Thursday Bookshelf - SU-WO

Lots of Virago Elizabeth Taylors & Josephine Tey. I read most of the Teys as a teenager so I don't own many of them. To own three copies of The Daughter of Time is completely normal. I have the Virago edition of Taylor's short stories on the tbr shelves & lots of Angela Thirkell. I picked up the omnibus Thirkell secondhand years ago but have only read one of the novels in it.

Edward Thomas is a favourite poet & I especially loved his wife, Helen's, memoirs about their life together. Biographies of Agatha Christie, Karen Blixen, Emily Tennyson & Odette Sansom as well as the Lennox sisters (Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats) & the 17th century Verneys. Then, the beginning of the Tolstoys...

... & the end of the Tolstoys. The boxed set of War & Peace with Anthony Hopkins on the spine was the copy I read back in the 70s. I still haven't seen the series (any opinions? Is it worth seeing?) but I reread the book with Dovegreyreader a couple of years ago & loved it much more. Claire Tomalin's biographies are wonderful. I've reread The Invisible Woman (about Ellen Ternan & Charles Dickens) several times & my other favourites are her books on Mary Wollstonecraft & Thomas Hardy. Then, the Trollopes begin,

& take up the whole of the next shelf. He did write a lot of books & many of them are very big books.

Another Trollope, Joanna this time. I think The Rector's Wife is still my favourite. It was the first of hers I read (back in my Ringwood Library days, again). I loved her early books best, as you can see by the fact that I not only bought them but kept them. Jenny Uglow is another favourite. I have her latest book, In These Times, about Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, reserved at work. The Louis Untermeyer poetry anthology is a favourite from childhood. It was where I first read many of the poems that I still remember. I first came across Alison Uttley's Traveller in Time through the TV series with Sophie Thompson & Simon Gipps-Kent. I loved the whole time travel idea & anything about the Queen of Scots was just wonderful. I didn't read the book until years later. Letters to Vicky, the correspondence between Queen Victoria & her daughter, the Empress of Germany was one of those completely immersive reading experiences. I'd have read for hours at a time if the book hadn't been so heavy (& if I hadn't had a cat on my lap).

More Viragos here - the terrific anthologies of ghost stories & Elizabeth Von Arnim (I still have lots more of her books to read as well). Marina Warner's books on Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria & the Virgin Mary.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's novels are all so different, Lolly Willowes is still my favourite. Retha Warnicke's books on Anne Boleyn & Anne of Cleves, C V Wedgwood's books about the Civil War & Alison Weir. I think I've read all her books & I'm looking forward to her next biography, of Margaret Douglas, which is out later this year.

The rest of Alison Weir, H G Wells & three copies of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. One of my favourite WWI novels & the movie (with Alan Bates, Ann-Margret, Glenda Jackson & Julie Christie) is also very good. If you do watch the movie, there are also tiny bit parts by Kevin Whately & Pauline Quirke, both actors much better known now than they were back in 1982. In both scenes, it's the actors' very distinctive voices that are recognizable.
The Lore of the Land is here because it didn't fit on the shelf where it should be shelved.
Don't forget to click on the photos to see the whole shelf.

Next week, Wharton to Zola - the end!