Top 10 Books of 2011 - Non Fiction

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.

Behind Closed Doors - Amanda Vickery

I loved this book. Behind Closed Doors is a fascinating look at Georgian domestic life. As Amanda Vickery writes in the Introduction,

This book takes the experience of interiors as its subject, staking claim to and uncharted space between architectural history, family and gender history and economic history. It brings hazy background to the fore to examine the determining role of house and home in power and emotion, status and choices.

Amanda Vickery has unearthed diaries, account books, wills & letters of the period & has used the research beautifully to look at all aspects of what home meant to the Georgians.  The period covered is the long 18th century, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the end of the 1820s. Some of the most poignant chapters are about the desire for a home. Servants & apprentices who lived with their employers were lucky if they had a locked box to keep their belongings in. If they had a room, they probably share it & they may not even have had that. They may have slept on the shop floor or in the kitchen. For these Georgians, their box is their home, the only private place they have to call their own.

Then, there are the young men living in lodgings. They may pay for their room & board but they often have as little real privacy as a servant. Their landlady may snoop under the guise of changing the sheets or keep the key to their room in her own pocket. For these young men, marriage & a home of their own was something to aspire to. We often think of marriage as the goal of every young lady of the period but these young men desired it too. Living in lodgings meant being dependant on a whole range of suppliers of goods & services. If they were studying or working, they had to present themselves in clean clothes every day & find their own meals. The dream of a home with a loving wife as companion & provider of all domestic comforts was a very common one. Professional men needed a wife to run their household as well. The college or club was only a substitute for all the comforts of home. There was a lot of pressure on men to have a home fir for a wife.

Women also craved their own home. Women who did not marry often lived as dependants in the homes of relatives or in cheap lodgings. Their status, like that of the young bachelors, was much reduced by the lack of a home of their own. Marriage meant becoming the mistress of their own house, managing servants & creating a home for their husband & children. Very few single women could afford their own home. Widows were the only women thought really respectable if they lived alone. Amanda Vickery tells the stories of many women yearning for a home. Gertrude Savile was an especially frustrated spinster, living in her brother’s home, but miserable & discontented. Gertrude’s diary is an outpouring of frustration at the humiliations & privations of life as a dependant. Her physical surroundings may have been quite luxurious but she felt herself to be a prisoner nonetheless, ...the baseness of my dependency upon my Brother: neither father nor husband. Nature makes the dependency upon the one, and choice upon the other, easy... She finds a measure of happiness with her sewing & her cat but no real contentment until a legacy allows her to finally afford a home of her own.

Mary Martin is one of the most likeable & certainly most capable women we meet in the book. She was engaged to her cousin, Isaac Rebow, for years while her aunt, & future mother-in-law, came to terms with the prospect of stepping aside from her role at the head of her son’s household. Mary was a very determined young woman & patiently & persistently made herself indispensable to Isaac. He was in the militia & Mary became his deputy in many respects throughout their engagement. She oversaw the refurbishments to his London house & her letters to him keep him fully informed of all her efforts on his behalf,

Your Room was in a fair way of being finish’d to Night, but fortunately I went up this Morning to see how it look’d & behold they have Painted it Stone Color instead of Dead White, which I think was by no means your intention as it looks so totally different from ye Dining Room & ye Cornish so I posted away to Mr Snow & have frighten’d him out of his Wits for he thinks he has certainly misunderstood...it shall be done White tomorrow & shall be finish’d quite tomorrow Night without fail.

The definition of taste that we have today which was a concept that began in the 18th century. The definition of good taste was really created by the Georgians. One of the most fascinating chapters in the book is about wallpaper & how the wallpaper you hung in your house reflected on your taste. By the early 18th century wallpaper was taking over from fabric hangings as a wall covering. It was cheaper & could be replaced when it started looking shabby. The letter book of Trollope & Sons, wallpaper retailers, is a wonderful source of information about who was buying wallpaper & what they wanted. The significance of patterns (size & type), colours & price are explored through these letters. In 1799, Dr Ferris wrote to Trollope & Sons,

I saw the other Day at our Friend Mr Pigous some very pretty papers your Man was putting up and Mrs Pigou recommended me to your House. I am in want of a paper for a very small Room which must be paper’s immediately...Pray...send a few of the cheapest patterns proper for Halls, Staircases & Passages for a Parsonage House I care nothing about fashion if they are neat & clean.

Neatness & cleanliness were characteristic of good taste. Small, pretty, delicate patterns were preferred over big, blowsy ones – unless you had large rooms that could take them. Vickery goes on to describe the kinds of wallpaper available, the importance of colour & pattern, all illustrated with quotes from the letters of prospective customers. This is just one example of the fruits of her research. I could go on quoting forever but I can’t resist sharing a couple more examples of the delights of this book. In the chapter on women’s craft, Anna Larpent uses her sewing as a means of avoiding the conversation of boring guests, “Mrs Webb, & Mrs Lake chattered here an hour, ribbands, gauzes, this, that, flip, flap. I worked.”

Retired army officer John Byng’s diaries give his opinion on many aspects of 18th century life,

He admired rural simplicity, venerable old mansions, magnificent cathedrals, the treasures of antiquity, libraries, good inns, family fare, comfortable beds and ‘very large portraits in the true taste of full wigs & naked bosoms.’ He disliked spa towns, scenes of alleged elegance and refinement, Chinese wallpaper, festoon curtains, flesh-coloured stucco, gilding, whimsical carving, modern glazing, ladies’ fancy work and anything French – in most of which he saw the triumph of women and the enfeeblement of men.

Behind Closed Doors is published by Yale University Press & it’s gorgeously produced with lots of plates & illustrations in the text & heavy, creamy paper. A beautiful object worthy of its contents.

I also have the DVD of the TV series Amanda Vickery made based on the book, At Home with the Georgians. I’ve watched the first episode & enjoyed it very much. I loved seeing the people in the book brought to life in their own words & seeing their houses & portraits was fascinating. I was also intrigued to see Amanda Vickery whip out her iPad at every opportunity to show us a print (which she enlarged with a touch to the screen to show details) or a document as well as lots of more traditional documentary scenes of her lovingly unwrapping diaries in various libraries & archives. Seeing poor, frustrated Gertrude Savile’s diaries with their crossings-out & miserable scribble was very poignant. I’ll be watching the other episodes over the weekend.