The Rector and The Doctor's Family - Margaret Oliphant

A couple of years ago Desperate Reader read all of Margaret Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford &, ever since, I've been collecting copies of them which have, naturally, never left the tbr shelves. Eventually, I moved the first book in the series, The Rector and The Doctor's Family, from the tbr shelves to the tbr pile & now, at long last, I've read it.

This first volume is actually a short story & a novella & it sets up all the themes for the Chronicles to come. In The Rector, we're introduced to the small town of Carlingford. The new Rector is about to arrive & everyone is curious about him. Will he be Low Church like the last Rector (who scandalised polite society by preaching to the bargemen at the canal) or will he be High Church? More importantly, will he be single? There are several unmarried ladies in Carlingford & the marital status of any new arrival is of paramount importance.

Morley Proctor has been a fellow of All Souls for the last fifteen years and, if it had been left to him, he would be a Fellow of All Souls still. However, he has an elderly mother & he feels it his duty to provide a home for her so he has accepted the living at Carlingford. Mr Proctor soon discovers that he is not suited to the duties of a parochial clergyman. His sermons are stiff, but, more importantly, he doesn't know how to talk to people. He is shy and finds it difficult to relate to his parishioners. When he is called in to comfort a dying woman, he has no idea what to say & watches in embarrassed mortification as young Mr Wentworth, the curate of St Roque's, rescues the situation with practiced ease & real feeling.

Mr Proctor is also aware that he is seen as a matrimonial prize & his mother is urging him to marry. Mr Wodehouses's two daughters, the elder known only as Miss Woodhouse, is nearly forty, mild & kind. Her young half-sister, Lucy, is beautiful & wilful, & seems to have young Mr Wentworth at her feet. Mr Proctor is dazzled by her beauty but also aware that he is as much out of his depth with Lucy as he is in every other aspect of his life in Carlingford.

As The Rector sets up the ecclesiastical themes of the series, The Doctor's Family introduces us to another part of Carlingford society. Dr Edward Rider is a newcomer who lives in a less fashionable part of town. He can't rival old Dr Marjoribanks who has an iron grip on the leaders of Carlingford society so he sets up his practice at the other end of town. Dr Rider is a dissatisfied man as he has a burden, an albatross around his neck - his slovenly, drunken brother, Fred. Fred occupies an upstairs room & is a blight on the doctor's life. He has returned from Australia, with no money & no prospects. He has also neglected to tell Edward that he left behind a wife & three children. When Fred's wife, Susan, arrives in the care of her very capable sister, Nettie, Edward's first thought is horror. To have Fred around his neck is one thing but a sister-in-law & three children to provide for is just too much.

Nettie, however, has other ideas. She has a little money of her own & has spent her life looking after Susan, who is a peevish, spiteful woman. Nettie takes lodgings near St Roque's for the family & spends her life looking after the children, trying to keep up Susan's spirits & bullying Fred into better behavior. Edward is fascinated by Nettie & begins visiting, even though it means he must also see his brother & his family. Edward falls in love with Nettie but she realises that if they married, Fred & family would have to come along as well. She knows that Edward would never be able to tolerate this. He's a dissatisfied, grouchy man who is quick to take offence & jump to the wrong conclusions. Seeing Nettie walking with Mr Wentworth sends him into a paroxysm of bad temper although he has no claim on her & no right to be upset by her friendship with another man.

Nettie is such an interesting character. She is a good young woman who is very sure of herself & bears her responsibilities with fortitude. The fact that her family are less than grateful for all she does for them bothers her not at all. She tries hard to discipline & educate the unruly children & treats Fred like a hopeless invalid which he resents. Edward is grateful that she has taken the family off his hands but also feels guilty that he doesn't do more to help. Nettie's sense of herself is bound up with her sister & her family & she only begins to resent her position when her own happiness looks threatened. Mild Miss Wodehouse had tried to warn Nettie to think of herself more, but had been ignored.

But now the time predicted by Miss Wodehouse had arrived. Nettie's personal happiness had come to be at stake and had been unhesitatingly given up. But the knowledge of that renunciation dwelt with Nettie. Not all the natural generosity of her mind - not that still stronger argument which she used so often, the mere necessity and inevitableness of the case - could blind her eyes to the fact that she had given up her own happiness; and bitter flashes of thought would intervene, notwithstanding the self-contempt and reproach with which she became aware of them.

As Desperate Reader says, these books can be compared with Trollope's Barsetshire series as the themes of Church & society are common to both. The Rector and The Doctor's Family can be compared with The Warden & Barsetshire Towers in the way they set up the themes & characters of the whole series. However, Margaret Oliphant brings her own sensibility to the stories she tells. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote the Introductions to the Virago reprints in the 1980s & these are well worth reading to get an idea of the context of the novels. The essays have been reprinted in A House of Air, a wonderful collection of essays & reviews by Penelope Fitzgerald which I'd recommend to anyone who loves reading about books.

Margaret Oliphant wrote for a living. She worked to support her husband, sons, brothers & other assorted family members. I couldn't help seeing quite a lot of Oliphant in Nettie & maybe Oliphant had experienced that selfish ingratitude from her own family that Nettie experiences. Sometimes I couldn't help having a little sympathy with Fred as Nettie bullies & bosses him but, where would Fred be without her? Although as Margaret Oliphant wrote in her Autobiography, she often wondered if she did the wrong thing propping her family up all the time. Would they have saved themselves if she hadn't been there to do it for them? I had that same thought about Nettie as Edward Rider did when he tries to persuade Nettie to leave them & marry him.  It's a question that Margaret Oliphant struggled with & maybe tried to work through in her fiction. As Penelope Fitzgerald writes,

Mrs Oliphant creates a moral atmosphere of her own - warm, rueful, based on hard experience, tolerant just where we may not expect it. One might call it the Mrs Oliphant effect. In part it is the 'uncomprehended, unexplainable impulse to take the side of the opposition' which she recognized in herself and Jane Carlyle. It is the form that her wit takes, a sympathetic relish for contradictions.

I'm looking forward to reading more of the Chronicles of Carlingford.  

There's a copy of The Rector and The Doctor's Family available at Anglophile Books. 

Sunday Poetry - John Keats

One of my favourite sonnets. It always makes me wonder what Keats would have done if he'd lived. It also provides the quotation for the crossword clue Fred is working on in Brief Encounter, one of my favourite movies. He asks Laura for help with the missing word in this quotation, Huge cloudy symbols of a high - something in seven letters. Laura knows it's Romance.
That might be an idea for a series of Sunday poems. Famous quotations from books & movies & the poems they came from.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Why I really like Why I Really Like This Book

I've recently discovered a blog & a series of podcasts that I love & I think readers of this blog would also love. Kate Macdonald has a blog called Why I Really Like This Book. Kate is a fan of forgotten fiction, as she calls it. The books that used to be well-known, that our grandparents used to read but now, no one does. Every fortnight she records a podcast about her chosen book. You can listen to the podcast from the link on the blog or you can download it to your iPad (& to other devices as well, I'm sure, but I only know about iPads) & listen to it anywhere, anytime.

Kate & I have a lot of authors & books in common. I've listened to about half a dozen of the podcasts & have downloaded a dozen more. You can see from the photo above some of the authors & books Kate has already blogged about. E M Delafield, Angela Thirkell, Stella Gibbons, John Buchan, Barbara Pym. In a way, these authors aren't as forgotten as they used to be. They've all been reprinted in recent years & they're being discovered by a new generation of readers. On the other hand, those of us who love middlebrow fiction are still a small group when you consider the many millions of people reading John Grisham, Janet Evanovich, E L James & now Robert Galbraith. Anything that promotes our favourite authors & keeps the reprints coming is wonderful.

Kate's latest podcast is about When William Came by Saki. I'd already downloaded this book a few months ago when I read Simon's review at Stuck In A Book but, of course, haven't read it. The only Saki I've read is The Unbearable Bassington although I have his Complete Stories on the tbr shelves. Kate recommended four short stories by Saki as an introduction to his style - Tobermory, The Reticence of Lady Anne, Music on the Hill & Esme. They certainly encapsulate Saki's themes of satire & wicked humour. Other books I'm now keen to read are Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill & John Buchan's The Power-House. I'm sure I'll find more as I look back through the archives of Why I Really Like This Book. On the blog there's also a link to an interview with Kate from Pod Academy where she discusses forgotten fiction & her love of browsing in secondhand bookshops (which is where the interview takes place).

Just borrowed

I borrowed a couple of new books at work last week & I think they're so funny & true & beautifully done that I wanted to share them. Nikki McClure's How To Be A Cat is one of the loveliest picture books I've seen in ages & I buy picture books as part of my job so I see a lot of them.

Black & white drawings with a splash of blue. One word per page. There's no story as such, it's about a kitten watching his mother & learning the skills he will need to be a cat.

This book is for anyone who loves cats. You don't need to be three years old to see the truth in the observation of the cats that's gone into creating this book. I make no comment on this picture at all but there are days when I feel I do nothing but open doors for Lucky & Phoebe.

The other book is by Jen Campbell. A few years ago she published a book called Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops. It was exactly that. A collection of weird, wonderful, mad, funny, incomprehensible things that customers or patrons say when they walk into your bookshop or library. Jen works at the Ripping Yarns Bookshop in London & began collecting the odd things people said. The idea grew into the book & other booksellers & librarians began sending in their own examples. Now, she's published the sequel More Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops. Jen has a blog where she talks about her books, her poetry & more weird things that have come her way. Here are just a few of my favourite weird things from this latest book.

Customer: Pride and Prejudice was published a long time ago, right?
Bookseller: Yep.
Customer: I thought so. Colin Firth's looking really good for his age, then.

Customer: I don't like biographies. The main character pretty much always dies in the end. It's so predictable.

Customer: Can you recommend a book of spells to raise pets from the dead?
Bookseller:...
Customer: Just animals, you understand - not people. I don't want my husband coming back.

If you laughed at any or all of those examples, you will enjoy this book. The line drawings throughout are by The Brothers McLeod.

Plotting for Grown-ups - Sue Hepworth

I enjoyed Plotting for Beginners so much, I raced on to the sequel almost as soon as I'd downloaded it. Aspiring writer Sally Howe is a few years older now, about to turn 60 in fact. Her marriage to Gus is over. He decided he loved living in the wilderness so much that he's applied for permanent residency & is living in his cabin in the Rockies. Her brother, Richard, has just broken up with Pippa, although as he keeps walking her dogs & doing odd jobs for her, she may not believe the relationship is really over. Two of Sally's children live overseas & her youngest, Sam, is still popping in for home comforts & a chance to rant at his mother with his latest girlfriend, Xanthe, who takes over the kitchen & enjoys walking around in the nude. Best friend Wendy has reached the end of the line with her philandering husband, Alan, but keeps Sally amused with an endless stream of new outfits & her attempts at finding a replacement for Alan before she throws him out of home. At least the local village speed dating socials have two areas - one for those looking for a date & one for those who are already attached & just want to support the cause & chat to the locals.

Sally's writing career seems to have stalled. Her first novel sold reasonably well but her second is doing the rounds of the publishers & her agent is getting to the end of the list. Her third novel, a romantic comedy (written with the aid of Billy Mernit's Writing the Romantic Comedy) is coming along slowly as she works her way from The Chemical Equation : Setup & on to the Cute Meet & the Sexy Complication : Turning Point. When her agent, Donna, reaches the end of her list of publishers, Sally decides to publish the book herself. This involves finding a printer, organising an ISBN, investigating paper quality & font sizes as well as building her profile on Facebook & Twitter. Sally's writing group friend, Kate (aka Giovanna), helps out with a few tweets for the days when Sally can't think of anything to say in 140 characters & Sally blogs about the process of self-publishing.

Sally's love life is non-existent. It's been three years since Gus finally left but she's not ready to move on. Walking Pippa's dogs one day on the Monsal Trail, she accidentally trips up a cyclist who accuses her of criminal incompetence & rides off without giving her a chance to explain about the dodgy lead that led to the accident (I couldn't help thinking of Jane Eyre's first meeting with Mr Rochester at this point). The cyclist's bike lamp had fallen off in the crash & Sally wonders if she'll ever find out who he is so she can return it. Running into him again in a bookshop, she discovers that he's Kit Wyatt, the local printer who has been recommended to her for her book. After a few sticky moments at their first meeting in his office, she realises that he is a very professional printer with lots of good ideas for a novice publisher. That he also happens to be gorgeous & a widower doesn't escape her notice.

Kit & Sally's relationship follows the plot of her novel as she follows the chapters of Billy Mernit's writing manual from the Sexy Complication to the Hook that will bind her two romantic leads together. It's a funny, realistic look at love in middle age. Sally worries about her figure (what will Kit think of her post-mastectomy body?), the reaction of her children & his children (his daughters are incredibly jealous & over-protective of their father) & her desire to be with Kit but also have a life of her own. She spends most of her time trying to get Richard & Sam to move out so she can have her house to herself.. Sometimes only her addiction to Neighbours & Yorkshire Tea keep her sane.

I loved Plotting for Grown-ups. Sally is a very sympathetic character & I enjoyed meeting Richard, Wendy & Pippa again. It's great to see a woman in her 60s enjoying romance & getting on with her career even though there are complications with moody Kit & his horrible daughters. I especially enjoyed Sally's self-publishing journey. Sue Hepworth's own experiences were obviously great copy for this part of the plot as she self-published her novel, But I Told You Last Year That I Loved You,  a couple of years ago & wrote about the process on her blog. Plotting for Grown-ups is currently available as a Kindle book from Amazon but it will be available as a paperback later in the year.

Sunday Poetry - James Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt was a writer & editor of radical newspapers in the early 19th century. He was a supporter & friend of Keats & Shelley. Unfortunately for his later reputation, he was immortalised as the awful scrounger Harold Skimpole in Bleak House & now that's his main claim to fame. This poem was written during a period of imprisonment in 1814 after Hunt had attacked the Prince Regent in his newspaper, The Examiner.

Winter has reached thee once again at last,
And now the rambler, whom thy groves yet please,
Feels on his house-warm lips the thin air freeze,
While in his shrugging neck the resolute blast
Comes edging; and the leaves, in heaps down cast,
He shuffles with his hastening foot, and sees
The cold sky whitening through the wiry trees,
And sighs to think his loitering noons have passed.

And do I love thee less, to paint thee so?
No. This the season is of beauty still,
Doubled at heart; of smoke, with whirling glee
Uptumbling ever from the blast below,
And home remembered most - and oh, loved hill,
The second, and the last, away from thee!

To show how admired Leigh Hunt was in his radical days, here's the poem that Keats wrote on the day he was released from prison.

What though, for showing truth to flatter’d state,   
Kind Hunt was shut in prison, yet has he,   
In his immortal spirit, been as free   
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.   
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?           
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,   
Till, so unwilling, thou unturn’dst the key?   
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!   
In Spenser’s halls he strayed, and bowers fair,   
Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew           
With daring Milton through the fields of air:   
To regions of his own his genius true   
Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair   
When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew? 

Dead Water - Ann Cleeves

Journalist Jerry Markham returns to Shetland, telling his parents that he's on the track of a big story. A story about the future of the offshore gas & oil industry at Sullum Voe, under attack from environmentalists & locals worried about the future once the industry has gone. When Jerry is found murdered, laid out in a boat near the home of Rhona Laing, the Procurator Fiscal, the assumption is that it must be connected to his work.

Jerry left Shetland years before. His parents, Maria & Peter, own a luxury hotel on the island but Jerry had rarely returned home. He left few friends behind & he had been involved in scandal when Evie Watt, a student working at the hotel, became pregnant. Now, Evie is engaged to John Henderson, & seems to have put her unhappy relationship with Jerry behind her. Jerry had left
Evie behind without a second glance but on this trip he tries to contact her. Could Jerry's past hold the key to his death rather than his search for a story?

Inspector Jimmy Perez hasn't returned to full time work since his fiance Fran was murdered six months before. He's finding it hard to recover from the guilt he feels over Fran's death & only her daughter, Cassie, who Jimmy cares for, provides a reason to keep going. Jimmy's sergeant, Sandy Wilson, is adrift without his boss but doesn't know how to help. When Jerry Markham's body is found, D I Willow Reeves is sent from Inverness to head the investigation. Willow grew up on a commune in the Hebrides although this doesn't make her any less of an outsider on Shetland, what ever her boss might think. This is her first chance to head a murder enquiry & she's desperate to do well. Almost against his will, Jimmy is drawn into the investigation. His local knowledge is invaluable & Reeves is keen to include him in the team. Gradually Jimmy, Sandy & Willow work through the connections between the Markhams, Evie Watt & her family, drawing in Rhona Laing as well as Jerry's London life, to find his murderer.

This is a terrific book. I loved the Shetland Quartet & I was so pleased that Ann Cleeves decided to write a second quartet of which Dead Water is the first part. I love books set in Scotland & the atmosphere of Shetland & the other island communities is perfectly captured in these books. Jimmy Perez is an intriguing character, with his Spanish ancestry & his self-contained manner. His intuitive methods of investigation & his local knowledge of the people he lives among make him an excellent detective. It's interesting to see him in this book coming out of the worst of his grief over Fran's death & rejoining the world. I hope there's a chance to see more of Willow Reeves in future books too. I haven't seen the TV version of Shetland. A pilot was made & a series has now been commissioned. Much as I like Douglas Henshall, he's not my idea of dark, brooding Jimmy Perez but I'd love to see what he does with the role.

Ann Cleeves has been writing for many years but I only discovered her through the Shetland novels. Her other well-known series featuring Vera Stanhope has also been made into a TV series starring Brenda Blethyn. I've read one of the Vera books & will get to the others one of these days.  Bello have recently reissued earlier series featuring Inspector Ramsay (set in Northumbria) & bird watchers George & Molly Palmer-Jones, as e-books so most of Ann Cleeves's work must now be available again.