I prefer reading

The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

2012-01-31T01:26:00.000+11:00

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was only 24 when he set off in 1910 with Scott's expedition to Antarctica. The aim of the expedition was scientific but Scott also wanted to be the first man to reach the South Pole. The tragic end of the expedition is well-known. Not only was Scott beaten to the Pole by the Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen but he & four companions died on the journey back to their base at Hut Point.

The Worst Journey in the World is one of the most moving & distressing books I've ever read. All the members of the expedition kept diaries or wrote letters home so Cherry has all this material to help shape his compelling narrative. He's looking back, ten years after the event, & his belief in the expedition & its aims is still clear. His admiration for Scott & his companions is also very moving. The group of men who set out on this voyage were Englishmen of their time & class. The desire for adventure & scientific endeavour inspired them all. Their ability to endure incredible hardships, to work as a team & to think of their fellow men & their animals before themselves is admirable.

The members of this expedition believed that it was worth while to discover new land and new life, to reach the Southern Pole of the earth, to make elaborate meteorological and magnetic observations and extended geological surveys with all the other branches of research for which we were equipped. They were prepared to suffer great hardship; and some of them died for their beliefs. Without such ideals the spirit which certainly existed in our small community would have been impossible.

I know that the hero worship that Scott inspired at the time of his death & for many years afterwards has diminished in recent years. There have been criticisms of his qualities as a leader & some of his decisions have been derided. I haven't read enough to weigh into those arguments. Cherry admired Scott although he could also see his faults & weaknesses & it's Cherry's book I've been immersed in for the last week.

The tragic ending of the expedition may have overshadowed our memories of it but reading The Worst Journey in the World reminds us of the beauties of Antarctica & the important scientific work carried out by the expedition. Cherry writes beautifully of the landscape & the natural wonders of Antarctica,

At the same time, to visualize the Antarctic as a white land is a mistake, for, not only is there much rock projecting wherever mountains or rocky capes and islands rise, but the snow seldom looks white, and if carefully looked at will be found to be shaded with many colours, but chiefly with cobalt blue or rose-madder, and all the gradations of lilac and mauve which the mixture of these colours will produce... When to the beautiful tints in the sky and the delicate shading on the snow are added perhaps the deep colours of the open sea, with reflections of the ice foot and ice-cliffs in it, all brilliant blues and emerald greens, then indeed a man may realize how beautiful this world can be, and how clean.

The title of the book refers most specifically to the gruelling journey that Cherry, Wilson & Bowers took to the Emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier. The object of the journey was to observe the penguins & bring back specimens to allow Wilson to study the embryology of the species. Virtually nothing was known of the Emperor penguin at this time, the most solitary species on earth. The journey was undertaken in the Antarctic winter so they were completely in the dark the whole time. They were hauling loads of 153 lbs each on sledges. The severe temperatures they experienced, the ice that made every task they had to do torture (it was so cold that their breath froze their balaclavas to their heads & they had to force themselves into their icy sleeping bags with blistered hands) & always in the dark. The long chapter describing this journey is so distressing that I had to keep putting the book down.

The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better - they were far worse - but because we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying - they little know - it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on...

And later, as they trudged back to camp with the three penguin eggs that were the sole specimens they had been able to collect, more than half-dead, Cherry writes,

Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.

This wasn't the end of the expedition. At the end of 1911, Scott & his companions - Wilson, Oates, Bowers & Evans - set off for the Pole. Cherry & the rest of the team travelled with them, laying depots of food & supplies all the way. Expectations were high when the Polar Party departed from the rest as the outward journey had been positive & they calculated that Scott & his party would have no trouble reaching the Pole & returning. However, as the days lengthened into weeks with no sign of the Polar Party, Cherry & his companions realised that they would not be returning.

They had to wait through another Antarctic winter before the relief party could go out to search for them & the tent with the bodies of Scott, Wilson & Bowers was found just eleven miles from One Ton Depot. Evans had died some time before & Oates, whose strength was failing & knew that he was a drag on his companions, had famously walked out into the blizzard saying " Well, I am just going outside & may be some time." The ordeal of the Polar Party after they left Cherry is told through their diaries & Scott's last letters to his family & friends, written as he lay in the tent in a howling blizzard that lasted days & meant that they would never have the strength to reach the depot. Cherry's diary records the scene,

Their story I am not going to try to put down. They got to this point on 21 March and on the 29th all was over. Nor will I try and put down what there was in that tent. Scott lay in the centre, Bill (Wilson) on his left, with his head towards the door, and Birdie (Bowers) on his right, lying with his feet towards the door. Bill especially had died very quietly with his hands folded over his chest. Birdie also quietly. Oates's death was a very fine one. We go on tomorrow to try and find his body. He was glad that his regiment would be proud of him. They reached the Pole a month after Amundsen.

The relief team constructed a cairn over the tent, read the burial service & left a cross marking the spot. They were unable to find Oates's body & they returned to camp with all the records, diaries & geological specimens the men had carried with them to the last to wait for the ship to take them home.

Whatever we may think now about the wisdom of the journey, I don't think anyone could fail to be moved by the endurance of these men exploring an unknown continent under horrendous conditions. The only wonder is that more men didn't die. Apsley Cherry-Garrard returned to England & served in WWI before being invalided out. He suffered from nightmares & had several breakdowns. Writing The Worst Journey in the World helped him come to terms with his experiences, although he was often tormented by the thought that something he could have done might have saved Scott & the others. Nothing he could have done would have saved them (he explores the options in the book & his conclusions were supported by others) but he suffered from this guilt for the rest of his life, dying in 1959.

The Worst Journey in the World has been called a great travel narrative & I suppose it is but I think it's a great classic of friendship, endurance & exploration under conditions that would have defeated lesser men. I picked it up from the tbr shelves because the centenary of Scott's last journey is upon us & because I read Barbara's fascinating post at Milady's Boudoir about polar exploration & remembered how often Barbara has recommended this book to me.

Sunday Poetry - James Drake

2012-01-29T11:43:00.000+11:00

I'm enjoying my serendipitous selection of poems from my Everyman's Book of English Love Poems. It often throws up unknown poems & completely obscure poets. I can't find any information about today's poet, James Drake. The poem comes from a collection called The Humours of New Tunbridge Wells at Islington, published in 1742. The picture is Mr & Mrs Andrews by Gainsborough (from here) & I wonder if their courtship was anything like this?

Can any transports equal those
Which two fond lovers feel,
Who meet, that thought to meet no more,
And their past woes reveal?

Their joys, too great to be expressed,
So crowd the faltering tongue,
Fain would they breathe their soul in words,
But passion strikes them dumb.

Yet do their eyes at the blest sight
Enraptured glances dart;
By these and sighs their wishes paint,
Which flutter round the heart.

Like statues fixed, amazed they stand,
Survey their mutual charms;
Then, when the ecstasy gives leave,
Fly to each other's arms.

The Fair Miss Fortune - D E Stevenson

2012-01-28T11:45:00.003+11:00

I've been reading The Worst Journey In The World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a gruelling account of Scott's last Antarctic expedition. It's a wonderful book but very distressing so I've needed something completely different to read last thing at night to stop myself worrying about Cherry, the other expedition members & especially the ponies & dogs. The Fair Miss Fortune couldn't be more different & fitted the bill perfectly.

D E Stevenson wrote The Fair Miss Fortune in the late 30s. Her publishers weren't interested in publishing it & so, it was left in the attic until it was recently rediscovered & published for the first time by Greyladies, an Edinburgh publishing house who introduced me to the delights of O Douglas & Mabel Esther Allan's mystery novels. This edition includes several letters between Stevenson & her agent about the difficulties they were having placing the novel. The theme of twins (this isn't giving anything away as it's in the letters) was thought to be a little hackneyed & they thought the story too old fashioned for the modern reader.

Jane Fortune moves to the village of Dingleford to open a teashop. She's accompanied by her old Nannie & she plans to renovate the house she's bought & capture passing trade from the recently built bypass. The previous owner of the house, Mrs Prestcott, is a vile woman who totally dominates her nice but downtrodden son, Harold. Empire builder Charles Weatherby is home on leave from India, living with his invalid mother & trying to avoid boring social engagements. Once he meets Jane, he falls almost immediately in love, saving her from an overflowing cistern & chopping down monstrous rhododendron bushes. Harold has also met Jane & is a little smitten although his shyness & sense of inferiority hinders him from doing anything about it.

The fun really starts when Jane's identical twin sister, Joan, arrives. Joan has been working in London while Jane establishes the teashop & finds out whether it will be successful enough for them to make a living in Dingleford together. Joan appears one day in the local shop, ignoring Charles & denting his ego. She's left London in a hurry as her boss is making a nuisance of himself. She swears Jane to secrecy as she's afraid he'll follow her & discover her whereabouts. Harold arrives one day to see Jane, meets Joan instead and, after fixing the doorbell, finds himself falling in love. Joan's romance with Harold blossoms, even though he thinks it's Jane he's in love with. The misunderstandings culminate with both Harold & Charles believing they're engaged to Jane & the sisters have to confess all.

The plot of The Fair Miss Fortune certainly isn't new but D E Stevenson has a sure touch & her cast of characters are a delight. Mrs Trail, who runs the village shop; Charles's mother, Emma; the Morleys, a discontented family with two very modern children longing for the bright lights & nightclubs of London; & especially monstrous Mrs Prestcott, with her newly built home, Suntrap, all sleek lines & a roof for sunbathing & her tyranny over Harold. She even tries to sabotage his efforts to lose weight by ordering all his favourite desserts. The scene where Mrs Prestcott confronts Jane to warn her off is obviously inspired by the similar scene between Elizabeth & Lady Catherine in Pride & Prejudice. The twins take a childish delight in confusing everybody right up to the end of this charming novel which could have been designed for the label comfort reading. The fact that the book was rejected shows once again that even established authors (Stevenson had been writing since the early 1920s) can have trouble being published. I'm glad the resurgence of interest in D E Stevenson has led to more of her work becoming available.

Greenbanks - Dorothy Whipple

2012-01-26T02:37:00.000+11:00

Greenbanks is the story of the Ashton family. Any novel by Dorothy Whipple is guaranteed to be an absorbing story of family relationships, romance & heartache & Greenbanks is no exception. They're the qualities that have made her Persephone's best-selling author. But, can I say that this is not the most absorbing Whipple I've read? I find that the Whipples I've read fall into two camps. The unputdownable ones like Someone At A Distance, They Were Sisters, They Knew Mr Knight & High Wages & the pleasant but more ho-humish ones like The Priory & Greenbanks.

I enjoyed the relationship between Louisa Ashton & her granddaughter Rachel very much. This is a theme that's mentioned in every review I've read so far. Rachel is about three when the novel begins & 18 at the end. Her relationship with Louisa is the most nurturing one she has. Her mother, Letty, is a disappointed woman. Married to pompous Ambrose & with three sons as well as Rachel to look after, she often seems exhausted. Rachel's schools are chosen not for their academic excellence but for their proximity to Greenbanks so that she can have lunch with her grandmother & stay there as well. Louisa encourages Rachel in her ambitions, but subtly. When Ambrose refuses to allow Rachel to take up her scholarship to Oxford, Louisa is there to support Rachel.

Louisa's marriage wasn't particularly happy either. Her husband, Robert, was a philanderer & is killed in a carriage accident while driving out with his latest mistress. Her eldest son, Jim, runs the family business but he's an unsympathetic man, thinking about the fortune he hopes to make & the awful young woman, Mabel, that he wants to marry. He has no real sympathy with his mother & is contemptuous of his brother, Charles, his mother's favourite. Charles is charming but feckless & eventually Jim & Ambrose pack him off to South Africa to make a living or disappear altogether - they don't really mind which. The scene where Louisa travels to London to see Charles off is heartbreaking.

The agony was long. The train did not move. Louisa's lips ached intolerably. She was determined not to cry, not to upset him. When the train went out, she could give way, but not before. She began to long for the train to go, to get it over, to let her heart break this iron oppression, and yet when the train began to move, she hurried along with it, and Charles had forcibly to tear his hand from hers.

When Charles returns with no money, a monkey & a parrot, his brother is appalled & soon packs him off to Malaya. Only Louisa is really pleased to see him & her only rebellions against the might of the men of the family are on Charles's behalf. Charles returns from Malaya in 1914 to enlist in the Army & cause his mother more anxiety.

Louisa's daughter, Laura, is another unhappy woman. Engaged to Cecil Bradfield, the love of her life, they quarrel over her green velvet hat, the ridiculous argument turns serious & neither will back down. Laura marries a rich manufacturer from Nottingham out of despair & leads a miserable life of luxury. Her rebellion, when it comes, causes Louisa anguish but when Laura, as always, relies on her mother to help her, Louisa is again the rock on which all her children rely. The loving, supportive relationship of Louisa & Rachel contrasts always with the ungrateful, selfish generation in between.

The most interesting character in the book for me was Kate Barlow. Kate had an affair with a married man, had his child, and, after the baby was taken for adoption, left town to work at poorly paid jobs as companion. After Charles leaves for South Africa, Louisa, who has kept in touch with Kate, decides to ask her to come & live with her. The family are scandalised, of course, & Kate, when she arrives, is quite different to how Louisa expected. Louisa made the offer from friendship & thought that Kate would look on her position as that of a guest. Kate, however, can't leave her past behind. The scandal of her love affair has scarred her character & she can't let anyone forget it. The portrait of this woman is summed up in one phrase, "She was always inadequate at rejoicing." Her presence is a blight on family dinners, her attempt to join a wartime sewing circle is a disaster, she gives no pleasure to anyone & isn't able to receive the gifts of friendship & love that Louisa would happily give her. She is ungracious, prickly & difficult. Even when her life seems about to change for the better, circumstances are against her.

I did enjoy reading Greenbanks. It's absorbing & full of those domestic details of middle-class life of the period that I enjoy. There are characters to love & characters to sneer at. Even then, Dorothy Whipple is too clever to have merely stock characters. Even Ambrose can be pitied at the end of the book as he imagines that his wife & daughter have rejected him. I think it's just that I have such high expectations when it comes to reading Dorothy Whipple that anything less than complete absorption & staying up far too late to finish the book, means that I feel slightly disappointed. There are other reviews of Greenbanks at normblog, Book Snob, & A Year of Actually Reading My Own Books.

Washing Lines : a collection of poems - selected by Janie Hextall & Barbara McNaught

2012-01-24T01:21:00.000+11:00

I came across a review of this book of poetry & immediately knew I wanted to read it. In the note on the back flap of the book, Janie Hextall & Barbara McNaught write that they became friends because of a shared love of poetry. They discovered that they both collected poems & woodcuts about laundry & enjoyed train travel because it meant they could look at washing blowing in the breeze in other people's backyards. Their passion for poetry & laundry led to the creation of Lautus Press - Lautus being the Latin for washed, clean or refined, elegant. The book that resulted from this passion is a beautiful object in itself. Pale lilac cover with French flaps & a lovely woodcut, Wash Day by Clifford Harper, on the cover.

The subject of all the poems & woodcuts (above is September Morning by Anne Hayward) is washing, laundry, cleaning, but the poems range from the traditional to the modern. They use laundry as a way to remember childhood or a symbol of the love of a mother for her sons. Sometimes it's a way of testing the loved one's resolve as in this famous song,

Can you make me a cambric shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Without any seam or needlework?
And you shall be a true lover of mine.

Can you wash it in yonder well,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Where never sprung water, nor rain ever fell?
And you shall be a true lover of mine.

Can you dry it on yonder thorn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Which never bore blossom since Adam was born?
And you shall be a true lover of mine.

In Gillian Clarke's poem, Women's Work, the poet is thinking of her own writing & remembering a long-ago summer,

August Sunday morning,
and I'm casting for words,
Wandering the garden sipping their poems,
leaving cups of them here and there in the grass
where the washing steams in the silence
after the hay-days and the birdsong months.

I am sixteen again, and it's summer,
and the sisters are singing, their habits gathered,
sleeves rolled for kitchen work,
rosy hands hoisting cauldrons of greens.
The laundry hisses with steam-irons
glossing the collars of our summer blouses.

I enjoyed Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Washing-Day, full of the apprehension of bad weather spoiling the wash & the irritation of an uninvited visitor when wash day is in full swing, The woodcut above is Lympstone Washday by Pam Pebworth.

The silent breakfast-meal is soon dispatch'd
Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks
Cast at the lowering sky, if sky should lower.
From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens!
For should the skies pour down, adieu to all
Remains of quiet; then expect to hear
Of sad disasters - dirt and gravel stains
Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once
Snapped short - and linen-horse by dog thrown down,
And all the petty miseries of life.
...

...Woe to the friend
Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim
On such a day the hospitable rites;
Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy,
Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes
With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie,
Or tart or pudding: - pudding he nor tart
That day shall eat; nor, tho' the husband try,
Mending what can't be help'd, to kindle mirth
From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow
Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest
In silence dines and early slinks away.

As well as an enjoyable collection of poems about the delights of cleanliness & domesticity, the Afterword of Washing Lines by Alexander Lee also explores the environmental issues at stake. I'd read about this trend in the papers & was incredulous that some cities in the US ban householders from drying their washing outside. They're forced to use clothes dryers which now consume 6-10% of domestic electricity in the US. The smell of freshly dried sheets is one of the joys of life & I'm lucky to live in a country where I can dry my washing outside all year. Banning the outdoor drying of laundry just seems so ridiculous. It's free & it's environmentally friendly. Alexander Lee has started a movement, Project Laundry List, to encourage outside drying & cold water washing. There's even a National Hanging Out Day!

I've only used a couple of my photos of the gorgeous woodcuts in the book as they make them look quite muddy & don't do them justice. If you enjoy poetry & woodcuts on domestic themes, I recommend Washing Lines. It's a little gem.

Sunday Poetry - Henry King

2012-01-22T11:38:00.000+11:00

Henry King (picture from here) was a 17th century poet & also Bishop of Chichester. He was the friend & executor of John Donne &, like Donne, seems to have written love poems in his youth that weren't published until the end of his life. This is a lovely poem of melancholy resignation but also with a touch of self-pity in the final verse.

Tell me no more how fair she is,
I have no mind to hear
the story of that distant bliss
I never shall come near:
By sad experience I have found
That her perfection is my wound.

And tell me not how fond I am
To tempt a daring fate,
From whence no triumph ever came,
But to repent too late:
There is some hope ere long I may
In silence dote myself away.

I ask no pity, Love, from thee
Nor will thy justice blame,
So that thou wilt not envy me
The glory of my flame:
Which crowns my heart whene'er it dies,
In that it falls her sacrifice.

An unexpected day

2012-01-20T02:16:00.000+11:00

I had an unexpected day off work yesterday & it was one of the loveliest days I've had in ages - probably because I thought I'd be at work & I wasn't. I had to wait at home in the morning for an electrician so I'd taken a few hours annual leave. He was on time & the job was done quickly, so by 10.30, I could have been on my way in to work. But, I'd just had a letter asking me to take some annual leave as I have accumulated too much & it was a beautiful day, not too hot, lovely cool breeze & work is pretty quiet at the moment & I had nothing urgent that needed to be done. So, I rang in & said I was taking a few more hours annual leave & I'd see them tomorrow. It was a very liberating feeling.

I did a few useful things like a load of laundry & some grocery shopping. I posted my review of Ann Bridge's Dangerous Islands. Then, I looked at my veggie garden & decided that I'd buy some more lettuce seedlings to replace a few plants that hadn't taken off. I also needed to buy Lucky a new collar as she's lost her old one, no idea where, & if she knows, she's not telling. I thought I might as well buy Phoebe a new one as well as she's very hard on her collars & her current one is looking a bit tatty. After visiting the pet shop & the first nursery for the plants, I went along to another nursery which has the most tempting gift shop because I have two friends with birthdays coming up. I found a lovely present for S who's very difficult to buy for & half of T's gift. I'll pick up a couple of other goodies at the farmers market in a couple of weeks to complete it.

I've become slightly addicted to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & his River Cottage TV series. I sat down after lunch with a cup of tea to watch the last of his Autumn series (DVDs borrowed from work) & I have Spring & Summer to watch as well. My addiction really started with his new Veg cookbook. I've tried several recipes, including the Macaroni Peas that Cornflower recommended. Then, I was looking through a gardening magazine & saw a review of a book that I think will be perfect for another friend's birthday next month. By this stage, I was feeling so organized I was just about ready to start Christmas shopping!

Late this afternoon, I planted out the lettuce, mulched & watered it all in & took these photos of the garden. At the top is my pride & joy, my first almost-ripe tomato. Then, some of the dozen or so green tomatoes at varying stages of growth. Then there's basil. Why is this basil in the garden bed against the fence looking so beautiful when the seedlings from the same punnet that I planted next to the tomatoes in the veggie bed look so sick? I hope it's because they've been eaten by all the bugs that would have eaten the tomatoes if the basil hadn't been there. Above is a picture of that garden bed by the fence with peppermint & pink geraniums, parsley & hebe.

Last but not least, here's Lucky enjoying the late afternoon shade in front of the veggie bed. It's been a lovely day, I feel I've accomplished so much, it felt as though I'd been given a special holiday. I finished the day with a little more Hugh, another cup of tea & a few more chapters of Middlemarch.

The Dangerous Islands - Ann Bridge

2012-01-19T10:55:00.001+11:00

After my little e-reader hiccup, I'm glad to say I've been able to get back to reading Ann Bridge's series of novels about Julia Probyn. The Dangerous Islands is set in Scotland, Ireland & the Scilly Isles & involves sailing, espionage & romance in equal measure.

Julia is at Glentoran, visiting her cousins the Munros. On a sailing trip around the Hebrides, Julia & Colin Munro discover a suspicious installation on a remote island. They suspect it's a radio transmitter, planted by the Russians to transmit satellite positions & other information to Moscow. This is 1963, so the Cold War is raging, & Colin's job in the Secret Service means that he needs to pass the information on & have it investigated. Philip Jamieson is dispatched from London to investigate. Jamieson, with help from Julia, is able to locate several more transmitters on remote islands. They also keep running into three Russians pretending to be Scandinavians on a trawler that has no legitimate reason to be there. Jamieson disables the transmitters & the search for more leads them to Ireland & the Scilly Isles.

Julia's friend, Mary Hutchinson, is concerned about her old friend Professor Burbage. The Professor has been acting suspiciously & his archaeological excavations seem to be taking place very close to the locations of the transmitters. He seems nervous when Julia meets him & his reputation is already under a cloud because he's suspected of helping the Russians when he worked in the Middle East. Julia's affection for the Professor makes her very protective of him & Jamieson's determination to do his job regardless of personal feelings complicates their personal relationship, especially when it becomes obvious that he's falling in love with Julia. Julia's feelings about him are equally romantic until she hears a rumour about his personal life that disconcerts her. The climax of the story on the Scillys is exciting & tragic but, as with all good adventure stories, right prevails & the good guys (mostly) live to fight another day.

The Dangerous Islands is another rollicking adventure for Julia & her friends. I've always loved reading about Scotland & the first section of the book involving the sailing trip around the Hebrides, is very exciting. I know it's a product of the period when the book was written but Julia's cousin, Edina, now married to Philip Reeder who we met in the first book, A Lighthearted Quest, spends a lot of time on the boat cooking & cleaning. Julia does much more in the way of sailing & exploring. When you think that Edina was practically running Glentoran single-handed in the first book, I was a bit annoyed to see her so diminished by marriage into a galley slave! It reminded me of the Famous Five - George the tomboy out there with the boys & Anne already in training as a good wife & mother. This kind of domestic stereotyping doesn't usually bother me as I read a lot of books of this period & earlier but I thought it was very marked here. Maybe I haven't read enough thrillers.

Julia herself is still a very attractive character. I enjoy the fact that she's independently wealthy & can just race off at a moment's notice on a trip to Ireland where naturally she has friends with a beautiful estate. She ingratiates herself with the locals wherever she goes & even when she visits the Scillies for the first time, has no trouble in finding out any necessary information. She's a natural intriguer & spy, if the Secret Service ever decide to employ her officially, instead of being content with her unofficial help. For all Julia's outward confidence, she hasn't been particularly successful in her romantic relationships so far. Her relationship with Philip Jamieson seems promising but there are four more books in the series & I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to them next.

As always in this series, the locations are important. All the island settings are beautifully described, the scenery, history & local legends are a part of the story & really add to the atmosphere of a very exciting plot & a cast of characters that I'm looking forward to meeting up with again.

Virginia Woolf - Alexandra Harris

2012-01-17T02:45:00.000+11:00

Over a year ago, I read Alexandra Harris's book, Romantic Moderns. I was so inspired by her survey of modernist English writers & artists that I had great plans to read more about them, especially the fiction of Virginia Woolf. Now, just to give me another nudge, Alexandra Harris has written a biography of Virginia Woolf.

This is an elegantly written, concise survey of Woolf's life & work. It would be ideal for someone who knew little about Woolf & wanted to know who she was. Harris acknowledges the magnificent biography of Woolf by Hermione Lee, which Harris called, "the book that showed me what literature can do and sent me off to study English." Woolf's life is economically described. Her happy early childhood, the summers at Cornwall that inspired To The Lighthouse, her despair & breakdown after the death of her beloved mother, Julia. Her education, directed by her father, Leslie Stephen, & the revelation of books & literature. The escape from conventionality that was only possible for Virginia & her siblings after their father's death. Life in Bloomsbury, Richmond & Sussex, marriage to Leonard Woolf. Her relationships with friends & lovers. The mental illnesses that punctuated her life & the soothing work at the Hogarth Press that helped her to recover.The last years with the threat of war & her final decision to commit suicide when she felt the mental illness returning in 1941.

I found it especially invaluable for the insights into the fiction, which I've never really been able to love, & the connections between the life & the work. I always feel at a bit of a distance from Woolf's fiction. I've read most of the novels but my real love is the Diaries. From A Writer's Diary, the selection that Leonard put together to show Virginia as a working writer (about to be reprinted by Persephone) to the complete six volumes, I loved Woolf's voice.

Woolf did not conceive her diary as a place of guarded privacy...She started to write for her older self, imagining conversations with Virginia Woolf at fifty. And she was fully aware, especially as she became more famous, that her diary might well be read by others. Reading her accounts of meetings with Yeats or T S Eliot, for example, one feels her shaping the moment for posterity. There is surprisingly little about the boredoms, humiliations, and terrors of illness. As usual, she bothered to think through the reasons for this: "I want to appear a success even to myself." The diary feels so full and expansive that it is tempting to imagine that all her life is here. It is not, but here is the version of life she wanted to remember.

I find it fascinating to pick an event from the diaries & then read the letters she wrote at the same time. As we all do, she had different voices for different people & she can write several letters about the same incident to different people, putting a slightly different slant on it each time. It's even more exciting to open A Writer's Diary as I just did & find myself reading the entry she made on October 27th 1928 when she returned from giving the lecture that became A Room of One's Own.

Thank God, my long toil at the women's lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women - that's my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine and have a room of their own. ... I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer and thicker knowledge of life. I get a sense of tingling and vitality from an evening's talk like that; one's angularities and obscurities are smoothed and lit.

I also prefer the essays to the fiction. The Common Reader books are just so full of Woolf's wide reading & Harris describes how much research & reading went into just one essay. I recently treated myself to Vol 5 of the Collected Essays edited by Stuart N Clarke which contains the second series of The Common Reader as well as the essay Women & Fiction that became A Room of One's Own & I've been reading an few essays every week.

Inspired by this biography, I did read Between the Acts last week. I admired it but it left me cold. I think I'll just have to admit quiet defeat & keep reading the essays, letters & diaries.

Virginia Woolf is a beautifully produced book. A compact hardback with almost 50 illustrations it's an example of a book that doesn't need to be a single page longer. The final chapter is a survey of Woolf's reputation since her death, & is especially good on the various feminist interpretations that portrayed Woolf as a victim of the patriarchy & the medical establishment or a lesbian feminist heroine. Alexandra Harris's version of the life is admirably balanced & gives full weight to all the aspects of Woolf's life. I enjoyed it very much.

Sunday Poetry - Sarah Williams

2012-01-15T11:53:00.001+11:00

I had never heard of Sarah Williams when I came across this lovely poem called Youth & Maidenhood. I haven't been able to find a picture of her (this picture is from here). I found out a little about her short life from The Feminist Companion to Literature in English by Blain, Clements & Grundy, one of my favourite reference books. Known as Sadie, Sarah was the daughter of a wealthy family who studied at Queen's College, London. She used the proceeds of her writing to help the poor. She died following an operation at the age of 27 & her poetry was published posthumously in a collection called Twilight Hours. I think it encapsulates that Victorian melancholy abvout love when death was never far away & maybe love was all the sweeter for that contrast.

Like a drop of water is my heart
Laid upon her soft and rosy palm,
Turned whichever way her hand doth turn,
Trembling in an ecstasy of calm.

Like a broken rose-leaf is my heart,
Held within her close and burning clasp,
Breathing only dying sweetness out,
Withering beneath the fatal grasp.

Like a vapoury cloudlet is my heart,
Growing into beauty near the sun,
Gaining rainbow hues in her embrace,
Melting into tears when it is done.

Like mine own dear harp is this my heart,
Dumb without the hand that sweeps its strings;
Though the hand be careless or be cruel,
When it comes my heart breaks forth and sings.

Sorting out the new e-reader... & a bit of a ramble

2012-01-14T15:00:00.000+11:00

My faithful e-reader, basic but easy to use, conked out a couple of weeks ago. My friend P thinks it was the CPU as I couldn't access any of the books, all I could see were little grey thumbnails (& the only excuse for grey book covers is Persephone books which these weren't). So, I decided that I would look around for a new e-reader with a few more whiz bang features.

I decided on the new Sony Touch with wi-fi. I won't go through all my struggles with Adobe not talking to the Sony Reader or the number of registration forms I had to fill in for just about every move I made. All I will say is that, after a couple of hours of me talking to the PC & the PC not talking back to me, the Sony Reader miraculously found the e-books I had stored on Adobe & whizzed them across to the Sony Reader & I somehow worked out how to get them on the new reader. Then, I needed a Bex & a good lie down. Just today (because I needed a week's recovery time), I managed to get the free e-books I had stored on my PC onto the reader so I'm feeling quite pleased. I'm not very clever with technology so this is an achievement, believe me!

The Sony Touch is smaller & much lighter than my old e-reader. I'm enjoying the increased functionality. It's much easier to move through a book (now I can type in a page number. Before I could only move through a book by increments of 5%. Awkward but it did wonders for my maths skills). I can bookmark, use the dictionary & I even tried out the wi-fi at work & was able to download a book from our e-library.

I have been reading (Alexandra Harris's excellent biography of Virginia Woolf) & I will be posting a review & a poem over the next couple of days but I need to walk away from the PC for a bit. I've started the next Julia Probyn book by Ann Bridge now that I'm e-able again & it's just as good as the previous books in the series.

I also want to mention a new feature on Blogger. I can now reply directly to a comment rather than my replies being at the bottom of the list. Anyone can reply to a comment of course but when a conversation starts as it sometimes does, it will be easier to keep track.

Some book news to end this ramble. Virago are going to reprint two novels by Angela Thirkell in December. High Rising & Wild Strawberries. I haven't read any Thirkell but I know there are many fans out there. I've always thought I should read Thirkell one day & I have an omnibus on the tbr shelves so I may be inspired this year. I'm sure I'm going to want to buy the Viragos, can't wait to see the covers.

The Betrayal of Trust - Susan Hill

2012-01-10T01:30:00.000+11:00

Sixteen years ago, young Harriet Lowther disappeared. She was waiting at a bus stop but she didn't get on the bus. There were few witnesses & no clues as to what could have happened. Harriet was a good student who loved music & sport. She was happy at home & had plenty of friends. There seemed no reason to believe she'd run away but, if she was abducted, she vanished without trace. Now, after a storm that washes away earth & rocks on the Moor near the cathedral city of Lafferton, a shallow grave has been discovered. The remains prove to be Harriet's & Simon Serrailler is put in charge of the investigation. When another shallow grave with the remains of another young woman are discovered in the same area, the case becomes more complicated because this young woman wasn't reported missing. Are the two deaths connected?

Cold case investigations are the most difficult to pursue. Memories fade, witnesses move away or die. Simon is also faced with cutbacks in the police force that mean he's virtually investigating on his own. He's a loner, as all the best fictional detectives are, so that doesn't really matter. But there's a mountain of evidence to sift through about Harriet's disappearance & the need to identify the second victim is vital. When a TV producer agrees to do a reconstruction of the afternoon of Harriet's disappearance, Simon hopes that it will jog someone's memory.

When Jocelyn Forbes discovers that she has motor neurone disease, she knows how horrible her inevitable death will be. She decides to investigate assisted suicide although her barrister daughter, Jenny, is horrified at the suggestion & initially refuses to accompany her mother to a clinic in Switzerland. Although Jocelyn changes her mind about the Swiss clinic, she is determined to choose the time of her death before her symptoms become too distressing. When she's contacted by a local doctor who seems to know all about her experience in Switzerland, she decides to investigate further.

Simon Serrailler's sister, Cat Deerbon, is a GP who also attends a hospice. The hospice is in financial trouble & Cat is increasingly concerned that the work they're doing is being compromised by the constraints they're suffering. Another trustee at the hospice is Sir John Lowther, Harriet's father, & he decides to ask Leo Fison for help with fundraising. Fison & his wife have just opened a nursing home for dementia patients but he's willing to take on the task & immediately comes up with several ideas to keep the hospice going.

Susan Hill's novels are never just about the investigation. There's usually a social issue that threads through the narrative. This time, it's euthanasia. The characters in the book explore all sides of the question &, because it's a question that has resonance for Simon & his family because of events in earlier books in the series, it becomes part of the wider tapestry. That's what I especially enjoy about this series. Apart from the puzzle of who killed Harriet & who the unidentified woman is, there's a real sense of a family & a community. Simon is an aloof character although in this book we see him as vulnerable when he falls in love, virtually at first sight. Naturally, the course of Simon's love is not going to run smooth as although the woman he loves reciprocates his feelings, she's not free. Cat is struggling with being a single parent after her husband's death & is finding the demands of family & work more difficult. None of these personal issues is resolved at the end of the book & I can't wait for the next one to find out what happens to the Serraillers next.

I read very few detective novels last year, I just wasn't in the right mood. At the moment I have new novels by Cath Staincliffe, Marcia Muller & Cynthia Harrod-Eagles on my desk, all continuations of series I've enjoyed. Hopefully reading The Betrayal of Trust has given me the kickstart I need to put a little mystery into my reading again.

Sunday Poetry - Sir Walter Raleigh

2012-01-08T10:38:00.001+11:00

Last Sunday I was reading Christopher Marlowe, this week, it's Sir Walter Raleigh's response to Marlowe's poem. The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd is a sober, cool response to the rapturous heights of Marlowe's poem. Just as last week's poem suited the hot, languorous weather we were having in Melbourne that day, so this poem suits today's grey, coolness. It rained all night & it's still quite humid but I hope a southerly breeze will take the humidity away very soon.

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee, and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complain of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee, and be thy love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee, and be thy love.

Shirley - Charlotte Brontё

2012-01-07T14:27:00.001+11:00

I've found myself rereading the novels of the Brontё sisters over the last year or so. I reread Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights nearly every year but the other novels not so often. I read Villette again last year & The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as well but this is the first time I've read Shirley in years. I've only ever read Agnes Grey & The Professor once so I feel I need to read them again as well.

Shirley is a historical novel, set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars in early 19th century England. Shirley Keeldar is an orphaned heiress who has returned to her family estate, Fieldhead, after years of living with her guardian & his family. She was given the name Shirley in the expectation that she would be a boy as it was originally a boy's name (Shirley Temple has changed the way we think of the name. In 1849 when Shirley was published, readers would have been surprised to find a heroine called Shirley). Shirley is beautiful, spirited, wilful but essentially a kind, loving girl. She is determined to look after her estate & her tenants. However, she returns to a community in disorder.

The war with France has been devastating for the local cloth manufacturers. There have been riots by workmen laid off due to the introduction of new machinery in the factories that will mean less hand labour is needed. Robert Gérard Moore, a half-Flemish, half-English mill-owner, has boldly introduced the new frames to his factory. His methods have been a little brusque, a little unfeeling to the fears of his workers who have been laid off. Moore is determined to press on with the innovations as quickly as possible. The consequence is that the first delivery of new machinery is attacked & destroyed by a gang of frame-breakers determined to stop progress at any cost. Shirley champions Robert & loans him money to keep his factory afloat as restrictive laws limit the market for his cloth. Robert is handsome & Shirley is beautiful & rich. Rumours are soon about that they intend to marry.

Caroline Helstone is a quiet young woman, niece to the Rev Helstone, a cold, distant man whose unkindness is said to have driven his wife to an early grave. Caroline's childhood was unhappy. Her father was a drunkard & her mother left him & Caroline & hasn't been heard of for years. Caroline is a distant cousin of Robert Moore & his sister, Hortense, & spends her days at their house, The Hollow, improving her French & her sewing. Caroline is in love with Robert but his thoughts are on his business & his future. The rest of her time is spent as a helper at Sunday School & acting as her uncle's hostess at tedious social occasions.

When Shirley arrives at Fieldhead, she & Caroline become friends. Caroline's uncle forbids her to see the Moores after he quarrels with Robert & Caroline gradually pines away with unrequited love & a sense of hopelessness as she has no purpose in life. Practically uneducated, unwilling to think of marrying anyone but Robert, who seems to be in love with Shirley, Caroline sinks into a dangerous illness.

Shirley is a fascinating but not wholly successful novel. The first two volumes (my OUP edition is divided into the original three volumes) are wonderful. From the opening chapters with the attack on the factory machinery to the story of Caroline's love for Robert & her frustrated lack of purpose & the arrival of Shirley who rejuvenates everyone around her, the story is gripping. The chapters about Caroline's illness are incredibly moving, especially with the knowledge that Charlotte was writing these chapters just after the death of Anne, her last remaining sibling. The chapter about the old maids of the village, Miss Ainley & Miss Mann, is full of all the withering scorn Charlotte was capable of. Charlotte knew the likely fate of unwanted women all too well in a society that was content to have undereducated women languishing for want of useful work. Caroline can see her fate in that of the old maids & it leaves her demoralised & depressed.

The attack on Moore's mill is exciting & full of tension as is the attack on Moore himself that leaves him close to death. The portraits of the Yorke family (based on Charlotte's friend Mary Taylor's family) & the three curates, Donne, Malone & Sweeting (based on curates Charlotte had known at Haworth. Apparently when Arthur Nicholls, Charlotte's future husband, first read Shirley, his landlady heard him shout with laughter & stamp his feet as he read the opening chapters) are truly felt & observed. Charlotte based Caroline & Shirley on her sisters, Anne & Emily, using wish fulfillment as well as her memories in her portraits. She said that Shirley was Emily as she would have been if she'd had wealth & she uses the true episode where Emily cauterised a bite on her arm from a dog suspected of rabies & gives it to Shirley. The historical background is based on extensive research into the newspapers of the time as well as her father's recollections.

It's the third volume that falls off in interest & credibility. Robert's brother, Louis, has been tutor in the family of Shirley's guardians, the Sympsons. When the Sympsons visit Fieldhead, Caroline is surprised that Shirley hadn't mentioned knowing Louis. Unfortunately Louis is not an interesting character & his journal entries demonstrate all the difficulty Charlotte had when trying to write from a male perspective. Seeing Shirley change from the vibrant young woman of the first two volumes to someone looking for a master & content to be ruled by another is a real anticlimax. Shirley does say that she felt she had to defer to Louis so that he wouldn't be embarrassed by their difference in fortune & status, but I wasn't convinced. Their courtship is stilted & drawn-out & the part played by young Martin Yorke & Henry Sympson very awkward.

Even with my reservations about the relationship between Louis & Shirley, I enjoyed revisiting Shirley very much. Charlotte promised her readers "Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning", and after the romance & mystery of Jane Eyre, that's what they got. All Charlotte's strengths as a writer are here - the strong female characters, the domestic details, the true relationships between uncle & niece, mother & daughter, friends & lovers. If I don't love Shirley as I love Jane Eyre, I can certainly enjoy revisiting some of the most vivid characters ever created by one of my favourite authors.

Gaudy Night - Dorothy L Sayers

2012-01-03T01:51:00.000+11:00

I've been watching the latest series of Lewis with Kevin Whately & Laurence Fox. One episode was set at a Gaudy at an Oxford women's college & as soon as the program finished, I grabbed Gaudy Night & started reading it for the umpteenth time. This is one of my favourite books. Dorothy L Sayers is one of the few mystery writers I can reread. Even when I know whodunit, I read her books for the atmosphere & flavour of England in the 1920s & 30s. As P D James has said, if you want to know what it was like to work in an advertising agency in the 20s, you read Murder Must Advertise. Sayers worked in such an agency & she gets the office politics just right. The Nine Tailors is a loving portrait of life in a village in the Fens, the same kind of place where she grew up. Have His Carcase is a portrait of a seedy watering place where rich widows are seduced by gigolos. In some ways, the investigation takes second place for me to the evocation of a period that has gone.

Harriet Vane is one of my literary heroines & Gaudy Night is her story. Peter Wimsey makes only fleeting appearances until quite late in the book. Harriet is a successful detective novelist. It's five years since she was tried for the murder of her lover, Philip Boyes, & acquitted with the help of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was convinced of her innocence from the moment he first saw her. Wimsey has pursued Harriet with proposals of marriage ever since & she has done her best to reject him. When she is invited to her old college's Gaudy, she decides to go, if only to meet a friend who is now ill & wanting to see her. Harriet has avoided Oxford since she went down. She had to work hard to make a living & then her notoriety made her wary of going back. Now, she's made a success of her professional life, however unsatisfied she may be personally, & she returns to Oxford.

The Gaudy reunites Harriet with old friends, some of whom she's happier to see than others. She finds she grown apart from Mary Stokes, the friend she came to meet, but is happy to be reacquainted with others, including the Dean, Miss Martin, & her English tutor, Miss Lydgate. Some of the other dons, including spiky Miss Hillyard, are less pleased at Harriet's return. When Harriet finds an anonymous letter in her gown, accusing her of murder, she thinks nothing of it. There have been many such letters & she returns to London after the Gaudy reflecting on how soothing a little time at Oxford pursuing some research would be.

A letter from Miss Martin, asking Harriet to visit Shrewsbury College for the opening of the new Library, awakens Harriet's desire to retreat to academe for a while. The Dean & the Warden of the College want to consult Harriet about a spate of unpleasant practical jokes & anonymous letters that have been sent to dons & students. The letters are explicit & very nasty, accusing people of disgusting crimes & unnatural acts. They all seem to be against the idea of women intellectuals, seeing an unmarried woman as an abomination against nature. Harriet realises that the letter she found was part of the same campaign & therefore the culprit could only be a don or one of the college servants as very few students were in college during the Gaudy.

Harriet agrees to investigate & returns to College to research the life of Sheridan LeFanu as well as helping Miss Lydgate with the proofs of her new book as a cover for her investigations. While there, she makes the acquaintance of Peter Wimsey's nephew, Lord St George, & is pursued by Reggie Pomfret, a young undergraduate who she discovers helping a very drunk Shrewsbury student over the College wall in the middle of the night. The incidents & letters keep coming, including the vandalising of the Library the night before the official opening & letters being sent to a vulnerable student who attempts suicide as a result. As the atmosphere among the dons grows more poisonous, Harriet realises that she needs help & decides to consult Peter.

Gaudy Night isn't just a mystery novel though. It's really Dorothy L Sayers's love letter to Oxford. She writes so lovingly about Oxford, the University life, the College & all the personalities who inhabit it. The dons are beautifully drawn. Miss Martin is a delight as is Miss Lydgate, a scatty, lovable woman who is devising a new theory of prosody that requires her to rewrite her book endlessly while driving the printers mad with her use of different fonts & notation styles. The clash of personalities among the dons is convincing & Harriet discovers the downside of community life as well as the joys of scholarship & the ordered beauty of a life devoted to the mind rather than the messiness of personal relationships. This description of Oxford is idyllic & full of nostalgia for the days of Sayers's youth,

April was running out, chilly and fickle, but with the promise of good things to come; and the city wore the withdrawn and secretive beauty that wraps her about in vacation. No clamour of young voices echoed along her ancient stones; the tumult of flying bicycles was stilled in the narrow strait of the Turl; in Radcliffe Square the Camera slept like a cat in the sunshine, disturbed only by the occasional visit of a slow-footed don; even in the High, the roar of car and charabanc seemed minished and brought low, for the holiday season was not yet; punts and canoes, new-fettled for the summer term, began to put forth upon the Cherwell like the varnished buds upon the horse-chestnut tree, but as yet there was no press of traffic upon the shining reaches; the mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.

Harriet pursues her investigations & comes to terms with her feelings for Peter, finally seeing a way forward that will allow her to preserve her hard-won independence while allowing someone else into her life. I always find the last few pages, as Peter & Harriet stroll through the College grounds after hearing Bach's Double Violin Concerto, very moving.

The pictures by Natacha Ledwidge are from my lovely Folio Society edition of Gaudy Night. I don't feel I'm done with Dorothy just yet though. In the middle of a hot Melbourne summer, maybe The Nine Tailors should be next or The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club?

Sunday Poetry - Christopher Marlowe

2012-01-01T10:45:00.001+11:00

Happy New Year everyone. I'm beginning the New Year with a new poetry anthology, Everyman's Book of English Love Poems, edited by John Hadfield in 1980. I rescued it from a library book sale a long time ago. I'm going to ignore all my librarian's training & just dip in where the mood takes me instead of going through the book chronologically. The first poem I've chosen is an early one though, Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.

I've had a restless couple of days, flitting from book to book, unable to settle on anything. I enjoyed compiling my Top 10 lists but then couldn't decide what to read next. I started reading some of Michael Wood's essays from his collection In Search of England & that led me on to his TV series from about 10 years ago, In Search of Shakespeare. I watched the first two episodes of it last night & I'll watch the rest this afternoon. I don't really care if this gorgeous portrait (from here) is Marlowe or not. It's how I've always imagined him & it's the picture I have in my mind as I read his poetry. I always hear the lovely version of this poem that was used in the opening scenes of the Ian McKellen version of Richard III. You can hear it here (the song starts at 2.13).

Come live with me, and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my Love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my Love.

Next week, Sir Walter Raleigh's reply to Marlowe.

The books I didn't quite get to in 2011

2011-12-31T11:32:00.000+11:00

Now that the reading year is coming to a close, I've been thinking about the books that I bought this year, usually as a result of enthusiastic reviews & then, by the time they arrived, the moment had passed. I'd moved on & the books made their way to the tbr shelves to await their moment.

After reading Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee, I was sure I'd go straight on to read more Edgeworth. I'd already been tempted by these lovely new editions of two of her novels, Helen & Patronage by Sort Of Books. But, of course, I didn't!

I was so enthusiastic about Virginia Woolf after reading Alexandra Harris's wonderful book Romantic Moderns this time last year that I bought a copy of Between the Acts straight away & haven't thought about it since. Maybe in 2012?

The Vintage Stella Gibbons reprints caught my eye & I couldn't wait to get my hands on them. I have read Conference at Cold Comfort Farm & Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm but Westwood is the one everyone is raving about, including Desperate Reader & Stuck In A Book.

Speaking of Simon at Stuck In A Book, one of his books of the year is Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages which I rushed to buy on the strength of his wonderful review. I dipped into it this morning as I was taking the photo of the cover & I think I may read it next. How's that for a definite commitment? I've just finished my umpteenth rereading of Dorothy L Sayers's Gaudy Night & I'm only one chapter into Dorothy Whipple's Greenbanks so Shirley may jump in this afternoon as my New Year's Eve reading.

Constance Maud's suffragette novel, No Surrender, was reviewed by Desperate Reader & Book Snob. I'm fascinated by the suffragettes but I haven't got to it yet.

Virginia Nicholson's new book, Millions Like Us, was eagerly anticipated. I loved her earlier books & this one is about women in WWII. I will definitely get to it soon.

I've only discovered Georgette Heyer in the last few years. I read all her mystery novels years ago but her Regency romances left me cold until I read a few of her books with older heroines & I found her wit & incredible grasp of historical detail irresistible. So, I'm looking forward to Jennifer Kloester's new biography of Heyer, especially after Elaine's review at Random Jottings.

Dovegreyreader's Edward Thomas reading trail was fascinating because I've always loved Thomas's poetry & I've read his wife Helen's books about him as well as Eleanor Farjeon's memoir. So, I had great intentions of reading Matthew Hollis's new book, Now All Roads Lead To France, during November. But, my Remembrance reading went in another direction & I didn't get to it.

So, there you have it. My unread books confessions for the year. Of course, there are hundreds more unread books on the tbr shelves but I'm going to try to stop adding to them for a while & enjoy the books I already own. That's the only New Year reading resolution I'm making. What are your reading resolutions?
Happy New Year from Lucky & Phoebe (that's a rare photo of them together) & here's to lots of lovely reading experiences for us all in 2012.

Top Ten Books of 2011 - Fiction

2011-12-30T11:12:00.001+11:00

My Top 10 Fiction books for the year range from 19th century sensation fiction to 20th century adventure & romance. There's no crime in there & I haven't read many crime novels at all this year. I haven't read much contemporary fiction at all &, as a result, there's very little that's new or modern in my Top 10. I also read most of these books on my e-reader but I don't think that means much except that my e-reader has allowed me to get hold of titles that were previously unavailable. Again, the titles are in no particular order & you can read my original reviews by clicking on the links.

The First Violin by Jessie Fothergill was a book I downloaded from Girlebooks after reading about the author in one of my Top 10 Non Fiction books of the year, Notable Women Authors of the Day. This is the story of a young woman who goes to Germany to study music & falls in love with a mysterious man who plays first violin in the orchestra. It also has a very sympathetic portrayal of a married woman in love with another man.

Another treat from Girlebooks was The War Workers by E M Delafield. The story of a group of women working in a supply depot in England during WWI. It was based on the author's own experiences & is very different to her popular Provincial Lady books.

I'm going to pop a whole series in here even though I've only read the first three books. The Julia Probyn series by Ann Bridge has been my find of the year. Thanks to blog reviews & the wonderful Bloomsbury Reader, I've been able to get hold of the whole series & will be working my way through them all. I've read A Lighthearted Quest, The Portuguese Escape & The Numbered Account so far. Adventure in exotic locations sums up the series. Julia is a delightful character - attractive, clever & determined, she gets to the bottom of any mystery.

Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon was another unputdownable book. I almost stopped breathing at one point. If I hadn't had to get up for work, I think I would have read this in one sitting. The story of an abducted child & his mother's determination to find him, this seemed an unlikely choice for Persephone. But, the experiences of Susan Selky, her reactions to the investigation & her friends & family are universal so it doesn't really matter when the book was written.

Linda Gillard's foray into self-published e-books has been one of my favourite success stories of the year. House of Silence & Untying the Knot are both compelling reads but I think House of Silence was my favourite of the two. As Linda describes it, Cold Comfort Farm meets Rebecca. Family secrets, a beautiful house in the country & a passionate love story, what more could you want?

Anne Hereford by Mrs Henry Wood was my sensation novel of the year. I read it with my 19th century book group & was supposed to stick to seven chapters a week. Well, that was never going to happen once I started! An orphan forced to earn her own living, a mysterious house & its occupants, a vengeful man & a mysterious wing of the house where Anne is excluded, all the ingredients of classic sensation.

Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac was a novel of revenge, greed & lust & I loved every minute of it. A downtrodden poor relation gets her revenge on her family when she loses the only man she cares about. The downfall of the Hulots is inevitable but even Bette doesn't have it all her own way.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley is a book-lover's delight. The story of a travelling bookshop & the man who owns it shows what can happen when a passion for books takes over your life.

Garthowen by Allen Raine was another 19th century book group choice & it was a delightful surprise. The story of a farming family in Wales, of two brothers in love with the same woman & the different paths they take in life was absorbing & there was an element of the supernatural that made the story different to anything else I've read.

O Douglas was the pseudonym of the sister of John Buchan & I've read several of her novels since discovering her through Greyladies. Penny Plain is the story of a family & the efforts of the eldest sister to keep the family together. Jean Jardine, her family & friends in Priorsford show what life was like in a small Scottish town just after WWI. I called the book charmingly comfortable & it is, perfect comfort reading with humour & romance.

Tomorrow, for something completely different, a list of books that I'm sure would have made my Top 10 - if I'd had time to read them.

Top 10 Books of 2011 - Non Fiction

2011-12-29T12:28:00.001+11:00

It's time for my Top 10 lists of the year. First, Non Fiction. I've read some terrific Non Fiction this year with several of my Top 10 read in the last month. Here's the list, in no particular order. Follow the links to my original reviews.

Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin. A marvellous biography of a complex man. An excellent introduction if you know nothing about Dickens & full of interesting detail for those who have read all the other biographies.

Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport. I knew as I was reading this that it would make my Top 10. Again, there are hundreds of books about Victoria & Albert but Helen Rappaport's deep concentration on the crucial decade from 1861-1871 makes this special.

Memoirs of a Highland Lady by Elizabeth Grant. Along with The Highland Lady in Ireland, these two books provide a memorable portrait of life in Scotland & Ireland in the early 19th century. I was completely absorbed in Eliza's remarkable memories of her childhood & early married life.

Catherine Pope's Victorian Secrets is a wonderful publishing house specialising in reprinting 19th century fiction complete with new Introductions & contemporary reviews. One of the books published by Victorian Secrets this year was Notable Women Authors of the Day by Helen C Black. These interviews with now-forgotten authors are a fascinating insight into the literary life of the 1890s.

Behind Closed Doors by Amanda Vickery was an enlightening & unputdownable journey into the Georgian home. I especially remember the importance of wallpaper - the patterns, the colours were markers of social status. A beautifully illustrated & produced book by Yale University Press. I also loved the TV series of the book, At Home with the Georgians.

The Letters of T S Eliot Vol 2 1923-1825 was a book I'd waited 20 years for. That's how long ago Vol 1 came out. Full of detail about his editing, his struggles to leave the Bank & his worries about the health of his wife, Vivienne, I was fascinated.

An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope. This was one of those serendipitous reading choices that came from reading a review on another blog & taking the book from the tbr shelves where it had sat for far too long. Trollope was such a lovable man & his modesty & surprise at his success are very endearing. If you're interested in how writers write, especially Victorian writers, or in how a man can overcome a desperately unhappy childhood, you need to read this book.

Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence. Again, I picked this from the tbr shelves after reading an obituary of the author in the Jane Austen Society of Australia newsletter. Jon Spence looks at Jane's work through her knowledge of her family history & through her relationships with Tom Lefroy & her cousin, Eliza. A fresh look at a well-known story. This book proves that there are always new angles to explore in any life.

Graven with Diamonds by Nicola Shulman is about Sir Thomas Wyatt & his poetry. Not a conventional biography, Shulman looks at the way Wyatt wrote & how his poetry, with its obscure (to us) allusions, can illuminate the Court of Henry VIII. I love books about the less well-known corners of history & this book taught me about the way poetry was written & read in Tudor times.

Reading Montrose by C V Wedgwood was the result of reading one of Montrose's poems & posting it as a Sunday Poem earlier this month. The comments on the poem inspired me to take this book from the tbr shelves & I discovered a fascinating & ultimately tragic life story.

So, that's the list. If anything, it justifies my overflowing tbr shelves as four of these books had been sitting on the shelves for some years. Tomorrow, my Top 10 Fiction of 2011.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

2011-12-28T14:22:00.003+11:00

Stella Gibbons has enjoyed something of a revival this year with new editions of several of her novels from Vintage Classics & this volume of short stories, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm. Only the title story is set at Cold Comfort Farm & a miserable place it is, especially at Christmas. The story takes place some years before Flora Poste arrives to sort everyone out. The Christmas pudding is full of not charms but curses. Whoever gets the coffin nail will be dead within the year. Why anyone had any desire to eat that pudding, I have no idea. Aunt Ada is fulminating against all her kin as always & Adam's attempts to fill the Christmas stockings with treats like turnips & swedes are not appreciated. Luckily Dick Hawk-Monitor saves the day, at least as far as Elfine is concerned.

The other Christmas story, The Little Christmas Tree, concerns a woman who decides to spend Christmas alone in the country. She refuses all invitations & is just starting to find herself feeling a little lonely & bored when two children arrive & her day ends very hopefully. In To Love and To Cherish, a woman decides to leave her husband. She writes him a farewell letter, takes a train to London for a job interview but gradually realises that her boring, comfortable life has left her unfitted for any other.

More Than Kind is about a very modern second marriage. Ian Wardell's first wife, Sophie, comes to stay so that the children won't be traumatised by their parents' separation & his new wife, Lillian, is expected to welcome her with open arms & without jealousy. The fact that no one, not even the children, really enjoy Sophie's visits, is immaterial. They're behaving in a modern, sophisticated way as all their friends would expect them to do. Sophie upsets the servants & causes Nanny to resign when she upsets the children's routine. She visits Ian in his room which makes him uncomfortable & Lillian resentful. Finally, the explosion we've been waiting for comes & modern morality is shown to be a facade with all the old emotions seething underneath the polite small talk.

My favourite story, apart from the visit to Cold Comfort, was Sisters. Elaine Garfield is a kind, middle-aged spinster living in a village. She decides to employ a young girl who has been ostracised because she's had an illegitimate baby. At first, Elaine is irritated by the girl's clumsiness & her annoying chatter. But, gradually, she becomes accustomed to Ivy's presence &, as they become more intimate, Elaine tells Ivy about her own great secret. The result is not what she expected. What this story does so well is explore the chasm between the classes, between Elaine's kind but patronising efforts to help Ivy & treat her as she would wish to be treated herself & Ivy's working class family's strict moral code which they apply to everyone, including Elaine.

These stories were originally published in magazines such as The Lady & Good Housekeeping and, as Alexander McCall Smith says in his Introduction, they come from a period when a story had a tale to tell & told it straightforwardly with maybe a twist or two before the resolution. Literary effect was not as important as plot. All these stories are about an England that would be changed by the Second World War. The moral attitudes, some of the class consciousness, the formality would be swept away. I enjoyed these stories for that picture of another England & for the touches of dry humour & satire that Stella Gibbons is so good at portraying. Hopefully now that Vintage have reprinted some more of her fiction, Gibbons's reputation as a one-hit wonder will be gone forever.

Magnificent Obsession - Helen Rappaport

2011-12-27T15:22:00.000+11:00

Queen Victoria was devastated by the death of her beloved husband, Albert, the Prince Consort. He died in December 1861 at the age of only 42 & Victoria withdrew from public life almost completely in the years that followed. Helen Rappaport's subtitle, "the death that changed the monarchy" is no exaggeration. The public sympathised with the Queen in her grief at first. After all, Victoria, Albert & their nine children were the epitome of devoted, happy family life. But, as the months of mourning turned into years, sympathy waned & was replaced by dissatisfaction with a monarch who was never seen but who continued to draw a large income. Politicians & civil servants were forced to travel to the Queen's private (& inconvenient) homes at Osborne & Balmoral to coax the Queen into performing her duties & keeping the wheels of government turning. Rumbles of republicanism were heard &, in some quarters, grew louder. It was only another near-tragedy in the Royal family, 10 years after Albert's death, that silenced the republicans & restored confidence in the monarchy.

This is a brief summary of Helen Rappaport's fascinating new book. By concentrating on the 10 years from 1861-1871, she has created a compelling picture of the central crisis of Victoria's life & the impact of Albert's death, not only on the Queen but on England. Even if, like me, you've read dozens of biographies of Victoria, Albert, their children & other personalities of the period, Magnificent Obsession is indispensable. The detailed story of Albert's last year - his declining health through stress & overwork as well as supporting Victoria through her intense grief when her mother died; the torment he suffered in trying to mould his eldest son Bertie into a responsible young man; the political stress of negotiating a diplomatic solution to the Trent affair that could have seen Britain enter the American Civil War - all this is discussed in detail.

Albert's death has always been attributed to typhoid, exacerbated by a chill he contracted when he visited Bertie at Cambridge to talk to him about his scandalous lifestyle. Rappaport shows that his illness could not be typhoid & was more likely a chronic condition like Crohn's disease exacerbated by stress & a refusal to rest. Albert had been King in all but name for years. He took on most of the administrative work & Victoria rarely made a decision on anything without consulting him. Her attitude to his increasing illness through that last year was incredibly selfish. She was rarely ill & had little sympathy for anyone else's ill-health. Maybe she also didn't want to admit that Albert was unwell. Her reaction to the death of her mother in March 1861 had been extreme. Their relationship had always been difficult & Victoria's grief may have had an element of guilt & regret in it.This led to the doctors caring for Albert being too afraid of disturbing Victoria's fragile mental health to tell her how serious his condition was. It also led to the official bulletins released to the public being so anodyne that they gave no real inkling of the likelihood of his imminent death. This led to dreadful scenes of shock when the news of his death was announced. Arthur Munby recorded in his diary,

This morning came the astounding news of Prince Albert's death: so unexpected and sad and ominous, that people are struck dumb with amaze (sic) and sorrow. The news-offices in the Strand were open and besieged by anxious folk; a strange gloom was upon the town; in church, the preacher spoke of it, and an awful silence there was, with something too very like sobbing, when his name was left out of the prayers.

Victoria's grief was extreme. She collapsed with shock & decreed that nothing should be changed in the room where Albert died. The Blue Room at Windsor was left as it was on December 14, 1861 for the rest of Victoria's life. Every day, a valet would lay out Albert's clothes as though he was still alive, Victoria slept with his clothes, holding a marble replica of his hand. She gave herself up to grief & mourning & could think of nothing but how to memorialise Albert. Victoria wore deep mourning for the rest of her life. Her ladies-in-waiting were never allowed to wear colours. After a while, she allowed them to wear half-mourning - grey or mauve.

The effects of Albert's death were felt across the country. The Queen's devotion to the details of mourning was a bonus for the purveyors of mourning clothes & accoutrements. All of Society, the middle classes, anyone who wanted to be respectable followed the Queen's lead & the elaborate mourning rituals we think of as typically Victorian were created. The jet workshops in Whitby flourished with the need for black mourning jewellery. Loyal City Councils & Shires across the country wanted to remember Albert with a bust or a statue or by naming a new building after him. Victoria was very involved in the many memorials built in Albertopolis, as the part of London that contained the Albert Memorial & the Victoria & Albert Museum, was soon being called.

Victoria built a magnificent mausoleum at Frogmore for Albert & visited often. She fully expected to die within months of his death but she survived him for 40 years &, once she realised that she was not going to die, she had to find a way to go on living while she waited to be reunited with him. Her family, servants, courtiers & politicians tried to encourage her to take up her duties. The country was increasingly restless & dissatisfied with a monarch who was never seen. Someone put a sign up on the railings at Buckingham Palace offering it for rent as it was unoccupied. The Queen's Highland servant, John Brown, did more than anyone to draw the Queen out of her seclusion but his efforts only led to gossip about their relationship as she relied on his presence more & more. Victoria was determined to have her own way & simply refused to listen to anyone.

The contradictions were boundless; claiming with one breath to have the business of the country at heart, time and time again Victoria forbade a topic of conversation which was 'precisely that on which it is most important that she should be informed.' The problem, as (Lord) Torrington explained to Delane (editor of The Times), was that 'Every one appears more or less afraid to speak or advise the Queen' , so much so that she now had a habit of sending word prior to any meeting with ministers on what she would and would not discuss, 'lest it should make her nervous'. If those about her had a little more courage, 'things might mend.' But no one did.

Matters had reached a crisis by the end of 1871, 10 years after Albert's death & with Victoria showing no sign of coming out of seclusion. It was the near-fatal illness of Bertie, the Prince of Wales, that turned around public opinion. As the crisis approached, on the fatal December 14th, the public held their breath. Prayers were offered for the Prince's recovery &, when he did recover, the relief was enormous. Victoria was convinced to attend a public service of Thanksgiving & the warm reception she received was another step towards her resumption of her duties & becoming more visible to her people. She became the revered & beloved Queen Empress, the Widow of Windsor who was regarded as the mother & grandmother of her people.

I loved Magnificent Obsession. It's in my Top 10 non-fiction books of the year. It was enthralling, full of fascinating detail about Victoria & Victorian society & unputdownable. If you're not obsessed by the Victorians before you read it, you will be afterwards.

How It All Began - Penelope Lively

2011-12-26T11:12:00.000+11:00

Charlotte is mugged & her handbag is stolen. This incident starts off a chain of events in her life & the lives of her family that leads to changes in all their lives. Charlotte is 77. Her hip was broken in the attack & she goes to stay with her daughter, Rose & Rose's husband, Gerry while she recuperates. Rose works as personal assistant to a pompous, self-important retired academic, Henry, Lord Peters. Charlotte's accident means that Rose can't accompany Henry to a lecture he's giving in Manchester so Henry's niece, Marion, an interior designer, has to go with him. Marion had been planning to meet her lover, Jeremy, so she sends him a text explaining what's happened. Jeremy's wife, Stella, reads the message & throws Jeremy out of their house, threatening divorce. In Manchester, Henry's lecture is a disaster as he finds he can't remember the names of 18th century Prime Ministers & Marion meets a man who may be able to rescue her business from the consequences of the economic downturn as fewer people can afford to pay her to redesign their homes.

Charlotte chafes at the restrictions of living with Rose. She misses her Independence & is afraid that this is the beginning of the end of her living in her own home. Charlotte is a part-time literacy teacher, her students are adults who have never learnt to read or immigrants wanting to improve their English. She arranges to tutor Anton, an Eastern European migrant who is working on a building site until his English improves enough for him to apply for accountancy work. The lessons are a success as Charlotte hits on the idea of engaging Anton in stories to make the lessons more interesting. From Where the Wild Things Are to Pride & Prejudice, Anton's confidence & facility with language improves. Rose takes Anton shopping for a gift for his mother & they begin a gentle, restrained relationship that moves from shopping to walks in the park & visits to the V & A.

I loved this book. I've read nearly all Penelope Lively's books & I enjoy the way that time & history are always major themes of her fiction. Books & literature are also central & Charlotte, in particular, defines herself by her relationship to books. She decides to reread her favourite books while she convalesces to see if they are still the same books that influenced her on first reading. But, she finds The House of Mirth hard going, P G Wodehouse is all she can cope with, & it's not until she recovers physically that she can begin to re-engage with literature. When she finds she can read & enjoy What Maisie Knew, she knows she's on the road to recovery. The scene where she takes The Da Vinci Code to read at a hospital appointment (it's all she can find at Rose's house) is very funny as she analyses her own reaction to the book (she gives up after two pages) & how she feels other people perceive her when she is seen reading it. I felt that she lost some respect for her surgeon when he approved of her choice of reading.

Henry is a great comic character. His pompous pronouncements on prominent academics & politicians he's known; his great plans for a six-part TV series on the 18th century to enlighten the masses; his delight in the nursery food that his housekeeper serves up; his conviction that My Memoirs will put the cat among the pigeons when they're finally published. Henry is easy to laugh at but his clinging to the glorious past in the face of his current irrelevance is very touching. As he tells his niece, Marion, it was the Manchester lecture that threw them both off course,

'We are both the victims of circumstance,' said Henry. 'I have the greatest mistrust of circumstance, whether in private life or public affairs. History is bedevilled by circumstance. Ah - here's Corrie. Am I right in thinking it's the rice pudding, Corrie? Excellent! Progress is forever skewed by circumstance - without the unforeseen event, an untimely death, the unpredicted circumstance, the course of history would be one of seamless advance. Without the Manchester circumstance, you & I would be carefree.'

This sums up the whole book, really. If Charlotte hadn't been mugged, Rose would have gone to Manchester with Henry. She (unlike Marion) wouldn't have forgotten to pick up his lecture notes & he wouldn't have made a mess of the lecture, leading him to try to redeem what he saw as his ruined reputation with a foray into television. Charlotte's lessons with Anton lead to he & Rose falling in love & becoming aware of new possibilities in life. Anton realises that he was right to move to London & he believes he will make a success of this new life. Rose is struck by the roads not taken in her comfortable, predictable life with Gerry, her children, now grown-up & her part-time job with Henry. These were the characters I really engaged with. Marion's affair with Jeremy & his frantic efforts to reconcile with Stella while keeping Marion as well didn't interest me as much.

This is such an enjoyable book, full of humour, especially Charlotte's wry musings on aging & its horrors. I don't read many contemporary authors but Penelope Lively has been a favourite since I read According to Mark over 20 years ago.

Christmas Carol - God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen

2011-12-25T01:41:00.000+11:00

Merry Christmas Day to everyone who visits I Prefer Reading. This is one of my favourite carols. I love the power of the words & the majesty & drama of the traditional organ accompaniment with a full choir singing at the top of their voices. In Dickens's A Christmas Carol, this is the carol that the boy sings at Scrooge's door on Christmas Eve. The picture is from this lovely blog, Be Book Bound. As Miriam & Erika say, may we always be book bound.

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this day,
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray:

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy.

From God our heavenly Father
A blessed angel came
And unto certain shepherds
Brought tidings of the same,
How that in Bethlehem was born
The Son of God by name:

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy.

The shepherds at those tidings
Rejoiced much in mind,
And left their flocks a-feeding,
In tempest, storm and wind,
And went to Bethlehem straightway
This blessed babe to find:

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy.

But when to Bethlehem they came,
Whereat this infant lay,
They found him in a manger,
Where oxen feed on hay;
His mother Mary kneeling,
Unto the Lord did pray:

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy.

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All others doth deface:

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T11:23:00.000+11:00

Lucky, Phoebe & I would like to wish everyone who visits I Prefer Reading a very Merry Christmas & a peaceful & Happy New Year. As the weather warms up, the girls are finding new, cooler places to relax & sleep. Lucky is fond of the rug in the study. She like to stretch out there while I type (she's there now).

Phoebe likes to be up off the ground. The chair in my study is good,

but a pile of shopping bags on the kitchen bench (I know, she's not meant to be up there!) is even better.

This time last year it was my dear Abby wishing you all a Merry Christmas. She's still much missed but I'm very lucky (no pun intended) to have found these two sweeties to love & keep me company.

Coming up tomorrow will be another favourite Christmas carol & next week, along with a couple of reviews of books just read, will be my Top 10 lists of the year. I have a Top 10 of fiction & non-fiction but it's not set in stone yet. There's still a week to go & lots of reading time as I don't go back to work until the New Year. I'm just about to start Penelope Lively's new book, How It All Began. She's one of my favourite authors so it might push its way into the Top 10 if it lives up to expectations. Then, just for something completely different, there will also be a list of books that I'm sure would have made my Top 10 this year if I'd gotten around to reading them. Maybe I should make a New Year's resolution to read them sooner rather than later? Merry Christmas everyone!

Montrose - C V Wedgwood

2011-12-20T01:50:00.000+11:00

I'm always interested in the comments that readers of the blog leave. Sometimes a post attracts no comments at all, even though quite a few people have looked at it. Sometimes a post gets lots of comments & the comments lead me on to other books. Last week's Sunday poem was by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose. I knew a little bit about him, mostly because I vaguely remembered reading Margaret Irwin's novel, the Proud Servant, many years ago (It's now available again as part of the wonderful Bloomsbury Reader publishing initiative). George left a comment recommending John Buchan's historical novel, Witch Wood, so I've downloaded the Canongate edition of that & I also remembered that I had C V Wedgwood's biography of Montrose on the tbr shelves.

C V Wedgwood is one of my favourite historians. She specialised in the 17th century & her books, The King's Peace, the King's War & The Trial of Charles I are the most accessible, beautifully-written accounts of the English Civil War I've read. I also have her biography of The Earl of Strafford on the tbr shelves, just waiting for inspiration. I picked up her short (150pp) biography of Montrose & read half of it in one sitting.

James Graham was a golden boy. Born into a wealthy family, he was handsome, charming, privileged but his wealth & advantages hadn't made him superior or arrogant. His great strength was as a leader of men & it was his personal qualities of honesty & integrity in his dealings with both friends & enemies that made him so loved & admired in his day. Unfortunately he was an honest man in a time of great dissemblers & he gave his loyalty to a man, Charles I, who didn't keep his side of the bargain.

Charles I was King of Scotland but rarely visited his Northern kingdom. As a consequence, he didn't know the Scottish nobles &, always lacking in judgement, fell under the influence of the Duke of Hamilton, a wily politician & no friend to Montrose. Montrose's relationship with Charles never really recovered from the bad impression of him that Charles received from Hamilton. Montrose initially joined the Covenanters in the religious struggles over the use of the Anglican prayer book in Scotland. Basically, Charles wanted the Scots to use the Anglican form of worship & the Presbyterians refused. There were violent scenes in churches as the clergy tried to enforce the new rules & eventually, Charles sent an army north to suppress the rebels. Montrose joined the Covenanting army &, although they were successful in pushing Charles's army back over the border, Montrose realised that there were plenty of men on his side with no idea of fair play & loyalty to a cause.

Although Montrose had opposed Charles over the Covenant, he was a loyal subject & when the Civil War broke out, was determined to fight for his King. Charles was suspicious & initially reluctant to accept Montrose's offer of service but was forced to reconsider as his fortunes in Scotland grew more disorganised. The Covenanters, of course, regarded Montrose as a traitor to their cause & were determined to defeat his army & see him dead.

All Montrose's actions during the Civil War show him to be an exceptional leader, without the need for personal aggrandizement & totally committed to the King's cause. He raised troops throughout Scotland, relying on the ties of family & kinship to command loyalty as well as his personal qualities. The Covenanting army soon gave chase & Montrose's troops kept one step ahead through a series of brilliant feints & manoeuvres that kept them one step ahead of the enemy. When they had to turn & fight, Montrose's grasp of strategy & knowledge of the terrain made him a formidable & almost unbeaten opponent. Time & again Montrose looked to be trapped & he led his men out of danger & turned the tables on his enemy. Unfortunately all this was largely unsupported by Charles who had too many calls on his purse & left Montrose to his own devices.

By 1646 Montrose had won some great victories & was preparing for the spring campaign when he heard that Charles had surrendered to the Scots army that had invaded England. Charles was forced to repudiate Montrose & order him to disband his army. Montrose went into exile where he continued to try to raise money & troops for Charles. He was shocked by the news of Charles's execution & vowed to revenge the murder, convincing the new king, Charles II, to appoint him Lieutenant-Governor of Scotland. He immediately planned an invasion of Scotland to restore Charles to the throne. Unfortunately the inexperienced young king was indecisive & when he received the Scots ministers, rumours spread that he would abandon Montrose as his father had done. Privately Charles encouraged Montrose but publicly, the Scots declared him a traitor & soon he was on the run. He was captured days later at Ardvreck Castle amid rumours of treachery.

Montrose was brought to Edinburgh where he was sentenced by the Scots parliament to a shameful death - hanged, his head set on the Tolbooth & his quartered body to be set on the town gates of Stirling, Glasgow, Perth & Aberdeen. For a nobleman, this was a shameful death, but the parliament were determined to destroy his fame & his cause. Montrose's progress through the streets of Edinburgh became a triumph as the people were impressed by his youth & bearing & maybe ashamed at the shabby treatment he was receiving from their leaders.

C V Wedgwood sums Montrose up so beautifully in the final pages of her biography that I'll leave you with her words.

His single year of victory earned him a place in local legend, in Gaelic song and Scottish ballad, but it was his death which made him, to all posterity, the Great Marquess; for it was in that last month that the greatness of his nature, responding to the awful challenge, turned the squalid prose of life into a poetic tragedy which few could watch unmoved. It was then that the hero and the poet in him triumphed at once over his weaknesses as a man and the baseness of his enemies. He earned his place in history and legend not for what he did, but for what he was. The quality of the human soul matters more than the political causes for which men fight and die. Good and evil in politics change from age to age but good and evil in themselves are unchanging. The life and character of Montrose, rightly studied, throw a steady shaft of light on this eternal problem.

Christmas Carol - Good King Wenceslas

2011-12-18T12:23:00.000+11:00

I had planned to start a new anthology of poetry today but as it's so close to Christmas, I thought I'd share a couple of my favourite Christmas carols today & next Sunday, Christmas Day.

Good King Wenceslas (picture from here) is one of my favourites. In recent years I've discovered a jaunty folk version sung by Ian Giles that I really like as well as the more traditional choral versions. I don't really care that there may never have been a Wenceslas or if there was, he wasn't a particularly charitable person. I love the rhythm of this carol & I often find I'm humming it all through December.

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night,
Thought the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
Gathering winter fuel.

'Hither, page, and stand by me,
If though knowst it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?"
'Sire, he lives a good league hence,
Underneath the mountain,
Close against the forest fence
By St Agnes' fountain.'

'Bring me flesh and bring me wine,
Bring me pine logs hither,
Thou and I will see him dine,
When we bear them thither.'
Page and monarch on they went
On they went together,
Through the rude wind's wild lament
And the bitter weather.

'Sire, the night is darker now
And the wind grows stronger;
Fails my heart I know not how;
I can go no longer.'
'Mark my footsteps, good my page;
Tread thou in them boldly;
Thou shalt find the winter's rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.'

In his master's steps he trod
Where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
Which the saint had printed.
Therefore Christian men be sure,
Wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
Shall yourselves find blessing.

The Magic of Christmas - Trisha Ashley

2011-12-17T14:18:00.003+11:00

Trisha Ashley's books are perfect for this time of year. Funny, absorbing, romantic & full of cooking & foodie treats. When I'm in the middle of the Christmas rush, a light, amusing read is just what I need before the next round of shopping & cooking begins.

In The Magic of Christmas, Lizzie Pharamond is reluctantly realizing that her marriage to charming but philandering Tom is coming to an end. The last straw for her came when their son, Jasper, was rushed to hospital with suspected meningitis. When Tom eventually turned up, his first thoughts weren't for Jasper but jealousy that Lizzie was being comforted by his cousin, Nick. From there, Lizzie & Tom began to lead seperate lives although still living in the same house, mostly for Jasper's sake but also because Lizzie's series of books, The Perseverance Chronicles, are based on her life at the cottage owned by Tom's family who live at the big house in the village.

Lizzie's books are a mixture of village life, cooking, gardening & self-sufficiency. Her traditional comfort food is scornfully dismissed by Nick Pharamond, a successful TV chef, as hopelessly unprofessional but her books are a success & the sparring is all part of Lizzie & Nick's relationship. They were teenage sweethearts but Nick wanted to travel & Lizzie wasn't prepared to wait. So, Nick left, she fell for Tom's charms & they moved to Perserverance Cottage where Lizzie writes & Tom runs a surfboard business reliving his wild youth with frequent trips away & affairs with several women much closer to home. Nick has married Leila & they run a restaurant in London although as Nick spends half his time at the Hall, their marriage is a little semi-detached.

Lizzie is just holding out until Jasper goes to university but when a sudden accident leaves her a widow, she has to reconsider her future & adjust to life on her own. Her best friend, Annie, & the other members of the Christmas Pudding Circle are supportive & there's always the rehearsals for the traditional Boxing Day Mystery Play to take her mind off the fact that the police are suspicious about Tom's death. For the last few years, Tom has played Adam to Lizzie's Eve but who will take over? Will it be Ritch Rainford, the soap star who has bought a house in the village & has his eye on Lizzie? Or will it be Nick?

The Magic of Christmas has been revised from an earlier book by Trisha Ashley, Sweet Nothings. It's been several years since I read Sweet Nothings but I remembered quite a lot of the plot & characters. This didn't bother me but if you've read the earlier book, be warned.

Trisha Ashley's books are lovely, romantic books with English village atmosphere & lots of recipes. Lizzie & Nick are engaging characters & I enjoyed their spiky relationship. The secondary characters are terrific, from Unks, Tom's great-uncle Roly who lives at the Hall with his slightly fey but cunning sister, Mimi to Annie & her gentle romance with the new vicar. The Mystery Play is very funny, full of local dialect & with Roly as the Voice of God, a role he's played for so many years that he doesn't bother to come to rehearsals. If you're in the mood for a gentle romance set in an English village, The Magic of Christmas is highly recommended.

The Christmas Angel - Marcia Willett

2011-12-15T01:02:00.000+11:00

The Christmas Angel is the story of a year in the lives of an extended family living in Cornwall. Dossie was widowed early & lives with her parents in their house, The Court, where they once ran a B & B. Now, Dossie runs her catering company from home while caring for her elderly parents. Dossie's son, Clem, gave up his theological studies when his young wife died in childbirth, leaving him to care for their son, Jakey. Clem has finally found a spiritual home at Chi-Meur, a religious community of just four sisters, Mother Magda, Sisters Emily, Ruth & Nichola. Clem is general handyman in exchange for a home for himself & Jakey, close to Dossie & far away from the frenetic life he lived in London. Finally he has the time to consider his future & decide if he wants to become a priest. Janna has also found a home at Chi-Meur. Abandoned by her parents, she has spent her life as a traveller, always moving on before she can settle down or be tied down. Independent, reserved but very caring, she becomes absorbed into the life of Chi-Meur.

The community at Chi-Meur has some hard decisions to make. The sisters are all elderly & Nichola is suffering from dementia. Should they think about moving to another community? Their house has become well-known for the spiritual retreats & seminars they run but how much longer can they keep going with no new professions likely? When they're offered a good price to sell the house to a developer who wants to convert it into a hotel, it may be the answer to their dilemma but is the offer all it seems?

Dossie leads a busy life but romance hasn't been one of her successes. She seems to fall for men who are married or shy of commitment. When she meets Rupert, an attractive man who buys & renovates country properties, she's walking on air, singing Joni Mitchell songs & wondering if, at last, this could be the relationship she's been searching for since her husband died.

Marcia Willett's books are perfect comfort reading. She brings together a group of people the reader cares about & we're happy to be in their company for a while. Location & atmosphere are always important. Most of her books are set in Cornwall & the West Country & she evokes the life of country families & small towns so well. I enjoyed all the characters in the book, especially Dossie's parents with their dogs & their worries about their selfish son & his grasping partner. I loved the details of the sisters' lives, especially Sister Emily with her joy in everyday pleasures & her determination to help everyone she comes in contact with. This is a perfect Sunday afternoon book. My only regret is that now I have to wait a year for the next one.

Dickens' Women - Miriam Margolyes & Sonia Fraser

2011-12-13T02:26:00.000+11:00

Dickens’ Women is the script of the one woman show written by Miriam Margolyes & Sonia Fraser. In her Introduction, Margolyes has been fascinated by Dickens since she first read Oliver Twist as a girl. She believes that, more than any other writer, the man can be found in his work. Maybe that’s why there are so many biographies of Dickens.

It is a life worth studying in detail because of its great contrasts, its secrets and because of the genius of the subject. He is our greatest prose writer, he stands with Shakespeare as a master, his creations are etched in our consciousness. The life started in obscurity, and then rose to the heights of wealth and celebrity. It is a romantic story of rags to riches; these always appeal to the Public. But it is also a story of committed application, focused energy and occasionally ruthless exploitation.

Margolyes believes that the women in his life – his mother, his wife, his sister in law, his first love & his mistress – influenced the creation of the women in his books. This is not a new theory but it’s a compelling one. Knowing about Dickens’s life is an excellent way in to the novels. Dickens’ Women is a survey of some of the most theatrical of Dickens’s creations. It opens with Mrs Gamp, the midwife from Martin Chuzzlewit, cheerily talking about laying out the dead with her eye on a bottle on the mantelpiece. Dickens’s heroines are next & the curious fact that they’re all around 17 years old. This was the age at which Mary Hogarth, Dickens’s much-loved sister-in-law, died suddenly in Dickens’s arms after a night at the theatre. Dickens was distraught & wanted to be buried with Mary when his time came. He was most upset when her brother, George, died first & took his place in her grave.

His sinister or uncaring older women, like Mrs Pipchin in Dombey & Son, are based on the miserable landlady, Mrs Roylance, who he was sent to board with during his time at the blacking factory. It’s well-known that the period Dickens spent working in the factory at the age of 12 blighted his life. He blamed his mother, Elizabeth, for sending him back to the factory even after his father was released from prison. Nobody seemed to think that he should have been released from his servitude & sent to school. Although he cared for his mother financially in later years there doesn’t seem to be much warmth in their relationship.

Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell, a pretty but rather heartless young woman who rejected him. He romanticised her as Dora in David Copperfield & then, when they met in later life, caricatured her cruelly as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit. Other characters in Dickens’ Women include Edith Dombey’s dreadful mother, Mrs Skewton, the tiny chiropodist Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield (another portrait from life that led to hurt feelings & a quick rewriting of the character from sinister to kind) & a startling portrait of a lesbian, Miss Wade in Little Dorrit. The wonder is that he can write so movingly of a tormented woman like Miss Wade yet his prostitutes & fallen women are stereotypes. Nancy in Oliver Twist, Little Em’ly, Edith Dombey & Lady Dedlock have come straight from melodrama. Yet Dickens knew many young women through his charitable work who could have lent realism to his portrayals.

The play ends with monstrous Miss Havisham from Great Expectations & pathetic Miss Flite from Bleak House. Miss Flite has gone mad waiting for a judgement in her case before the Court of Chancery. She keeps birds & names them after the stages of her journey through the Court & the people she has met there – “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach!”

This Hesperus Press edition of Dickens’ Women also includes The Women in the Boxes, all the women who had to be left out of the stage show for lack of space. They include Betsey Trotwood from David Copperfield, the philanthropic Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House & Mrs Bardell from The Pickwick Papers. Miriam Margolyes writes with such enthusiasm for Dickens that if you haven’t read the novels you will be inspired to do so immediately. This is a wonderful introduction to Dickens the man & the writer & to some of his most fascinating creations. Miriam Margolyes will be touring Dickens’ Women next year for the Dickens Bicentenary. I’m sure it will be one of the highlights.

I’ve also enjoyed browsing through a lovely book by Hilary Macaskill, Charles Dickens at Home. The original photographs are by Graham Salter.

It traces the houses Dickens lived in from his birthplace in Portsmouth to his London homes, including the house in Doughty St which is now the Charles Dickens Museum.

It follows his travels abroad when he lived in France & Italy for months at a time & ends at Gad’s Hill, the home of his final years.

One of my favourite pictures is this one of the churchyard at Cooling where Dickens saw the little lozenge shaped graves that inspired the scene at the beginning of Great Expectations where Pip visits the graves of his parents & little brothers.

This atmospheric photo shows the graveyard at Bowes in Yorkshire which Dickens visited when he was researching the Cheap Schools for unwanted boys for Nicholas Nickleby. The inscriptions on the gravestones inspired some of the character’s names in the novel.

There are going to be so many books about Dickens published next year & I may be all Dickensed out by April, but I think I’ve made a good start already with these two books & Claire Tomalin’s magnificent biography. My online reading group is planning to read Martin Chuzzlewit early next year & I’m looking forward to Jenny Hartley’s edition of the Selected Letters. The full Pilgrim edition of the Letters is now mostly out of print & very expensive secondhand so a Selected edition full of footnotes will do very nicely.

Sunday Poetry - Enduring Love

2011-12-11T02:38:00.000+11:00

James Graham, Marquis of Montrose (picture from here) was a Scottish general & hero of the Royalist cause in Scotland during the English Civil Wars. He won many victories for Charles I against the Covenanters but was forced into exile when Charles was defeated by the Covenanters in 1646. After Charles's execution, Montrose swore to do all he could to restore Charles II. He occupied the Orkneys in 1649 as a prelude to a full-scale invasion of Scotland but by the time he reached the mainland, Charles was negotiating with the Scots & ordered Montrose to disband his army. These orders never reached him & he was defeated in battle at Carbisdale. He escaped but was eventually betrayed & executed as a traitor in 1650.

This poem about the power of love is very much in the tradition of the Cavalier poets. It's a fitting end to my posts from Antonia Fraser's anthology of Scottish Love Poetry. Next week, I'll stay in the 17th century with an anthology of metaphysical poetry.

My dear and only Love, I pray
This noble World of thee,
Be govern'd by no other Sway
But purest Monarchie.
For if Confusion have a Part,
Which vertuous Souls abhore,
And hold a Synod in thy Heart,
I'll never love thee more.

Like Alexander I will reign,
And I will reign alone,
My Thoughts shall evermore disdain
A Rival on my Throne.
He either fears his Fate too much,
Or his Deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the Touch,
To win or lose it all.

Castles in the Air - Judy Corbett

2011-12-09T12:49:00.001+11:00

This is the story of a young couple with no money or experience but lots of dreams & determination. Judy & Peter fall in love with a derelict castle in Wales & decide to buy it & restore it to its former glories. They persuade the castle's owner to sell it to them & then have to set about evicting the squatters, removing the evidence of various "renovations" that have been done since the 1950s, including part of the castle being turned into a seedy nightclub, & living in a filthy, cold & wet home while they try to work out the puzzles of the castle & its past. They're determined to bring it back to the glory of the 17th & 19th centuries (one wing each) & remove the accretions of bad taste & inauthenticity that have obscured its beauty.

There was a kind of ghostly nostalgia to it all, echoes of what the great house had once been and could be again. We would attempt to blow the dust off its ravaged face and play the alchemist's hand, transmuting a low and unloved drinking den into a wonder, a lovely glowing ruby in Wales's mossy crown. We would stitch up the wound that neglect had made in its past. We would seal up the roofs with love. And those who had written off the dear old house (and there were many), the 'old buildings-stand-in-the-way-of-progress' types, would one day eat their words.

This romantic view of their mission, their destiny, never really leaves Judy & Peter. The book opens in a storm when they each patrol a wing of the castle checking for leaks & emptying buckets. It continues with unreliable tradesmen, sceptical locals & uninvited visitors who turn up day & night to look at the castle as though it were a National Trust property. They ask a friend who's also a surveyor & architect, to have a look at the castle & tell them what needs doing. He says there's enough work to keep five builders working full time for years. Judy & Peter aren't daunted by this assessment, even though they've spent all they had on just buying the castle & have no budget for the restoration. They work at their own jobs (Judy is a bookbinder who sets up a workroom in the castle, Peter is an architectural historian) to finance the restoration, doing what they can themselves & often having just enough money to pay the tradies at the end of the week.

Apart from sheer hard physical work, they also do a lot of historical detection, trying to rediscover the past. They become determined to recover as much of the original fixtures & fittings as they can, especially after discovering a catalogue from a sale of the contents in 1921. They discover that William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper owner bought the panelling of two of the rooms & travel to New York on the trail. Along with the bats, mice & other unpleasant inhabitants, they also discover that Gwydir is home to several ghosts. The most frightening of these is the ghost of a woman who becomes fixated on Judy & begins to influence her behaviour & personality in a very malevolent way. Eventually their hard work pays off as they begin offering B & B, hiring out the chapel for weddings & opening the castle to tourists. The culmination of all their work is a visit by the Prince of Wales to officially open the castle.

I admit I can't think of anything worse than living in squalor, working day & night to restore a building that is only one step away from falling down altogether. I don't have that kind of mad determination & single-minded devotion to a dream. But, I did enjoy reading about someone else doing it. I enjoyed reading about the history of the castle & its former owners & the research Judy undertook in pursuit of her dream. I was inspired to take Castles in the Air off the tbr shelf (where it had been since 2005) by Captive Reader's lovely review a couple of weeks ago. Another example of blog reading leading me to an exceptional reading experience.

The Numbered Account - Ann Bridge

2011-12-06T01:35:00.000+11:00

I've just raced through the third book in the Julia Probyn series. I'm completely addicted to Ann Bridge & I can't thank Bloomsbury Reader enough for bringing her books back into print. I'm even downloading non-Julia Probyn books even when there's no synopsis & I have no idea what they're about. That's the definition of true addiction for me. Bloomsbury have just completed the Julia Probyn series by releasing The Episode at Toledo (the further adventures of Hetta from The Portuguese Escape) & I've also downloaded The Tightening String & Enchanter's Nightshade. If anyone has read these & can tell me what they're about, I'd love to know.

The Numbered Account is set in Switzerland. Julia goes to Switzerland to accompany her great friend Mary Hathaway's maid, Watkins. Mrs Hathaway is ill & staying with a friend. She wants to relieve his household of the burden of her care & Julia agrees to take Watkins, a nervous traveller, out to Switzerland to look after her. When her cousin, Colin Munro, hears about her trip, he asks her to look into a little problem of his own. His fiancée, Aglaia Armitage, has just become a wealthy heiress after the death of her grandfather, Greek tycoon, Orestes Thalassides. His money is safely stowed away in a numbered account in a Swiss bank & can only be accessed by a representative with the appropriate documentation & bona fides. Mr Thalassides' will is a little vague as to his intentions & Aglaia's mother has just sent her on a trip to South America so Julia agrees to visit Aglaia's godfather, a Swiss pastor, get all the necessary passwords & retrieve Aglaia's money.

Of course, it's not that simple. Julia has no trouble with the Swiss pastor but on her way, she discovers that a girl impersonating Aglaia, along with two men calling themselves her godfather & fiancé are also on their way to dupe the bank out of the money. Blueprints for a top secret & very valuable oil transportation system are also at stake & soon British Intelligence are involved as well as the imposters & some very sinister Germans. When the bank hands over the money & the blueprints to the imposters, Julia is soon on the trail, befriending the false Miss Armitage & crossing swords with John Antrobus, British Intelligence's man on the spot.

This is another exciting adventure set in an exotic location & I loved it. Julia visits Aglaia's godfather in his idyllic country parsonage, picks wildflowers on mountainsides with Antrobus, rides a funicular railway to a mountaintop & sweet talks her way in & out of several very tricky situations. In a way, the locations are the real stars of this series. Ann Bridge must have been a great observer on her travels as she makes the countries she writes about come alive. Julia is her usual supremely confident self, although her personal vanity takes a hit when she meets her match in John Antrobus.

As a lover of all things Scottish, I'm especially looking forward to the next Julia Probyn adventure, The Dangerous Islands, set on the west coast & islands of Scotland. My dilemma is, do I just gulp the whole series down by Christmas or should I try to make them last all summer? I do have those unknown Ann Bridge novels to look forward to & there's always the chance that there will be more to come, including, fingers crossed, Illyrian Spring? Decisions, decisions!

Getting ready for Christmas - and salad days

2011-12-05T01:25:00.000+11:00

I've had a busy weekend getting ready for Christmas & starting my first veggie garden. I've had a small pine tree growing in a pot for the last couple of years & I brought it in on Saturday to decorate for Christmas. My decorations aren't fancy, as you can see, my little gold putti has lost his wings, but I've collected them over the years & I enjoy seeing them again every year.

My sister brought this home from Harrods last year on her trip to Europe.

The china ball was bought on my own trip to Ireland over 10 years ago now. The angel is one of many I've bought over the years from a local handicrafts group. I buy two every year & my friend's daughter, E, chooses her favourite for their tree & I have the other one. We started when E was about five & she'll be 18 next month so it's a long tradition.

I have several of these little Father Christmases with very blue eyes. So far, Lucky & Phoebe haven't showed much interest in the tree. Lucky was more interested in the plastic bag the decorations are kept in! They've had a bit of a sniff but they haven't tried to climb the tree or eat anything so fingers crossed it's all still standing on Christmas Day.

I've also started my first veggie garden. I've grown herbs before but I've never tried vegetables until now. I bought a stand-alone garden bed, had some soil delivered on Friday morning & my friend P & I set everything up. Yesterday morning I went to the nursery, bought my plants & did the rest.

I planted two varieties of tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, basil, parsley & chives. Of course, I bought too many plants so some of the herbs are in the other garden bed against the fence. I've started a compost bin as well. I'm slowly becoming more interested in gardening & I've always wanted to grow veggies but never had the space. I'll keep you up to date with progress & hopefully some pictures of my first home grown salad!

Then, I baked a cake for Monday morning tea at work. I have a lovely new cookbook, Favourite Cakes by Julie Le Clerc. I bought copies for the library but I knew this was a book I would have to own.

There were so many recipes I wanted to try but I chose this one because it was easy & didn't need icing. It also sounded delicious. Apple Crumble Teacake. It certainly smells gorgeous. It was slightly too long for my square cake carrier so I've cut off the end which also gave me a chance to show you what it looks like. It's an oaty, apple & raisin cake with a crumble topping. It would also be good warm as a pudding with cream or ice cream.

Sunday Poetry - Old Loves

2011-12-04T02:23:00.000+11:00

Andrew Lang (picture from here) is best known for his collections of fairy tales & legends that were collected in the Blue Fairy Book, Lilac Fairy Book, the Yellow Fairy Book etc. He also wrote on French literature, Scottish history & literature & poetry. This poem, O Joy of Love's Renewing, is sweetly melancholic, remembering lost delights.

O joy of love's renewing,
Could love be born again;
Relenting for thy rueing,
And pitying my pain:
O joy of love's awaking,
Could love arise from sleep,
Forgiving our forsaking
The fields we would not reap!

Fleet, fleet we fly, pursuing
The love that fled amain,
But will he list our wooing,
Or call we but in vain?
Ah! vain is all our wooing,
And all our prayers are vain,
Love listeth not our suing,
Love will not wake again.

Christmas reading

2011-12-03T02:28:00.000+11:00

I've started putting together a collection of books to read this month with Christmas themes. I made my Christmas pudding last weekend to the sounds of Christmas carols & the Christmas cake was made on Cup Day (first Tuesday in November) & had its final feeding of brandy the other day. I've planned the contents of the hampers I'm putting together for Christmas presents. I'm buying a few things from the farmers market tomorrow morning & I'm going to make chocolate truffles & panforte a couple of days before Christmas. My Christmas cards (from Animal Aid this year because that's where I adopted Lucky & Phoebe) have arrived & I hope to have them written in the next week or so. I'll set up the Christmas tree tomorrow as well. I have a small pine tree in a pot that I'll bring inside & decorate. Abby never went near the tree in previous years, I'm not so sure about Lucky & especially Phoebe so we'll see how long the decorations last. I found Phoebe asleep on the top shelf of the pantry the other day. I have no idea how she got in there.

Anyway, back to books. Last year I enjoyed lots of 19th century stories as well as some romance. This year is looking more 20th century. I'm very excited about the Stella Gibbons reprints from Vintage. Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is a volume of short stories. Although only the title story takes place at the famous Cold Comfort Farm, the reviews have been enthusiastic in the Guardian & the Independent & I'm looking forward to reading it.

Nancy Mitford is another author who's had lots of attention this years with reprints of her non-fiction from Vintage & her fiction from Capuchin. I'm not sure how Christmassy Christmas Pudding is but I can't resist the title at this time of year.

Romance is covered in Trisha Ashley's new book, The Magic of Christmas. This is "loosely based on one of my earlier novels, Sweet Nothings, with the addition of a lot of new material." according to a note at the beginning. I've read Sweet Nothings but it was a long time ago so I'll think of this as a whole new story as the author intends.

Every year I read and/or listen to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I have an audio book of Miriam Margolyes reading the book which I'll be listening to on the way to work in a couple of weeks & Hesperus has just published a book by Miriam Margolyes & Sonia Fraser called Dickens' Women. This is the text of the one woman show that Margolyes has toured around the world & there will be another tour next year to celebrate the Dickens Bicentenary. I'm looking forward to it very much. Margolyes is a Dickens devotee & presented an excellent series some years ago about Dickens's trip to America. She also played Flora Finching in the 1988 TV production of Little Dorrit.

So, I'm all set for a month of reading, listening to far too many Christmas carols, watching my favourite Christmas movies again & wondering how long the angel on top of the Christmas tree is going to survive Phoebe's attentions. I also have a new gardening enterprise to keep me busy. I'll post some photos of that in a couple of days.

Mary Boleyn - Alison Weir

2011-12-02T09:30:00.000+11:00

Alison Weir's new biography of Mary Boleyn, sister of the more famous Anne, aims to reclaim its subject from the centuries of myth & rumour that have become attached to her name. The subtitle of the book, "The Great & Infamous Whore", is typical of the labels that have become attached to Mary's name. Mary's father, Thomas Boleyn, worked his way up through the ranks of the Tudor Court. He married the Duke of Norfolk's sister & made himself valuable to the King as a diplomat & courtier. Mary & Anne attended Henry VIII's sister, Mary, to France when she married King Louis XII. The marriage lasted only months, the decrepit bridegroom died, leaving his beautiful young widow to return to England but only after she had secured her own happiness by marrying Charles Brandon, one of her brother's close friends. Mary Boleyn stayed on at the French court & had a brief affair with the new King, François I.

When Mary returned to England, she was married to William Carey. It was an arranged marriage & it's not known if they were happy or well-suited. Mary had two children, Katherine & Henry, & there has been much speculation that they were really the children of Henry VIII with whom she had an affair. Alison Weir believes it's likely that Katherine was Henry's daughter as he gave Mary payments & annuities in later years that could be seen as a way of providing for his daughter. Henry & Mary's affair was definitely over before her sister Anne returned to Court & captured Henry's attention.

William Carey died of the sweating sickness, a form of plague, in 1528 & Mary spent several miserable years dependant on her father for her maintenance. Her relationship with her sister, Anne, doesn't seem to have been close & she would not have been welcome at Court now that her affair with the King was an embarrassing memory. Their affair would be an impediment to any marriage between Henry & Anne & the King was forced to ask the Pope for a dispensation, which is the main source of evidence for the relationship. The affair was also useful to Henry when he tired of Anne & wanted to be rid of her as he could conveniently ignore the Pope's dispensation & say that his marriage to Anne had never been legal because of his affair with her sister.

Mary's second marriage caused anger & scandal among her family as she married for love. William Stafford was of good family, but he was a second son with few prospects. He was several years younger than Mary & pursued her for some time before she agreed to marry him. The marriage was seen as a disgrace for the Queen's sister & Mary was far away from Court when Anne's downfall ended the influence of the Boleyns forever. Mary died in 1543 in her 40s & her last years seem to have been contented ones far from the centre of power.

Alison Weir spends a considerable time sifting through the evidence for the facts of Mary's life & dismissing most of the interpretations of other historians & novelists. I found this interesting but I think it's indicative of how little real evidence there is for Mary's life. This must be one of the difficulties of writing the biography of a person, especially a woman, at this period. There are no authenticated portraits of Mary; even the portrait on the cover of the book is of Queen Claude of France. It's why there are endless biographies of Kings, Queens & chief ministers & relatively few of anyone else. The evidence just isn't there. Weir does a good job of analysing the evidence for the many questions in Mary's life - was she or Anne the elder daughter? Did she have an affair with François I? Was she promiscuous at the French Court? Was she sent home in disgrace? What was her relationship with Anne? With Henry? Alison Weir comes up with considered interpretations of the available evidence but Mary herself remains a shadowy figure.

That's why I loved this letter, one of only two by Mary that survive. Finally we hear her own voice rather than the historian's interpretation of her thoughts & actions. The letter was written to Thomas Cromwell after Mary's second marriage, to William Stafford. Mary is asking Cromwell to intercede with the King as the couple are struggling financially. Marrying for love may have made Mary happy but it hadn't made her rich.

So that for my part, I saw that all the world did set so little store by me, and he so much, that I thought I could take no better way but to take him and to forsake all other ways and live a poor, honest life with him. And so I do put no doubt but we should, if we might once be so happy to recover the King's gracious favour and the Queen's. For well I might a had a greater man of birth, and a higher, but I ensure you I could never a had one that should a loved me so well, nor a more honest man.... But if I were at my liberty and might choose, I ensure you, Master Secretary, for my little time, I have spied so much honesty to be in him that I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the greatest queen christened. And I believe verily he is in the same case with me; for I believe verily he would not forsake me to be a king.

Maybe not the most tactful way to present her case, to say she was happier than a queen when her sister was Queen but the letter is honest & slightly desperate rather than diplomatic.

As always, Alison Weir's book is a great read, full of interesting insights into the motivations of the main players. If you're interested in the Tudors, this is a book you will want to read.

Sunday Poetry - Change & Paradox

2011-11-27T03:16:00.000+11:00

This poem, Ettrick, is by Alicia Anne Spottiswoode, who published under her married name of Lady John Scott (picture from here). I couldn't find a picture of her, only this title page of her Songs and Verses. She was best known for the tune Annie Laurie (words by the 17th century poet William Douglas), & lived a long life in Berwickshire, dying in 1900 at the age of 90 after being a widow for 40 years. Ettrick is very close in mood & tone to last week's poem by Byron. That particular mood of Scottish melancholy is one I've always been attracted to.

When we first rade down Ettrick,
Our bridles were ringing, our hearts were dancing,
The waters were singing, the sun was glancing,
An' blithely our hearts rang out thegither,
As we brushed the dew frae the blooming heather,
When we first rade down Ettrick.

When we next rade down Ettrick
The day was dying, the wild birds calling,
The wind was sighing, the leaves were falling,
An' silent an' weary, but closer thegither,
We urged our steeds thro' the faded heather,
When we next rade down Ettrick.

When I last rade down Ettrick,
The winds were shifting, the storm was waking,
The snow was drifting, my heart was breaking,
For we never again were to ride thegither
In sun or storm on mountain heather,
When I last rade down Ettrick.

Wodehouse for the weekend

2011-11-25T15:04:00.001+11:00

I've been dipping into this lovely Vintage Classics edition of Wodehouse snippets called Week-End Wodehouse. It's so delicious that I thought I'd share a little something from it to get the weekend off to a good start. Published in 1939, the book has chapters & anecdotes from all the Wodehouse series. This story is called The Salvation of George Mackintosh & it's from The Clicking of Cuthbert, one of the collections of golfing stories told by The Oldest Member.

George is miserable because he doesn't have the gift of the gab. He's in love with Celia Tennant but doesn't have the confidence to propose to her. He wants to ask his boss for a raise but is too timid. The Oldest Member suggests he write away for a booklet on "How to Become a Convincing Talker" advertised in a magazine. The Oldest Member forgets the incident until he meets George a few weeks later & discovers for himself just how confident a talker he has become.

The George Mackintosh I had known had had a pleasing gaze, but, though frank and agreeable, it had never been more dynamic than a fried egg. This new George had an eye that was a combination of a gimlet and a searchlight. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, I imagine, must have been somewhat similarly equipped.

Exuding "a sort of sinful, overbearing swank", George describes how he talked his boss into offering him double the raise he'd asked for by talking at him for an hour and a half. George had always been a favourite at the golf club with more offers to play than he could accept but now his incessant talking had driven all his former playing partners to distraction & they ran to avoid him. His new-found confidence leads to a successful engagement with his beloved Celia but even she is wilting under the incessant flow of talk.

"When he proposed," said Celia dreamily, "he was wonderful. He spoke for twenty minutes without stopping. He said I was the essence of his every hope, the tree on which the fruit of his life grew; his Present, his Future, his Past...oh, and all that sort of thing. If he would only confine his conversation now to remarks of a similar nature, I could listen to him all day long. But he doesn't. He talks politics and statistics and philosophy and... oh everything. He makes my head ache."

The last straw comes during a round of golf. After talking throughout Celia's every tee shot so that her ball invariably lands in the rough or in a bunker & then telling her what she did wrong & how she could improve her stroke, Celia is driven to desperate straits when George begins discoursing on the price of rubber & why this should mean that the price of golf balls should be cheaper. She hits George over the head with her niblick.

"I had just made my eleventh attempt to get out of that ravine," the girl went on, "with George talking all the time about the recent excavations in Egypt, when suddenly - you know what it is when something seems to snap-... He bent his head to light his pipe, and well - the temptation was too much for me, that's all."

Although the Oldest Member thinks Celia was completely justified in her actions, he agrees that they should see whether George has really been killed after all. The result is not exactly what they expect but leads to a happy ending for all concerned with George back to his usual inarticulate self.

I've never really been attracted to P G Wodehouse's golfing books because sport doesn't interest me at all but if the other stories are half as funny as this one, I'm ready to be converted. All Wodehouse is beautifully written, he had such a command of the language that what reads so effortlessly is really incredibly complex & so clever. I laughed all the way through this story, it's so ridiculous but so true to life in the central idea. We've all known someone who can talk on any subject at great length & always knows more about it than anyone else. Queen Victoria complained that Gladstone addressed her as if she were a public meeting but she hadn't met George Mackintosh. Wodehouse is perfect reading for the weekend.

Thunder on the Right - Mary Stewart

2011-11-24T01:04:00.000+11:00

Jenny Silver travels to the Pyrenees in search of her cousin, Gillian. Gillian is half-French & has lived in France with her husband for some years, although she lived in Oxford with Jenny's family after her parents were killed in an air raid during the war. After Gillian is widowed, she writes to Jenny, telling her that she is about to enter a convent in the Vallée des Orages. Jenny is surprised & a little hurt that her cousin should do something so unexpected & she decides to go out & see Gill. At her hotel in the nearby town of Gavarnie she meets Stephen Masefield, a man she knew at home. Stephen was very much in love with Jenny but her mother disapproved of the relationship & his prospects & he left England to study music in Vienna. Now, after returning to Oxford, finding Jenny gone but encouraged by her father to pursue her, Stephen has followed her to Gavarnie.

Jenny sets out for the convent only to be told when she arrives that Gillian is dead. Doña Francisca, the bursar of the convent, tells her that Gillian was involved in a car accident on her way to the convent, caught pneumonia & died soon after. Jenny is shocked & determined to find out as much as possible. She's also wary of Doña Francisca, a Spaniard who has never been professed but seems to wield enormous power within the convent. She takes decisions that would seem to be the province of the Reverend Mother, a gentle, elderly woman who also happens to be blind. So, she can't see the rich paintings & gold candlesticks in the chapel of this humble convent & orphanage & doesn't seem to have any idea that they're there. Or realize how much power Doña Francisca seems to have over the young novice, Celeste, who has secrets of her own.

Jenny is immediately suspicious & becomes more so after she learns a little more about Gillian's illness. Only Doña Francisca & a young novice, Celeste, seem to have seen Gillian. The Reverend Mother visited her but, of course, couldn't see her. The description of Gillian seems to fit but there are worrying discrepancies. She was lucid at times, but never spoke of England where she grew up or mentioned Jenny even though she had asked her to come to visit her at the convent. Gillian was also colour blind, a rare condition in a woman & when Celeste tells Jenny how much Gillian had admired the blue gentians she put by her bed, Jenny knows that something is wrong. She is convinced that Gillian is not dead & that some other woman is in her grave.

The Reverend Mother is kind but unconvinced & Doña Francisca is scornful & does all she can to frustrate Jenny's enquiries. Celeste & the other nuns seem completely under Doña Francisca's spell & even Stephen thinks that Jenny's grief has made her unreasonable. Jenny is invited to stay at the convent & she becomes more convinced that there is a secret at the convent that concerns Gillian. In the middle of the night she follows Doña Francisca to a nearby farm owned by Pierre Bussac, a man with a shady past & overhears enough to realise that there's more at stake than just finding out about Gillian. Stephen becomes convinced when he learns from the police about Bussac's activities during the war & after & their investigations lead them into danger as they try to find out what became of Gillian &, if she's alive, who was the woman buried in the convent graveyard?

Thunder on the Right is a suspenseful, exciting story set, as all Mary Stewart's books are, in a beautifully-realised location. The Pyrenees, near the border between France & Spain, are lonely, wild & treacherous & the climax of the book takes place on a stormy night as Jenny races along mountain paths dodging a landslide & the murderous Doña Francisca to get to the truth. Doña Francisca is a great villain, a woman totally obsessed with her power & her status. The pace is frantic &, although Jenny does a fair bit of running to Stephen for comfort & reassurance, she doesn't give up her quest & is alone in the thrilling final chapters as she finally discovers the truth. Mary Stewart & Ann Bridge, who I've also been reading recently, both wrote novels of romantic suspense set in exotic locations & featuring heroines who do more than just sit back & wait for a man to work out what's happening. Their books are perfect comfort reading with enough suspense to make the heart beat just a little bit faster & to make me feel very pleased to be sitting in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea at my side & a cat sleeping on my lap.

Clerical Errors - D M Greenwood

2011-11-22T01:56:00.000+11:00

I love a good clerical crime. D M Greenwood was one of my favourite mystery writers back in the 90s & I'm really pleased that Ostara Publishing have begun reprinting her novels featuring Theodora Braithwaite as a deaconess whose common sense & intelligence is much needed in the backbiting murderous corridors of Anglican Church. Clerical Errors is the first book in the series & introduces Theodora, tall, calm, kind & a woman who sees the foibles & problems in the Church while still devoting her life to it.

Julia Smith, a young woman at a loose end & looking for a role in life, arrives for a job interview at the diocesan office of St Manicus. She's bewildered by the Church hierarchy & unsure that her meagre typing skills are up to the job but she is offered the post by Canon Wheeler. As she recovers from the interview in the Cathedral, she is startled to hear a woman screaming. When she goes to investigate, she discovers a man's head in the font.

This is not a good start to Julia's working life but she is taken under the wing of Theodora, who works in the diocesan office & Ian Caretaker, an administrator in the office. Julia soon realises that Canon Wheeler is a bully, a man of obscure origins using the power of his position, & the absolute loyalty of his secretary, Rosamund Coldharbour, to intimidate more timid souls. He also takes advantage of the frailty of the current Bishop & obviously has his eye on his next step up the diocesan ladder. The dead man is Paul Gray, a young priest from a local parish. There was a little mystery & some murky scandal in his past but there seems to be no real motive for his murder & in such a horrible way. Was the placing of his head in the font a message to another member of clergy or to the Church?

Theodora & Ian begin investigating the murder but are they becoming sidetracked by other strange events such as the discovery of some of the Cathedral candles being used in what looks like a Satanic rite? The police are being thwarted by the closed shop mentality of the clergy & Canon Wheeler enjoys wrong footing them at every turn. Ian's contempt for Canon Wheeler is obvious & the Canon is determined to get rid of him. Ian's talent as an administrator would make it hard for him to be dismissed but is there something in his past that could trip him up? Then, a second murder takes place & the secrets of everyone caught up in the case are uncovered.

I like Theodora as a character very much. I found this first book a little frustrating as there wasn't really enough of Theodora & much more of Julia Smith who, apart from discovering the bodies & being a convenient audience for Theo & Ian's speculations, doesn't really have much to do except follow them around. I know we see much more of Theo in the later books as I read them all when they were first published & I'd like to read them all again. Theo is in the tradition of the great loner detectives, partly because of her job & vocation but also because she's an observer. This, & her compassion, is what makes her such an engaging character. She is a little on the sidelines, watching everything & everyone but keeping her own counsel. Her knowledge of the personalities involved here is what leads her to the murderer. The Cathedral setting is also beautifully evoked, not surprising really as D M Greenwood was the Director of Education for the diocese of Rochester until her retirement in 2004. She wrote nine novels in the series in the 1990s. I've always loved a good clerical mystery. Kate Charles is another favourite & I enjoyed the beginning of a new series, The Reluctant Detective by Martha Ockley last year. I hope both these authors publish new books soon. Until then, I may have to invest in some more D M Greenwood.

Sunday Poetry - Love in Abeyance

2011-11-20T02:05:00.000+11:00

This has always been one of my favourite poems. It could be about the Scots Border reivers harrying the English through the centuries or about a highwayman & his gang at the end of their career. Byron's (picture from here) short lyrics are just perfect. This one is romantic, melancholy, elegiac, lovely.

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

Charles Dickens : a Life - Claire Tomalin

2011-11-17T01:47:00.000+11:00

This is a wonderful book. I've read & loved all Claire Tomalin's previous biographies, especially The Invisible Woman, her book about Dickens & Nelly Ternan. Her new book expands on the research she did for the earlier book & concentrates on Dickens, the man & the novelist. This is a beautifully-written biography. At just over 400pp it's also one of the more concise biographies of Dickens, a prodigiously busy man who crammed more into every day than almost any other writer I can think of.

Dickens's life story is well-known. His childhood was dominated by his father's descent into debt & imprisonment in the Marshalsea. Charles was sent out to work at the age of 12 & he felt humiliated by the job found for him, sticking labels on pots of blacking. Even when his father's debts were paid & he was released from prison, Charles never forgave his mother for insisting that he should return to the blacking factory rather than go back to school. He felt the lack of a proper education all his life & his endeavours to educate himself - by learning shorthand & working as a parliamentary reporter & eventually writing journalism & fiction - are a testament to how he tried to distance himself from his misery in childhood.

He fell in love with Maria Beadnell, who broke his heart & married Catherine Hogarth, who gave him 10 children & the family stability he longed for. Catherine's essentially passive, gentle nature couldn't satisfy Charles for ever though & he unfairly blamed her for the continual pregnancies that ruined her health & her figure, without doing anything to prevent them himself. Catherine is a shadowy figure in this & every other biography of Dickens I've read. She briefly comes into focus on the tour of America they undertook in the 1840s, when they only had each other to rely on for companionship. Her good natured tolerance of the strains of a long trip are praised by Dickens but this was probably the only time of their marriage, apart from the very beginning, when they were alone together without children, family, friends & colleagues. Dickens's dreadful behaviour to Catherine when he fell in love with Nelly Ternan & left her after over 20 years of marriage is unforgivable & Catherine's dignified silence is a measure of her love for him.

Claire Tomalin's is especially fascinating on this period of Dickens's life. From the moment he met Nelly, when she & her family acted in one of his amateur theatre productions, he was enthralled by her & the secretive, determined side of his nature came to the fore. Tomalin shows how his obsession with Nelly took over his life, leading to the painful separation from Catherine, the demands that his children & friends take his side & shun Catherine or be cut off entirely. Only his eldest son, Charley, defied him to live with his mother. All the other children & even Catherine's sister, Georgina, who had lived with the family as housekeeper for years, chose Dickens. Friendships with Thackeray & Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, were broken. He was a force of nature & it took a great deal of courage to defy him.

This episode shows Dickens at his worst. He saw the situation in black & white. You were either with him or against him. He began telling people of Catherine's unsuitability as a mother, that she had never loved the children & they didn't love her, that she was mentally unstable. He published an open letter in his periodical, Household Words, that justified his actions & alluded to Nelly without spelling anything out. It was a huge mistake. Outside his own circle, no one really knew about his separation. Now, he'd started rumours among people who had known nothing before. Rumours began that he was having an affair with Georgina, his sister-in-law, & his image as the family man, the chronicler of English family life, was damaged.

His notoriously busy life meant that he could flit from place to place, visiting Nelly, taking her on trips to France or on his reading tours, & fudge his whereabouts so that only a few close confidants knew where he was. The growth of the railways also helped him on his mad dashes to Nelly at Slough or Houghton Place. Tomalin believes that Dickens & Nelly had a child, a son who died soon after birth & the evidence points to Nelly living in France during the pregnancy & afterwards. She also believes that it's possible that Dickens suffered his fatal stroke at Nelly's house in Slough & that she took him home to Gad's Hill to avoid scandal. There is no conclusive evidence on either of these points but Tomalin's arguments, first aired in The Invisible Woman, are very persuasive.

Tomalin concentrates on Dickens the novelist in her discussions of his work & on Dickens the man in his personal relationships. Michael Slater's excellent biography focused on Dickens's journalism & his working life & the two books complement each other. Tomalin's discussions of the novels are trenchant & she is honest about the problems that serial publication imposed on the sometimes baggy plots & extended length of some of the novels. She also highlights Dickens's inability to write convincing heroines. Even with his wide knowledge of people, many of his women are blank canvases. His charity work with Baroness Burdett Coutts at their Home for young prostitutes (Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens & the House of Fallen Women is an excellent account of this work) shows that he had met, talked to & sympathised with the plight of these young women but the prostitutes & fallen women in his novels talk like characters from theatrical melodrama. His fiction is most convincing when it calls on his own deepest feelings & experiences such as Great Expectations & David Copperfield or when he is exposing the evils of society as in Bleak House.

Dickens was a man of contradictions. The man who generously supported the widows & children of his friends was the same man who cut off his brothers & sons when they couldn't meet his high expectations. The man who flirted by letter with his old love, Maria Beadnell, when she contacted him years after their romance was the same man who caricatured her cruelly as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit after they met & she disappointed him by being middle-aged, fat & silly.

Claire Tomalin's biography has many riches, I've only just scratched the surface. This would be an excellent introduction to Dickens as it made me immediately want to reread my favourite Dickens novel, Great Expectations, & dip into a few others.

Last weekend in the garden, the back porch & the kitchen..

2011-11-16T01:02:00.000+11:00

I took a few photos of the girls in the garden last weekend. They're gradually exploring different parts of the garden. Here's Lucky among the agapanthus leaves in the front garden bed.

She also enjoys climbing just a little way up this tree. I love the way her coat looks a different colour in different light.

The back porch is another favourite spot in the sunshine.

Phoebe always looks elegant against the grey slate of the front steps,

but when it's time for a snooze, the kitchen stool is one of her favourite spots. She can open one eye & see what's going on.

An Airman's Wife - Aimée McHardy

2011-11-15T02:03:00.000+11:00

My Remembrance Day reading has continued with An Airman's Wife, subtitled A True Story of Lovers Separated by War. This little book consists mostly of the letters Bill Bond wrote to his wife, Aimée, as he served in the RFC on the Western Front & she waited at home in England. It was published in 1918 & then forgotten until Barry Marsden discovered it during his researches into Derbyshire fighter pilots. He was so impressed that he arranged for it to be reprinted. So many books were written during the War & forgotten. This story is, in some ways, representative of so many stories of the War but it's also unique because it's Bill & Aimée's story.

Aimée & Bill lived quite a bohemian life in Paris before the war & Amy McHardy began spelling her name in the French manner. Both writers & journalists, they shared a love of adventure & a disregard for convention. Bill enlisted in the Army at the beginning of the war & served at Gallipoli & Ypres where he won the Military Cross. He decided that he needed a new challenge & transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. After training in England, he & Aimée were married & he was posted to Treziennes, near St Omer. The book begins here, with his departure for the Front & contrasts Aimée's life at home & his letters from France. They wrote to each other every day, sometimes several times a day & counted the days until they could expect a letter if one of them was travelling. The book was published in 1918 & subject to censorship so all the names were changed. Barry Marsden has been able to recover the names of most of the RFC personnel from the squadron's Operations Book.

The RFC worked behind & over the trenches on the Western Front. The war in the air hasn't been written about as much as the war in the trenches but the raids undertaken by the pilots were vital to the safety of the men below. Bill's squadron was responsible for escorting planes sent over the German lines to take photographs of manoeuvres & materiel as well as pursuing enemy aircraft & engaging in dogfights. The planes were primitive, the pilots inexperienced & life expectancy was short. Everyone was so young, not just the pilots but their commanding officers,

The General commanding our Brigade and a Colonel from the Brigade were dining with us. Combine the ages of our C.O. (a major) and that of our two guests and the average is about 26 years.... I looked on as an impartial spectator. The picture was one of youth not sobered, but stimulated, by responsibility: graced, not by a heroic air, but by one of serenity; endowed by unfailing optimism and avowing but one object of hate - not the Hun but the perpetrator, whoever he may happen to be, of 'hot air'. Nearly thirty people under twenty-five years old doing a vital part of the work on which a whole army may depend!

Bill describes raids & everyday life at the base. A 'dud' day is one where the weather is unsuitable for flying. Sometimes a dud day is welcome when they've been flying up to three operations a day but in general they're all keen to be flying & anxious to get on with the job. Aimée, on the other hand, is living in a cottage in the country with friends or in London with her family & waiting for Bill to come on leave. She writes stories & tries to have them published, looks after her two younger sisters when they visit, & learns to cook.

Betty & I are cooks! I used to think those who could turn raw flour and other raw things into something one liked to eat must have a special gift. Now I no longer am surprised, except that anyone should go on doing it day after day. We enjoyed ourselves because it was adventure, but I shouldn't care to be obliged to spend my time in a kitchen - even such a darling of a kitchen as this - whether I felt inclined or otherwise. Our cakes are perfect and the cornflour jelly stuff slips down like a dream. That's because it was flavoured with chocolate and had the beaten white of eggs stirred in at the last minute.

Bill's letters are full of longing for Aimée. He writes quite straightforwardly of his work but ends every letter by telling her how much he misses her & how he spends hours thinking of her. His letters begin, "My own wife," "Aimée, dearest one," "Ma bien Aimée," & end with "Do you know that I love you? Darling Aimée, I want you and soon...", "All my love, my sweet wife," "I love you, dearest woman."

As the months pass, the main topic of Aimée's thoughts is Bill's leave. She's afraid to think about it in case something should happen to him before he gets it.

I want to know and I'm frightened to know. I want to be able to count the days, and yet I think I shall be worn to a shadow if I do - and what joy would a shadow be to Bill? We want each other to kiss and love, and we want to see each other. It's very difficult to explain why spiritual union is not enough, any more than mere bodily union would be enough. I suppose it's because - on this earth anyway - we are human; and because there must be something beyond - above! When Bill comes back to me I think I will weep. Tears come to my eyes even at the thought.

Bill's leave did come through & they spent a blissful 10 days together. However, the news Aimée had always dreaded came at last. Bill was reported missing in July 1917. Aimée went to Bill's family & stayed with them while they waited for more news. Her emotions are very much on the surface, trying to stay calm for Bill's mother & father's sake, hoping that he had been taken prisoner after he was shot down but always fearing to have her worst thoughts confirmed. Aimée keeps writing her daily letter until the news comes that there's no hope of Bill having survived the crash. I couldn't help thinking about the many women & families who never got that certainty. Aimée describes so well the limbo of hoping for the best yet fearing the worst until the confirmation of Bill's death comes.

The book ends with Aimée accepting Bill's death yet feeling that he's watching over her as she tries to imagine a future without her. Unfortunately, nothing is known of Aimée's story after the war. I wonder if she was able to make a living as a writer & if she was able to return to Paris after the war. An Airman's Wife is a touching story, told with humour & passion. I'm glad that it was rediscovered & that I had a chance to read it.

Sunday Poetry - Love Lost

2011-11-13T13:39:00.001+11:00

I knew that Mary, Queen of Scots (picture from here) wrote poetry but I don't remember ever reading any of her poems, except probably in biographies of her. This lovely poem, The Absent One, has been translated from the French by Antonia Fraser. It doesn't say when it was written but Mary certainly had many absent loved ones to write about over her long years of imprisonment so maybe it dates to that period of her life. The imagery implies a more active life but maybe she was imagining her life as she wished it could be.

Wherever I may be
In the woods or in the fields
Whatever the hour of day
Be it dawn or the eventide
My heart still feels it yet
The eternal regret.

As I sink into my sleep
The absent one is near
Alone upon my couch
I feel his beloved touch
In work or in repose
We are forever close.

In this same section of the anthology, there was also a poem by Mary's son, James VI of Scotland & I of England (picture from here). Again, I don't know when it was written but this stanza is lovely. It could refer to his mother but, as they were not close (understandable as they were seperated when James was less than two years old), it probably doesn't. It's from a poem called Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix.

Yet worst of all, she lived not half her age.
Why stayde thou Tyme at least, which all dois teare
To worke with her? O what a cruell rage,
To cut her off, before her threid did weare!
Wherein all Planets keeps their course, that yeare
It was not by the half yet worne away,
Which sould with her have ended on a day.

Remembrance Day

2011-11-11T01:33:00.000+11:00

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The Portuguese Escape - Ann Bridge

2011-11-10T01:43:00.000+11:00

After I finished reading The Lighthearted Quest, the first of the Julia Probyn series by Ann Bridge, I could barely wait to read the second book. As the title suggests, this time Julia's in Lisbon, covering a royal wedding for one of her newspapers. Naturally she's staying with the bride's family which gives her an entreé into high society. Julia's friend, Major Hugh Torrens, who she met in Morocco when she was searching for her missing cousin, Colin, is also in Lisbon. He works for British Intelligence & has been given the task of getting a Hungarian priest, Father Antal Horvath, out of Communist Hungary to the United States so that he can tell the West what's really happening behind the Iron Curtain. He must go through Portugal because the Vatican has an emissary there to talk to him about the fate of a Cardinal imprisoned by the Communists.

As the book begins, another Hungarian refugee is making headlines. Young Countess Hetta Páloczy was left behind when her parents had to suddenly flee during the Soviet invasion. Hetta has spent the last six years first in her convent school & then, when the convents were shut down, working as a cook in a country village for Father Horvath. At the age of 22, she arrives in Lisbon as the result of an exchange & is reunited with her mother, a social climbing woman who would give her right arm for an invitation to the royal wedding which is the only topic of conversation at cocktail parties & receptions. Hetta is truly an innocent abroad but she knows her own mind. She refuses to speak to journalists when she first arrives, insists on an explanation for everything asked of her &, although she has nothing in common with her mother & her values, she is intent on rebuilding their relationship. Hetta's stories of life under Communist rule could make her a celebrity but she refuses to talk to idle people who see her as just the new sensation,

The fact was that Hetta Páloczy found herself rather up against the western world as presented to her at Estoril in many of its aspects, of which the social ease, the urbane worldly wisdom of her mother's confessor was most definitely one. The richly-dressed congregation at Mass on Sundays, with shiny cars waiting outside, the interior richness of the churches themselves, with all their treasures displayed, not hidden away in the deep reed thatch of some peasant's house for security - the very safety of it all jarred on her, after the passionate devotion of the people at home, holding with such stubborn intensity to the practice of their religion in the face of persecution and danger.

Richard Atherley, Secretary to the British Ambassador in Lisbon, takes Hetta under his wing & his protective feelings soon become something more. When Torrens asks Hetta to help him identify Father Horvath, she is pleased to think she will see her mentor again but Atherley begins to realise the danger she may be in as they are followed around Lisbon by thugs who speak Spanish with German accents. His fears are realised when Hetta is kidnapped on her way to visit Father Horvath at Gralheira, the Duke of Ericeira's country estate where Julia has arranged for him to stay until he can leave the country. A further emotional complication is that Richard's former mistress, the elegant Mme de Vermeil has arrived in Lisbon for the royal wedding, & Hetta soon discovers their relationship.

The Portuguese Escape is a terrific adventure story with car chases, espionage & a plot so convoluted that I can't even begin to summarise it. The descriptions of Lisbon & the countryside are wonderful, it's almost like reading a beautifully written travel narrative at times & the reader learns of the culture & some of the history of Portugal as well. This isn't the kind of thriller that could be set anywhere. Even the car chases are written so that we can enjoy the countryside they're all racing through. Julia is magnificent as always. She has the Duke & his family completely entranced & has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Portuguese road networks that mere mortals can only marvel at. I could barely turn the e-pages fast enough to find out what would happen next. I've already downloaded the rest of the series, & it won't be long before I move on to The Numbered Account, set in the world of Swiss bank accounts & a Greek heiress who is engaged to Julia's cousin, Colin.

My Father as I Recall Him - Mamie Dickens

2011-11-08T02:02:00.000+11:00

The bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens is coming up in 2012 & already there are many events planned & books to be published about this writer who is probably second only to Shakespeare in fame & affection. I've loved Dickens's novels for as long as I can remember & I plan to read Martin Chuzzlewit & Barnaby Rudge next year as they're the only two of the novels I haven't read yet. I've never found the titles very appealing for some reason. Why is David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby an inviting title for a novel & these two are not? I may be pleasantly surprised & become as fond of Barnaby & Martin as I am of so many other characters in the novels.

I've also read many biographies of Dickens. Michael Slater's magnificent biography will be hard to beat but I am looking forward to Claire Tomalin's book which is on its way to me right now. I love Tomalin's writing & one of my favourite biographies is her book on Ellen Ternan & Dickens, The Invisible Woman. In anticipation of all this Dickensmania to come over the next 12 months, I've just read this delightful book by Dickens's daughter, Mamie. My Father as I Recall Him (picture from here) is only 50pp long & is brimming over with love & affection for the man who was adored & admired by his daughter without reservation.

The book was written at the end of Mamie's life in the 1890s & is a collection of stories & anecdotes about Dickens as a father, a friend & a writer. The only biography of her father that Mamie recommends is John Forster's quasi-authorized book & Mamie never mentions the fact that her parents had separated or, of course, that her father had a mistress. This is Dickens as a great man who loved his home & family & was never happier than when he was among them. This was certainly one aspect of Dickens & Mamie's book is the source for many anecdotes that have appeared in every book about Dickens written since. One of the most famous stories, about Gad's Hill House, is almost like a fairy tale,

As a "very queer small boy" he used to walk up to the house - it stood at the summit of a high hill - on holidays, or when his heart ached for a "great treat". He would stand and look at it, for as a little fellow he had a wonderful liking and admiration for the house, and it was, to him, like no other house he had ever seen. He would walk up and down before it with his father, gazing at it with delight, and the latter would tell him that perhaps if he worked hard, was industrious, and grew up to be a good man, he might some day come to live in that very house.

Of course he did just that, living at Gad's Hill for the last years of his life. Another famous story shows how absorbed Dickens became when writing. Normally he was left quite alone when he was working but, after Mamie had been ill, Dickens asked if she would like to lie on the sofa in his study while she convalesced.

On one of these mornings, I was lying on the sofa endeavouring to keep perfectly quiet, while my father wrote busily and rapidly at his desk, when he suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward, but evidently not seeing, me, he began talking rapidly in a low voice. Ceasing this soon, however, he returned once more to his desk, where he remained silently writing until luncheon time...for the time being he had not only lost sight of his surroundings, but had actually become in action, as in imagination, the creature of his pen.

The last years of Dickens's life were blighted by illness, both physical & emotional. His last reading tour of the United States was an act of will that almost killed him. The readings took so much emotional energy, especially the sensational scenes like the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist that Dickens himself wondered how he would ever get through the tour.

"It likewise happens, not seldom, that I am so dead beat when I come off the stage, that they lay me down on a sofa after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there extremely faint for a quarter of an hour. In that time I rally and come right again."

Dickens was returning from France one day in 1865 with Ellen Ternan & her mother when their train was derailed at Staplehurst in Kent. The shock of this incident never left him for the final years of his life as, although not physically hurt, Dickens helped to tend the injured & saw people die from their injuries. The fear that his relationship with Ellen would be discovered must also have affected him, although this is not mentioned in Mamie's book. Dickens wrote of the sense of dread he felt whenever he had to travel by train & Mamie saw how badly he was affected,

...on one occasion, which I especially recall, while we were on our way home from London to our little country station, Higham, where the carriage was to meet us, my father suddenly clutched the arms of the railway carriage seat, while his face grew ashy pale, and great drops of perspiration stood upon his forehead, and though he tried hard to master the dread, it was so strong that he had to leave the train at the next station. The accident had left its impression upon the memory, and it was destined never to be effaced.

Mamie writes movingly of Dickens's death. She & her sister, Katey, were summoned to Gad's Hill by their Aunt Georgina after her father became ill.

All through the night we watched him - my sister on one side of the couch, my aunt on the other, and I keeping hot bricks to the feet which nothing could warm, hoping and praying that he might open his eyes and look at us, and know us once again. But he never moved, never opened his eyes, never showed a sign of consciousness through all the long night...Later, in the evening of this day, at ten minutes past six, we saw a shudder pass over our dear father, he heaved a deep sigh, a large tear rolled down his face and at that instant his spirit left us. As we saw the dark shadow pass from his face, leaving it so calm and beautiful in the peace and majesty of death, I think there was not one of us who would have wished, could we have had the power, to recall his spirit to earth.

Mamie's book is full of a daughter's memories of a much-loved father. There are many Dickensian moments at Christmas, on holidays, practical jokes played on family & friends. The cover of the book shows Dickens & the illustrator John Leech dancing with Mamie & Katey. The girls had tried to teach the two men to dance & the result was incongruous as Leech was over six feet tall & Dickens could never learn even the simplest dance although he was so clever at acting & performing in other ways. This was the private man that his daughter knew & although much is left unsaid, this is a book that any Dickens fan would enjoy reading. I downloaded my copy of My Father as I Recall Him free from ManyBooks.

Sunday Poetry - Farewells

2011-11-06T10:58:00.000+11:00

A sadly Romantic poem today by Thomas Campbell (picture from here). Gilderoy was a 17th century highwayman who killed several people (including a judge & his treacherous mistress) on his way to the gallows or he was a Perthshire freebooter hanged with five of his gang. Although, if he killed his mistress, who is the speaker of the poem? The name Gilderoy may have come from the name of a 13th century Irish chief who raided Scotland & mean the red-haired boy. The poem was set to music in the 19th century.

The last, the fatal hour is come,
That bears my love from me:
I hear the dead note of the drum,
I mark the gallows tree!

The bell has toll'd; it shakes my heart;
The trumpet speaks thy name;
And must my Gilderoy depart,
To bear a death of shame?

No bosom trembles for thy doom;
No mourner wipes a tear
The gallows' foot is all thy tomb,
The sledge is all thy bier.

Oh, Gilderoy! bethought we then
So soon, so sad, to part,
When first, in Roslin's lovely glen,
You triumph'd o'er my heart?

Your locks they glitter'd to the sheen,
Your hunter garb was trim;
And graceful was the ribbon green
That bound your manly limb!

Ah! little thought I to deplore
Those limbs in fetters bound;
Or hear, upon thy scaffold floor,
The midnight hammer sound...

A V.A.D in France - Olive Dent

2011-11-05T13:36:00.000+11:00

I've started my November Remembrance reading with Olive Dent's short memoir of the two years she spent as a V.A.D (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nursing in France during WWI. Olive doesn't tell the reader anything about her personal circumstances apart from the fact that she had no personal ties & could therefore volunteer to help the war effort. She becomes a St John's Ambulance volunteer, takes some nursing classes & embarks for France with 100 other V.A.Ds in the late summer of 1915.

Olive & another girl are sent to a tent hospital set up on a racecourse outside a town. Although the Sister in charge is dismissive of them to begin with - no experience, totally untried etc - they soon show their worth. A camp hospital in France is nothing like a well-equipped civilian hospital in England,

The newcomer to a camp hospital finds matters very different to what she has been accustomed in England; no hot water, no taps, no sinks, no fires; no gas-stoves, a regular Hood's "November" of negation. She probably finds the syringe has no suction, and all the cradles are in use, and there is none for the boy with bad trench feet, that there are only six wash-bowls for the washing of a hundred and forty patients, and that there is nothing but a testing stand, and a small syringe with which to help the medical officer through a dozen typhoid inoculations.

Improvisation becomes second nature. Scrimping & saving, borrowing a little of this & that from the next ward. All the staff have the same dedication to the soldiers they're caring for. Olive's hospital assessed wounded men to see if they needed to be sent back to England or could stay & be treated at the hospital for a quicker return to the front line. A coveted Blighty ticket would send a man home with a minor wound. Even though he would be given two tickets - one for the journey home & one to bring him back again - it was still a blessing to be away from the front even for a short time.

The coming of winter brings new challenges. Living & working in tents can be quite cosy but the differing problems of snow & frost are feelingly described. Olive remarks that the only good thing about frost is that they know the men on the front line prefer it to snow which just adds to the mud & discomfort of the trenches. The wards are kept warm & dry but the trek to the mess & sleeping tents needed careful preparation.

Going to bed is a prodigious rite and ceremony. After a bath in a camp bath, which against the feeble force of chilblained fingers has a maximum resistance, immovability and inertia, and yet seems to possess a centre of gravity more elusive than mercury, one dons pyjamas, cholera belt, pneumonia jacket, bed socks and bed stockings as long and woolly as a Father Christmas's, and then piles on the bed travelling rug, dressing gown, and fur coat. Even in bed the trials of active service do not end, on occasion. We found one girl lying in bed the other night with her umbrella up. The snow had melted and was trickling through the tent, and she was too tired to trouble about having matters righted. "I'm imagining it is a garden parasol, and I'm in a hammock, and it's June." Gorgeous imagination!

The hard work & the exhaustion contrast with the pleasure Olive gets from her work. The men she nurses are grateful for their care & the respite from the trenches. They put on a fancy dress party & half the men dress up as women so they can dance as the nurses aren't permitted to dance with their patients. At Christmas, the wards are decorated with anything they can find, scraps of material, holly & greenery from the woods around the hospital. The greatest pleasure for Olive is knowing that she's doing her duty. Her patriotism shines through every page of this book. We may think that her attitude is naive but it comes through again & again in memoirs of the period. The British stiff upper lip, mustn't let the side down, keep a cheerful face for our boys attitude is exemplified by Olive & her colleagues. The patients too realise that they have a job to do & don't want to let their mates down. Even after the worst night, full of pain & suffering, Olive can still see the importance of her role & gives thanks that she can help.

One's eyes smart and feel filled with salt as a man with life ebbing, - oh, so painfully quickly, - grasps one's hand and says "Sister, God bless you." The full meaning of the remark arrests one, its sanctity, its solemnity, the benedictory significance of the words spoken under such circumstances engulf one.... But the longest night ends and joy cometh with the morning. The restless tossings have ceased, the breathing is soft and regular. The dew-laden air accentuates the foetid smell of the wounds. I go to the door of the marquee to roll back the walls, and I lean for a moment against the bamboo pole, a surge of emotions overpowering me - aching pity, immeasurable sadness, a sense of human limitations - often indeed - human impotence. Then the joy of success, the transcendent happiness of helping to snatch back a life from the Gates of Death.

Olive Dent's memoir isn't great literature. Her prose is occasionally a little purple. Her judgements of men are often based on a class snobbery that was unconscious in a woman of her period. I could ignore all that because the book gives an immediate, enthusiastic, detailed account of active service nursing. This book can't compare in literary quality to Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. But, that's not where the value of personal memoirs like this lies for me. A V.A.D in France was published in 1917 when the experiences were still raw & immediate. There was a great deal of poetry & prose published during the war but the public quickly grew tired of war memoirs once the war ended & it wasn't until the late 1920s that the war weariness ended & readers & publishers wanted to read about it again. Testament of Youth benefited greatly from the 15 years of reflection that passed before Vera Brittain began writing it. I admired Olive's courage, her unflappable initiative & her common sense, qualities that should never go out of fashion or be forgotten.

A Lighthearted Quest - Ann Bridge

2011-11-03T02:10:00.000+11:00

I'm glad that A Lighthearted Quest is the first of a series because I'm looking forward to spending more time with Julia Probyn. Julia is a freelance journalist with private means who agrees to go out to Morocco to look for her cousin, Colin Monro. Colin is the son of a rather flustery widow. She owns an estate in Scotland that, until recently, was run by her brother-in-law. His recent death has brought Colin's sister, Edina, home to look after things but she has a well-paid job in advertising in London, & doesn't want to live at Glentoran indefinitely. Her salary also pays some of the bills. Colin hasn't been in touch for months & all their letters & newspaper advertisements have met with silence. He was last heard of sailing a yacht around Casablanca & Gibraltar, buying & selling oranges. Julia agrees to go out to look for Colin, planning to supplement the meagre currency allowance with some articles for her newspaper clients.

Julia is practical & very determined. She's also beautiful & has admirers in some very advantageous places such as the Foreign Office & various banks. Julia's good looks lead some people to underestimate her, see her as a "dumb blonde" but they're wrong. She's the kind of no nonsense Englishwoman who asks questions & just expects to receive answers. This sometimes leads to over-confidence & gets her into trouble more than once on her adventures but I found her an endearing character. She also reads Nancy Mitford & Edith Wharton so I could approve of her literary taste as well. Published in 1956, the book is full of the details of travel & politics of the era. Some of the attitudes to women & colonialism are dated but they're of their time & I enjoy books of this period & earlier without worrying too much about the sometimes questionable attitudes of the characters.

Julia goes out to Morocco on a freight ship &, after an unexpected stopover in Casablanca that allows her to meet up with her banking friend, she moves on to Tangier. No one she speaks to believes that Colin is selling oranges, they all assume he's smuggling as everyone does along the coast. Tracking him down becomes complicated &, as money is running out, Julia gets a job as secretary to an eccentric Belgian archaeologist, Mme La Besse. Mme is excavating a Phoenician settlement with oil presses, wine vats &, hopefully, some undisturbed tombs.

Julia also makes contact with the mysterious Purcell, the owner of a bar where a lot of English expats congregate. Purcell is able to give Julia a few clues & she soon decides that whatever it is that Colin is smuggling, it's something more important than a few luxuries for the beauty-starved English. He could even be involved with British Intelligence. She catches a glimpse of Colin & his red-bearded companion on the roof of a house in Tangier but loses him in the crowd. Julia's search takes her to Fez & Marrakesh, into the souks & bazaars as well as the cocktail parties & hotels of the wealthy. She pieces together the story after adventures including a bomb blast & a night spent in an empty tomb to deter grave robbers. There's even a hint of romance for Julia by the end of the book.

I loved the atmosphere of this book. I was reminded of Mary Stewart's books with their resourceful heroines in exotic locations. Also of M M Kaye, who wrote a series of murder mysteries called Death in Zanzibar, Death in Kashmir etc. Although M M Kaye is better known for her big Indian Raj historical novels like The Far Pavilions & Shadow of the Moon (both just reprinted by Penguin), I enjoyed this series which I think was influenced by the author's life as an Army wife being posted all over the world. I'd love to read them again. Ann Bridge's husband was in the diplomatic service & you can feel her personal knowledge of North Africa in her evocative descriptions of the cities Julia visits,

Afterwards they all strolled again on the Djema el F'na. There was a full moon, and the great Koutoubia minaret - to eyes familiar with the minarets of Turkey, slender as knitting-needles, so much more like a tower - stood up almost transparent in the moonlight, in all its immense dignity and beauty. At night, under the naphtha flares, the tempo of pleasure and entertainment on the great square - the "place folle" as the French call it - is heightened: the circles around the dancers are more dense, the grey-bearded performers leap more wildly, while the metal clappers, the original castanets, rattle like machine-gun fire; the gestures of the story-tellers are more dramatic, the serpents of the snake-charmers writhe like souls in torment. Public enjoyment for its own sake here achieves an expression unparalleled elsewhere on earth - it is indescribably stimulating. But it is also exhausting, and presently Julia declared for bed.

All the Ann Bridge series (the list of titles is here) are available from Bloomsbury Reader as Print on Demand paperbacks or as e-books, which is how I'll be reading them. I bought my e-book copy from The Book Depository where it was on sale for 40% off.

Becoming Jane Austen - Jon Spence

2011-11-01T02:15:00.000+11:00

I've read a lot of biographies of Jane Austen. She's one of my favourite authors &, in some ways, one of the most unknowable. Famously, her sister, Cassandra, burnt most of her letters after her death & the letters that remain are, with a few exceptions, concerned with domestic matters, fashion & a little polite gossip. The first biography was written by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in the Victorian period & portrays a genteel woman who may have written novels but did everything in the best possible taste. In the 20th century, biographers have variously seen Jane Austen as a sour spinster or a radical feminist. Jon Spence's biography, written in 2003, looks at Austen as a writer & searches for the people & places that may have inspired her fiction.

Becoming Jane Austen became famous or notorious as the basis for the film, Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway & James McAvoy. I quite liked the movie but it didn't completely satisfy me. Some of the plot elements seemed unbelievable although I did like the relationship between Jane & Cassandra & between Jane & her mother. They had the ring of truth & I found the same ring of truth in this book. Of course, the central premise of the movie & book was that Jane Austen fell in love with Tom Lefroy, a young lawyer, but they couldn't marry because she had no money & he was at the beginning of his career & couldn't support a wife. This lost love was the basis for the romantic relationships she wrote about in her novels.

Jon Spence builds up a convincing case for the idea that Jane was attracted to Tom. There are joking references to their meeting & dancing at parties in Jane's letters to Cassandra. I don't find it inconceivable that Jane was infatuated with an attractive young man & every experience is useful to a novelist. Spence doesn't give the relationship more weight than it can bear on the basis of the letters & family tradition & I found his theory persuasive. He doesn't make the mistake of assuming that Jane Austen couldn't have written about love if she hadn't experienced it herself. She wrote about many things she couldn't have experienced including marriage & motherhood. She was a novelist, she had imagination.

Her imagination carried her out of herself, not only into those fictional worlds and characters she created, but into the real world and into the feelings and thoughts and situations of many other people, making her life richer and more varied than might casually appear. She was not limited by the emotions and experiences that were directly her own. In observing Jane's habits of mind and imagination at this time we see how she practised imaginative engagement as a moral activity - an exercise in turning outward from herself.

He also doesn't go down the route of more romantic biographers of single lady novelists who can't bear the thought that their heroines never experienced romance. Emily & Anne Brontё have suffered from this as well!

The reality of Jane & Cassandra Austen's lives was that they had no money of their own & could only marry men who could support them. Cassandra became engaged to a young clergyman, Tom Fowle. He went out to the West Indies as a chaplain to further his career so that they could marry but died of fever. It's a tragic story but they could not have married without money. Jane accepted a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, a family friend. The next day she retracted her promise because she didn't love him. The marriage would have been a good match, financially secure. It would have meant security for Jane & Cassandra but she wasn't prepared to sacrifice her feelings. That was the reality for women in early 19th century England. Jane Austen uses this reality brilliantly in the story of Charlotte Lucas in Pride & Prejudice. Charlotte's options are limited. Already in her 20s, plain & with no fortune, she accepts dreadful, sycophantic Mr Collins & makes the best of her life with him. This was the more realistic future for someone like Elizabeth Bennet instead of the gorgeous fairytale of marriage to Mr Darcy.

When their father died, Jane & Cassandra (& their mother) had to rely on their brothers to contribute to their support. Eventually this led to the happy years at Chawton Cottage but they lived in uncomfortable circumstances in Bath & Southampton for several years before that happened. It's significant that, although Jane had written juvenilia & probably the first versions of several of the novels in earlier years, she published nothing until she felt secure at Chawton. The story of Jane's career as a novelist is well-told here. Jane was a clever businesswoman who made her reputation with Sense & Sensibility & used the word-of-mouth success of her first novel to good effect when publishing her masterpiece, Pride & Prejudice, on better terms. Her satisfaction in her earnings reflects her desire for independence. She left everything she owned to Cassandra in her will.

Jon Spence begins his book with a look at Jane's ancestors. When a biography begins with a ramble through the family tree of the subject, it usually makes my eyes glaze over & I start skimming. However, this time it was fascinating. The stories of her ancestors found their way into the novels, especially the story of old John Austen, who left all his fortune to his eldest grandson, ignoring the boy's half-siblings, whose widowed mother had to scrape & save to give them the education they would need to make their way in the world. Jane Austen knew this story & used it in Sense & Sensibility.

Jane's relationship with her lively cousin, Eliza, is also explored. Eliza was about 10 years older than Jane, just the right age for heroine-worship & Eliza became almost a fantasy figure to Jane as she flirted with her favourite brother, Henry, married a French Count who was guillotined during the Revolution, & eventually returned to England & married Henry. Spence relates this relationship to some of the characters in the juvenilia & also characters like Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. It sent me back to the juvenilia which I hadn't read for years. That's what I loved about Becoming Jane Austen. Jon Spence tells the familiar story of Jane Austen's life in a fresh way. By focusing on her family history & her relationships with significant people like Tom Lefroy & Eliza, he encouraged me to look at Jane Austen in a more rounded way.

One Book, Two Book, Three Book, Four Book...and Five

2011-10-31T02:26:00.000+11:00

Simon at Stuck in a Book came up with this lovely meme a little while ago & now he's invited us to do it again. It's a great way to see what everyone else is reading & focus my mind on what I want to read next. So, here goes.

1. The book I'm reading now.

A Lighthearted Quest by Ann Bridge, one of the Bloomsbury Reader e-books I downloaded the other day. As it's an eight book series, I thought I should make a start. I've almost finished it & loved it so I'll be posting about it soon.

2. The last book I finished.

The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley which I loved & posted about here.

3. The next book I want to read.

Now, this is the hard part! As it's almost November, I've put a couple of books about WWI on the tbr pile. I've had these books for over 5 years so I'd like to read them soon. A VAD in France by Olive Dent was first published in 1917 & An Airman's Wife by Aimee McHardy is based on the letters between Aimee & her husband.

However, as it's Halloween, I probably should read a ghost story or two tonight if I'm brave enough. Maybe something by M R James as I have this newly reissued volume of his stories.

4. The last book I bought.

Well, I've been on a bit of a spree lately with e-books & other goodies but I can't go past the new Persephone titles for Autumn/Winter. Dinners for Beginners by Rachel & Margaret Ryan, No Surrender by Constance Maud & the one I'll probably read first, Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple.

5. The last book I was given.

Well, no one gives me books as I'm so hard to buy for. I can't imagine why that would be. Anyway, I've been sent a review copy of Victoria Hislop's new novel, The Thread. So, that will have to count as a gift, which it is in a way.

Roses in bloom

2011-10-30T12:10:00.000+11:00

The first roses from Abby's rose garden are sitting in a honey jar next to me on the desk so I thought I'd share a few photos. The photos are a little blurry & they don't really capture the gorgeous colours & unfortunately you can't smell the glorious scent but I have successfully grown roses & I'm thrilled. These are Sophy's Rose & Noble Antony. They're covered in raindrops because it's been a showery morning. I took a chance & went out for a walk about an hour ago - it was just as well I took my umbrella. I wanted to get these few roses inside before the wind blew them away altogether. The first of many honey jars full of roses this summer, I hope.

Sunday Poetry - Doomed Love

2011-10-30T10:27:00.000+11:00

I was spoilt for choice in this section of Antonia Fraser's anthology of Scottish love poetry. Some of my favourite ballads were there - The Daemon Lover, Clerk Saunders & Lord Randal. But, I chose a poem I hadn't come across before by a poet I'm not familiar with. J F Hendry (1912-1986) was a writer & editor. Born in Glasgow, he served in the Royal Artillery during WWII & lived in Canada after the war, working at Laurentian University. The image of the compass in The Constant North reminds me of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, especially John Donne, one of my favourite poets.

Encompass me, my lover,
With your eyes' wide calm.
Though noonday shadows are assembling doom,
The sun remains when I remember them;
And death, if it should come,
Must fall like quiet snow from such clear skies.

Minutes we snatched from the unkind winds
Are grown into daffodils by the sea's
Edge, mocking its green miseries;
Yet I seek you hourly still, over
A new Atlantis loneliness, blind
As a restless needle held by the constant north we always have in mind.

The Rose Garden - Susanna Kearsley

2011-10-29T12:16:00.004+11:00

I love time slip stories & I've enjoyed all of Susanna Kearsley's novels so I was predisposed to enjoy The Rose Garden. And I did! It's a beautifully romantic, engaging story that I read in 100 page gulps. Eva Ward is a PR consultant living in Los Angeles. Her parents are dead & her sister, Katrina, is dying. After Katrina's death, Eva takes her sister's ashes back to the house in Cornwall where they had spent happy summers with family friends. Trelowarth House is home to the Halletts. Uncle George is dead but his second wife, Claire, lives in a cottage in the grounds while her stepchildren, Mark & Susan, live in the big house. Mark runs a rose nursery & Susan has returned from Bristol to help, full of plans for tea rooms & enticements for tourists.

As Eva relaxes into the familiar rhythms of life at Trelowarth, she becomes aware of voices in empty rooms & one day she steps back into the past, back to Trelowarth in the early 18th century. She meets Daniel Butler & his brother, Jack, Daniel's friend & ally, Fergal O'Cleary, & Constable Creed, who will do anything to see the Butlers hang. The Butlers are smugglers but they're also distantly related to the Duke of Ormonde, who is planning a rebellion to put the Pretender, James Stuart, back on the English throne. It's 1715 & the death of Queen Anne has seen the Protestant House of Hanover preferred over the Queen's Catholic half-brother, James. James's supporters, the Jacobites, are plotting to overthrow King George & the Butlers are in the thick of it.

Eva's presence is disconcerting but she's soon accepted by Daniel & the immediate attraction between them grows stronger. Even Fergal, suspicious & anxious, accepts Eva & she masquerades as his mute sister, just over from Ireland, as she learns the ways of an 18th century household. Jack, with his easy ways & loose tongue, isn't allowed into the secret, & Constable Creed, who hates Daniel for personal as well as political reasons is a threatening presence in all their lives. Eva's knowledge of the future is a heavy burden as she researches the Butlers in the present day & becomes more involved in their lives when she slips through the barrier. Time moves differently in the past. Eva spends days with Daniel in the past but when she returns to the present, she's only been absent a split second. As her love for Daniel grows stronger, Eva has to make a decision about where her future lies & find a way to make it happen.

The Rose Garden is full of the magic of Cornwall. There are echoes of Daphne Du Maurier's Cornish novels, Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek & The House on the Strand especially. I loved all the detail about the roses & Susan's plans to make the business a success. I was equally interested in the modern & 18th century stories & that isn't always the case with time slip novels. Although, I must admit, Daniel Butler was such a romantic figure that I wouldn't have minded spending more time in his company. I could fully understand Eva's desire to stay with him & her growing dissatisfaction with the present. The 18th century Trelowarth was as real to me as the 21st century house. The characters were convincingly historical, their speech was different without any thees & thous which can be jarring. I could understand why Daniel & Fergal didn't want Eva to speak to strangers - her speech & manner would have been so strange. There's excitement, adventure, tragedy & romance in The Rose Garden, it's a compelling read.

Bloomsbury Reader

2011-10-25T01:43:00.000+11:00

I was beside myself with excitement to discover Bloomsbury Reader, a new initiative of Bloomsbury Publishing to resurrect some fantastic authors in print on demand & e-book editions. Simon at Stuck in a Book posted about this last week & I couldn't wait to whiz through their list here. I'd read some months ago about Bloomsbury reprinting Monica Dickens who has enjoyed a little mini revival with Persephone reprinting Mariana & The Winds of Heaven in recent years. Then, when I saw the list & realised that I could download my choices onto my e-reader instantly, I was even more excited.

There are a few downsides to the Bloomsbury Reader website. There's no rhyme or reason to the listing. It's not alphabetical or any other order I can make out. There's no way to limit your search just to e-books so the same titles pop up twice in both formats but not together. There's no subject listing, not even fiction & non-fiction. You can search by author but you need to know who's there to do a usable search. There are no blurbs - well, there were no blurbs on any of the titles I looked at. With 57 pages to go through, it's a bit frustrating.

However, all is not lost. I pasted the ISBN into the search engine at The Book Depository & there are blurbs for most of the titles I was interested in. AND, the e-books are around 40% cheaper than the RRP so that makes them around $6.60AU. Much more reasonable than the print on demand physical books which I think are expensive at around $18 & I'd have to wait for them to arrive in the post. I can buy the Virago edition of Rose Macaulay's Told by an Idiot for $18 so why would I choose a POD edition instead?

So, I've had a little splurge & bought 9 titles. Personal Pleasures & Letters to a Friend by Rose Macaulay, Faster! Faster! & Late & Soon by E M Delafield, The Queens & the Hive by Edith Sitwell, Company Parade & The Road from the Monument by Storm Jameson, Kate & Emma by Monica Dickens & A Lighthearted Quest by Ann Bridge (because I read Fleur Fisher's review here & it sounds wonderful & if I enjoy it, the whole series is available from Bloomsbury Reader. So, quibbles about the website aside, I'm thrilled with this new venture & hope it's a success & that Bloomsbury keep adding authors to the list (in some sort of order & with blurbs please).

I'll leave you with a question. Margaret Irwin is one of the authors on the list & I loved her historical novels which I read many years ago. Does anyone know anything about another of her books called Still She Wished For Company? It looks contemporary rather than historical from the only cover I can find on the internet but I can't find anything on the plot. I'm also tempted by Phyllis Bentley's novels. I always remember her from Vera Brittain's diaries of the 30s. They had a tentative friendship wrecked by Vera's superiority & Phyllis's lack of self-esteem & touchiness. She was famous for her historical, regional saga, Inheritance, & there are more of her novels on the list. But, I have enough to be going on with at the moment. At least the tbr shelves on my e-reader are invisible.

Cats, roses, spring etc

2011-10-24T01:28:00.000+11:00

We've had very changeable spring weather over the last week. It was almost summery midweek then a cool change with rain swept through. Saturday was cool with a thunderstorm in the afternoon. Phoebe slept through the whole thing, Lucky burrowed under her blanket until long after it was all over. Abby was frightened of thunder too, she used to hide under my bed. Yesterday morning we woke up to fog but that cleared & it was a warm, humid day with more storms late in the day. Very tropical. So, as we were out early enjoying the sunshine before it got too hot, I thought a few pictures of the girls & an update on the roses was in order. There's no reason for this picture of Phoebe in the (thankfully) empty laundry basket except that she looks gorgeous.

I can't believe that it was only a month ago that the big tree in the front garden looked like this. Here's Phoebe in almost the same spot. Even a week ago there were only a few leaves & a little blossom. It always seems that overnight it shakes out its green glory.

Lucky always finds a sunny spot to start the day. In the garden...

or on the back porch.

And here's a picture of the girls together, one of the few I have as they're still happier in their own space. Actually, I think Phoebe has just invaded Lucky's space here...

Now, enough of this cat worship. The roses are looking wonderful & here are a couple of pictures of Sophy's Rose, buds just about ready to blossom, still sparkling with raindrops from Saturday night's storm. I can't wait!

Sunday Poetry - Fainthearts

2011-10-23T11:52:00.001+11:00

An anonymous poem this week about a fair lady & a knight (picture from here) who thinks he's going to get his heart's desire but is outwitted. If only he'd been bold instead of baffled! I always have questions about these ballads. Why was the knight out riding with two horses? Was he looking for an opportunity to take off with a willing young lady? Or did he make his squire walk?

Although the setting is medieval, the language & the repetition of "sir" sound more Victorian to me. The last two lines also remind me of the verse inscribed on the little Victorian box that Wilmet receives in Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings. The gift is anonymous & Wilmet has a lovely time speculating as to who the giver might be.

The Baffled Knight

There was a knight, and he was young,
A riding along the way, sir,
And there he met a lady fair,
Among the cocks of hay, sir.

Quoth he, Shall you and I, lady,
Among the grass lye down a?
And I will have a special care
Of rumpling of your gown a.

'If you will go along with me
Unto my father's hall, sir,
You shall enjoy my maidenhead,
And my estate and all, sir.'

So he mounted her on a milk-white steed,
Himself upon another,
And then they rid upon the road,
Like sister and like brother.

And when she came to her father's house,
Which was moated round about, sir,
She stepped straight within the gate,
And shut this young knight out, sir.

'Here is a purse of gold,' she said,
'Take it for your pains, sir;
And I will send my father's man
To go home with you again, sir.'

'And if you meet a lady fair,
As you go thro the next town, sir,
You must not fear the dew of the grass,
Nor the trumpling of her gown, sir.

'And if you meet a lady gay,
As you go by the hill, sir,
If you will not when you may,
You shall not when you will, sir.'

The Camomile - Catherine Carswell

2011-10-22T11:55:00.000+11:00

Ellen Carstairs is a young woman living in Glasgow in the early 20th century. She's an orphan & lives with her brother, Ronald, & their evangelical Aunt Harry. Ellen is ambitious. She longs to write but her mother was a very unsuccessful novelist & Aunt Harry is alert for any signs of the same unsuitability in Ellen. She did manage to escape to Frankfurt for several years to study music & returns to Glasgow to earn her living as a music teacher at her old school. She also takes private pupils although it's not music that stirs her soul but writing. She rents a cold, miserable room from a neighbour just so that she can work without Aunt Harry interrupting her. The Camomile takes the form of a letter-journal Ellen writes to her friend Ruby, a fellow student in Frankfurt now living in London.

Ellen hasn't much in common with her old school friends in Glasgow or with her fellow teachers. She spends time in the Mitchell Library just so that she can be free to read what she wishes without enduring Aunt Harry's disapproval. There she meets a man she nicknames Don John, John Barnaby, an ex-priest & scholar who lives on the edge of poverty, sustained only by his love of books. John Barnaby encourages Ellen's writing & sends her stories to a London editor. It's John who explains the title of the book when he likens Ellen's writing to the camomile. "I see. It is like the camomile - the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows." And when I asked him who had said that, he smiled again and said, "An observant fat man called Falstaff." Ellen is conflicted about her writing. She feels compelled to do it but also knows how Aunt Harry & conventional Glasgow society feels about it.

There is no doubt writing makes me more irritable with her. Today I have felt quite desperate whenever she came near me. Now is this a sign that writing is wrong for me? I am deeply worried these days about this old question. Is writing - serious writing - simply a mistake for a woman? Ronald, as you know, thinks it is. But Ronald, I do think, is influenced here by Mother's unfortunate example. The worst of it is I know so terribly well what people mean when they say it is "a pity" that a woman should write. I can feel why it is so different from, for instance, a woman's singing or acting. Because, however severe the technique of these arts may be, they are in their effect womanly. But writing!

Ellen becomes engaged to Duncan, the brother of an old school friend. He's a doctor, on leave from his post in India. They're instantly attracted to each other & Ellen gradually finds herself swept up in the excitement of her first love affair. Once they're engaged, however, she begins to consider what marriage to a conventional man like Duncan will mean. They have lunch with a couple Duncan knows from his Indian station & it's a disaster. Duncan is desperate to impress them & encourages Ellen to look sophisticated, even buying her pearls for the occasion. Ellen realises that only a girl who will be sociable, go to parties & dances & not be "too intellectual" could be a suitable wife for Duncan in the middle-class hidebound colonial society he lives in. When the wife asks her if she's fond of reading, Ellen struggles to hide her real tastes because she knows they are too intellectual for this woman who despises trash & only pretends to know the authors Ellen mentions. Duncan doesn't share Ellen's misgivings,

He thinks I have grown "just a wee bit morbid," being too much alone with my thoughts, which is "bad for women." He believes the life in India, with its tennis and riding, jolly, rather superficial chatter and determined suppression of serious talk, will be the best possible antidote for me. How I hope and try to believe that he is right!... But he warns me to beware of one thing as of the devil. In India I must not speak of anything abstract or "superior," or of "high-brow works of art," unless I am content to be regarded as a bore and a blue-stocking.

Ellen's doubts only increase as she attends the conventional weddings of her friends & then when Duncan has to return to India early & refuses to marry her immediately so she can return with him. Duncan's complacent assumptions & the disapproval of a few people like Don John who Ellen respects, gradually lead her to realise that she has to make a decision. Does she have the courage to follow her dream of being a writer at the expense of the conventional happiness that society expects of her?

The Camomile is a very engaging novel. Written in 1922, Ellen is a radical misfit in the conventional world of narrowly religious Aunt Harry. Ronald is sympathetic but his sights are set on going to America. Her school friends follow the expected path to marriage without ever feeling the need to express themselves. Only her former music teacher Miss Hepburn is outraged by her decision to forego a career for marriage. Don John is quietly disappointed & retreats from Ellen's life. I enjoyed Ellen's determination to write & her descriptions of her great plans for the future & her struggle to find somewhere congenial to work & read. Ellen wants experience but marriage to Duncan may be too high a price to pay. It would also mean the end of her writing as Duncan's assurances that Ellen could continue to write have a a very hollow ring.

Catherine Carswell (photo above from here) wrote only two novels, this one & Open The Door! Both were reprinted by Virago in the 80s. She was a friend of D H Lawrence & lost a job at the Glasgow Herald when she praised his novel, The Rainbow. She later lived in London with her husband & son & was friends with writers including Storm Jameson & Rose Macaulay (of whom I'll have more to say soon). Canongate have since reprinted Open the Door! as well as Carswell's unfinished autobiography, Lying Awake. I downloaded The Camomile for free from Open Library. I was inspired to read The Camomile by Desperate Reader's review.

An Autobiography - Anthony Trollope

2011-10-20T01:33:00.000+11:00

I pulled Anthony Trollope's Autobiography off the tbr shelves a couple of months ago after reading Elaine's enthusiastic review. But, the moment passed, I went on to other things & eventually Anthony went back to the shelves. Then, last weekend, I read Christine Poulson's review at her blog, A Reading Life, & suddenly I knew what I would be reading that afternoon. I settled down & read almost half the book in one sitting. Reading impulses are like that! I'd read other biographies of Trollope, most memorably, Victoria Glendinning's, but reading about his life in his own words was an absorbing experience. I can only agree with Christine's description of Trollope as "the most lovable of writers."

I admit to rushing through his miserable childhood. My heart ached for the awkward, poor, ignorant, badly dressed, neglected boy who was sent to one dreadful school after the other. His father was a bad-tempered, difficult man with no business sense so the family was often on the edge of ruin. His mother, Fanny, was a formidable woman. She took some of the family off to America to start a bazaar, of all things, to set her son, Henry, up in business. She also wrote a book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, which caused a scandal with its blunt assessments of Americans & their way of life. The book was, of course, wildly popular in England & started Fanny on a career as a writer which kept the family afloat. Neither parent seems to have had much time for Anthony & never seemed to have noticed his misery. The family even had to move abroad to Bruges, where Fanny nursed her dying husband & two children suffering from consumption, all the time writing constantly.

Anthony's fortunes improved when he was employed as a clerk at the General Post Office in London. He got into debt as he struggled to live in London with no family support & earning a little money for the first time. He applied for a job as a Surveyor's Assistant in Ireland, was sent there with dreadful references from his superiors at the GPO but met with success. Living was cheap in Ireland, he enjoyed the work which entailed riding around the countryside planning mail delivery routes & he met with great kindness & hospitality from the local people. He also met his wife, Rose, although we don't get much sense of his family life at all from the book. He mentions children & says he was happy but we hear much more about his literary friends than we do about his family.

As the son of writers, Anthony always had ambitions to be a writer. He thought novels would be easier than poetry or plays (although he did attempt a play which was rejected by a theatre manager. He reused the plot of The Noble Jilt in Can You Forgive Her?) It took some years before he made any money by his pen. His first two novels were published at half-profits & he saw no profits from them at all. His first quiet success came with the publication of The Warden & Barchester Towers. Trollope had a very workmanlike attitude to the writing life. This shocked some of his original readers as his emphasis on writing as a profession rather than a vocation was not what was expected. He writes of his delight in earning his first £100 for Barchester Towers,

I am well aware that there are many who think that an author in his authorship should not regard money,- nor a painter, or sculptor, or composer in his art. I do not know that this unnatural self-sacrifice is supposed to extend itself further. A barrister, a clergyman, a doctor, an engineer, even actors and architects, may without disgrace follow the bent of human nature, and endeavour to fill their bellies and clothe their backs, and also those of their wives and children, as comfortably as they can by the exercise of their abilities and their crafts.

Trollope's descriptions of the tables he drew up at the commencement of each book showing how many words per day he needed to write to finish the book in a certain time; his descriptions of finishing a novel one day & starting a new book the next day, led to accusations that he was nothing but a writing machine, devoid of inspiration. Trollope advises young writers to be disciplined, not waiting for inspiration but writing a set number of words a day. Success means hard work although that doesn't mean that there weren't times when the excitement of his story didn't carry him away from his tables & careful plans,

When my work has been quickest done,- and it has sometimes been done very quickly - the rapidity has been achieved by hot pressure, not in the conception, but in the telling of the story. Instead of writing eight pages a day, I have written sixteen; instead of working five days a week, I have worked seven. I have trebled my usual average, and have done so in circumstances which have enabled me to give up all my thoughts for the time being to the book I have been writing.... And I am sure that the work so done has had in it the best truth and the highest spirit that I have been able to produce. At such times I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.

Once Trollope had moved his family back to London, where he felt he needed to be in order to pursue his literary career, he found himself part of a literary milieu that included Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot & George Henry Lewes among many others. He was still working for the GPO & regarded his literary earnings as the cream that allowed him some luxuries like his beloved hunting. He became a member of clubs & associations like the Garrick Club & he enjoyed his popularity with the enjoyment that only a man who remembered a lonely, friendless childhood can enjoy it.

I think that I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have long been aware of a certain weakness in my own character, which I may call a craving for love. I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me,- a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified. In my school-days no small part of my misery came from the envy with which I regarded the popularity of popular boys. They seemed to me to live in a social paradise, while the desolation of my Pandemonium was complete... My Irish life had been much better. I had had my wife and children, and had been sustained by a feeling of general respect.... It was not till we had settled ourselves at Waltham that I really began to live much with others. The Garrick Club was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular.

What a disarmingly honest & touching thing to have written. Although Dickens's childhood was just as miserable & he was just as much an outsider, I can't imagine him ever writing anything so revealing about his feelings.

Trollope writes a lot about his method of writing, his relations with publishers & his opinions of other writers of the period. I found all this fascinating. His appraisals of Dickens, Eliot & Thackeray are so interesting. He doesn't seem to be a big fan of Charlotte Brontё (although he does admire the second volume of Jane Eyre set at Thornfield) but I was amused & surprised at this perceptive comment about Villette, "The character of Paul... is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love with some Paul when she wrote the book..." Charlotte's unrequited love for M Heger had not, of course, been mentioned in Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte & her letters to him would not be published until 1913.

This is such a good-humoured book. Trollope was writing near the end of his life, although he still had many books to publish. He left the manuscript (written in 1878) to his son, asking that it be published, unchanged, after his death. Trollope died in 1882 & the Autobiography was published the next year. Although Trollope had listed all the books he'd written at the end of the manuscript, his son could add another 13 titles published in the last 4 years of his life! Prolific, indeed. I've read quite a few of Trollope's novels but there are a lot more to read. I've been hoarding the last two Palliser novels for a few years now, not wanting to reach the end but I think I need to read The Prime Minister very soon.

Æthelstan : the first king of England - Sarah Foot

2011-10-18T02:33:00.000+11:00

Yet if one asked a group of educated Britons to name three Anglo-Saxon kings, few would now number Æthelstan among those they could recall. Alfred who burnt the cakes would top any list, followed swiftly by Harold (he who died with an arrow in the eye at the battle of Hastings) and then perhaps Æthelred the Unready, or Edward the Confessor. In his homeland, outside the few places with monuments to his memory, Æthelstan has become England's forgotten king, an almost entirely unknown figure of a remote past no longer seen as relevant to modern culture, or included in a national school curriculum.

In her new book, Sarah Foot sets out to remedy this & put Æthelstan back in the national consciousness, where he belongs. Æthelstan was the grandson of Alfred the Great & his achievements have been almost entirely eclipsed by those of Alfred. Yet it was Æthelstan, not Alfred who was the first King of Britain. Æthelstan not only inherited the kingdom of Wessex, he also became overlord of Mercia when his aunt, Æthelflaed, died. He then conquered Northumbria & eventually had all the rulers of the Scots & Welsh kingdoms paying him tribute & acknowledging him as their ruler. Æthelstan's achievements are even more remarkable because he reigned for only 14 years & had to overcome not only opposition at his accession but an invasion by disgruntled Scots & Scandinavian leaders that he defeated at the famous battle of Brunanburh.

Æthelstan was the son of Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great. He was Edward's eldest son, born around 894, but his mother, Ecgwynn, died young or was repudiated. Edward married again & his new wife produced a large family. Æthelstan was sent to Mercia to live at the court of Æthelflaed, Lady of the Mercians & her husband, Æthelred. When Edward died, Æthelstan was not the only candidate for the throne of the West Saxons, even though he was the eldest son. He was relatively unknown at the West Saxon court because he had spent his childhood in Mercia. His younger half-brother, Ælfweard, was proclaimed King but he died only a short time later. Æthelstan's other half-brothers were too young to succeed so, maybe reluctantly, the West Saxons accepted Æthelstan as King.

Æthelstan never married & there have been many theories to account for this. Producing an heir was vital so that the succession would be smooth & the family line would continue. Æthelstan was a notably religious man so he may have taken an oath of celibacy, similar to the oath that Edward the Confessor was said to have taken in the 11th century. Æthelstan may have felt that he should allow one of his half-brothers to succeed him. He may have feared that, if he died young, leaving a child as his heir, civil war could be the result. Although Æthelstan didn't marry, he was very shrewd in the marriage alliances he arranged for his half-sisters. His full sister, who may have been called Eadgyth, was married to the Scandinavian King of York, Sihtric. After Sihtric's death, Æthelstan used his family relationship to bring York back into his kingdom after many years of Scandinavian rule. His half-sisters were married to various European rulers - Eadgifu to Charles, King of the West Franks, Eadhild to Hugh, Duke of Frankia, Ælfgifu to Louis of Burgundy & Eadgyth to Otto of Saxony. These alliances made Æthelstan & England respected throughout Europe & allowed Æthelstan to pursue his passion for collecting religious relics. He also helped two of his nephews & a foster-son to regain their thrones after they had spent years of exile at the English court. All these diplomatic alliances & initiatives enhanced England's reputation.

Æthelstan was also a great warrior. He helped his aunt & uncle to recapture northern Mercia from the Danes under the overall lordship of his father, King Edward the Elder. Once Æthelstan became King, he led raids further north into the Scottish kingdoms, driving out the Danes & forcing the Scots King, Constantin, to become his vassal. Æthelstan's greatest test was the battle of Brunanburh in 937 against an invasion led by Constantin, the Strathclyde Welsh led by Owain (another client king) & Olaf Guthfrisson, the Norse King of Dublin. The site of the battle has never been definitively known, but Sarah Foot believes it must have been at Bromborough, near Chester. Æthelstan took both land & naval forces on the campaign, which was an amazing logistical exercise for the period. The details of the battle are only known through a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle but it was a convincing victory for Æthelstan & his eldest half-brother, Edmund. If Æthelstan had been defeated, England would have been plunged back into the divisive days when Viking raiders had forged their own kingdoms out of England, creating the Danelaw where they ruled almost half of England. Æthelstan's victory at Brunanburh confirmed his title of King of Britain although he didn't live long to enjoy it. He died in 939, & was succeeded by his half-brother, Edmund.

Sarah Foot also considers the reasons for Æthelstan's disappearance from historical consciousness. The fact that he was succeeded by his half-brother rather than a direct descendant meant that his achievements weren't recorded as a father or grandfather's would have been. Although he was a religious man, his military exploits meant that he was never seen as a candidate for sainthood as Edward the Confessor was. He didn't have an Asser at his court to write his biography as Alfred the Great did. There are few written sources for Æthelstan's life & his achievements became lost in those of his grandfather & later Anglo-Saxon kings like Edgar.

Sarah Foot has written a fascinating & accessible account of the life of one of England's greatest kings. She looks at his religious life, especially his collection of relics & the gifts he made to churches & monasteries. She looks at the charters which set out the gifts of land he made to individuals & which are one of the key sources of information about the period. She examines the coins minted during the reign & analyses the different images of the king to try to understand what Æthelstan meant when he called himself rex totius Brittaniae, king of all Britain.

Sunday Poetry - Unrequited Love

2011-10-16T11:50:00.003+11:00

I haven't been able to find out very much about today's poet, Marion Angus, apart from her dates, 1866-1946. Even the link on the website where I found this photo is broken. She was born in Aberdeen where her father was a minister & spent most of her life there. Her poetry was often based on the old ballad forms & written in Scots like this lovely poem, Mary's Song. Her work was out of print for many years after her death but a new edition of her selected poems was published in 2006. This poem is melancholy & heart breaking as unrequited love is. I think it's beautiful.

I wad hae gi'en him my lips tae kiss,
Had I been his, had I been his;
Barley breid and elder wine,
Had I been his as he is mine.

The wanderin' bee it seeks the rose;
Tae the lochan's bosom the burnie goes;
The grey bird cries at evenin's fa',
'My luve, my fair one, come awa'.'

My beloved sall ha'e this he'rt tae break,
Reid, reid wine and the barley cake,
A he'rt tae break, an' a mou' tae kiss,
Tho' he be nae mine, as I am his.

Recent arrivals

2011-10-14T13:36:00.000+11:00

All my Book Depository preorders are coming home to roost! I ordered these lovely books months ago, as soon as I knew they were on the horizon, so it's been a real treat to come home & find packages on the doorstep this week. Vintage have reprinted Nancy Mitford's four historical biographies. I've bought Voltaire in Love & Frederick the Great but not The Sun King or Madame de Pompadour, which I already own. I also have the Capuchin editions of Christmas Pudding & Pigeon Pie to come but they're not published until the end of the month.

Alison Weir is one of my favourite writers of historical biography & her latest subject is Mary Boleyn. Mary has always been quite a shadowy figure. She avoided the fall of her sister, Anne, & brother, George but has been best known for having been the mistress of two kings - Francis I of France & Henry VIII. In recent years, Mary has been the subject of historical novels including Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl which started that dreadful fashion for headless women on book covers, as well as perpetuating some of the myths about Mary & her character & starting a few new ones. I'm looking forward to seeing what Alison Weir has managed to discover about the real Mary.

I've only become a fan of the novels of Georgette Heyer in the last few years. I didn't read Regency romances as a teenager which seems to be the time when most women fall in love with Heyer's heroes. I started reading her books with the encouragement of my online bookgroup, some of whom are big fans & know the books backwards. So, I asked for recommendations & read A Civil Contract which I enjoyed very much. I prefer the books with older heroines - I'm too old to have much in common with young flibbertigibbets - & since then, I've enjoyed half a dozen more including Lady of Quality, The Black Sheep, The Reluctant Widow & The Nonesuch. So, I was pleased to hear about this new biography of Heyer who was a notoriously private woman. I'd read Jane Aiken Hodge's biography but there was still a lot to be discovered & Jennifer Kloester has worked on her book for over 10 years. She had the help of Jane Aiken Hodge & Heyer's son & I'm hoping for lots of detail about how she wrote her books which are famous for the extensive research & accuracy of historical detail. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the Press already about comments Heyer made about Dame Barbara Cartland, accusing her of plagiarism. You can also hear an interview with Kloester & Katie Fforde on the BBC here. Just scroll down to Chapter 3 at the bottom of the page. Speaking of Jane Aiken Hodge, there's a novelist who I would love to see reprinted. Very much in the vein of Mary Stewart. I have fond memories of her romantic suspense novels, often with historical settings like Watch the Wall My Darling & Greek Wedding. Those 1970s Pan paperback covers bring back a lot of memories.

So, what to read first? I have no idea!

Cooking the Books - Kerry Greenwood

2011-10-11T01:50:00.000+11:00

I can't read Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman books when I'm hungry. It's torture. If I'm stuck on a train or on a journey of any kind without rations, I just read something else. I sat down on Friday afternoon to begin reading Cooking the Books. It was grey & threatening rain. I had a cup of tea beside me, Lucky was asleep on the couch, Phoebe was asleep on my lap. An hour & a half (& a very loud thunderstorm) later, I was starving & had to upset sleeping cats to get to the kitchen & eat.

Corinna Chapman is a baker. She's a big woman, traditionally built as Alexander McCall Smith would say. She lives in Melbourne in an Art Deco building called Insula with her lover, Daniel, cat Horatio & an assortment of friends & fellow tenants. Her bakery, Earthly Delights, is closed for January, her assistant, Jason, has gone to surf on the coast & her two assistants, resting actors Goss & Kylie, have landed roles on a new soap, Kiss the Bride. When an old school enemy begs Corinna to help her out in a catering emergency, employing a little bribery to ensure success, Corinna is happy to oblige. Holidays aren't for her & she's bored. The job, baking for the production of Kiss the Bride at Docklands studios, means she can keep an eye on Goss & Kylie as well as be highly paid for doing what she does best - baking.

The kitchen is fraught & tense, as all commercial kitchens are, in Corinna's experience. The tension is also evident on the set where star Molly Atkins plays the prima donna on & off the set. Her downtrodden assistant, Emily, suffers most but stays on, hoping for her big acting break if Molly pulls a few strings for her. Who could be playing practical jokes on the leading lady? Chili oil in her scrambled eggs, mustard in her face powder & wasabi in the lip gloss is only the start of it. Then, Corinna becomes aware of other little conspiracies among the cast & crew. Emily seems quite different off the set & when Molly faints & Emily has to step in at the last minute, she is transformed. Cameraman Ethan seems close to Emily & very antagonistic to Molly. The writers, Gordon & Kendall, seem to be hatching plots they haven't written into the script & Tash, the director, just wants to keep Molly happy & get to the end of shooting with no disasters.

Corinna's lover, Daniel, is a private detective & his latest case is a hard one to crack. A young woman, Lena, who works for a firm of corporate lawyers, is desperate to recover some missing papers. Lena is being bullied by her employers & it soon becomes obvious that something dodgy's going on. The search for the papers leads Daniel to the haunts of the homeless & to deciphering clues left by the mysterious Pockets, a former banker, now one of the many people living on the streets, suffering from mental illness & alcoholism. Pockets has "filed" the missing papers somewhere safe & obviously understands their worth. He leaves clues at various locations around Melbourne & Daniel & Corinna set off on the treasure hunt. Daniel is also employed by Molly Atkins to find the son she gave up for adoption at birth. All the clues point to Molly's son being on the set or in the kitchen at Kiss the Bride.

There's always lots of plot & subplot in Kerry Greenwood's novels. But, even the plot doesn't distract me from the ever-present food. Corinna's bread is legendary as are Jason's muffins. In this book, Corinna takes on Bernie, a young pastry cook, to help out while Jason's away & the two of them create some mouth-watering treats. The catering company has a different theme for the Kiss the Bride set each day. So, on Greek day, we have spanokopita, baklava & Greek shortbread. Hungarian day means apricot cake, hundred layer cake & raspberry cream roulade. You get the idea? I could practically smell the bacon & scrambled eggs for breakfast. Then there are the medieval recipes Bernie makes out of an old cookbook she found. Lots of marzipan, spices & fruit.

I also enjoy the setting of the novels. I love the fact that I guessed a couple of the clues in Daniel's treasure hunt (the fine lady on the fine horse, for example) because I live in Melbourne & I knew exactly what statue was referred to. I don't read many novels set in Melbourne but this series & Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher detective series set in the 1920s, are a lot of fun. There's almost as much food in the Phryne books but I especially love the fact that Corinna's a baker. I love baking & as well as eating, this book made me long to bake something, anything! There are recipes in the back of the book as well.

Sunday poetry - Laments

2011-10-09T01:42:00.000+11:00

I love this poem which I first knew as a song. There are many versions of the words of Waly, Waly. It's also known as The Water is Wide. This is only one of them. The version I know best was arranged by Chris Hazell & sung by Bryn Terfel on his lovely album of British folk songs. I couldn't find a video of Bryn singing this but here's a video of him singing Loch Lomond which is the link to the picture of Loch Lomond above (from here).

O waly, waly up the bank!
And waly, waly down the brae!
And waly, waly yon burn-side,
Where I and my love wont to gae!

I lean'd my back unto an aik,
I thought it was a trusty tree;
But first it bow'd, and syne it brak,
Sae my true-love did lightly me.

O waly, waly! but love be bony
A little time, while it is new;
But when 'tis auld, it waxeth cauld,
And fades away like morning dew.

O wherefore should I busk my head?
Or wherefore should I kame my hair?
For my true-love has me forsook,
And says he'll never love me mair.

Now Arthur-Seat shall be my bed,
The sheets shall ne'er be fyl'd by me;
St Anton's well shall be my drink,
Since my true-love has forsaken me.

Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
And shake the green leaves off the tree?
O gentle death, when wilt thou come?
For of my life I am weary.

'Tis not the frost that freezes fell,
Nor blawing snaw's inclemency;
'Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry,
But my love's heart grown cauld to me.

When we came in by Glasgow town,
We were a comely sight to see;
My love was clad in black velvet,
And I my sell in cramasie.

But had I wist, before I kiss'd,
That love had been sae ill to win,
I'd lock'd my heart in a case of gold,
And pin'd it with a silver pin.

Oh, oh, if my young babe were born,
And set upon the nurse's knee,
And I my sell were dead and gone!
For a maid again I'll never be.

Summer at Fairacre - Miss Read

2011-10-07T14:51:00.001+11:00

I've written before about my love of Miss Read. Her books are so evocative of the English countryside in the 1950s & 60s, just at that point of change when the modern world was intruding on traditional rural ways. It's an idealised world but not sentimental. Miss Read's love of nature is unmistakable & is one of the delights of reading her books.

Summer at Fairacre takes place over a period of months from late spring to the first hint of autumn. Everyone delights in the warmer weather as winter finally ends & nature walks & gardening are the order of the day.

The unseasonable and chilly weather suddenly changed, and May became 'the loveliest month' which the poets praise.
Sunlight flooded the ancient schoolroom, and chalk dust danced in the slanting rays. The massive brass inkstand on my desk gleamed like gold, and little rainbows glanced from the glass over the photograph of our Queen, centrally placed on the rear wall, in the most honoured position...
The cherry tree in the Post Office garden dangled white flowers, and everywhere, it seemed, the fruit trees were breaking into a froth of blossom and tender green leaf. The lilac bush in the most sheltered corner of my garden was in full bloom, and the heady scent floated up to my bedroom window in the warm nights.

Miss Read is spared the threat of her house being given a good spring clean & bottoming by Mrs Pringle's bad leg flaring up. However, when this means that Mrs P decides to give up her job as school cleaner as well, Miss Read has a dilemma on her hands. Allow hopeless Minnie Pringle to wreak havoc or begin the search for a new cleaner - for her own house as well as the school. Mrs Pringle may be tyrannical & obstinate but she's an excellent cleaner & will be very hard to replace.

Miss Read's friend Amy decides to give her husband James a taste of his own medicine & takes herself off without warning for a few days. James is distraught &, on Amy's return after a relaxing time at a spa resort & in Scotland with her niece, Vanessa, becomes much more attentive. Henry Mawne, on the other hand, knows exactly where his wife is. Elizabeth has gone home to Ireland to try to convince a cantankerous aunt to leave her inconvenient house & go into a nursing home. Henry, meanwhile, is lonely & at a loose end & takes to visiting his single female friends in the evenings, causing gossip & upsetting their routines.

The Coggs family has its share of misfortune. Feckless Arthur is sent to prison & then Mrs Coggs is taken ill & goes into hospital. Miss Read's pupil, young Joseph, stays with her at the schoolhouse & they both enjoy the company. The school's Sports Day is a great success & Miss Read is secretly thrilled when Joseph wins a race. Miss Read is apprehensive when she's asked to give a talk on children's literature, especially when she learns that one of the other speakers is to be Miss Crabbe, a woman with very decided ideas on children's education who she's clashed with before.

The village jumble sale results in the usual drama & vying for prized positions among the ladies who run the stalls. Jumble sales always remind me of Barbara Pym but Miss Read's jumble sales have none of the subversive humour & gentle sarcasm of Pym. Miss Read is thwarted in her desire to buy a gorgeous chocolate cake but manages to buy a fruit cake instead. She witnesses Mrs Pringle's very decided ideas about selling shoes & watches a newcomer defeated in her attempts to get the better of the redoubtable Mrs P. The baking summer weather is broken by a tremendous thunderstorm that fills the water tanks & refreshes the gardens although its fury isn't appreciated by everyone,

The first distant rumblings of thunder came as the children played after school dinner. Then it came nearer, and vicious lightning cracked the skies. I called the children in, just as the first spots of rain began to fall.
Within ten minutes there was a deluge. Raindrops spun like silver coins in the playground, and the chalky dust at the edge of the field was first pock-marked and then turned to silt within seconds....
The noise was tremendous and awe-inspiring. Thunder crashed and lightning flashed, and I could hear some wailing from the infants next door. My own class was scared, but silent, under the onslaught. I pitied anyone caught in the storm. One would be drenched to the skin in a matter of minutes.

The end of summer resolves everything & life returns to normal with the approach of autumn. Miss Read's world is a very reassuring one & I love visiting Fairacre & Thrush Green from time to time. The beautiful illustrations in my Houghton Mifflin edition are by J S Goodall.