Brattle family, not to mention poor Farmer Trumbull murdered. But there is also much to like here, starting with the Vicar. His preaching so offends the Marquis by proclaiming that since all are sinners - even marquises, not to mention vicars - all stand in need of grace and forgiveness. There is much consideration of faith and observance in this book, as well as what I think is Trollope's only depiction of Holy Week services. The Vicar practices what he preaches, but he isn't a plaster saint. His interest in Carry is not in fact completely pastoral, he is very aware of her physically, though he doesn't admit that to himself. His wife points out that he enjoys picking fights a little too much, and he is as much to blame as the Marquis for their conflict. I admire what Trollope was trying to do through him, to address a real problem in society, by emphasizing the humanity of the outcasts, and asking what in practical terms could be done to help them.
The edition I read is a Dover reprint of the 1870 first edition, with lovely engravings but no notes or supplementary materials. I learned from the Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope that this was one of his least-successful books. The Saturday Review actually called it "third-rate"! According to the editor of the Companion, this book has "never been much read or appreciated." That's a shame. In my opinion, this isn't one to miss.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
A family together & apart
Together and Apart, Margaret Kennedy
As I was finishing the second of two fantasy novels that I read recently, I had a sudden craving for a story about regular people, something mid-20th century, rooted in everyday life. I have that kind of book on the TBR shelves, but then we had an early Christmas holiday on Friday afternoon, and what better way to celebrate it than with a visit to a bookstore? After reading and loving Lucy Carmichael earlier this year, I have been meaning to look for more of Margaret Kennedy's books. This Dial Press edition caught my eye, and the back-cover blurb intrigued me:
The story begins with a letter from Betsy to her mother, announcing her impending divorce from her husband Alec. She gives several reasons, such as Alec's surprising success writing lyrics for musicals, and her discovery that he has been having an affair. Betsy insists that their minds are made up, that the divorce is the best thing for everyone, including their three children. In return she receives a telegram: "horrified letter am returning england immediately do nothing irrevocable till I see you . . ." But it isn't her mother who arrives at their summer home in Wales. It is someone else, with a decided agenda, and this person's actions will set off a chain of reactions that have completely unintended - and ultimately unfortunate - consequences.
As the chain of events unfolds, the story shifts between Betsy and Alec, their three children, and Joy, a family friend acting as a mother's helper over the summer. Sometimes we see events directly through their eyes, other times at second-hand, through news (or gossip). One section consists of letters, in which we see reports of the Cannings' situation spreading through their friends and acquaintances, with stories shaded to favor one side or the other, and we watch people choose sides - and even switch allegiances. As time passes, we also see the effects particularly on the children, who must make their own difficult choices.
For me this book lacked the warm heart of Lucy Carmichael, but I liked it very much. I could understand each of the characters, why they spoke and acted as they did, and sympathize with most of them - in the end, even with the person whose self-righteous meddling was the catalyst. It was painful watching them make choices that clearly would not lead to their happiness or good, but they acted and reacted in very human ways. On the other hand, sometimes what seemed like a bad decision came right in the end, against my expectations. Actually, much of the story took me by surprise, because I assumed too much from the back-cover description of a "love story." (I'm still not sure whose love story that refers to.) The opening also reminded me of the 1939 film The Women, a wonderful melodrama about a wife who forces a divorce from her husband over his affair, against the advice of her mother. I think that set up some other expectations in my mind. Instead, I found a very different story, of a family torn apart and re-made, of the different faces of love. I wish there was a sequel, to see where these people are in ten years, but then those years from 1936 will bring even greater changes and challenges to them all.
The introduction also describes the book Margaret Kennedy wrote before this one, A Long Time Ago, as "a hilarious evocation of an Edwardian houseparty invaded by an amorous prima donna." I've already put in an inter-library loan request for it!
As I was finishing the second of two fantasy novels that I read recently, I had a sudden craving for a story about regular people, something mid-20th century, rooted in everyday life. I have that kind of book on the TBR shelves, but then we had an early Christmas holiday on Friday afternoon, and what better way to celebrate it than with a visit to a bookstore? After reading and loving Lucy Carmichael earlier this year, I have been meaning to look for more of Margaret Kennedy's books. This Dial Press edition caught my eye, and the back-cover blurb intrigued me:
It is 1936, and in British society the decision to divorce still constitutes a major disgrace - an alternative to be considered only in cases of scandalous adultery. But Betsy Canning decides almost unconsciously to leave her husband . . . Together and Apart is a love story of a most unusual kind. It reflects Margaret Kennedy's greatest talents as a novelist: an accurate yet humorous eye for the minutiae of daily living and a sympathetic understanding of its oddities and complexities.A brief introduction by Kennedy's daughter Julia Birley notes that when her mother wrote the book, "she and my father were puzzled and distressed by what amounted to an epidemic of divorce among their acquaintance."
The story begins with a letter from Betsy to her mother, announcing her impending divorce from her husband Alec. She gives several reasons, such as Alec's surprising success writing lyrics for musicals, and her discovery that he has been having an affair. Betsy insists that their minds are made up, that the divorce is the best thing for everyone, including their three children. In return she receives a telegram: "horrified letter am returning england immediately do nothing irrevocable till I see you . . ." But it isn't her mother who arrives at their summer home in Wales. It is someone else, with a decided agenda, and this person's actions will set off a chain of reactions that have completely unintended - and ultimately unfortunate - consequences.
As the chain of events unfolds, the story shifts between Betsy and Alec, their three children, and Joy, a family friend acting as a mother's helper over the summer. Sometimes we see events directly through their eyes, other times at second-hand, through news (or gossip). One section consists of letters, in which we see reports of the Cannings' situation spreading through their friends and acquaintances, with stories shaded to favor one side or the other, and we watch people choose sides - and even switch allegiances. As time passes, we also see the effects particularly on the children, who must make their own difficult choices.
For me this book lacked the warm heart of Lucy Carmichael, but I liked it very much. I could understand each of the characters, why they spoke and acted as they did, and sympathize with most of them - in the end, even with the person whose self-righteous meddling was the catalyst. It was painful watching them make choices that clearly would not lead to their happiness or good, but they acted and reacted in very human ways. On the other hand, sometimes what seemed like a bad decision came right in the end, against my expectations. Actually, much of the story took me by surprise, because I assumed too much from the back-cover description of a "love story." (I'm still not sure whose love story that refers to.) The opening also reminded me of the 1939 film The Women, a wonderful melodrama about a wife who forces a divorce from her husband over his affair, against the advice of her mother. I think that set up some other expectations in my mind. Instead, I found a very different story, of a family torn apart and re-made, of the different faces of love. I wish there was a sequel, to see where these people are in ten years, but then those years from 1936 will bring even greater changes and challenges to them all.
The introduction also describes the book Margaret Kennedy wrote before this one, A Long Time Ago, as "a hilarious evocation of an Edwardian houseparty invaded by an amorous prima donna." I've already put in an inter-library loan request for it!
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Sharing knives and lives
The Sharing Knife, Passage (Vol. 3) and Horizon (Vol. 4), Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois Bujold may be best known for her multi-book Vorkosigan saga, but she has also written several alternate-universe fantasy novels. There are the Chalion novels, two of which are set in a series of small kingdoms reminiscent of Spain in the 15th century, and the third in a version of the Holy Roman Empire. These books have a very interesting theology, centered in an unusual Holy Family that includes the Mother's Bastard. Interactions with the five gods drive the plots of these books, particularly the Bastard, a trickster with a wicked sense of humor.
The Sharing Knife series, on the other hand, is set in an AU North America. In that world, the land erupts from time to time in malices, entities that suck the life-force from everything around them to create themselves and armies of creatures like them. Humans who come in contact with the malices, also known as blights and bogles, end up etther as food or mind-controlled slaves. For generations the Lakewalker people have dedicated themselves to fighting malices. Lakewalkers can sense the life-force in everything, which they call ground, and this "ground-sense" enables them to detect malices. They spend their time patrolling the land for emerging malices, who can only be killed with a special sharing knife. Lakewalkers facing death can "share" that death through ritual means, binding it to the knife, their last contribution to the war on these evils.
This constant struggle is made more complicated by "farmers," non-Lakewalkers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of their settlements in search of new lands (the parallels between Native Americans and European settlers are obvious, malices aside). Farmers don't have ground-sense, which makes them vulnerable to malices. Those who have never experienced a malice directly, or seen the blight they leave behind, resent the Lakewalkers. They also tell strange stories about Lakewalker sorcery, particularly the creation of the sharing knives, which are made of human bone.
(Spoilers for all the Sharing Knife books follow.)
In the first book of this series, we meet Fawn, a young woman running away from home, pregnant by a neighboring farmer who won't marry her and unwilling to face her family. She is caught by a new malice's creatures (called mud-men), and rescued by Dag, an older Lakewalker. In the course of this, she kills the malice with his sharing knife and miscarries her child. She and Dag quickly fall into mutual lust and later into bed, despite the strong prohibitions against such liaisons in both farmer and Lakewalker societies. Eventually they return to Fawn's home, where over the objections of her family they are married ("string-bound" in Lakewalker terms). In the second book, they travel up to Dag's family encampment, where his relatives refuse to accept his farmer bride (and where we learn more about Lakewalker life).
I think Lois Bujold has created an interesting world with this series. There is something of "Little House on the Prairie" about the farmer sections, and the parallels with Native Americans in the Lakewalker sections are intriguing. The malices are fascinating villains, in a nauseating way, and Bujold manages to evoke sympathy for their creatures, particularly animals caught in their making spells. But with all due respect to one of my favorite authors, the first two books really don't work for me, in large part because of the two main characters. I like them in and of themselves, but I find their romance tiresome and not particularly credible. Fawn is eighteen, a small-town girl, very bright and adventurous, who makes friends easily. Dag is a morose fifty-five, a veteran of many years fighting malices, who lost his first wife in battle. Though we are told constantly that Lakewalkers don't look their age, we are also reminded constantly of the big gap in age between these two, and I find it a bit creepy (like Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon). I certainly get why Dag is attracted to Fawn, but I can't quite figure out what she sees in him. I have something of the same problem with the age gap between Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell in Laurie King's series, but those stories build up a relationship before the romance, and then build on their partnership, professional and romantic. With this series, the couple fall into lust hardly knowing each other, and while Fawn is still recovering from her miscarriage. In the later books, we're frequently told they are deeply in love with each other, and I have to take the author's word on that.
This was my second time reading the last two books in the series, Passage and Horizon, and I do enjoy them, because they are less focused on Dag and Fawn's relationship, more on exploring the world Bujold has created here. In the third book, Passage, they have left Dag's camp because the Lakewalkers won't accept his marriage to Fawn. Nor is his farmer marriage his only renegade idea. He is coming to see that farmers can be allies in the fight against the malices, particularly as they push new settlements into malice-ridden territories, but they must be trained, and that means sharing Lakewalker knowledge with them. And he is learning that he may have undiscovered talents as a healer, but he wants to use those talents on farmers as well as his own people. Lakewalkers use their ground-sense in healing, which can seem like more sorcery to farmers - reason enough for Lakewalkers to refuse to treat them.
Dag and Fawn decide to take a delayed wedding trip to the southern coast, in part because Fawn like Emma Woodhouse has never seen the sea. Traveling with one of Fawn's brothers, they earn their passage on a flatboat heading down a series of rivers leading to the great Gray (standing in for the Mississippi), ending up in Greymouth (not quite colorful enough to be New Orleans). On their journey, they collect around them an unlikely surrogate family - or perhaps a Lakewalker patrol - including the boat's young boss Berry, two equally young Lakewalkers in need of training, and Hod, a lost soul whom Dag heals in more than body, They meet other boat crews, and a fearsome set of river bandits. Through it all, Dag tries to bridge the gap between Lakewalker and farmer (or boater), translating each to the other and learning how to heal farmers. The fourth book, Horizon, covers their return journey north, by horseback along a great trail called the Trace, traveling with much of the company from the previous book, as well as more farmers and Lakewalkers encountered along the way.
These two stories are fun adventures, with danger in the form of bandits and malices balanced with the excitement of seeing new places and encountering new people. Dag and Fawn create an extended family, drawn to their very different personalities, despite the uneasiness that farmers feel around Lakewalkers and vice versa. This aren't my favorite among Lois Bujold's books, but I do enjoy these last two. Anyone interested in the series, though, should probably start with the first two, just for the background on Lakewalkers, farmers and malices - and may well enjoy them more than I do. Lots of other readers have.
Lois Bujold may be best known for her multi-book Vorkosigan saga, but she has also written several alternate-universe fantasy novels. There are the Chalion novels, two of which are set in a series of small kingdoms reminiscent of Spain in the 15th century, and the third in a version of the Holy Roman Empire. These books have a very interesting theology, centered in an unusual Holy Family that includes the Mother's Bastard. Interactions with the five gods drive the plots of these books, particularly the Bastard, a trickster with a wicked sense of humor.
The Sharing Knife series, on the other hand, is set in an AU North America. In that world, the land erupts from time to time in malices, entities that suck the life-force from everything around them to create themselves and armies of creatures like them. Humans who come in contact with the malices, also known as blights and bogles, end up etther as food or mind-controlled slaves. For generations the Lakewalker people have dedicated themselves to fighting malices. Lakewalkers can sense the life-force in everything, which they call ground, and this "ground-sense" enables them to detect malices. They spend their time patrolling the land for emerging malices, who can only be killed with a special sharing knife. Lakewalkers facing death can "share" that death through ritual means, binding it to the knife, their last contribution to the war on these evils.
This constant struggle is made more complicated by "farmers," non-Lakewalkers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of their settlements in search of new lands (the parallels between Native Americans and European settlers are obvious, malices aside). Farmers don't have ground-sense, which makes them vulnerable to malices. Those who have never experienced a malice directly, or seen the blight they leave behind, resent the Lakewalkers. They also tell strange stories about Lakewalker sorcery, particularly the creation of the sharing knives, which are made of human bone.
(Spoilers for all the Sharing Knife books follow.)
In the first book of this series, we meet Fawn, a young woman running away from home, pregnant by a neighboring farmer who won't marry her and unwilling to face her family. She is caught by a new malice's creatures (called mud-men), and rescued by Dag, an older Lakewalker. In the course of this, she kills the malice with his sharing knife and miscarries her child. She and Dag quickly fall into mutual lust and later into bed, despite the strong prohibitions against such liaisons in both farmer and Lakewalker societies. Eventually they return to Fawn's home, where over the objections of her family they are married ("string-bound" in Lakewalker terms). In the second book, they travel up to Dag's family encampment, where his relatives refuse to accept his farmer bride (and where we learn more about Lakewalker life).
I think Lois Bujold has created an interesting world with this series. There is something of "Little House on the Prairie" about the farmer sections, and the parallels with Native Americans in the Lakewalker sections are intriguing. The malices are fascinating villains, in a nauseating way, and Bujold manages to evoke sympathy for their creatures, particularly animals caught in their making spells. But with all due respect to one of my favorite authors, the first two books really don't work for me, in large part because of the two main characters. I like them in and of themselves, but I find their romance tiresome and not particularly credible. Fawn is eighteen, a small-town girl, very bright and adventurous, who makes friends easily. Dag is a morose fifty-five, a veteran of many years fighting malices, who lost his first wife in battle. Though we are told constantly that Lakewalkers don't look their age, we are also reminded constantly of the big gap in age between these two, and I find it a bit creepy (like Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon). I certainly get why Dag is attracted to Fawn, but I can't quite figure out what she sees in him. I have something of the same problem with the age gap between Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell in Laurie King's series, but those stories build up a relationship before the romance, and then build on their partnership, professional and romantic. With this series, the couple fall into lust hardly knowing each other, and while Fawn is still recovering from her miscarriage. In the later books, we're frequently told they are deeply in love with each other, and I have to take the author's word on that.
This was my second time reading the last two books in the series, Passage and Horizon, and I do enjoy them, because they are less focused on Dag and Fawn's relationship, more on exploring the world Bujold has created here. In the third book, Passage, they have left Dag's camp because the Lakewalkers won't accept his marriage to Fawn. Nor is his farmer marriage his only renegade idea. He is coming to see that farmers can be allies in the fight against the malices, particularly as they push new settlements into malice-ridden territories, but they must be trained, and that means sharing Lakewalker knowledge with them. And he is learning that he may have undiscovered talents as a healer, but he wants to use those talents on farmers as well as his own people. Lakewalkers use their ground-sense in healing, which can seem like more sorcery to farmers - reason enough for Lakewalkers to refuse to treat them.
Dag and Fawn decide to take a delayed wedding trip to the southern coast, in part because Fawn like Emma Woodhouse has never seen the sea. Traveling with one of Fawn's brothers, they earn their passage on a flatboat heading down a series of rivers leading to the great Gray (standing in for the Mississippi), ending up in Greymouth (not quite colorful enough to be New Orleans). On their journey, they collect around them an unlikely surrogate family - or perhaps a Lakewalker patrol - including the boat's young boss Berry, two equally young Lakewalkers in need of training, and Hod, a lost soul whom Dag heals in more than body, They meet other boat crews, and a fearsome set of river bandits. Through it all, Dag tries to bridge the gap between Lakewalker and farmer (or boater), translating each to the other and learning how to heal farmers. The fourth book, Horizon, covers their return journey north, by horseback along a great trail called the Trace, traveling with much of the company from the previous book, as well as more farmers and Lakewalkers encountered along the way.
These two stories are fun adventures, with danger in the form of bandits and malices balanced with the excitement of seeing new places and encountering new people. Dag and Fawn create an extended family, drawn to their very different personalities, despite the uneasiness that farmers feel around Lakewalkers and vice versa. This aren't my favorite among Lois Bujold's books, but I do enjoy these last two. Anyone interested in the series, though, should probably start with the first two, just for the background on Lakewalkers, farmers and malices - and may well enjoy them more than I do. Lots of other readers have.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Eight cousins and how they grew
Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, Louisa May Alcott
The box-set of Louisa May Alcott books that my mother gave me for my eighth birthday included Eight Cousins, so I feel like I grew up with Rose Campbell and her aunts, uncles, and especially those cousins. I still have my worn-out copy with its broken spine, though years later I discovered it had been bowdlerized, like the set's edition of Little Women, so now I also own an unedited edition. It was some time before I learned there was a sequel, Rose in Bloom, which I then checked out of the library on a regular basis. It was even longer before I finally had my own copy. (Oh, those pre-internet days, when I couldn't just click on a website and buy books from across the centuries and around the world.) I usually read both these books together now, since as I have mentioned before, I love sequels and series.
Eight Cousins introduces us to thirteen-year-old Rose Campbell, recently orphaned after the death of her father. She has been brought to live with her great-aunts while she awaits the arrival of her new guardian, her uncle Alec. Living close on the "Aunt-Hill" are the families of four other Campbell brothers, who between them have produced seven sons, who rather overwhelm Rose at first. Aunt Myra, a croaking old hypochondriac, produced the only other girl in the family, who died at a young age, possibly from her mother's constant doses of medicine. Rose also finds a friend, later an adopted sister, in Phebe, a foundling who works as a maid for the great-aunts Plenty and Peace (who perfectly fit their names).
Rose in Bloom opens some five years after the first book. Rose, Uncle Alec and Phebe are returning from three years in Europe. Rose is about to turn twenty-one, when she will inherit a fortune from her late father. As she settles back into the tight-knit web of family, she must decide what course her life will take, and what use she will make of her riches. Phebe, trained as a singer in Europe, is determined to make her own way, especially after she falls in love with a young man whose family doesn't welcome a daughter-in-law out of the poor-house. Meanwhile, the other cousins are also finding their own way into adulthood, careers, love and marriage.
I have read these books so often that they have really imprinted themselves on my literary DNA, so I am not the most objective reader. I absolutely dote on Uncle Alec, one of the best foster-fathers in literary history. Actually, I think he is something of a stand-in for Alcott herself, who raised one sister's daughter Lulu and adopted another's two sons. As she wrote in Eight Cousins,
They are unusual though in that Rose is Alcott's only wealthy heroine, at least in the young adult books. The Campbells are one of the leading families in Boston society, descended from Scottish gentry (much play is made at one point of "our blessed ancestress Lady Margret" when one of the cousins wants to marry unsuitably). Their riches come from generations of sea trading, which still employs three of the uncles (and in the end Archie, the eldest of the cousins). Among Alcott's other heroines, Amy in Little Women marries money, but only after bravely facing poverty as a child. Fanny in An Old-Fashioned Girl is rich, though she is not the heroine, and in the second half of the book her father loses the family fortune, and she has to learn from Polly how to be happy in poverty (as she wasn't in wealth). Here Rose has to learn to manage her money, from the first book where Dr. Alec teaches her to balance accounts, to the second where she inherits her fortune. She decides to make philanthropy her life's work, bravely facing not just society's ridicule but even the teasing of her own family. One of her projects, two houses of rent-controlled apartments "for poor but respectable women" might have benefited Alcott's other heroines - both Jo and Polly live in boarding or rooming houses. At the same time, Rose learns that her wealth, combined with her beauty, draws fortune-hunters and acquaintances hanging out for rich presents. She also has to face three aunts, hoping to win her for a daughter-in-law. Today we tend to be squeamish about first cousins marrying, but it doesn't seem to worry Alcott or her characters here.
In contrast to Rose and her fortune, we have Phebe the foundling. Her story is typical for an Alcott heroine. She is hard-working, determined to get an education, grateful for favors, always cheerful, and gifted with music. When her education and training as a singer are complete, she insists on making her own way, and trying to pay Uncle Alec and Rose back in some way for all they have given her. She is too proud to accept her lover against his family's wishes, but of course in the end she proves her worth and is welcomed with open arms.
I also have to mention an even more unconventional match. The Campbells' ships trade with China, and in the first book Rose visits the warehouses full of teas, porcelain, and other exotic merchandise. There she meets Fun See, a young Chinese merchant who has come to the United States to learn English with the trade. Alcott presents him in stereotypical terms, "from his junk-like shoes to the button on his pagoda hat . . . altogether a highly satisfactory Chinaman." Rose keeps expecting him to present her with "a roasted rat, [or] a stewed puppy..." However, in the second book, See falls in love with Rose's friend Annabel Bliss, and she with him. Rose, still obsessed with the Chinese diet, points out that when they move to China, Annabel will have "to order rats, puppies, and bird'-nest soup for dinner." Everyone accepts the match, which as a younger reader I simply took in stride. Now, however, knowing about the virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in America at the time Alcott was writing, I am struck by her audacity in having a young American woman, from a good Boston family, marry a member of a despised minority, a man of another race. I do wonder how Alcott's readers, or their parents, reacted to this in 1876. Perhaps the comical way she presents Fun See - and Annabel, who like her intended is short and plump - made the match palatable. I don't think she could have gotten away with a young merchant from Africa.
There is so much more to say about these books - Cousin Mac's love for Emerson, Cousin Charlie's sad fate, Rose's lessons in housekeeping, the visits to "Cosey Corner" in Maine - but this post is long enough already. They are just such fun, and I expect I will be reading them still when I am as old as Aunt Plenty.
The box-set of Louisa May Alcott books that my mother gave me for my eighth birthday included Eight Cousins, so I feel like I grew up with Rose Campbell and her aunts, uncles, and especially those cousins. I still have my worn-out copy with its broken spine, though years later I discovered it had been bowdlerized, like the set's edition of Little Women, so now I also own an unedited edition. It was some time before I learned there was a sequel, Rose in Bloom, which I then checked out of the library on a regular basis. It was even longer before I finally had my own copy. (Oh, those pre-internet days, when I couldn't just click on a website and buy books from across the centuries and around the world.) I usually read both these books together now, since as I have mentioned before, I love sequels and series.
Eight Cousins introduces us to thirteen-year-old Rose Campbell, recently orphaned after the death of her father. She has been brought to live with her great-aunts while she awaits the arrival of her new guardian, her uncle Alec. Living close on the "Aunt-Hill" are the families of four other Campbell brothers, who between them have produced seven sons, who rather overwhelm Rose at first. Aunt Myra, a croaking old hypochondriac, produced the only other girl in the family, who died at a young age, possibly from her mother's constant doses of medicine. Rose also finds a friend, later an adopted sister, in Phebe, a foundling who works as a maid for the great-aunts Plenty and Peace (who perfectly fit their names).
Rose in Bloom opens some five years after the first book. Rose, Uncle Alec and Phebe are returning from three years in Europe. Rose is about to turn twenty-one, when she will inherit a fortune from her late father. As she settles back into the tight-knit web of family, she must decide what course her life will take, and what use she will make of her riches. Phebe, trained as a singer in Europe, is determined to make her own way, especially after she falls in love with a young man whose family doesn't welcome a daughter-in-law out of the poor-house. Meanwhile, the other cousins are also finding their own way into adulthood, careers, love and marriage.
I have read these books so often that they have really imprinted themselves on my literary DNA, so I am not the most objective reader. I absolutely dote on Uncle Alec, one of the best foster-fathers in literary history. Actually, I think he is something of a stand-in for Alcott herself, who raised one sister's daughter Lulu and adopted another's two sons. As she wrote in Eight Cousins,
in this queer world of ours, fatherly and motherly hearts often beat warm and wise, in the breasts of bachelor uncles and maiden aunts; and it is my private opinion that these worthy creatures are a beautiful provision of nature for the cherishing of other people's children. They certainly get great comfort out of it, and receive much innocent affection that otherwise would be lost.She goes on to say, "Dr. Alec was one of these, and his big heart had room for every one of the eight cousins, especially orphaned Rose and afflicted Mac." Mac is afflicted with eye problems threatening blindness, but also with a stern disciplinarian of a mother, Aunt Jane. Uncle Alec's unconventional parenting is contrasted not just with Aunt Jane's, but also with Aunt Clara, who spoils her only son, the handsome but lazy Charlie. Aunt Jessie, on the other hand, matches Uncle Alec in her warm heart and motherly wisdom, and the two often join forces not just with Rose but with the boys as well, and with Phebe. They both want to raise strong, healthy, pure, and happy children. They advocate rational dress especially for Rose. In a very funny chapter, Aunt Clara tries to convert Rose over to the current fashions, while Dr. Alec stops just short of advocating Bloomerism. His worst horror is reserved for the corsets Clara has smuggled in. He wants Rose to romp and play, he forbids her to drink coffee or take Aunt Myra's tonics. And his training continues even after she grows up. In Rose in Bloom, he frets that she spends too much time in Society, and he all but censors her reading, warning her away from those dangerous yellow-backed French novels. If he wasn't such a love, he might stray over into Aunt Jane territory. These books are definitely on the moralizing end of the Alcott scale, with lessons in every chapter, usually coming from "Uncle Doctor."
They are unusual though in that Rose is Alcott's only wealthy heroine, at least in the young adult books. The Campbells are one of the leading families in Boston society, descended from Scottish gentry (much play is made at one point of "our blessed ancestress Lady Margret" when one of the cousins wants to marry unsuitably). Their riches come from generations of sea trading, which still employs three of the uncles (and in the end Archie, the eldest of the cousins). Among Alcott's other heroines, Amy in Little Women marries money, but only after bravely facing poverty as a child. Fanny in An Old-Fashioned Girl is rich, though she is not the heroine, and in the second half of the book her father loses the family fortune, and she has to learn from Polly how to be happy in poverty (as she wasn't in wealth). Here Rose has to learn to manage her money, from the first book where Dr. Alec teaches her to balance accounts, to the second where she inherits her fortune. She decides to make philanthropy her life's work, bravely facing not just society's ridicule but even the teasing of her own family. One of her projects, two houses of rent-controlled apartments "for poor but respectable women" might have benefited Alcott's other heroines - both Jo and Polly live in boarding or rooming houses. At the same time, Rose learns that her wealth, combined with her beauty, draws fortune-hunters and acquaintances hanging out for rich presents. She also has to face three aunts, hoping to win her for a daughter-in-law. Today we tend to be squeamish about first cousins marrying, but it doesn't seem to worry Alcott or her characters here.
In contrast to Rose and her fortune, we have Phebe the foundling. Her story is typical for an Alcott heroine. She is hard-working, determined to get an education, grateful for favors, always cheerful, and gifted with music. When her education and training as a singer are complete, she insists on making her own way, and trying to pay Uncle Alec and Rose back in some way for all they have given her. She is too proud to accept her lover against his family's wishes, but of course in the end she proves her worth and is welcomed with open arms.
I also have to mention an even more unconventional match. The Campbells' ships trade with China, and in the first book Rose visits the warehouses full of teas, porcelain, and other exotic merchandise. There she meets Fun See, a young Chinese merchant who has come to the United States to learn English with the trade. Alcott presents him in stereotypical terms, "from his junk-like shoes to the button on his pagoda hat . . . altogether a highly satisfactory Chinaman." Rose keeps expecting him to present her with "a roasted rat, [or] a stewed puppy..." However, in the second book, See falls in love with Rose's friend Annabel Bliss, and she with him. Rose, still obsessed with the Chinese diet, points out that when they move to China, Annabel will have "to order rats, puppies, and bird'-nest soup for dinner." Everyone accepts the match, which as a younger reader I simply took in stride. Now, however, knowing about the virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in America at the time Alcott was writing, I am struck by her audacity in having a young American woman, from a good Boston family, marry a member of a despised minority, a man of another race. I do wonder how Alcott's readers, or their parents, reacted to this in 1876. Perhaps the comical way she presents Fun See - and Annabel, who like her intended is short and plump - made the match palatable. I don't think she could have gotten away with a young merchant from Africa.
There is so much more to say about these books - Cousin Mac's love for Emerson, Cousin Charlie's sad fate, Rose's lessons in housekeeping, the visits to "Cosey Corner" in Maine - but this post is long enough already. They are just such fun, and I expect I will be reading them still when I am as old as Aunt Plenty.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Jane & Prudence
Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym
This novel, published in 1953, combines two of Barbara Pym's familiar settings. The title characters met at Oxford, where Jane was Prudence's tutor. Despite the twelve-year gap in their ages, they became and remain friends. As the book opens, they are attending a Reunion of Old Students at the college (a setting that instantly evoked Gaudy Night for me). Their lives have taken different paths since those college days. Jane is married, with a daughter about to go up to Oxford in her turn. Her husband is a vicar, and they are preparing to move from their suburban parish to one in a small country town. Prudence on the other hand lives in London, in an elegant flat with Regency-style furniture. She has fallen in and out of love many times over the years - Jane thinks that her affairs "were surely as much an occupation as anything else." The current object of her devotion is her married boss, Dr. Grampian, who writes learned books (about economics or history; we are never told which exactly). Prudence is part of the office staff who assist in the research and publication of his books, though like the office in Quartet in Autumn, it is never clear what anyone actually does there.
The story moves back and forth between Jane in the country and Prudence in the city, and the occasional visits they exchange. Jane is settling into the new parish, where she doesn't quite fit. She is warm-hearted and friendly, interested in people and sympathetic. But she is an unconventional vicar's wife: a poor housekeeper, badly dressed, uninterested in parish work, given to saying whatever crosses her mind without considering her audience, and confusing people with random lines of poetry. I liked Jane very much, and it was painful to watch her flounder around, sticking her foot in her mouth, irritating even her long-suffering husband. It's especially endearing that she recognizes and humbly admits her own failings, though perhaps basing her ideas of a vicar's wife on the novels of Anthony Trollope and Charlotte M. Yonge set her up for disappointment from the start.
Jane is also determined to find Prudence a husband. Her first choice is a youngish man in the village, Fabian Driver, playing up his role as a widower after neglecting his wife while she was alive and carrying on affairs in London. I would have considered that a major red flag, but he is single and comfortably well off, which seems enough for Jane. She invites Prudence down for a visit, the two meet, and Prudence begins seeing Fabian both in London and the village. She transfers her affections from Dr. Grampian to Fabian, but they seem hardly any warmer, let alone the basis for a real relationship. Both Prudence and Fabian seem to be following a script for romance, leading to suitable marriage, though in the end they aren't reading from the same one. Prudence at 29 feels the pressure of social expectations, that women should marry and have children, set against her quiet flat and her independent life in the city. But then her work is not particularly interesting, particularly after she falls out of love with Dr. Grampian. I enjoyed the sections set in the offices, where Prudence feels herself rather superior to her co-workers, with their quiet gossip and constant clock-watching. She also feels herself in competition for Dr. Grampian's attention, particularly with the sole male on the staff, Geoffrey Manifold, a young man of her own age.
In the end, Prudence's story is left unresolved, in what I am coming to think a typical Pymian ending. However, we do learn the coda to an earlier story, with its own ambiguous ending, that of Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women. I was disappointed that we didn't get a cameo from Mildred herself, my favorite so far of Pym's characters; we only learn her news second-hand, through something Jane hears. It did make me wonder, though, if we might hear of Prudence especially in a later story. I'd like to think that Jane just continues on her own happily idiosyncratic way, malaprops and all. Instead of Trollope and Yonge, though, perhaps she should have read Dorothy L. Sayers' books, with their excellent vicars' wives, especially Mrs. Venables from The Nine Tailors. I do love characters who are readers. Prudence, whose last name is Bates, disavows any likeness to the Bates mother and daughter in Emma, though she seems to prefer modern novels, "well written and tortuous, with a good dash of culture and the inevitable unhappy or indefinite ending, which was so like life." I wonder whose books Barbara Pym had in mind when she wrote that!
I still have several of her books to read, but I don't want to rush through them, and I feel that I don't want to read too many at once, unlike say Angela Thirkell. Reading one Thirkell (or even someone else's review of Thirkell) always makes me want to pick up the next in the series. Perhaps that's because they are a series, though, unlike Pym's stand-alone novels. Speaking of Thirkell, I read a Moyer Bell edition of this novel, and I did not notice a single misprint or error, unlike those that plague their awful editions of Thirkell's novels, which proves they did have a copy-editor at one time.
This novel, published in 1953, combines two of Barbara Pym's familiar settings. The title characters met at Oxford, where Jane was Prudence's tutor. Despite the twelve-year gap in their ages, they became and remain friends. As the book opens, they are attending a Reunion of Old Students at the college (a setting that instantly evoked Gaudy Night for me). Their lives have taken different paths since those college days. Jane is married, with a daughter about to go up to Oxford in her turn. Her husband is a vicar, and they are preparing to move from their suburban parish to one in a small country town. Prudence on the other hand lives in London, in an elegant flat with Regency-style furniture. She has fallen in and out of love many times over the years - Jane thinks that her affairs "were surely as much an occupation as anything else." The current object of her devotion is her married boss, Dr. Grampian, who writes learned books (about economics or history; we are never told which exactly). Prudence is part of the office staff who assist in the research and publication of his books, though like the office in Quartet in Autumn, it is never clear what anyone actually does there.
The story moves back and forth between Jane in the country and Prudence in the city, and the occasional visits they exchange. Jane is settling into the new parish, where she doesn't quite fit. She is warm-hearted and friendly, interested in people and sympathetic. But she is an unconventional vicar's wife: a poor housekeeper, badly dressed, uninterested in parish work, given to saying whatever crosses her mind without considering her audience, and confusing people with random lines of poetry. I liked Jane very much, and it was painful to watch her flounder around, sticking her foot in her mouth, irritating even her long-suffering husband. It's especially endearing that she recognizes and humbly admits her own failings, though perhaps basing her ideas of a vicar's wife on the novels of Anthony Trollope and Charlotte M. Yonge set her up for disappointment from the start.
Jane is also determined to find Prudence a husband. Her first choice is a youngish man in the village, Fabian Driver, playing up his role as a widower after neglecting his wife while she was alive and carrying on affairs in London. I would have considered that a major red flag, but he is single and comfortably well off, which seems enough for Jane. She invites Prudence down for a visit, the two meet, and Prudence begins seeing Fabian both in London and the village. She transfers her affections from Dr. Grampian to Fabian, but they seem hardly any warmer, let alone the basis for a real relationship. Both Prudence and Fabian seem to be following a script for romance, leading to suitable marriage, though in the end they aren't reading from the same one. Prudence at 29 feels the pressure of social expectations, that women should marry and have children, set against her quiet flat and her independent life in the city. But then her work is not particularly interesting, particularly after she falls out of love with Dr. Grampian. I enjoyed the sections set in the offices, where Prudence feels herself rather superior to her co-workers, with their quiet gossip and constant clock-watching. She also feels herself in competition for Dr. Grampian's attention, particularly with the sole male on the staff, Geoffrey Manifold, a young man of her own age.
In the end, Prudence's story is left unresolved, in what I am coming to think a typical Pymian ending. However, we do learn the coda to an earlier story, with its own ambiguous ending, that of Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women. I was disappointed that we didn't get a cameo from Mildred herself, my favorite so far of Pym's characters; we only learn her news second-hand, through something Jane hears. It did make me wonder, though, if we might hear of Prudence especially in a later story. I'd like to think that Jane just continues on her own happily idiosyncratic way, malaprops and all. Instead of Trollope and Yonge, though, perhaps she should have read Dorothy L. Sayers' books, with their excellent vicars' wives, especially Mrs. Venables from The Nine Tailors. I do love characters who are readers. Prudence, whose last name is Bates, disavows any likeness to the Bates mother and daughter in Emma, though she seems to prefer modern novels, "well written and tortuous, with a good dash of culture and the inevitable unhappy or indefinite ending, which was so like life." I wonder whose books Barbara Pym had in mind when she wrote that!
I still have several of her books to read, but I don't want to rush through them, and I feel that I don't want to read too many at once, unlike say Angela Thirkell. Reading one Thirkell (or even someone else's review of Thirkell) always makes me want to pick up the next in the series. Perhaps that's because they are a series, though, unlike Pym's stand-alone novels. Speaking of Thirkell, I read a Moyer Bell edition of this novel, and I did not notice a single misprint or error, unlike those that plague their awful editions of Thirkell's novels, which proves they did have a copy-editor at one time.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Julia Margaret Cameron and her camera
From Life, Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography, Victoria Olsen
A couple of months ago, Anthony Lane wrote an article for The New Yorker about an exhibit of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the website for the exhibit is here). By the end of the first page, I was wondering, "How on earth have I missed this amazing woman?" Just in case I'm not the last to learn about her: she was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta in 1815, her father a member of the British East India Company. One of ten children, she and her siblings were sent "home" to be educated, in their case to their maternal grandmother, a woman of Franco-Indian descent then living in Versailles. The seven sisters who survived to adulthood formed a close-knit family unit that their friend William Thackeray called "Pattledom." The fourth sister, Maria Theodosia, married a man named John Jackson and became the grandmother of Vanessa Bell and Virgina Woolf.
In 1848, Cameron and her husband Charles Hay settled in England with their five children (a sixth would be born later). For many years the Camerons lived in a house on the Isle of Wight next to Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and the families became the closest of friends. Anthony Lane related one incident when Tennyson "refused to be vaccinated against smallpox, [and] she stood at the foot of his stairs and cried, 'You're a coward, Alfred, a coward!'" I think that's when I put the magazine down and went to look for books about her.
Julia Margaret Cameron's daughter Juley gave her a camera in 1863, and within a couple of months she had produced her first finished works. Photography was then still a relatively new process. Cameras were heavy and cumbersome, they used fragile glass negatives, they required long exposures when the subjects had to hold completely still, and the chemicals needed for developing images were both expensive and dangerous. Men were starting to make a name for themselves as photographers, but Cameron was one of only a few women to do so, in an age where women of her class did not work nor promote themselves, as she had to do to sell her images. Through her family and her friendships, as with the Tennysons, she knew the leading political, literary, artistic, and scientific figures of her day, and many of them ended up in front of her camera. Cameron produced portraits, but also the allegorical scenes that were then popular, growing out of amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants. One of her last major works was a series illustrating Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
In her lifetime, and ever since, critics have disagreed over Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs. Her portraits, especially of "great men," have generally been praised, while her staged scenes have been dismissed (especially in the 20th century) as mawkish, Victorian tripe. More troubling for critics has been her technique. Cameron played with focus: many of her images are blurry, partially obscured with shadows. She sometimes brought the camera very close to her sitters, so that their faces fill the frame. And she was unconcerned about flaws in her negatives, scratches and cracks that then appeared on the finished photos. She would scratch out something in an image and leave the marks for all to see. In her own day, many critics took her to task for what they perceived as technical faults. They wrote above all that she needed to learn how to focus her camera. Cameron knew exactly what she was doing, and she kept on doing it. As Victoria Olsen writes, "Cameron could make perfectly focused images, but she did not always want to." She believed that her camera was catching not just the physical likeness of an individual, but also something of his or her essence, the interior reality.
Anthony Lane mentioned this book in his article, calling Victoria Olsen the "most perceptive biographer of recent years." Taking that as a recommendation, I requested a copy from inter-library loan. I have to say, I found this book disappointing and struggled to finish it. My faith in the author was shaken early on, when she mentions the Pattle family's friendship with William Thackeray, whom they knew in France as well as India and later England. At one point in 1833, when they were living in Calcutta, Thackeray wrote his mother that he was going to dine with the Pattles and "shall meet pretty Theodosia," to whom "I would not hesitate above two minutes in popping that question wh. was to decide the happiness of my future life," if she only had £11,000. Olsen says that "Thackeray biographers have long speculated over this reference to a 'Theodosia' Pattle, since none of the sisters was so named." If so, then neither she nor those biographers have looked closely at the Pattle family tree, handily printed at the front of this book, where Maria Theodosia appears clear as day.
I can't speak to other biographies of Cameron, but I think that, ironically, Olsen mirrors some of the flaws that critics have seen in her subject's work. The book's focus shifts constantly away from Cameron, to discuss the key people around her at crucial points in her life. This is one of the biggest challenges that a biographer faces: how to put the subject's life in context, to integrate the other characters into the story, while still keeping the focus on her. Olsen doesn't quite manage it. I felt that she put Cameron's story on hold, while she turned to the astronomer Sir William Herschel, the actress Ellen Terry, and Cameron's niece Julia, among others. In fact, Olsen frames Cameron's story with her great-niece Virginia Woolf. There is also a great deal of discussion of the place of photography in history and in art. In general I find art criticism even less intelligible than literary criticism.
At the same time, there are some surprising omissions in Olsen's account. While emphasizing the importance of family in Cameron's life, she mentions that both her parents died in India in 1845 almost in passing, without stopping to consider the impact on their daughter. She spends a lot of time detailing and analyzing Cameron's relationships with her children, but she refers only briefly to her grandchildren, at least one of whom lived with the Camerons in England. Along the same lines, Olsen reports that when Cameron and her husband relocated to Ceylon in 1875, they traveled with "Julia Margaret's great-niece and adopted daughter Mary Clogstoun, and their maid Ellen Ottingham." This was the first (and last) mention of an adopted daughter; the maid fares better. Most tellingly for me, Cameron's death in January of 1879 is discussed in terms of what her sons remembered about it, and how Virgina Woolf recorded it in a play four decades later. On the other hand, Cameron's husband Charles Hay died two years later, and Olsen describes not only his deathbed but his funeral. It is only then that we even learn where Julia Margaret was buried.
I also have to mention the most irritating feature of this book, one I find incomprehensible in a book of this type, about an artist and her work. There are four sections of photographs, by Julia Margaret Cameron and other artists (including one of her sons). For some reason the images are labeled but not numbered. Olsen discusses the images in detail and refers back to them frequently, instructing the reader to "[see figure]." With no way to know which section includes the "figure" in question, and with only a title or description to go by, I spent an inordinate amount of time flipping back and forth between the sections, distractedly trying to find the picture, muttering imprecations on whoever decided to omit this basic aid to the reader. It was a distraction that for me constantly broke up the flow of the narration.
In the end, I felt that I learned a good deal about Victorian photography and the people who influenced Julia Margaret Cameron, and something about the woman herself. I wish that the proportions had been reversed, and I will probably look for other books about her. I also learned that I had in fact read about Cameron before. There is no mention of Anthony Trollope in Olsen's book, but when I checked my Oxford reader's guide to Trollope, I found that he met her on a trip to the Isle of Wight in 1864, and that he sat for her at least twice during his visit. Victoria Glendinning mentions this in her biography, describing Cameron as "the pioneer photographer," adding that she "took a marvelous photography of Anthony Trollope." I guess in this case my own focus was too much on Trollope himself.
I am glad to have finished this book, and after a steady diet of history and biography over the last couple of weeks, I am hungry for stories, as Helene Hanff once said, of things that never happened to people who never existed.
A couple of months ago, Anthony Lane wrote an article for The New Yorker about an exhibit of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the website for the exhibit is here). By the end of the first page, I was wondering, "How on earth have I missed this amazing woman?" Just in case I'm not the last to learn about her: she was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta in 1815, her father a member of the British East India Company. One of ten children, she and her siblings were sent "home" to be educated, in their case to their maternal grandmother, a woman of Franco-Indian descent then living in Versailles. The seven sisters who survived to adulthood formed a close-knit family unit that their friend William Thackeray called "Pattledom." The fourth sister, Maria Theodosia, married a man named John Jackson and became the grandmother of Vanessa Bell and Virgina Woolf.
In 1848, Cameron and her husband Charles Hay settled in England with their five children (a sixth would be born later). For many years the Camerons lived in a house on the Isle of Wight next to Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and the families became the closest of friends. Anthony Lane related one incident when Tennyson "refused to be vaccinated against smallpox, [and] she stood at the foot of his stairs and cried, 'You're a coward, Alfred, a coward!'" I think that's when I put the magazine down and went to look for books about her.
Julia Margaret Cameron's daughter Juley gave her a camera in 1863, and within a couple of months she had produced her first finished works. Photography was then still a relatively new process. Cameras were heavy and cumbersome, they used fragile glass negatives, they required long exposures when the subjects had to hold completely still, and the chemicals needed for developing images were both expensive and dangerous. Men were starting to make a name for themselves as photographers, but Cameron was one of only a few women to do so, in an age where women of her class did not work nor promote themselves, as she had to do to sell her images. Through her family and her friendships, as with the Tennysons, she knew the leading political, literary, artistic, and scientific figures of her day, and many of them ended up in front of her camera. Cameron produced portraits, but also the allegorical scenes that were then popular, growing out of amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants. One of her last major works was a series illustrating Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
In her lifetime, and ever since, critics have disagreed over Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs. Her portraits, especially of "great men," have generally been praised, while her staged scenes have been dismissed (especially in the 20th century) as mawkish, Victorian tripe. More troubling for critics has been her technique. Cameron played with focus: many of her images are blurry, partially obscured with shadows. She sometimes brought the camera very close to her sitters, so that their faces fill the frame. And she was unconcerned about flaws in her negatives, scratches and cracks that then appeared on the finished photos. She would scratch out something in an image and leave the marks for all to see. In her own day, many critics took her to task for what they perceived as technical faults. They wrote above all that she needed to learn how to focus her camera. Cameron knew exactly what she was doing, and she kept on doing it. As Victoria Olsen writes, "Cameron could make perfectly focused images, but she did not always want to." She believed that her camera was catching not just the physical likeness of an individual, but also something of his or her essence, the interior reality.
Anthony Lane mentioned this book in his article, calling Victoria Olsen the "most perceptive biographer of recent years." Taking that as a recommendation, I requested a copy from inter-library loan. I have to say, I found this book disappointing and struggled to finish it. My faith in the author was shaken early on, when she mentions the Pattle family's friendship with William Thackeray, whom they knew in France as well as India and later England. At one point in 1833, when they were living in Calcutta, Thackeray wrote his mother that he was going to dine with the Pattles and "shall meet pretty Theodosia," to whom "I would not hesitate above two minutes in popping that question wh. was to decide the happiness of my future life," if she only had £11,000. Olsen says that "Thackeray biographers have long speculated over this reference to a 'Theodosia' Pattle, since none of the sisters was so named." If so, then neither she nor those biographers have looked closely at the Pattle family tree, handily printed at the front of this book, where Maria Theodosia appears clear as day.
I can't speak to other biographies of Cameron, but I think that, ironically, Olsen mirrors some of the flaws that critics have seen in her subject's work. The book's focus shifts constantly away from Cameron, to discuss the key people around her at crucial points in her life. This is one of the biggest challenges that a biographer faces: how to put the subject's life in context, to integrate the other characters into the story, while still keeping the focus on her. Olsen doesn't quite manage it. I felt that she put Cameron's story on hold, while she turned to the astronomer Sir William Herschel, the actress Ellen Terry, and Cameron's niece Julia, among others. In fact, Olsen frames Cameron's story with her great-niece Virginia Woolf. There is also a great deal of discussion of the place of photography in history and in art. In general I find art criticism even less intelligible than literary criticism.
At the same time, there are some surprising omissions in Olsen's account. While emphasizing the importance of family in Cameron's life, she mentions that both her parents died in India in 1845 almost in passing, without stopping to consider the impact on their daughter. She spends a lot of time detailing and analyzing Cameron's relationships with her children, but she refers only briefly to her grandchildren, at least one of whom lived with the Camerons in England. Along the same lines, Olsen reports that when Cameron and her husband relocated to Ceylon in 1875, they traveled with "Julia Margaret's great-niece and adopted daughter Mary Clogstoun, and their maid Ellen Ottingham." This was the first (and last) mention of an adopted daughter; the maid fares better. Most tellingly for me, Cameron's death in January of 1879 is discussed in terms of what her sons remembered about it, and how Virgina Woolf recorded it in a play four decades later. On the other hand, Cameron's husband Charles Hay died two years later, and Olsen describes not only his deathbed but his funeral. It is only then that we even learn where Julia Margaret was buried.
I also have to mention the most irritating feature of this book, one I find incomprehensible in a book of this type, about an artist and her work. There are four sections of photographs, by Julia Margaret Cameron and other artists (including one of her sons). For some reason the images are labeled but not numbered. Olsen discusses the images in detail and refers back to them frequently, instructing the reader to "[see figure]." With no way to know which section includes the "figure" in question, and with only a title or description to go by, I spent an inordinate amount of time flipping back and forth between the sections, distractedly trying to find the picture, muttering imprecations on whoever decided to omit this basic aid to the reader. It was a distraction that for me constantly broke up the flow of the narration.
In the end, I felt that I learned a good deal about Victorian photography and the people who influenced Julia Margaret Cameron, and something about the woman herself. I wish that the proportions had been reversed, and I will probably look for other books about her. I also learned that I had in fact read about Cameron before. There is no mention of Anthony Trollope in Olsen's book, but when I checked my Oxford reader's guide to Trollope, I found that he met her on a trip to the Isle of Wight in 1864, and that he sat for her at least twice during his visit. Victoria Glendinning mentions this in her biography, describing Cameron as "the pioneer photographer," adding that she "took a marvelous photography of Anthony Trollope." I guess in this case my own focus was too much on Trollope himself.
I am glad to have finished this book, and after a steady diet of history and biography over the last couple of weeks, I am hungry for stories, as Helene Hanff once said, of things that never happened to people who never existed.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Voices from the past
The Voices of Morebath, Eamon Duffy
The subtitle of this book is "Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village." When I came across it at Half Price Books, it instantly appealed to me on several levels. It is the history of a community over more than 50 years, covering the different phases of the Tudor Reformation, based on church archives, from a small village in Devon. When I was in high school we lived in Devon for several months, in a small village, while my father was on a teaching exchange at the University of Exeter. I don't know that we ever went to or through Morebath, in our rambles around Devon. After reading this book, I'd like to visit someday.
The Tudor period was one of my areas of focus in college, though this book made it clear just how much I have forgotten in the years since. I have never been lucky enough to work with archival documents from that era, though I have seen them in museums. At Hatfield House a letter with Elizabeth I's signature was on display, which gave me goosebumps. This book is based on a set of churchwardens' accounts, kept by Morebath's parish priest, Christopher Trychay, from 1520 until his death in 1574. Eamon Duffy argues it is his voice that makes Morebath's accounts unique:
Morebath weathered the changes that came under Henry's reforms fairly smoothly, if a bit reluctantly at times. Trouble came however during his son Edward's reign, which brought much more abrupt changes, including at one point the prohibition of church ales. With the veneration of saints condemned, the "stores" disbanded, the communal sheep flocks dispersed, and the parish lost its major funding sources. As tensions over the changes mounted, Morebath sent five young men to the siege of Exeter in 1549, part of a rebellion that was convulsing the west of England. The armed uprisings ended in bloody defeat for the rebels; only two of Morebath's are known to have returned home. The accession of the Catholic Queen Mary relieved Sir Christopher if not to all his parishioners, but only a few years later her death brought Queen Elizabeth to the throne. Here again, as under King Henry, priest and parishioners conformed to yet another series of changes in religious life, sometimes dragging their feet a bit, as when they hid vestments and images of the saints that had been removed from the church. Duffy suggests that priests like Sir Christopher, who accepted the changes whatever their personal convictions, helped their parishioners to do so as well and moved the English Reformation forward, especially in Elizabeth's reign. That isn't to say there weren't problems, especially over money. Parliament under all of the Tudor monarchs passed levies to raise funds for war, with Scotland, France and Ireland. Without the money from the "stores," Morebath had to scramble to pay its share, selling everything they could from the church. Eventually they were forced to rely on contributions from the wealthier parishioners. Duffy shows how the lack of funding from the "stores" hurt the parish, and he argues that their loss weakened the community's bonds.
This was a really interesting, engrossing book. It was not a quick read, and I was sometimes a bit lost among the villagers, their stores and flocks. I really had to concentrate and pay attention, more than I usually do in reading for pleasure, but it was well worth the effort. At times I even felt a sense of dislocation, moving from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. I particularly appreciated Duffy's succinct and balanced overview of the English Reformation. In the end, I was sorry to read about Sir Christopher's death, which closes Duffy's account, and I found myself wondering how Morebath fared in the centuries that followed, and who lives there today. I also found myself contrasting this book with another that I read recently, Jill Lepore's Book of Ages, also based on one individual's years of personal accounts, written 200 years after Sir Christopher's. Both are social history, documenting the everyday lives of ordinary people, which in the past have been overlooked by historians focused on kings, statesmen, generals and popes. Of course, one of the problems in chronicling "the short and simple annals of the poor" is that they tend to leave fewer records behind them. The people of Morebath were lucky to have Sir Christopher as their chronicler.
I have to say, reading about the Tudor era brought the Lymond Chronicles very strongly to mind. Of course, I'd have to get any re-reading done before the Triple Dog Dare kicks off on January 1st.
The subtitle of this book is "Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village." When I came across it at Half Price Books, it instantly appealed to me on several levels. It is the history of a community over more than 50 years, covering the different phases of the Tudor Reformation, based on church archives, from a small village in Devon. When I was in high school we lived in Devon for several months, in a small village, while my father was on a teaching exchange at the University of Exeter. I don't know that we ever went to or through Morebath, in our rambles around Devon. After reading this book, I'd like to visit someday.
The Tudor period was one of my areas of focus in college, though this book made it clear just how much I have forgotten in the years since. I have never been lucky enough to work with archival documents from that era, though I have seen them in museums. At Hatfield House a letter with Elizabeth I's signature was on display, which gave me goosebumps. This book is based on a set of churchwardens' accounts, kept by Morebath's parish priest, Christopher Trychay, from 1520 until his death in 1574. Eamon Duffy argues it is his voice that makes Morebath's accounts unique:
There are more than two hundred surviving sets of churchwardens' accounts from Tudor England, but none of them like Morebath's. Almost everywhere else these accounts are what they sound like - bare bones, dry records of income and expenditure. The Morebath accounts contain all that, but they are packed as well with the personality, opinions and prejudices of the most vivid country clergyman of the English sixteenth century, and with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes, or rather through his voice, talking, talking, talking - for he wrote these accounts to be read aloud to his parishioners - we catch a rare and precious glimpse of life and death in an English village.Duffy uses the Morebath records to introduce us to Morebath itself, to its priest Sir Christopher (I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that Catholic priests in England before the Reformation were called "Sir"), and to the people who made up the parish. He uses the accounts to show a small community with close ties, centered in the church, particularly in the different "stores." These were groups within the parish, one each for the young men and women, others dedicated to the Virgin Mary or other saints like the local Devon saint Sidwell. The stores helped maintain the church through flocks of sheep communally raised, contributions, and community celebrations called "ales," which were the main source of funding in the year. Parishioners were elected as wardens of the different groups on a rotating basis, women serving as well as men, and even the younger girls in the "Maidens." All these groups provided an accounting at least once a year, which Sir Christopher recorded in the accounts, often in the words of the wardens themselves.
Morebath weathered the changes that came under Henry's reforms fairly smoothly, if a bit reluctantly at times. Trouble came however during his son Edward's reign, which brought much more abrupt changes, including at one point the prohibition of church ales. With the veneration of saints condemned, the "stores" disbanded, the communal sheep flocks dispersed, and the parish lost its major funding sources. As tensions over the changes mounted, Morebath sent five young men to the siege of Exeter in 1549, part of a rebellion that was convulsing the west of England. The armed uprisings ended in bloody defeat for the rebels; only two of Morebath's are known to have returned home. The accession of the Catholic Queen Mary relieved Sir Christopher if not to all his parishioners, but only a few years later her death brought Queen Elizabeth to the throne. Here again, as under King Henry, priest and parishioners conformed to yet another series of changes in religious life, sometimes dragging their feet a bit, as when they hid vestments and images of the saints that had been removed from the church. Duffy suggests that priests like Sir Christopher, who accepted the changes whatever their personal convictions, helped their parishioners to do so as well and moved the English Reformation forward, especially in Elizabeth's reign. That isn't to say there weren't problems, especially over money. Parliament under all of the Tudor monarchs passed levies to raise funds for war, with Scotland, France and Ireland. Without the money from the "stores," Morebath had to scramble to pay its share, selling everything they could from the church. Eventually they were forced to rely on contributions from the wealthier parishioners. Duffy shows how the lack of funding from the "stores" hurt the parish, and he argues that their loss weakened the community's bonds.
This was a really interesting, engrossing book. It was not a quick read, and I was sometimes a bit lost among the villagers, their stores and flocks. I really had to concentrate and pay attention, more than I usually do in reading for pleasure, but it was well worth the effort. At times I even felt a sense of dislocation, moving from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. I particularly appreciated Duffy's succinct and balanced overview of the English Reformation. In the end, I was sorry to read about Sir Christopher's death, which closes Duffy's account, and I found myself wondering how Morebath fared in the centuries that followed, and who lives there today. I also found myself contrasting this book with another that I read recently, Jill Lepore's Book of Ages, also based on one individual's years of personal accounts, written 200 years after Sir Christopher's. Both are social history, documenting the everyday lives of ordinary people, which in the past have been overlooked by historians focused on kings, statesmen, generals and popes. Of course, one of the problems in chronicling "the short and simple annals of the poor" is that they tend to leave fewer records behind them. The people of Morebath were lucky to have Sir Christopher as their chronicler.
I have to say, reading about the Tudor era brought the Lymond Chronicles very strongly to mind. Of course, I'd have to get any re-reading done before the Triple Dog Dare kicks off on January 1st.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Taking the Triple Dog Dare
It's that time of year, when James from Ready When You Are, C.B. issues his TBR challenge. This year, it's the fearsome Triple Dog Dare. The rules are pretty simple: read only what's already on your TBR shelves from January 1st to April 1st of 2104. No new books, no re-reading, and no library books (except those reserved by Dec. 31st). There's no ban on buying new books, just on reading them. I'm going to try not to buy too many, though, because it kind of defeats the purpose of the Dare to be adding new books as fast as I'm clearing old ones off. And then new books are always so tempting and distracting!
This will be my third year of participating. Last year I cleared 35 books off the stacks, which wasn't bad, but I know I can do better (my total the first year was 71 books). Just to make it interesting, I'm going to donate a dollar for each book crossed off the list (finished or not), to RIF (Reading Is Fundamental), a children's literacy non-profit. As the rules allow, I am claiming my usual exemptions for book club books, and also for Deborah Crombie's latest book. It will be released on March 25th, and I should be able to wait another week to read it, except the last one ended with such an awful cliffhanger.
Thanks to James for hosting the Dare again this year. I am cudgeling my brains to figure out what comes after the Triple Dog Dare, so this doesn't really have to be the last.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Jane Austen's fans
Among the Janeites, Deborah Yaffe
Our Houston-area chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) is discussing this book at our monthly meeting on Saturday. The author will even join us for a brief chat via Skype. When the book was first suggested, there was some talk of a chapter focusing on a well-known Texas Janeite, who attends the annual conferences in elaborate Regency outfits. In fact, she travels to and from the conferences in costume, even on airplanes. From that, and from the cover of the book (which you can see here), I thought it might be a satirical look at the eccentricities and excesses of Jane Austen's fans.
Instead, from the first page Deborah Yaffe establishes herself as one of us. And not just as a Janeite; she was from a child the kind of compulsive reader that I think many of us were and still are, though she was reading Trollope and Thackeray when I was still reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and Nancy Drew. She was a Janeite long before Colin Firth and his wet shirt in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice created legions of new fans almost overnight. (I may be the only Jane Austen fan on the planet who has not seen that Pride and Prejudice, and I admit to a slight prejudice against the "wet-shirt Darcy" obsessives. I have gotten some nasty looks when I point out that the scene doesn't actually take place in the story Austen wrote.)
Recognizing the global "Austen phenomenon" that took off in the mid-1990s, Yaffe "set out to examine Janeite obsessiveness from the inside, and maybe to figure out along the way what kind of Janeite I was myself." She states that her book is "a work of journalism, not a scholarly study of Jane Austen appreciation . . ." It is based on interviews with a range of Austenites, primarily in North America, but also on her own experiences as a fan. In the interests of research, she ordered a custom-made Regency gown, and a corset to go under it. She traveled to England with a JASNA tour, and she attended the 2011 annual general meeting in Fort Worth. She immersed herself in fan fiction, modern continuations and sequels (something that has never, ever appealed to me). One chapter focuses on Sandy Lerner, the American millionaire, co-founder of Cisco, who funded the restoration of Chawton House and the establishment of a research library focused on women writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Other chapters discuss Janeites on-line, the founding of JASNA, and teaching Austen in colleges and universities, among other topics.
Yaffe defines a Janeite as someone who enjoys and engages with Jane Austen's work. As she points out more than once, there are many different ways of appreciating and enjoying Austen. I count myself a Janeite of long-standing. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I was introduced to Austen's work by the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice. I've read and re-read her novels for many years, and I've gone on to read about her life and the world in which she lived. I now have about three times as many books about Austen as by Austen. I've visited Bath and Chawton and Winchester. I've enjoyed meeting other Janeites through JASNA, as well as through the Yahoo Janeites group (which features in Yaffe's book). I'd like to attend the annual meeting one day. But I am a book-based Janeite, who prefers not to see the films. (I made an exception for the Ciaran Hinds-Amanda Root Persuasion; the book is still better). And I don't think I'll be buying a Regency dress.
This was an interesting and entertaining exploration of "the world of Jane Austen fandom," as the subtitle says, and I am looking forward to discussing it with the Houston Janeites.
Our Houston-area chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) is discussing this book at our monthly meeting on Saturday. The author will even join us for a brief chat via Skype. When the book was first suggested, there was some talk of a chapter focusing on a well-known Texas Janeite, who attends the annual conferences in elaborate Regency outfits. In fact, she travels to and from the conferences in costume, even on airplanes. From that, and from the cover of the book (which you can see here), I thought it might be a satirical look at the eccentricities and excesses of Jane Austen's fans.
Instead, from the first page Deborah Yaffe establishes herself as one of us. And not just as a Janeite; she was from a child the kind of compulsive reader that I think many of us were and still are, though she was reading Trollope and Thackeray when I was still reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and Nancy Drew. She was a Janeite long before Colin Firth and his wet shirt in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice created legions of new fans almost overnight. (I may be the only Jane Austen fan on the planet who has not seen that Pride and Prejudice, and I admit to a slight prejudice against the "wet-shirt Darcy" obsessives. I have gotten some nasty looks when I point out that the scene doesn't actually take place in the story Austen wrote.)
Recognizing the global "Austen phenomenon" that took off in the mid-1990s, Yaffe "set out to examine Janeite obsessiveness from the inside, and maybe to figure out along the way what kind of Janeite I was myself." She states that her book is "a work of journalism, not a scholarly study of Jane Austen appreciation . . ." It is based on interviews with a range of Austenites, primarily in North America, but also on her own experiences as a fan. In the interests of research, she ordered a custom-made Regency gown, and a corset to go under it. She traveled to England with a JASNA tour, and she attended the 2011 annual general meeting in Fort Worth. She immersed herself in fan fiction, modern continuations and sequels (something that has never, ever appealed to me). One chapter focuses on Sandy Lerner, the American millionaire, co-founder of Cisco, who funded the restoration of Chawton House and the establishment of a research library focused on women writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Other chapters discuss Janeites on-line, the founding of JASNA, and teaching Austen in colleges and universities, among other topics.
Yaffe defines a Janeite as someone who enjoys and engages with Jane Austen's work. As she points out more than once, there are many different ways of appreciating and enjoying Austen. I count myself a Janeite of long-standing. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I was introduced to Austen's work by the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice. I've read and re-read her novels for many years, and I've gone on to read about her life and the world in which she lived. I now have about three times as many books about Austen as by Austen. I've visited Bath and Chawton and Winchester. I've enjoyed meeting other Janeites through JASNA, as well as through the Yahoo Janeites group (which features in Yaffe's book). I'd like to attend the annual meeting one day. But I am a book-based Janeite, who prefers not to see the films. (I made an exception for the Ciaran Hinds-Amanda Root Persuasion; the book is still better). And I don't think I'll be buying a Regency dress.
This was an interesting and entertaining exploration of "the world of Jane Austen fandom," as the subtitle says, and I am looking forward to discussing it with the Houston Janeites.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Jane Franklin's "Book of Ages"
Book of Ages, The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, Jill Lepore
Dr. Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, which is where I first came across her work. Her articles and reviews often focus on some aspect of American history, though in this week's issue she writes about Doctor Who. They are always interesting and informative, and occasionally a bit snarky. I knew that she was working on a book about Jane Franklin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin's sister. I was already planning on reading it when I read an article in The New Yorker about the project, a personal essay linking her research and her own family history. This moved the book to the top of my waiting list. I picked up my copy on Monday evening, and for the past week I have been immersed in Jane Franklin's world and in this wonderful book. I am glad it has already been nominated for a National Book Award. I expect to see it on many more prize lists.
Benjamin Franklin was the youngest son and Jane the youngest daughter of their father's seventeen children from two marriages (their mother bore ten of them). He was born in 1706, she in 1712. They grew up in a small crowded house in Boston, which also served as their father's chandler shop. Benjamin famously ran away at seventeen, to Philadelphia, where he set up a printing shop. By writing, printing, and scientific experiment, he became the most prominent intellectual, the most famous man, in the American colonies. He was drawn into politics, serving in London as the representative for four colonial governments, before returning to take his part in the struggle for independence. Jane on the other hand remained in the family home, caring for her parents, marrying, starting a family of her own. She bore twelve children in twenty-four years; only two survived her. Though she could read, she wrote with difficulty, at least at first. But she read everything she could get her hands on. Despite their very separate lives and their rare visits, she and her brother remained close, exchanging letters and books through the years. Eventually, they were the only two siblings left, which drew them even closer. Yet he never mentioned her in his famous Autobiography, nor did he save her letters. She saved all of his, and she collected every piece of his writing that she could find. She also wrote an autobiography, of sorts: a small hand-sewn book she titled her "Book of Ages," where she noted the major events in her family's life, the births and (all too frequently) the deaths.
Jill Lepore argues that despite the silence about Jane Franklin in the published Autobiography, "little of what Benjamin Franklin wrote . . . can be understood without her." So to study Jane's life is to explore his as well, which gives "a wholly new reading of the life and opinions of her brother." This is really a double biography, of the sister and brother. Franklin has been studied exhaustively. The collected edition of his papers has reached thirty-nine volumes, with more to come, and many biographies have been written. His sister Jane has been the subject of only one previous biography, in the 1950s, as well as a edition of the letters exchanged with her brother.
This is more than just biography, though, it is also social history at its best. Dr. Lepore uses the siblings' lives, especially Jane's, as a base from which to explore many aspects of life in colonial America, particularly for women. It is fascinating reading. Among the topics she considers are education and literacy, religious practice, employment, housework, childbirth, funeral customs, and the conventions of letter writing. I did not know or had forgotten that in the New England colonies, children were taught to read but only boys learned to write; girls and women were never expected to do more than sign their names. This wide-ranging exploration of Jane Franklin's world reminded me of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's excellent A Midwife's Tale, which uses the diary Martha Ballard kept in a small Maine town in the late 1700s to the same effect.
Like Laurel Ulrich, Dr. Lepore does not lose sight of the people at the center of her story, Jane Mecom and Benjamin Franklin. I think she does an excellent job of bringing Jane especially to life, of making her real to us. That to my mind is the ultimate test of biography. It should convey, in the words of historian Paul Murray Kendall, "the warmth of a life being lived."
Initially Jane Franklin Mecom's world was bounded by the care of parents and children, not to mention a feckless husband always in debt. Many of her children died young, from consumption, and she raised grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. At least two of her sons had mental problems. It was heart-breaking to read of one, confined for years in a barn in the country; there was no place else to send him, no one who could care for him. But gradually Jane became more aware of and interested in politics, and this book then also becomes an overview of the colonial struggles with Britain over taxation, the clashes that led to war for independence, and the uneasy first years of the American republic. Living in Boston, Jane of course saw much of this first-hand, and she also had a unique perspective through her famous brother. She was living with him in Philadelphia in 1775 and 1776, and she was there for the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
All of this would be riches enough. But Dr. Lepore does something else with this work: in writing about an ordinary person, and a woman at that, she wrote "a meditation on silence in the archives." History is no longer just the stories of the great men, but history is dependent on sources, on what is saved and preserved. Benjamin Franklin did not keep his sister's letters. Neither did Jane Austen's brothers keep hers, and then her sister Cassandra mutilated what little was left. What we know about the past, about the lives of people like ourselves, depends on records: letters, diaries, account books, inventories, wills, church registers, Books of Ages. Dr. Lepore pieces together the fragments of Jane Franklin Mecom's life that have survived, and she uses "this most ordinary of lives to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written: from what remains of the lives of the great, the bad, and, not as often, the good." If you think that sounds dry, please take my word for it, it's most assuredly not.
Dr. Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, which is where I first came across her work. Her articles and reviews often focus on some aspect of American history, though in this week's issue she writes about Doctor Who. They are always interesting and informative, and occasionally a bit snarky. I knew that she was working on a book about Jane Franklin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin's sister. I was already planning on reading it when I read an article in The New Yorker about the project, a personal essay linking her research and her own family history. This moved the book to the top of my waiting list. I picked up my copy on Monday evening, and for the past week I have been immersed in Jane Franklin's world and in this wonderful book. I am glad it has already been nominated for a National Book Award. I expect to see it on many more prize lists.
Benjamin Franklin was the youngest son and Jane the youngest daughter of their father's seventeen children from two marriages (their mother bore ten of them). He was born in 1706, she in 1712. They grew up in a small crowded house in Boston, which also served as their father's chandler shop. Benjamin famously ran away at seventeen, to Philadelphia, where he set up a printing shop. By writing, printing, and scientific experiment, he became the most prominent intellectual, the most famous man, in the American colonies. He was drawn into politics, serving in London as the representative for four colonial governments, before returning to take his part in the struggle for independence. Jane on the other hand remained in the family home, caring for her parents, marrying, starting a family of her own. She bore twelve children in twenty-four years; only two survived her. Though she could read, she wrote with difficulty, at least at first. But she read everything she could get her hands on. Despite their very separate lives and their rare visits, she and her brother remained close, exchanging letters and books through the years. Eventually, they were the only two siblings left, which drew them even closer. Yet he never mentioned her in his famous Autobiography, nor did he save her letters. She saved all of his, and she collected every piece of his writing that she could find. She also wrote an autobiography, of sorts: a small hand-sewn book she titled her "Book of Ages," where she noted the major events in her family's life, the births and (all too frequently) the deaths.
Jill Lepore argues that despite the silence about Jane Franklin in the published Autobiography, "little of what Benjamin Franklin wrote . . . can be understood without her." So to study Jane's life is to explore his as well, which gives "a wholly new reading of the life and opinions of her brother." This is really a double biography, of the sister and brother. Franklin has been studied exhaustively. The collected edition of his papers has reached thirty-nine volumes, with more to come, and many biographies have been written. His sister Jane has been the subject of only one previous biography, in the 1950s, as well as a edition of the letters exchanged with her brother.
This is more than just biography, though, it is also social history at its best. Dr. Lepore uses the siblings' lives, especially Jane's, as a base from which to explore many aspects of life in colonial America, particularly for women. It is fascinating reading. Among the topics she considers are education and literacy, religious practice, employment, housework, childbirth, funeral customs, and the conventions of letter writing. I did not know or had forgotten that in the New England colonies, children were taught to read but only boys learned to write; girls and women were never expected to do more than sign their names. This wide-ranging exploration of Jane Franklin's world reminded me of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's excellent A Midwife's Tale, which uses the diary Martha Ballard kept in a small Maine town in the late 1700s to the same effect.
Like Laurel Ulrich, Dr. Lepore does not lose sight of the people at the center of her story, Jane Mecom and Benjamin Franklin. I think she does an excellent job of bringing Jane especially to life, of making her real to us. That to my mind is the ultimate test of biography. It should convey, in the words of historian Paul Murray Kendall, "the warmth of a life being lived."
Initially Jane Franklin Mecom's world was bounded by the care of parents and children, not to mention a feckless husband always in debt. Many of her children died young, from consumption, and she raised grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. At least two of her sons had mental problems. It was heart-breaking to read of one, confined for years in a barn in the country; there was no place else to send him, no one who could care for him. But gradually Jane became more aware of and interested in politics, and this book then also becomes an overview of the colonial struggles with Britain over taxation, the clashes that led to war for independence, and the uneasy first years of the American republic. Living in Boston, Jane of course saw much of this first-hand, and she also had a unique perspective through her famous brother. She was living with him in Philadelphia in 1775 and 1776, and she was there for the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
All of this would be riches enough. But Dr. Lepore does something else with this work: in writing about an ordinary person, and a woman at that, she wrote "a meditation on silence in the archives." History is no longer just the stories of the great men, but history is dependent on sources, on what is saved and preserved. Benjamin Franklin did not keep his sister's letters. Neither did Jane Austen's brothers keep hers, and then her sister Cassandra mutilated what little was left. What we know about the past, about the lives of people like ourselves, depends on records: letters, diaries, account books, inventories, wills, church registers, Books of Ages. Dr. Lepore pieces together the fragments of Jane Franklin Mecom's life that have survived, and she uses "this most ordinary of lives to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written: from what remains of the lives of the great, the bad, and, not as often, the good." If you think that sounds dry, please take my word for it, it's most assuredly not.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
A writer's raw materials
Raw Material, Dorothy Canfield
In the rather odd first chapter of this book, published in 1923, Dorothy Canfield suggests that many of us from our early years are story-tellers, creating vivid narratives woven together out of the messiness of our daily lives. We synthesize, we organize, we create order out of chaos. We may never write our stories down, or even share them with anyone else, yet they are a part of us. But there are also those who see the world only through other people's stories, through the prism of books they have read, art they have seen or lectures they have heard. In her view, that second-hand sight is really a type of blindness.
At least I think that's what she is saying. Anyway, her book is for the story-tellers:
I found that first chapter a little difficult to follow (let alone summarize). I also started to wonder uneasily if I am one of the second-hand crowd, too caught up in books. I thought, "If the whole book is like this, I won't get too far with it." But the chapters that followed were a delight. They consist of vignettes, reminiscences of people and places, episodes in her life or in the lives of family and friends. Some are set in her childhood, others in adulthood. Many of them take place around her home in Vermont, in the small town where generations of her family had lived. Others are set in France, during her times there as a student, and then later during the Great War, when she was doing relief work.
There is an interesting variety in the chapters. I could see connections to other books of hers that I have read, particularly the sections on France in World War I, which fit right in with Home Fires in France. One tells the story of her friend Octavie Moreau, who in the third year of the war was sent to a prison camp in Germany, with 39 other women from their town, as a reprisal for something that supposedly happened somewhere else. I have never read anything about German concentration camps in the First World War, nor about civilian deported to them. Another chapter, "Scylla and Charybdis," is about little Cousin Maria Pearl Manley, an orphan moving back and forth between two branches of her family, happy in neither. I wish she could have spent some time with the Putney family from Understood Betsy. In the last chapter, "Almera Hawley Canfield," Canfield builds up a picture of the great-grandmother whom she never met, from the reminiscences of family members and old friends, which also show us something of the community in which she lived. It's really beautifully done. The Vermont sections made me think of Sarah Orne Jewett and her evocative stories of Maine.
I have so many of her books still to read, and I will be looking for these connections, to see if she used her raw materials in later works.
I found my slightly battered and foxed 1923 edition at Kaboom Books here in Houston, and it was $8.50 well spent. A previous owner, Ralph M. Pons, left his bookplate inside the front cover. He can't ever have read it, though: at least a quarter of the pages were unopened. So for the first time in my life, I found myself nervously separating the edges of pages. It was more difficult than I expected, and I was a bit clumsy at times, so the book is a little more battered than when I bought it. I don't mind, I'm just happy to have it on my shelves.
I don't know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay it to the earlier generations of my family . . .
In the rather odd first chapter of this book, published in 1923, Dorothy Canfield suggests that many of us from our early years are story-tellers, creating vivid narratives woven together out of the messiness of our daily lives. We synthesize, we organize, we create order out of chaos. We may never write our stories down, or even share them with anyone else, yet they are a part of us. But there are also those who see the world only through other people's stories, through the prism of books they have read, art they have seen or lectures they have heard. In her view, that second-hand sight is really a type of blindness.
At least I think that's what she is saying. Anyway, her book is for the story-tellers:
[T]his is not a written book in the usual sense. It is a book where nearly everything is left for the reader to do. I have only set down for my own use, a score of instances out of human life, which have long served me as pegs on which to hang the meditations of many different moods . . . In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, I give you just the sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels you are writing in your own heads . . . I have only tried to loan you a little more to add to the raw material which life has brought you, out of which you are constructing your own attempt to understand.
I found that first chapter a little difficult to follow (let alone summarize). I also started to wonder uneasily if I am one of the second-hand crowd, too caught up in books. I thought, "If the whole book is like this, I won't get too far with it." But the chapters that followed were a delight. They consist of vignettes, reminiscences of people and places, episodes in her life or in the lives of family and friends. Some are set in her childhood, others in adulthood. Many of them take place around her home in Vermont, in the small town where generations of her family had lived. Others are set in France, during her times there as a student, and then later during the Great War, when she was doing relief work.
There is an interesting variety in the chapters. I could see connections to other books of hers that I have read, particularly the sections on France in World War I, which fit right in with Home Fires in France. One tells the story of her friend Octavie Moreau, who in the third year of the war was sent to a prison camp in Germany, with 39 other women from their town, as a reprisal for something that supposedly happened somewhere else. I have never read anything about German concentration camps in the First World War, nor about civilian deported to them. Another chapter, "Scylla and Charybdis," is about little Cousin Maria Pearl Manley, an orphan moving back and forth between two branches of her family, happy in neither. I wish she could have spent some time with the Putney family from Understood Betsy. In the last chapter, "Almera Hawley Canfield," Canfield builds up a picture of the great-grandmother whom she never met, from the reminiscences of family members and old friends, which also show us something of the community in which she lived. It's really beautifully done. The Vermont sections made me think of Sarah Orne Jewett and her evocative stories of Maine.
I have so many of her books still to read, and I will be looking for these connections, to see if she used her raw materials in later works.
I found my slightly battered and foxed 1923 edition at Kaboom Books here in Houston, and it was $8.50 well spent. A previous owner, Ralph M. Pons, left his bookplate inside the front cover. He can't ever have read it, though: at least a quarter of the pages were unopened. So for the first time in my life, I found myself nervously separating the edges of pages. It was more difficult than I expected, and I was a bit clumsy at times, so the book is a little more battered than when I bought it. I don't mind, I'm just happy to have it on my shelves.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Life as a small-town journalist
My Turn to Make the Tea, Monica Dickens
After a week with Henry Esmond, I really felt the need of something light, bright and sparkling, and I thought that Monica Dickens was just the thing. This is the third of her accounts of different (brief) careers (the first about working as a cook-general, the second nursing in World War II). I knew from reading her autobiography, An Open Book, that this is actually the least autobiographical: "I disguised the paper, since I meant to go on living in that corner of Hertfordshire, and I mixed some fiction in with the facts, since I felt that two autobiographical books was all people could stand."
I don't know if reading that pre-conditioned me, but I thought this book read more like a novel than the previous two. The book opens with Dickens at work, at the Downingham Post (standing in for the Herts Express). She is called to the downstairs office to deal with an irate reader, threatening a case for libel, because her name has been mistakenly published in the court reports, and demanding a retraction and apology. This is familiar Dickens territory: caught in a screw-up and frantically trying to set it right. And we know there will be more to come.
The Post is a small-town weekly paper, old-fashioned I imagine even when this book was published in 1951. Its offices are cramped, dingy, and overflowing with "old, old ledgers and files. Nothing much newer than the turn of the century." Dickens is the only woman on the small reporting staff, who spend an inordinate amount of time down at the pub playing darts, coming back to correct endless pages of proof. They are sent out to cover different events, though often they just crib stories from other papers and the morgue files. All the stories are local, about matters that affect the readers directly. There is little point in publishing even the biggest national stories, because as the editor points out, with a weekly paper "by the time we went to press, people would have read all about it in their morning papers." Dickens wants to do more than write up wedding announcements and magristrates' court reports and Women's Institute meetings. But she is squashed every time she tries to liven up her stories, or convince the editor they need a "women's section," or snare more exciting assignments. She is constantly told she doesn't have enough experience, and somehow, it is always her turn to wash the cups and make the tea.
Her work at the Post is only half the story here, though. The other half revolves around her room in a rather unsavory lodging house. Her landlady, Mrs Goff, is a bad cook and a worse housekeeper. Dickens is drawn into the lives and adventures of her fellow lodgers, some of which take a dramatic, not to say melodramatic, turn.
I don't think this is a silly book, but I don't think it's the best of her "working books." I enjoyed the sections set at the newspaper office, and when assignments took her out of the office, however dull she found them. There's a lot of humor in the staff's constant procrastination (all those darts matches), not to mention the way everyone falls asleep in court, at theatrical performances, and during political speeches. Then they have to rush around like mad to concoct stories, correct proofs, and "put the paper to bed." Their frantic busyness then reminded me of the advertising agency in Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, as well as my favorite fictional newsroom, in Terry Pratchett's The Truth. On the other hand, the stories of her fellow boarders weren't as interesting to me. They felt sometimes like padding. I don't know if I'd have felt the same way, if I hadn't know they were fiction. If so, I hope I haven't ruined the book for anyone else!
After a week with Henry Esmond, I really felt the need of something light, bright and sparkling, and I thought that Monica Dickens was just the thing. This is the third of her accounts of different (brief) careers (the first about working as a cook-general, the second nursing in World War II). I knew from reading her autobiography, An Open Book, that this is actually the least autobiographical: "I disguised the paper, since I meant to go on living in that corner of Hertfordshire, and I mixed some fiction in with the facts, since I felt that two autobiographical books was all people could stand."
I don't know if reading that pre-conditioned me, but I thought this book read more like a novel than the previous two. The book opens with Dickens at work, at the Downingham Post (standing in for the Herts Express). She is called to the downstairs office to deal with an irate reader, threatening a case for libel, because her name has been mistakenly published in the court reports, and demanding a retraction and apology. This is familiar Dickens territory: caught in a screw-up and frantically trying to set it right. And we know there will be more to come.
The Post is a small-town weekly paper, old-fashioned I imagine even when this book was published in 1951. Its offices are cramped, dingy, and overflowing with "old, old ledgers and files. Nothing much newer than the turn of the century." Dickens is the only woman on the small reporting staff, who spend an inordinate amount of time down at the pub playing darts, coming back to correct endless pages of proof. They are sent out to cover different events, though often they just crib stories from other papers and the morgue files. All the stories are local, about matters that affect the readers directly. There is little point in publishing even the biggest national stories, because as the editor points out, with a weekly paper "by the time we went to press, people would have read all about it in their morning papers." Dickens wants to do more than write up wedding announcements and magristrates' court reports and Women's Institute meetings. But she is squashed every time she tries to liven up her stories, or convince the editor they need a "women's section," or snare more exciting assignments. She is constantly told she doesn't have enough experience, and somehow, it is always her turn to wash the cups and make the tea.
Her work at the Post is only half the story here, though. The other half revolves around her room in a rather unsavory lodging house. Her landlady, Mrs Goff, is a bad cook and a worse housekeeper. Dickens is drawn into the lives and adventures of her fellow lodgers, some of which take a dramatic, not to say melodramatic, turn.
Sometimes the place seemed more like a nurses' home than a boarding house, with coffee brewing in an enameled jug on the gas ring and people in dressing gowns curled up on each other's beds, talking about themselves, until Mrs. Goff, like Night Sister, knocked on the door to inquire if we thought she was made of electricity.I've never lived in a boarding house. I don't think I could take that much togetherness. And though I don't have a huge apartment, I can't imagine having all of my life in one room. For one thing, the books would never fit! But all of this is part of the fiction in Dickens' account. At the time she was working on the paper, she was living in a cottage described in loving detail in An Open Book, where she was reveling in the solitude. So no boarding-house adventures, no cramped living conditions, but a peaceful life with dog and cats, family and friends visiting on the weekends. In addition to working on the Post (Express), Dickens was writing a weekly feature for Woman's Own, so she wasn't completely unfamiliar with journalism. She was also continuing to write her own books. She says in her autobiography that she left the Express to write My Turn to Make the Tea (a much less dramatic exit than in the book itself). She later sent copies to the editor and a reporter she had worked with. Getting no response, she finally called the reporter to ask what he thought of the book. "'I read some of it,' Arthur said. 'I thought it was silly.'"
I don't think this is a silly book, but I don't think it's the best of her "working books." I enjoyed the sections set at the newspaper office, and when assignments took her out of the office, however dull she found them. There's a lot of humor in the staff's constant procrastination (all those darts matches), not to mention the way everyone falls asleep in court, at theatrical performances, and during political speeches. Then they have to rush around like mad to concoct stories, correct proofs, and "put the paper to bed." Their frantic busyness then reminded me of the advertising agency in Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, as well as my favorite fictional newsroom, in Terry Pratchett's The Truth. On the other hand, the stories of her fellow boarders weren't as interesting to me. They felt sometimes like padding. I don't know if I'd have felt the same way, if I hadn't know they were fiction. If so, I hope I haven't ruined the book for anyone else!
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