The Life of Charlotte Brontë - Elizabeth Gaskell

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, she was a famous novelist. Her literary reputation was high after the success of Jane Eyre, Shirley & Villette. However, her personal life was still a subject for gossip & ill-informed rumour. When Charlotte's friend, Ellen Nussey, read an article that mixed critical acclaim with gossipy innuendo about Charlotte's life, she encouraged Charlotte's father, Patrick, & her widower, Arthur Nicholls, to commission a response that would silence the gossip. Although Arthur would have preferred a dignified silence, Patrick was persuaded & he agreed with Ellen that Elizabeth Gaskell was the right person to write such a response. Elizabeth Gaskell was not only a respected novelist herself but had known Charlotte in the last years of her life. The familiar story of the Brontë sisters begins with Gaskell's biography so, instead of retelling that story, I'm going to focus more on the writing of the biography & its effects on Brontë biography ever since.

The book that resulted is one of the greatest biographies ever written about a writer. Gaskell had admired Charlotte & had a profound sympathy for her struggles as a writer & as a woman. She had been just as avid as everyone else to discover the identity of the author of Jane Eyre, which had been published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847. Through her friendship with philanthropist Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth she met Charlotte & they became friends. Gaskell heard from Charlotte herself the sad tale of death & illness that had haunted her family & observed at first hand the struggle Charlotte made to overcome her shyness & her ill-health to enjoy the fame that her books brought her. They corresponded & visited each other so Gaskell was already predisposed to defend Charlotte from any slights when she was asked to write a memoir of her friend. The charge that Jane Eyre was a  "coarse" book, unsuitable for young girls to read, was especially offensive to Gaskell & so she was determined to emphasize the dutiful womanliness of Charlotte Brontë. Her book would show that the unique experiences of Charlotte's life & her devotion to the truth had fed into the work & charges of coarseness & unwomanliness were completely unjustified.

The publication of the Life caused an immediate storm & scandal. The public's desire to know more about the author of Jane Eyre was amply satisfied by the book although those who felt slighted or slandered were not long in coming forward. Gaskell's research had uncovered the truth behind the Lowood scenes in Jane Eyre & she did not scruple to name names when she described Cowan's Bridge & its head, the Rev Carus Wilson, the original of the odious Mr Brocklehurst. She also retold the story of Branwell Brontë's employment with the Robinson family & believed his story of his passion for Mrs Robinson & blamed her for Branwell's decline into alcoholism & death. When Gaskell was writing the book, she jokingly asked her publishers, " Do you mind the law of libel. I have three people I want to libel ...". Unfortunately it was no joke when she was threatened with lawsuits by Lydia Robinson (she had remarried after her husband's death & was now Lady Scott) & the family of Carus Wilson. A second edition was already in print but the third, corrected, edition took her months of work & was eventually longer than the first edition. The edition I read was the first edition which has all the libelous bits intact. Gaskell's righteous anger is clear in these passages & also her reliance on the evidence she gathered from Patrick Brontë & Ellen Nussey as well as Charlotte's own letters.

Patrick Brontë admired the book & felt that it did justice to his daughter but his reputation suffered as well. The picture of Patrick as a stern misanthrope, cutting up his wife's silk dress & destroying his children's coloured boots as too frivolous, made him seem a crank. Gaskell got these stories from a couple of disgruntled former servants but she was too intimidated by Patrick to ask him for his side of the story. He generously refused to reproach her for the portrait she drew of him & it has been said that his reputation has only recently been rehabilitated by the work of biographers like Dudley Green & Juliet Barker. Gaskell also suppressed evidence that didn't fit with her thesis of a woman made great by suffering. She went to Brussels, where Charlotte & Emily Brontë attended the Pensionnat Heger. Here, Charlotte fell in love with her teacher Constantin Heger, the model for Paul Emanuel in Villette. She wrote him passionate letters which Madame Heger had kept & which she showed to Gaskell. Horrified by this evidence of Charlotte's love for a married man, Gaskell attributed Charlotte's misery during her second year in Brussels to worries about Branwell & her family. The secret of the letters was kept until the early 20th century when the Heger's son donated them to the British Library.

One of the great strengths of the biography is the use that Gaskell made of Charlotte's letters. Charlotte's own voice, in her letters to Ellen, to her publishers George Smith & William Smith Williams & to Gaskell herself, is vigorous & alive. Her opinions are pithy &, even though Gaskell edited the letters carefully to remove any details or comments that detracted from the image she wished to present, it was impossible to silence Charlotte's unique voice. Gaskell was a novelist & the narrative reads like a novel, once the early scene setting chapters are past. The story itself could not be more compelling & although she fudged some unpalatable facts & got things wrong, Gaskell's version was substantially true. She may have emphasized Charlotte's domestic virtues over her literary talent, but those domestic virtues were part of Charlotte's life just as much as her work. It wasn't until the later twentieth century that the Brontë Myth (as Lucasta Miller calls it in her wonderful book of that name) of the scribbling sisters in their isolated moorland home was overturned. Gaskell's version of Charlotte's life isn't the only one to read if you want a complete view but it's the only biography written by someone who knew Charlotte & who had a profound sympathy for her life & her work, a fellow novelist who admired the work & was passionately committed to the rehabilitation of her memory.

Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert

For certain men the stronger their desire, the less likely they are to act. Lack of self-confidence holds them back, they are terrified of giving offence. Moreover, deep affections are like respectable women; they are afraid of being found out and go through life with their eyes cast down.

Frédéric Moreau is a romantic young ditherer. Sent by his mother to stay with a rich uncle, with a view to being mentioned in his will, he is returning home with no definite plans & no promise of an inheritance. On the journey home, Frédéric falls in love at first sight with Madame Arnoux, wife of an art dealer. All he can think about is getting to Paris to pursue her. He goes to Paris to study law, visiting Arnoux in his shop but unable to either declare himself to Madame or to stop visiting. His schoolfriend, Deslauriers, comes to Paris & they share rooms, mostly at Frédéric's expense. Through Deslauriers, Frédéric meets a group of radical writers & artists. His studies suffer & he still hasn't made an impression on Madame Arnoux.

Frédéric returns home discouraged & already half-forgetting Madame but then receives a letter informing him that his uncle has died intestate & he has inherited a substantial fortune. Immediately, all his plans for a sober provincial future are overturned. He's desperate to return to Paris. His mother thinks that a political or diplomatic career will now be open to him & urges him to make the acquaintance of the local landowner, Monsieur Dambreuse. Frédéric's return to Paris leads to a whirl of partying & he meets a courtesan, Rosanette, known as the Maréchale, who is Jacques Arnoux's mistress. Maréchale is attracted to Rosanette but still yearning for Madame Arnoux.

The company of these two women made a sort of twofold music in his life: one was playful, violent, entertaining; the other serious and almost religious. And the two melodies playing at the same time steadily swelled and became gradually intertwined. For if Madame Arnoux brushed him with her finger, the image of the other woman appeared before him as an object of desire, because he had more of a chance with her. And when in Rosanette's company his emotions happened to be stirred, he immediately remembered his one true love.

His friendship with the Arnouxs leads him into financial commitments & Deslauriers is also pressuring him to invest in a radical newspaper. Frédéric becomes almost a companion to the Maréchale, taking her to the races, paying for her portrait to be painted but he is not her lover, he's too timid to demand more than a few kisses. The Maréchale is offended by his apparent lack of interest but she's juggling several lovers so just accepts his companionship & his presents.

Frédéric is invited to the Dambreuse's home & he is impressed by the splendour of their lifestyle but he fails to take up any of Dambreuse's suggestions or invitations to invest with him & so again, he drifts along. When he does make money on an investment, he waits too long to sell his shares & loses again. His income diminishes & he continues to sell property while he loans money to Arnoux, who has sold his art dealership & is now running a porcelain factory. Frédéric's options are to find work, to spend less, or to make a rich marriage.

Frédéric's mother wants him to marry Louise Roque, the daughter of Monsieur Dambreuse's agent. Louise has been infatuated with Frédéric since she was a child & she is now a woman & an heiress. Again, he dissembles & can't commit himself to Louise while he's still in love with Madame Arnoux & lusting after the Maréchale, whom he finally makes his mistress. Marie Arnoux has discovered her husband's infidelities & she realises that she has fallen in love with Frédéric & then Madame Dambreuse, a haughty but attractive woman, begins to take an interest in him as well. Frédéric sees her as a challenge & the fact that she's wealthy is an added incentive.

He read her pages of poetry, putting all his soul into it, to move her and to win her admiration. She would stop him with a critical remark or a practical observation; and their conversation reverted constantly to the eternal question of Love. They wondered what occasioned it, whether women felt it more than men, what were the differences between them on that subject. Frédéric tried to express his opinion, avoiding both vulgarity and banality. It became a kind of battle, pleasant at times and tedious at others.

Frédéric's sentimental education begins conventionally enough - a young man falling in love with the first attractive older woman he meets - but it takes many twists & turns & although he's meant to be receiving an education in love & life, Frédéric seems to learn very little through the course of the novel. Will he be able to take the happiness that he's wanted for so long? Or will his constant indecision be his downfall? Maybe Frédéric's experiences are more realistic than those of many characters in fiction who seem to have a plan for their lives. All Frédéric's plans go awry which may be more true to life where plans often fall apart & leave a mess that has to be lived with.

Sentimental Education is a funny, cynical portrait of French society in the years leading up to the 1848 Revolution. Frédéric's inability to make a decision about anything & his misunderstandings with everyone he meets are amusing but also frustrating. His idealism leads him into one mess after another as his motives are misrepresented time & again. Madame Arnoux sees him as a kind young man; Arnoux as his friend who is helping to keep the knowledge of his affairs from his wife; the Maréchale sees him as a ready source of fun; Louise sees him as a chivalrous hero of romance; his mother sees him as a future Cabinet Minister. He lurches from one disaster to another either financial or romantic. He fights a ridiculous duel over an insult to Madame Arnoux but the Maréchale thinks he's saving her reputation while Arnoux thinks it's in his defence.

There are some great set scenes - the day at the races, the dinner party at the Dambreuses, the duel, the party where Frédéric first meets the Maréchale - that contrast with the poverty of students like Deslauriers & the journalists & artists in his circle. Then there's the radical element, men like the engineer Sénécal who is arrested for conspiring to assassinate King Louis-Phillippe. As the 1848 Revolution unfolds, Frédéric becomes even more of a bystander to events as he & the Maréchale escape Paris for a country idyll that can't last. His desire for approval from his friends paralyses him & whatever moral strength he may once have had just slips away as he juggles mistresses, potential wives & possible careers. In one farcical scene, he only just prevents Madame Arnoux & the Maréchale from meeting in his rooms & his selfishness is exposed in his relations with both Louise Roque & Madame Dambreuse as well as his remoteness from the political concerns of his friends. It's a fascinating novel & it's good to be able to read more Flaubert who is mostly remembered now for just one book, Madame Bovary.

Oxford University Press kindly sent me a review copy of Sentimental Education in a new translation by Helen Constantine.

Jean Erskine's Secret - D E Stevenson

Jean Erskine's Secret is one of the manuscripts by D E Stevenson that was literally "found in the attic" a few years ago & published by Greyladies. I've read & enjoyed The Fair Miss Fortune & Emily Dennistoun but Jean Erskine's Secret is the earliest of the manuscripts to be written. It's thought to have been written in about 1917 & is set in the Scottish village of Crale in the years just before & during WWI.

Jean Erskine is a daughter of the manse. Her father is advised to move from his city parish to the country &, soon after their arrival, Jean meets Diana McDonald. Diana is living at Crale Castle with her uncle Ian & cousin Elsa. Her parents aren't mentioned (Diana had previously lived with an aunt in Kensington) & Jean senses a mystery. However, the girls soon become great friends. Elsa is not a sympathetic person. She's engaged to a young man, Ray Morley Brown, who Jean knew as a child. Elsa is sarcastic, petty & generally unpleasant, spending as much time as she can in Edinburgh with Ray & her other friends & looking down upon country society. Her father sees none of this & assumes that his daughter & niece are good friends. Jean also meets Fanshaw Locke, who lives nearby & works in Edinburgh. Romantic complications develop as Jean is attracted to Fan but believes that he's in love with Diana.

The real subject of the book though is the friendship between Jean & Diana. The book is in the form of a story that Jean is writing about Diana, to explain the secret in Diana's life. I won't go into that part of the plot to avoid spoilers but the friendship between the two girls is touching & very believable. Both of them had been lonely & their friendship fills a gap in their lives that helps to make up for the disappointments & mysteries they have to overcome. Because so much of the plot is about secrets, I won't say any more about the plot.

There are many things to enjoy in this book although I do wonder whether D E Stevenson would have wanted it to be published. It's a very early work & there are plot holes & frankly unbelievably melodramatic incidents, particularly towards the end, that I felt were just ridiculous. One twist of the plot near the end reminded me more of Mary Shelley or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than the comfortably domestic fiction I associate with D E Stevenson. To me, this book shows all the signs of being a way for the author to try out different styles of writing & I do wonder what she might have toned down or changed if she'd ever revised the manuscript for publication. There are changes of personality in some of the characters that are inconsistent. For example, after being pretty despicable all through the book, Elsa suddenly has a complete change of personality when war breaks out & goes out to France as a (completely unqualified) nurse. There are too many coincidences involving friends and relations of Jean being involved with Diana & the Macdonalds to be altogether credible or necessary.

One of the aspects of Stevenson's writing that I do love is her sense of place, particularly in her Scottish novels. Even in this early work, this is evident & I especially love she writes about weather. Here, Jean & Ian are walking through a rainy Edinburgh,

Edinburgh was a black dripping place today; the castle towered up threateningly, clearly seen against the light patches of grey sky in its jagged ebony outlines. Arthur's Seat was swathed in a wet and smoky mist; here and there it was rolled back by a puff of chill wind, one caught a glimpse of black shoulder or jutting crag only half real in the gathering gloom. The trees in the gardens were sodden, the gardens themselves deserted and sloppy, the houses all dripping wet and as black as if the rain had been ink. Every street was a running river of muddy water, across which here and there a light twinkled out, making long pale yellow reflections like pointing fingers in the quickly falling gloom. On every face was written a patient yet sullen acceptance of the comfortless conditions, as their owners ploughed through the muddy water on their several businesses.

As always, she writes about the countryside beautifully,

The day fixed by Diana for her return was one of those rare days in winter when the whole world is like an old-fashioned Christmas card. Hoar frost outlined every branch of every tree and gleamed like powdered silver over the crackling ground. A pale pink mist shrouded the valley and softened the hard glare of the sun on the white-coated land.

All in all, I'm pleased to have had a chance to read this early work of one of my favourite authors &  bringing more Stevenson novels back into print has to be a good thing.

Greyladies is also starting a new venture, a magazine, The Scribbler, that will be published three times a year. My copy of the first edition arrived on Tuesday & I couldn't wait to sit down with a cup of tea & read it from cover to cover. It's subtitled A Retrospective Literary Review & the first edition has articles on the Desert Island Discs episode from 1976 featuring Noel Streatfeild (you can listen to it here, or wherever you find your podcasts), reviews of novels set in girl's schools that concentrate more on the teachers than the pupils; the book that changed editor Shirley Neilson's life (it was called Shirley, Young Bookseller by Valerie Baxter!), an author spotlight on Lorna Hill, a literary trail of the Scottish Borders & a short story by D E Stevenson.

Copies of Jean Erskine's Secret & many other books by D E Stevenson are available in the US from Anglophile Books.

Testament of Friendship - Vera Brittain

A few weeks ago I read John Forster's biography of Charles Dickens & one of the things I loved most about it was that Forster & Dickens were friends & he brought all his personal knowledge of Dickens to the biography. Vera Brittain's biography of Winifred Holtby is also the story of their friendship. I first read this book over 20 years ago &, as it's 80 years since the death of Holtby this month, I wanted to read it again.

Winifred was born in 1898, the daughter of a farming family in Yorkshire. Her schooldays were unremarkable, the most memorable event was being caught up in the Zeppelin raid over Scarborough during the War. Her family life was happy. Her father, David, ran the farm & her mother, Alice, eventually became the first female County Councilor in the East Riding, an achievement Winifred was very proud of. She based Mrs Beddows in her novel South Riding on her mother. In the last year of the War, Winifred joined the WAACs & helped to run a hostel in France for a Signals unit. It was at Huchenneville that she met her lifelong friend Jean McWilliam. Jean later emigrated to South Africa & their correspondence was published as Letters to a Friend.

Vera & Winifred met at Oxford after WWI. On the surface, they were unlikely friends. Vera had nursed throughout the War, had lost her fiancé, her brother & two close friends. She returned to Oxford bruised & exhausted by her experiences. Winifred's war had been quite different. Too young to join up until almost the end, she had lost no one close to her. Physically they were quite different. Winifred was tall, blonde, gregarious & outgoing. Vera was small, dark, pretty & intense. They first met during History tutorials & clashed over a debate where Vera felt ambushed by Winifred & the other students who hadn't suffered as she had done. Eventually though, they became friends &, when they graduated, decided to live together in London to pursue their dream of becoming writers.

Winifred's first novel, Anderby Wold, was accepted for publication & she was also in demand as a teacher. She was careful never to accept a full-time teaching post because she knew that writing & journalism was what she wanted to do. Vera & Winifred also became involved in the League of Nations Union (the precursor of the United Nations) & did a lot of lecturing for the cause of peace in Europe. Winifred's life was so full of commitments that it's exhausting to read. She became involved in encouraging Trade Unionism in South Africa after she spent five months touring & lecturing there; she wrote for the feminist journal, Time and Tide, & became a member of the Board; she continued tutoring & lecturing for the causes of peace & feminism that she felt so strongly about & she kept writing fiction. She was always disappointed in the results because she felt she was never able to satisfactorily carry out her original inspiration.

Winifred also spent a considerable amount of time supporting friends & family. She was an integral part of the household when Vera married Gordon Catlin in 1925 & helped to look after the children & encourage Vera in her work, especially when she was writing Testament of Youth. Family responsibilities also took her back to Yorkshire & she supported many friends both emotionally & financially when she could. She was always in demand as a lecturer & reviewer & her own needs often took second place. When she was at Oxford, so many friends came to her rooms to talk about their problems or just as a meeting place that she often had to go to the library to study, leaving them in possession. This exemplifies Winifred's unselfishness but also highlights one of the downsides of her nature. She was so busy supporting other people that her own needs often went unrecognised. She had never been strong & when her health began to fail, she was eventually diagnosed with kidney disease. She died in September 1935 at the age of just 37.

Testament of Friendship is such an interesting book on many levels. On one level, it's the story of a woman who was loved by everyone, almost a saint in her unselfish devotion to other people. It's the story of a life cut short by illness & of potential unrealized. On another level, this is as much a book about Vera as it is about Winifred. Even the title of the book links it to her own Testament of Youth. Vera's motives for writing the book have been much analysed. She states in the Prologue that she wanted to write a book about female friendship, a relationship that has not been celebrated as male friendship has been through the centuries. She wanted to celebrate a friendship that had saved her sanity after the losses of the War & maybe wanted to atone for her own feelings of guilt over taking advantage of Winifred's good nature. There's definitely an element of guilt here but there's also a feeling of proprietorship over Winifred's life that upset Alice Holtby & Winifred's other friends. Vera was Winifred's literary executor & saw South Riding through the Press after her death, even though Mrs Holtby didn't want it published.

Vera even gave Winifred a love story, a romance that, in reality, was so tenuous as to hardly exist. Was this because she wanted to show that Winifred had been a "normal" woman (far from the rumours of lesbianism & ménage a trois that circulated about Winifred, Vera & Gordon) or was it from a feeling of guilt that the demands of Vera, her family & friends prevented Winifred ever having time for a life of her own? After reading Testament of Friendship, I went back to Vera's diaries of the 1930s (published as Chronicle of Friendship) & read the entries for Winifred's last days. I was astonished all over again at how Vera stage-managed a death-bed proposal of marriage from the man she calls Bill in the biography at a time when Winifred was so ill that she could hardly see or recognize anyone. In the biography, this is presented as the touching end to a lifelong romance.

I loved the way the book opens, with a conscious imitation of the way Elizabeth Gaskell begins her Life of Charlotte Brontë. The pilgrimage to a Yorkshire village, recreating the steps of the literary pilgrim through the village to the churchyard where Winifred's grave lies. It's a beautiful piece of writing, the descriptions of nature & the countryside are just gorgeous & she ends with a description of the grave & the explicit comparison of Winifred with Charlotte Brontë. When I reread Testament of Youth earlier this year I noticed how often Vera prefigures the end of her story all the way through. She does this again here. I also loved all the details of Winifred's journalistic career & her work with Lady Rhondda, owner of Time and Tide. The quotations from Winifred's letters bring her to life with all her good humour & self-deprecation.

One of the lingering questions in a biography of a woman who died so young is, what might she have done differently if she'd known that she would die at 37? Would she have concentrated on her fiction? Would she have been more ruthless about the encroachments of others? Somehow I don't think she would. She was ill for several years before her death &, apart from her determination to finish South Riding, she kept on as she always had - supporting her friends, even going on holiday with Vera & her children when she was obviously not well so that Vera would be able to keep believing that she would recover. Testament of Friendship isn't the whole story of Winifred Holtby (Marion Shaw's The Clear Stream is an excellent modern biography) just as Forster's Life of Dickens isn't the whole story of Charles Dickens. Both books, however, are invaluable for the personal insights they give into the lives of their subjects.

Copies of many of the books mentioned in this post can be found at Anglophile Books.

The Life of Charles Dickens - John Forster

It might seem odd in the 21st century to read a biography of Charles Dickens that was written in the 1870s, the middle of the Victorian period, a time notorious for hushing up scandals & publishing hagiographies of the great & good. If you really want to know about Dickens, surely it's better to read Slater, Ackroyd, Tomalin or Johnson? After all, you won't find out about Dickens's cruel behaviour to his wife or about his affair with Ellen Ternan in a book written just after his death by his best friend. It's true. Forster barely mentions Catherine Dickens (in Dickens's letters she goes from being called Kate to Catherine to poor Catherine to silence) & I only caught one mention of Ellen (I assume the E mentioned is Ellen) at the very end of the book. Dickens is recounting a dream in a letter to Forster,

On Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she said "I am Miss Napier."  All the time I was dressing next morning, I thought - What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing! and why Miss Napier? for I never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading came into my retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and the Lady in the red shawl whom they present as Miss Napier! These are all the circumstances, exactly told. May 30, 1863 quoted in Volume 3, Chapter 19)

But, I loved this big, baggy monster of a book. I'm not sure exactly how baggy it is. I listened to Volume 1 on audio (beautifully read by Greg Wagland from Magpie Audio) & read Volumes 2 & 3 as ebooks as part of the Delphi Classics Dickens, but it must be over 1,000 pages. I bought the illustrated, abridged edition for my library a few years ago & that's 500pp. Forster has always struck me as a bit of a plodder - Watson to Dickens's Holmes - & it's true that his writing is quite pedestrian. He was one of those Victorian literary men who are forgotten today except in their relationships with other famous Victorians. I've always been fascinated to know that John Forster was engaged to the poet, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon). As a woman making a living from her writing, Landon was a controversial figure, who was rumoured to have had affairs & borne children out of wedlock. Forster asked her to refute the rumours & she asked him to investigate for himself. Apparently he was satisfied but she broke off the engagement because she said she couldn't marry a man who distrusted her. Forster strikes me as so cautious & careful that I can't imagine him engaged to Landon in the first place. I believe that Lucasta Miller (author of The Brontë Myth) is writing a biography of Landon & I can't wait to read it. Forster is mainly remembered these days as the friend & first biographer of Dickens.

Forster tells the story of Dickens's life - his childhood, family, early attempts at writing, the overnight success of The Pickwick Papers, the growing readership with each new novel, the periodicals he "conducted", his travels to America & Europe & the famous series of readings of his own work that made Dickens even more famous by the end of his life. The writing is genial & painstaking. However, as soon as Dickens makes a personal appearance in his letters or in an anecdote Forster remembers from their long friendship, the narrative fizzes. This is the real attraction of the book for me & makes me keen to read more of Dickens's letters. The letters show what a genius Dickens was. Everything he wrote became a story & some of his letters are as well-shaped as a chapter from the novels. The story of the death of the raven, Grip, is so moving yet so very funny. Magpie Audio chose this section of the book as the audio sample on Audible &, after hearing that, I just had to listen to the whole book.

The advantages that Forster brings to the familiar story lie in his intimate acquaintance with Dickens. Forster was not only a friend but a literary adviser, reading the novels in proof as they were written & advising on titles, illustrations & dealings with printers & publishers. He was one of the few people who knew about Dickens's experiences as a child - his father's imprisonment for debt & his own period of humiliation working in the blacking factory. It was in this biography that Dickens's reminiscences of his childhood were revealed for the first time. I found those early chapters very moving, even though I've read the story many times before. Imagine how the first readers would have felt, seeing the inspiration for many of the characters & plots of the novels based so closely on the author's own experiences.

Although Forster is discreet to the point of impenetrability at certain moments of Dickens's life, his personal knowledge of the man allows him to give some insight into his character which is impossible for any later biographer because it comes from personal observation. This is how he describes Dickens at the time of the breakdown of his marriage in 1858,

An unsettled feeling, greatly in excess of what was usual with Dickens, more or less observable since his first residence at Boulogne, became at this time almost habitual, and the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find in his home. He had not the alternative that under this disappointment some can discover in what is called society. It did not suit him and he set no store by it. ... It was among those defects of temperament for which his early trials and his early successes were accountable in perhaps equal measure. He was sensitive in a passionate degree to praise and blame, which yet he made it for the most part a point of pride to assume indifference to; ... His early sufferings brought with them the healing powers of energy, will, and persistence, and taught him the inexpressible value of a determined resolve to live down difficulties... (Volume 3, Chapter 7)

The subject of the public readings Dickens gave is one where the two men disagreed quite decisively. Forster was against the readings. He felt that they would not enhance his reputation & the implication is that they were a little beneath him. They were too close to theatre & actors were regarded as socially & morally suspect (Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, gives an excellent account of the world of the Victorian theatre & the less than respectable reputation of actors in relation to the Ternan family). Forster also feared that Dickens's health would not be up to the strain - & he was right about that. Dickens was determined to go ahead. He was a showman & loved the theatre, putting on plays with his family & for benefit performances for fellow writers. He loved to be in charge & he conducted his theatrical adventures as he did every other part of his life, with 110% effort & commitment. He was also tempted by the considerable sums of money that managers & entrepreneurs were willing to pay him.

I found myself wondering what the first readers & critics made of this. Trollope was derided for seeing his writing as a job, writing so many words every day & being pleased with the money he made, which he described in his Autobiography. Dickens may have loved being on stage but he loved the money he made just as much. Letter after letter to Forster lists the takings from each night's readings, the effect his reading had on the audience (women fainting & having to be taken from the theatre) & the queues of people desperate to get tickets.

The last years of Dickens's life were plagued by ill health. He was involved in the Staplehurst railway crash & this shook his nerves as well as resulting in physical problems. His left side was affected, especially his foot, which swelled so much at times that he couldn't walk. For a man who could walk all night without any ill effect (& often did), this meant that he was deprived of an outlet for his energy that he needed. His night walking also helped him to think through his work & gave him that intimate knowledge of London & the countryside around his home at Gad's Hill that he used so well in the novels. Forster tried to convince him to give up the readings & slow down but this was Dickens's reply,

"Too late to say, put the curb on, and don't rush at hills - the wrong man to say it to. I have now no relief but in action. I am incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.I must accept the drawback - since it is one - with the powers I have; and I must hold upon the tenure prescribed to me."

Forster describes the grief of people from all over the world when Dickens died & quotes the letters that he received. He describes his purpose in writing the Life to be to show the man himself, the way his books were conceived & written, using the letters written to him & the recollections of others. He says that he used barely half the letters in his possession & I think I read somewhere that he destroyed all the letters when the book was finished. If only he hadn't burned the letters! One of the many If onlys in literary history (If only we had Emily Brontë's second novel, if only we had Charlotte Brontë's letters to Mary Taylor, if only Dickens himself hadn't had so many bonfires of his correspondence, if only Princess Beatrice hadn't censored Queen Victoria's letters...). Still, there's no use crying over burnt letters & at least we have the hundreds of quotations in this book.

I wouldn't recommend Forster's Life as the first book to read about Dickens but it's definitely worth reading if you've read the modern biographies & want a more intimate view of the man. For all the discretion & the obfuscation, Forster's Life is fascinating in the way that Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë is fascinating. The authors knew their subjects & the sense of intimacy & personal knowledge makes up for the evidence suppressed & the curtains drawn over the less attractive aspects of their subject's character.

Moby-Dick or The Whale - Herman Melville

How can I possibly write about Moby-Dick? It's such a famous story but also one of those classics that I've always been daunted by. I've had a copy on my tbr shelves for several years now. Then, I bought another copy, this beautiful Penguin Deluxe Classics edition. I'd heard how difficult the book was, how elusive the language, how monumental the digressions. Finally, I borrowed the audio book from our e-library. Listening to William Hootkins' wonderful reading of Moby-Dick made me fall in love with the story & for the last six weeks, I've been listening to one of the most exciting, engaging & funny books I've ever read.

The story is well-known. Ishmael, a young man tired of working on merchant vessels, decides to give whaling a try. Arriving on Nantucket Island, he meets harpooneer Queequeg, a tattooed Pacific Islander, the son of a High Chief, with cannibal tendencies who worships an idol called Yojo. They are taken on by the owners of the Pequod, & are not deterred even when they are warned about the odd behaviour of the captain of the vessel, Ahab. They don't see much of Ahab during the fitting out of the Pequod but they meet the other mates, Starbuck, Stubb & Flask, & the rest of the crew, men from all over the world. It's not until they're at sea that the captain emerges from his cabin.

Captain Ahab has his own reasons for undertaking the voyage to the whale hunting grounds & it has nothing to do with procuring precious whale oil for the boat's owners. Ahab has lost his leg to the great white whale, Moby-Dick, & has sworn revenge. His obsession with Moby-Dick has become madness & he incites the crew's greed by nailing a gold doubloon to the mast with the promise that the man who kills Moby-Dick will have the coin as his prize. The Pequod sails from Nantucket to South America, round the Cape of Good Hope to South-East Asia & Japan. Whales are chased, caught & slaughtered but Ahab's only question to the other boats they encounter is "Hast thou seen the white whale?" Nothing else matters but his revenge & they sail towards the encounter with Moby-Dick that is the climax of Ishmael's story.

No mere retelling of the plot can give an idea of the flavour of this book. The language is heightened, convoluted, Biblical in cadence. Here's Captain Ahab telling the crew about Moby-Dick,

"Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby-Dick that dismasted me; Moby-Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."

Ishmael's narration is intimate & confiding. The long passages about the history of the whale & the whaling trade, the detailed descriptions of hunting, harpooning & catching whales are exciting if also a bit mind-numbing at times. When Ishmael describes the sperm whale's head, he takes several chapters to do it as well as describing every variety of whale & disputing the stories told of whales by every historical writer from the Bible & Aristotle to Beale & Bennett. But then, there are the tales of other ships that Ishmael tells along the way & the many funny incidents such as Ishmael's first meeting with Queequeg when he is terrified of sharing a room with a cannibal but ends up sitting up in bed with him confiding their life stories to each other as the best of friends. Or Stubb's determination to have a steak from the first whale they catch & making old Fleece the cook preach to the sharks scavenging on the gigantic corpse of the whale as it floats by the side of the ship because his steak was badly cooked & tough.

There are also some reflective moments of great beauty as when the Pequod comes across a pod of whales protecting the females & their calves,

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at then time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;- even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.

William Hootkins' narration won an Audie award in 2006 & it's a wonderful performance. He contrasts Ishmael's lightheartedness at the beginning of the story with the more serious passages describing whales & explaining every aspect of the whale hunt. Ahab's mad mutterings build to a crescendo as he becomes more obsessed with his hunt for the white whale & his monomania puts everyone's lives at risk. I usually listen to audio books in the car on the way to & from work but I was listening to this one when I was ironing, cooking & any other time I could find. It was the perfect way to get in to this mythic story & I'm so glad that I finally read it.

A Fig at the Gate - Kate Llewellyn

Kate Llewellyn is a poet and diarist who is best-known for her poetry & her memoirs of creating gardens in various parts of Australia. The Waterlily is probably her most famous book, about living in the Blue Mountains. I realised when A Fig at the Gate was published that I still had her previous book, Playing with Water, on the tbr shelves. I've pulled it off now though & look forward to reading it soon.

Llewellyn is now in her seventies & has moved back to Adelaide, South Australia, where she grew up. Her siblings are near by as well as friends she's known from her nursing days. She knows this climate well, & prepares to create a new garden in her house by the sea. The book is a diary, written from 2009-2012, moving through the seasons. Adelaide has experienced even hotter, dryer weather than Melbourne over the last few years so I could relate to her struggles with the climate & the failure of plants to thrive in the hot summers. I love this description of the beginning of autumn,

The first cold day and welcome, too, a feeling of zest and a sting in the air with rain in the night. The tank is half full. I knock, knock with my knuckles on the corrugated iron rings of the tank to hear where the water level makes a dull sound. ... A flock of starlings flies up from the newly mown lawn. A willie wagtail hops around in its cheerful way and a Murray magpie flutters down and then up. when pruning the apricot tree a while ago, I found a small bird's nest high up in the tree. I left the branch in case the bird uses the nest again. A sparrow flew into a dense olive tree in the front garden and, thinking it may be nesting there, I have been out to search but, apart from a small crop of green olives, the tree is empty. A flash of green and a lorikeet flew out. Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Apart from the planning & enthusiastic planting of the garden, Llewellyn visits friends & family, tries to make friends with neighbours, starts a garden on the roadside opposite her house, lies on her bed watching the trees through her window. She is very frugal & always on the lookout for some free seedlings or a way to reuse an object that would otherwise be thrown out. She rescues some old pink bricks from a demolished house (carrying them in a green wheelie bin) to create borders around the garden beds &, walking past a house with a load of soil on offer for free, soon has a friend there to help carry away as much as possible in buckets & wheelbarrows.

The garden causes just as much pain & frustration as pleasure. Seeds are sown & fail to come up. A crop of tomatoes at the side of the house, where nothing has probably ever been planted, give so much fruit that it can't all be eaten. Nothing ever grows there so well again so was it just that it was virgin soil? I loved the story of the blood orange tree. Nurtured, fed, mulched, watered, the tree gave no fruit at all. Listening to a gardening show on the radio, Llewellyn hears that blood oranges should be left alone & if neglected, will thrive. Which hers does as soon as she pulls away the mulch & ignores it.

The other major saga is that of the chickens & later, ducks. Llewellyn grew up with chooks & her brother rears them for a living so she is keen to have her own small flock. She begins with six white pullets & all is well until she introduces six red chickens. She calls the result the War of the Roses. She learns from her mistakes about feeding them & caring for them when ill. She even sets up an intensive care unit in her shower for the hens when they're sick, bathing them & anointing their bare red skin with calamine lotion. The story of the chickens becomes as suspenseful as a soap opera. I find I'm racing on to the next entry to see what has happened to the latest patient. Rearing ducks is more successful as the pair she buys soon have nine ducklings, most of which have to be sold as pets as there's not enough room for them.

There are many beautiful quiet moments in this book where Kate Llewellyn meditates on the pleasures & pains of getting older. The aches & pains of her body & a bout of depression are the downside but the advantages, from being able to lie in bed late watching the trees to being eligible for Council help with maintenance around the house, are also celebrated. I enjoyed reading about Kate Llewellyn's garden, her chooks, her clever contrivances, her successes & failures, everything that goes to make up this one woman's life.

Summer's Day - Mary Bell

Summer's Day is a school story with a difference. It's written for an adult audience rather than school age children & follows the teachers, staff & students of St Helens boarding school through one summer term.

At the beginning of term, the staff & students prepare to return to school. Housemaid Alice tidies the Headmistress, Unity Bishop's, office; Miss Meadows, retired Classics mistress prepares to return to work to help out Miss Bishop who has lost another Classics teacher. Assistant Matron Honor Christow reluctantly prepares to leave her father's rectory to return to a job she loathes. Students & best friends Jasmine & Sophie prepare for one last fling at a grown up cocktail party before returning to the Upper Fifth. Young Margery clings to her Nannie & prepares for misery, comforted only by her stuffed toy, Augustus.

Other staff begin the term with mixed feelings. The Cook, Mrs Prior, longs to see her sailor son, Jim, & lives for the times he has leave. She's a comforting presence in the kitchen & keeps an eye on the younger housemaids, Doris, Nora, Maude (known as Noranmaude) & pretty Shirley Briggs, who comes from a large, loving family that she visits on her days off. Mr Walker, the Art teacher, is an unhappy man. Forced to live with his miserable mother, he longs to be able to make a living with his painting but has to teach at St Helens instead. He's a bad teacher, with no real sympathy for his students & a hopeless passion for beautiful, aloof Jasmine. Albert Munnings, the gardener, lives with his wife & baby in a cottage in the grounds. Albert has been drifting since the War & exploits his Apollo-like beauty to flirt with Honor, Shirley & Poppy, the barmaid at the local pub.

The narrative intertwines all these characters as we follow them through the term. Jasmine & Sophie spend as much time as possible subverting the rules & are more often to be found in Mrs Prior's kitchen eating cake & listening to stories about Jim's adventures or in their attic hideaway, than studying. They do each others homework & answer for each other at roll call. They hate sports & do everything possible to avoid it. Both girls are attractive but Jasmine is a beautiful girl, fully aware of the effect she has on Mr Walker, Albert & Sophie's cousin, Tom, home on leave from his Civil Service job in Africa. There's a core of steel in Jasmine & she is the despair of the Headmistress who can never accuse her of insolence, just complete indifference to school & all that it involves. Sophie is a gentler girl, spending hours playing with Albert's little boy, Geoffrey, although she fears she'll never marry "for already she despaired of finding Mr Knightley's equal."

In some ways, this isn't really a school story at all. We see very little of the classroom & the characters only really live when they're outside it. There are romances & tragedy & a lot of humour but also much quiet despair when romance goes wrong or the future seems bleak & drab. The least sympathetic characters are those who subscribe to the hearty school ethos that seems more appropriate to a different era. Summer's Day was published in 1951 & describes life in post-war England. The class structure is still very evident, with the girls addressed as Miss Jasmine & Miss Sophie by the servants, but the efforts of some of the staff to instil the school spirit in the girls are met with complete apathy. One of my favourite characters is Games Mistress Celia Warrinder, who is Honor's only friend & in her hearty, uncomprehending way tries to cheer Honor up after a romance goes wrong. Celia longs for the days of her youth when sport was taken seriously,

"Believe it or not, but one of the Sixth supposed to be watching the match was half-way round the pavilion and reading a book. And guess what it was?"
From her expression Honor was about to hazard No Orchids for Miss Blandish but Celia said, "Poetry!" and taking a draught of tea she added profoundly, "Shelley" as if that made it worse.

The structure of the book reminded me of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet novels, where we move from character to character, almost hovering above them listening to their thoughts before moving on. Small details tell so much about the people in this novel. The teacher who has a passion for detective fiction & keeps Jasmine waiting outside for her reprimand while she hides her latest mystery under the cushions; Miss Meadows returning to her dusty cottage for half-term & deciding to read in the sun rather than clean; Jasmine's lovely, cosy Aunt May (who has brought her up after her parents died) conspiring with Jasmine to avoid her boring clergyman husband; Mr Walker becoming known as Fishy after he unfortunately brings a lobster into class as part of a still life composition, "Before the lesson was half over he wished it at the bottom of the sea." The omniscient narrator does such a beautiful job of setting the scene, showing that the characters are all true to their natures, even in sleep.

When  the school was quiet the moon rose late and flooded the seaward rooms. It swept into the dormitory and turned Jasmine's yellow hair to silver, exposing with fine impartiality her sleeping features and Charity's button nose. It dropped on Matron's countenance, who pulled the sheet over her head. Honor dreamed that Albert was coming towards her over gold and silver flowers. Miss Bishop stepped firmly from her couch and drew down the blind. In Miss Meadows' room the moving flood lit up an open Theocritus upon a pair of cotton interlock combinations; in Alice's it received a welcoming grin from a tumbler containing her teeth. It fell upon the reverberating mound that was Doris and caught a gleam from Shirley's open eyes.

There's a large cast of characters & it took me a while to work out who everyone was. I even started a list of who was who. Once I had a chance to read more than a few chapters at a time, I became caught up in the spell of the story & I loved it. I haven't even begun to mention all the characters & the subtle interweaving of their stories. It's a book that you have to set aside time to concentrate on but I think it's well worth it. I'm so glad that Scott from Furrowed Middlebrow raved about Summer's Day so much & made me feel that my life would not be complete until I'd read it!

There are copies of Summer's Day available from Anglophile Books.

Letters to a Friend - Winifred Holtby

Winifred Holtby is mostly known these days for her final novel, South Riding, which was adapted for television a few years ago. Building on the success of the series, Virago have also reprinted several of her novels, including Anderby Wold. Another novel, The Crowded Street, is in print from Persephone. Thirty years ago, Holtby was probably best known as the friend of Vera Brittain. She featured in Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth (also adapted for television) & Vera wrote a biography of Winifred, Testament of Friendship, after her early death in 1935 at the age of only 37. Letters to a Friend was first published in 1937 & comprises the letters Winifred wrote to her friend, Jean McWilliam, headmistress of a school in Pretoria.

Winifred Holtby joined the WAAC, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1918. She was posted to Huchenneville in France as hostel forewoman of a Signals unit. There she met Jean McWilliam, who was the Administrator of the unit & the two became friends. They referred to each other as Rosalind (Jean) & Celia (Winifred) after the cousins in Shakespeare's As You Like It & the correspondence begins in 1920 when Winifred is at Somerville College, Oxford & Jean is teaching in South Africa.

After leaving Oxford, Winifred & Vera Brittain decide to live in London & make a living as writers & teachers. They are also both members of the League of Nations Union (the precursor to the United Nations) & do a lot of unpaid lecturing for the cause. Gradually, Winifred becomes sought after as a teacher & as a journalist. Teaching is a way to pay the bills & she never commits herself to a full time post. Writing is her first love, even when she's discouraged by the difficulties of writing fiction compared to the realities. Her first novel, Anderby Wold, is published but she suffers from the feeling that the book isn't nearly as good as her imaginings while she was writing it. This is a theme of her work as a novelist. Her journalism is published in leading newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian & periodicals such as the feminist weekly, Time and Tide.

Winifred's letters are full of her busy professional life but the overwhelming theme to me was her generosity. She never seems to say no to sitting on a committee, tutoring young women wanting to go to Oxford, doing endless unpaid work for the League of Nations Union & helping anyone in need, from a young returned soldier needing money for his apprenticeship, to a young woman who came to visit her asking for advice because she identified so strongly with Muriel, the protagonist of The Crowded Street . Her family were in Yorkshire & several times she goes home to help in a crisis. Her formidable mother, Alice, was elected as the first woman alderman in Yorkshire & was the model for Mrs Beddows in South Riding.

Above all, the letters are funny. I have post-it notes sticking out all over my copy with passages I want to quote but I don't want this review to be almost as long as the book so I'll just mention a few. This scene is straight out of Barbara Pym's novel, Excellent Women. Doesn't it remind you of the scene when Mildred goes to hear Everard & Helena lecture to the Learned Society?

The Royal Asiatic Society has At Homes in a big library, where you stand round a table in company with scholars and missionaries, and nice, brainless-looking peers who have been to India, and their wives and daughters and sisters. And nobody knows anybody else very well, and everybody seems to cherish a secret suspicion that somebody else is going to eat all the tea first, which would make them inclined to be rude and snatch seed cake from their neighbours, if they weren't at the same time aware that their neighbour might be a celebrity. As an audience, it is sticky. As a tea-fight, it is greedy, unsociable, and a little more undecorative than usual.
January 21st, 1923

Planning a trip to South Africa to visit Jean, Winifred's constant contriving about clothes (one of the delights of the letters) threatens to derail the whole trip.

But I had a horrid shock the other day, reading in the Lady or something an article about South African fashions. ... ' We dress for eleven o'clock tea as for a garden party, and wear full evening dress for dinner every night.' For the Lord's sake, Rosalind, tell me it isn't true. I have exactly one evening dress.It has been dyed and twice renovated. It's already in pieces and I'm spending my autumn dress money on going to the Assembly (of the League of Nations Union) in Geneva again. I thought it might be more useful. This is horrible. Do write and reassure me or I shall paint myself with woad and wear nothing but your feather stole.
August 5th, 1925

Here she's working on her novel, The Land of Green Ginger.

It is queer how one goes on making the better acquaintance with one's characters, just as though they were people. I could no more make mine do what I want them to do, once I have created them, than I could make you do something. They seem to have a complete individual life, and I could follow every word and action and thought of theirs during a whole day if that were artistically possible. The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
October 6th, 1926

The letters were mostly written from 1920-1926. They continue sporadically for the last years of Winifred's life but the friendship seemed to peter out as Winifred grew busier & the sympathy between them lessened. In Marion Shaw's biography of Winifred, The Clear Stream, it's suggested that this volume, edited by Jean & Alice Holtby, was an attempt to regain some control of Winifred's memory from Vera Brittain. Vera had seen South Riding through the press after Winifred's death, against Mrs Holtby's wishes as she was unhappy with her portrayal as Mrs Beddows &, of course, Vera was writing her own account of Winifred's life. No matter how it came about, Letters to a Friend is an absorbing account of a young woman working in London in the 1920s. I loved all the domestic details of Winifred's life as well as the journeys she took & the funny stories she tells of her adventures in the schoolroom & on the lecture platform. I'm so pleased that it has been reprinted.

Mike Walmer kindly sent me Letters to a Friend for review. It's the first in his Belles-Lettres series & I'm looking forward to seeing what other gems he includes in the list.

Mrs Tim Flies Home - D E Stevenson

Mrs Tim Flies Home (cover picture from here) is the final Mrs Tim book. It's the early 1950s & Hester Christie has been living in Kenya with her husband,Tim, a Colonel in the Army. They decide that she should go home to England to spend time with their children, Betty & Bryan, & make a home for them over the summer holidays.Hester has arranged to rent the Small House, near the village of Old Quinings where Hester & Tim's former servants, Annie & Fred Boilings, now own the inn. Family friend, Tony Morley also lives nearby & between them, they have arranged everything.

Hester flies back via Rome where she spends a few days to break the journey. On the flight she meets Rosa Alston, an irritating woman (well, I found her irritating but Hester doesn't seem to at first) who takes Hester under her wing as she hasn't done much flying. It seems strange to us now, when air travel is so much more common, but in the 50s it was much more expensive & rare. In one of those typical Stevenson coincidences, Mrs Alston grew up near Old Quinings & remembers going to parties with Tony Morley, who she didn't like at all. Luckily, Mrs Alston has plans when they reach Rome & Hester has booked herself in to a pensione run by Signora Scarlatti, so they part &, although they make plans to meet the next day, Hester  expects to have little to do with her new friend in future.

Tony Morley turns up at the pensione as a surprise & whisks Hester off for a couple of days sightseeing. The Signora is convinced that they're carrying on an affair & nothing Hester can say in her imperfect French (the only language they share) can convince her otherwise. Unfortunately Hester forgets her appointment with Mrs Alston & that lady, speaking perfect Italian, soon hears all about Hester & Tony from the Signora.

Hester arrives in England & finds herself travelling down in the train with her new neighbour, Miss Crease, a disagreeable, quarrelsome woman who knows all about Hester already & is eager to know more. Hester is relieved to get to the inn & be pampered by Annie Boilings. She is soon settled in to the Small House. It was owned by Mrs Stroude & now that she's dead, her stepdaughter has rented the house while she goes on a cruise. Lorna Stroude was much loved & respected but her stepdaughter seems to be her opposite in every way. Olivia Stroude was unkind to her stepmother & is disliked by everyone Hester meets in the village. She seems to have no redeeming features, something which Hester discovers when, after a peaceful few weeks of solitude, she suddenly descends on the Small House & tries to bully Hester into leaving early.

Olivia claims to be searching for a valuable letter, written by Byron to her stepmother's grandfather, & intimidates Hester into letting her search the attic for it. Why Hester doesn't just wave the lease, a legal document, in the woman's face & tell her to go away, I don't know, but it isn't until her cleaner, Mrs Daulkes, advises ringing up Tony Morley because, of course, only a man could sort that woman out, that peace is restored. Tony says all the things Hester should have said & sends Olivia Stroude off with a flea in her ear.

Rosa Alston has also turned up again, asking Hester for help in finding somewhere suitable for her to stay with her son, Edmond, who is studying & needs peace & quiet. Hester arranges with Annie for them to stay at the inn & although everything Hester has heard about Edmond leads her to imagine him to be a priggish, spoilt horror, he turns out to be a delightful young man who talks to Hester about Trollope & couldn't be more unlike his mother.

Hester's children arrive for their holidays & the house comes alive. Bryan, Betty & Bryan's schoolfriend Perry soon make friends with Edmond & Susan Morven, an attractive young woman who lives in the local big house. Hester indulges in some matchmaking while the young people go on picnics, play tennis & race around on Perry's motorbike. Tony Morley gives a ball & he & Hester make a discovery in the Small House that will change the life of another of Hester's new friends. Meanwhile, Hester worries about Tim's short, distant letters from Kenya & wonders if he has somehow heard about the rumours spread by some of the old cats in the village about her & Tony in Rome.

This is a lovely, comforting book just like all the other Mrs Tim books. As always, I loved the descriptions of the countryside & the Small House, although not old, is a charming, comfortable house where Hester is perfectly happy until the doubts & worries about her family & friends begin to overwhelm her. One of my favourite scenes was when Bryan dismisses Scott & Trollope as "such small print and much too long". I did have a sneaking sympathy for him though when he had to read Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, "... it was the most awful tripe - all about a man who thought his wife was carrying on with another man, and of course she wasn't at all. The whole misunderstanding could have been cleared up in a few words, but He Knew He Was Right so it went drivelling on until he'd wrecked everything. A ghastly book." Bryan also thinks Scott's Redgauntlet would be improved if a modern thriller writer got hold of it & made it go quicker "and put some pep into it."

I hope someone reprints the Mrs Tim books one of these days. I think they would be perfect for anyone who has enjoyed the Miss Buncle series which has been reprinted twice in the last few years- by Persephone in the UK & Sourcebooks in the US. Why couldn't one of them have chosen the Mrs Tim books instead? Fingers crossed someone else does it one of these days.

On Your Marks - Gladys Mitchell

On Your Marks is a girls career novel set in a physical training college like the one in Miss Pym Disposes. Being Gladys Mitchell, the author can't resist a few mysteries - who drained the swimming pool? Who sawed through the hockey goal posts? - but it's really just a Jolly Good Read as Kay Whalley says in her Introduction to the Greyladies edition.

Lesley Scott is about to begin three years training at Falcons Physical Training College where she hopes to qualify as a PE teacher. Lesley is tall, attractive, kind, good at games, academic work & a born organiser. She is obviously going to succeed but not be so disgustingly perfect that the reader can't empathize with her. On her first day she meets Frankie Allinson, short, tubby, a demon tennis player who was destined for Wimbledon but her family couldn't afford it & someone who finds trouble wherever it may be. The two girls soon become best friends & the three years of their training combine several crises (usually involving Frankie) with lots of hard work & so much sport that I was exhausted just reading about it. The story also follows Lesley & Frankie to their first post in a school.

Gladys Mitchell taught games in various schools throughout her career & knows the school background well. I've never been much of a fan of school stories but I did love The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton & there are similarities here, even though the "girls" at Falcons are really young women, training for a career. The school is divided into Houses, all with nicknames - Leander (Leo's, where Lesley & Frankie live), Atalanta's (Auntie's), Pheidippides (Fido's) &  the fourth house is known as Prin's because that's where the Principal, Miss Betts, lives. Inter-House games & competitions are vital to instil the appropriate spirit & keep the students up to scratch.

The atmosphere of the 1950s is everywhere, although in some ways it could be pre-war. Lights out at 11pm & no young men from the local Technical College allowed to the dances. Divided skirts & only one visitor allowed to sit on the bed. I admit I was slightly shocked when one of the mistresses offers Lesley a cigarette but I was amazed when one of the students, a Miss Plumstead "came top of the College and took herself off to a job in India, where she was paid a fabulous salary by the local rajah for teaching English games in his State school and coaching his younger wives in tennis and badminton." That's what I mean by a pre-war atmosphere! I was also fascinated by the reference to a train as a Puffing Billy. Here in Melbourne, Puffing Billy means only one thing, a steam train that runs through the Dandenong Ranges & is a big tourist attraction. I had no idea that the name was used for steam trains in general. As one of the mistresses at Falcons might have said, "Even the lightest literature can be educational, girls."

There's not a bit of romance until the last couple of pages although I did catch a hint of this early in the book. The mysteries I mentioned above are tackled by the girls led by Lesley as their formidable general, showing tactical & leadership skills worthy of Napoleon or Wellington. My favourite scene was the fire in the Sanitorium (on the third floor, no less) where several injured girls (broken bones & sprains abound in the college) are encouraged to jump on to blankets & the reluctant ones are rescued by Frankie climbing up a pyramid of mistresses & girls & literally shoving one girl with a broken collarbone out of the window. Gymnastics are another mainstay of the curriculum.

I enjoyed On Your Marks very much. It was a light read but full  of engaging characters & the ultimate satisfaction of just reading about all that exertion from the comfort of my reading chair. If you have the Greyladies edition, don't skip Kay Whalley's Introduction (although don't read it until afterwards). She makes all the points I've made here & anticipated my every thought about the book, the plot & the characters & expresses it all with great humour & affection.

The Pure Gold Baby - Margaret Drabble

Jessica Speight is a student in London in the 1960s. She has an affair with her married teacher, the Professor as she calls him, and becomes pregnant. Her baby, Anna, is the pure gold baby of the title. The Professor eventually drifts back to his wife, after failing to convince Jess to have an abortion, & Jess becomes a devoted mother to Anna. Anna is a beautiful baby, calm & happy. However, as she gets older, it soon becomes apparent that everything is not right. There's no physical manifestation of her disability but she is slow to learn & physically clumsy. She will never learn to read & write although she can recognize letters & numbers. Anna has a developmental delay that is never precisely diagnosed. Is it genetic? Was she deprived of oxygen at birth? Jess doesn't know but she soon accepts that this is Anna & devotes her life to caring for her daughter.

Jess studied anthropology & made a journey to Central Africa that resonates throughout her life. She became fascinated by the children of the tribe she was studying, children afflicted by a disability then called Lobster-Claw syndrome (later called SHSF or split hand, split foot). The children coped well, adapting to their disability & accepted by their community. This trip to Africa represents the beginning of a career that will never really take off. Once Anna is born, Jess will take no more field trips. Her career became one centred on the home, on her neighbourhood of North London. She studied, she marked exam papers, she wrote articles & edited a journal. She worked so that she could be at home to take care of Anna. even after she finds Anna a place in a residential school for a few years, Jess doesn't venture far from home. She has a short-lived marriage & a few minor relationships but this is the story of a mother & a daughter.

The novel is narrated by Eleanor, a friend of Jess. Telling the story at one remove is an interesting decision but it works. Eleanor is part of Jess's circle of friends in North London. She's married with two sons but we never really know much about her. Her purpose is to tell the story of Jess & Anna as she knew it, through observation, rumour & the stories Jess told her over the years of their friendship. What we discover about Eleanor is through asides & scraps of conversation. The advantage for the reader is that we form a picture of a neighbourhood from the 60s to the present day. The type of neighbourhood that Margaret Drabble was writing about in the 60s & 70s, where the children are cared for almost collectively. Eleanor may be one of Jess's closest friends but even she doesn't know everything about Jess. For a long time she doesn't even know who Anna's father is. Jess tells her own stories in dribs & drabs, which is what life is like.

The Pure Gold Baby is a fascinating exploration of the changes in society over the last 50 years. Through Anna's story & through the stories of others, the depressed poet, Steve, or Zain, a Sudanese who was working at the BBC until his marriage ended in violence & he was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment, we witness the changes in medical care over the decades. Jess's involvement in the medical system as she tries to find the care that Anna needs, brings her into contact with Steve, Zain & many others, both carers & patients. It's an interesting look at the way society has changed in the way we look after the disabled, the way we view mental health. Above all, this is the story of Jess & Anna, a story of love & devotion & the way a woman's life is changed in a moment by the birth of a child who will always need her.

I enjoyed The Pure Gold Baby very much. The narrative is slow & discursive, taking in anthropology, health policy, information about authors who have cared for or denied their own disabled children or siblings (including Jane Austen, Pearl Buck & Arthur Miller) & the changes in North London over fifty years. I read over half the book in one sitting yesterday afternoon. There are no big, dramatic events. Even the dramas - an attempted suicide, a health scare - are concerning rather than heart-stopping. It was like sitting beside Eleanor as she told me the story of Jess & her pure gold baby over a pot of tea at the kitchen table. The novel is a beautifully observed slice of middle-class English life over the last five decades.

I've read quite a few of Margaret Drabble's novels, even though I always feel I'm about a decade too young to read them. I mean that I was born a couple of decades after Drabble, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood & I always felt that I couldn't read their novels in the same way that their own generation did. These writers all seem to have been writing very much for their generation of women, especially in the 60s & 70s, with the growth of the feminist movement. Having said that, I've enjoyed their work & Drabble's Radiant Way trilogy is a particular favourite - even though I read the books a decade after they were written. I'd read somewhere that Drabble had retired from writing fiction but I'm glad she changed her mind. I listened to a podcast from the BBC's Open Book programme last week (it's here if you'd like to listen to it) & was pleased that I could download the ebook from my library's collection straightaway.

Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers - Alexander McCall Smith

A new Scotland Street novel is always a treat even though I race through them in a day & then have to wait a year for the next instalment.

Bertie's seventh birthday is finally approaching & he's very excited - if only his mother, Irene, didn't insist that he invite as many girls as boys to his birthday party. He would also love a penknife as a special birthday present from his parents but he knows that he'll receive something non-violent & gender neutral instead. Art gallery owner Matthew & his wife, Elspeth are still getting used to being the parents of triplets. They decide that their wonderful Danish au pair, Anna, needs an assistant au pair but their choice isn't a complete success.

Angus Lordie, newly married to Domenica, has started sleepwalking & is encouraged by Domenica to see a psychiatrist. They also have a fascinating conversation about the order in which we think of the names of our married friends. Domenica feels that the order of the names is important & Angus is quite sure that everyone thinks of them as Domenica & Angus rather than the other way around. When their friend, Antonia, writes from her convent in Tuscany to invite herself to stay for a few weeks while she finishes writing her book on early Scottish saints, Domenica analyses every phrase of her letter in great detail. Antonia arrives accompanied by a nun from the convent, Sister Maria-Fiore, who has a talent for stating the obvious. The unfortunate affair of the blue Spode cup has not been forgotten by Antonia & causes some uncomfortable moments for Angus & Domenica.

Pat McGregor's love life seems to be improving when she meets an attractive young cabinet maker but their first date at a local bar becomes an embarrassment when Pat's father arrives accompanied by a very odd woman. Coffee shop owner Big Lou is always unlucky in love but decides that although her romantic relationships have been disastrous, she has a lot of room in her heart & in her life & becomes foster mother to young Finlay.

Irene Pollock wins a trip to a literary festival Dubai in a competition & Bertie & Stuart are eager for her to go. The trip doesn't turn out quite as Irene expected although Bertie & his father, while concerned for Irene's safety, settle down to enjoy their unexpected freedom.

As always, there are some very funny moments in this book as well as some poignant ones. McCall Smith's gentle humour & sense of the absurd is ever present & it's always a joy to catch up with the residents of Scotland Street.

Selected Letters - Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith was a 19th century clergyman who is probably best known today, if he's known at all, for his letters. He was born in 1771 & educated with his brother at Winchester College (two other brothers went to Eton). He became a clergyman & lived in Edinburgh for some years where he was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, an influential periodical on literature, politics & social issues. even after leaving Edinburgh, Smith continued to contribute reviews & articles. He then moved to London, becoming well-known as a preacher & in society. He held the living at Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire for many years, later moving to a living in Taunton near Bristol & later becoming a canon of St Paul's. He was happily married to Catherine & was a fond father to his daughter, Saba & son, Douglas.

If I was trying to describe Sydney Smith, the words good humoured & liberal come to mind. He had a genius for friendship. He wrote regularly to Francis Jeffreys & John Murray in Edinburgh. When he moved to London, he was introduced by his brother, Robert (known as Bobus), to Lord & Lady Holland, the great Whig political couple, where he become a frequent guest. He kept up a correspondence with both after he moved to Yorkshire. His letters are always respectful but never obsequious or servile. He is honest in his opinions & always interested in their family & friends.

Smith never received the preferments his friends believed him entitled to. He was a liberal Whig in an age of conservative Tory government. Church appointments were a matter of patronage & influence & Smith's friends never had the influence that would have helped him to high office. I don't see him as a particularly ambitious man, though. When he went to Foston, there had been no resident clergyman there for 150 years. He set about rebuilding the vicarage, built up the farm that came with the living & was a much-loved pastor to his parishioners. He was allowed to spend a few weeks away from his parish every year & went to London where he revelled in society & enjoyed the intellectual stimulation that he missed at home. His personality is particularly attractive to modern readers because he espoused many causes that weren't mainstream at the time but have become so. He was anti-slavery, he was in favour of Catholic emancipation & his inclinations were liberal in social matters while always being a devout Anglican.

In later life, he moved to a living near Taunton &, during a brief period of Tory government, he was appointed as a Canon of St Paul's which meant he could spend more time in London.

I think Lord Grey will give me some preferment if he stays in long enough; but the Upper Parsons live vindictively, and evince their aversion to a Whigg ministry by an improved health. The Bishop of Ely has the rancor to recover after three paralytic strokes, and the Dean of Lichfield to be vigorous at 82 -  and yet these are the men who are called Christians. Letter to J A Murray January 24th 1831

His father & brother died, leaving him enough money to live comfortably. Apart from the usual ills of old age, & the death of his son, Douglas, in 1829, he was a contented man by the end of his life.

The best way to demonstrate Sydney Smith's personality, though, is not to try to describe him but to quote his letters. This description of himself in 1805 held true throughout his life,

You ask me about my prospects. I think I shall long remain as I am. I have no powerful friends. I belong to no party, I do not cant, I abuse canting everywhere, I am not conciliating, and I have not talents enough to force my way without these laudable and illaudable auxiliaries. This is as true a picture of my situation as I can give you. In the mean time I lead not an unhappy life, much otherwise, and am thankful for my share of good. Letter to Francis Jeffrey July 4th 1805

Here he advises a friend how to improve her low spirits. I can only agree with all 20 of his precepts but here are just a few,

1st. Live as well as you dare. 3rd. Amusing books. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely - they are always worse for dignified concealment.12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not likely to end in active benevolence. 15th. make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 17th. Don't be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. Letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth February 16th 1820

He was popular in literary as well as political circles.

Dear Moore,
I have a breakfast of philosophers tomorrow at ten punctually. Muffins and metaphysics; crumpets and contradiction. Will you come?
Letter to Thomas Moore November 12th 1841

My dear Dickens,
I accept your obliging invitation conditionally. If I am invited by any man of greater genius than yourself, or one by whose works I have been more completely interested, I will repudiate you and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two.
Ever yours sincerely,
Sydney Smith     Letter to Charles Dickens May 14th 1842

However, my favourite quote comes from his Memoirs,

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

Barbara Pym Reading Week - An Academic Question

Quartet in Autumn was the last Barbara Pym novel I had left to read. I bought a copy over eight years ago when it was reprinted by Pan but I put off reading it. Partly because the subject matter seemed quite grim but mostly because it was the last Pym novel & when I'd read it, there would be no more. Barbara Pym Reading Week seemed like the perfect time to read it at last. Unfortunately I did find it depressing & grim so after 40pp I've put it back on the shelf. Instead, I've reread An Academic Question.

This is another of the novels that Pym wrote during the wilderness years when she couldn't get published. She never expected anyone except a few friends to read it & the manuscript was prepared for publication by Pym's literary executor, Hazel Holt. Although it was written in the early 1970s, it wasn't published until 1986. Pym wrote to Philip Larkin about this book,

I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about a provincial university told by the youngish wife of a lecturer. It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort but of course it hasn't turned out like that at all. 22 June 1971

Caro Grimstone is married to Alan, the lecturer at a provincial university. She reminded me of Wilmet Forsyth in A Glass of Blessings. Like Wilmet, Caro is bored with her life. She doesn't work, has a four year old daughter & a Swedish au pair to look after the child. She's jealous of one of Alan's colleagues, Iris Horniblow & wonders if they're having an affair. Instead of Rodney heading off to the Ministry every morning, Alan lectures in anthropology & is working on an article for a learned journal. Unlike Wilmet, Caro isn't a churchgoer & spends her time visiting Kitty, an older woman who once lived on a Caribbean island with her husband & Kitty's son, Coco. Coco is one of those sexually ambivalent men that so often appear in Pym's books. On the strength of his experiences living in the Caribbean, Coco has been offered a lectureship at the university to pursue research into West Indian immigrants on Britain. Kitty's sister, Dolly, runs a bookshop but the passion of her life is hedgehogs & she spends most of her time looking after the hedgehogs who live in her garden.

Caro volunteers to read to the residents of a nursing home, run by Sister Dew from An Unsuitable Attachment. She reads anthropological journals to Mr Stillingfleet, an old man, now blind, who was once a missionary in Africa. Alan & his boss, Crispin Maynard, are both keen to get hold of Stillingfleet's papers which they believe are vital to their research. Their academic rivalry leads to Alan stealing the papers from Mr Stillingfleet's room while Caro reads to him. When Alan's article is accepted for publication, Maynard suspects that Alan has got hold of Stillngfleet's papers where he had failed & tries to stop publication. Caro, meanwhile, is pressured by Alan to return the papers which proves difficult when Mr Stillingfleet dies & his papers are given to the University Library run by Evan Cranton. Caro is a little afraid of his sarcasm but she applies for a part-time job at the library & waits for an opportunity to return the papers.

An Academic Question is an odd book in some ways. Written in the first person like A Glass of Blessings, Caro never engages my sympathy as Wilmet does. It's the 1970s & Caro has less excuse than Wilmet did in the 1950s to be idle. Her voice is disillusioned & vaguely envious of everyone from Iris Horniblow to her sister, Susan, living in London & living with a designer.

I saw Alan as an adequate husband, an unenthusiastic lover, a dutiful father and a son who despised the family he had grown beyond. But he was said to be brilliant at his work and a great help to his students. Also, and even more important, I had once been in love with him and in a way I still was. But waiting here, without drink inside me, conscious of people around me who appeared not to be conscious of me, I tried to step outside myself. Carefully, cautiously, with a cool eye and as much detachment as I could muster, I peeped at myself and Alan, as it were lifting the corner of a curtain or peering through a chink in a lighted window. I saw two people, together yet apart, not exactly incompatible, and I wondered if it was my fault.

It's as if Pym was trying to update her style & it's not altogether a success. I wonder if she would have wanted it to be published at all. Her comments about it in her letters are pretty unenthusiastic and, of course, she put the novel away unfinished & never had the chance to revise it. She doesn't seem comfortable in the world of the 1970s university or in the world of a young mother. Caro's relationship with her daughter, Kate, seemed perfunctory & her constant smoking like an attempt at trendiness - although maybe I just think that now when we look at smoking as practically a crime. Pym seems adrift without the community of the Church or the village & there's very little of the characteristic Pymian humour. Pym's final novel, A Few Green Leaves, is much more successful. In this novel, she returns to the village setting but she seems much more comfortable with her characters & she's brought her characteristic world up to date to great effect.

I did enjoy reading An Academic Question again after many years although it's not one of her best novels. I don't think I'd reread it since it was published in the 80s. As well as rereading my favourite Pyms this year (which I've already done), I also want to reread the novels I've only read once or twice. So, I have A Few Green Leaves, No Fond Return of Love & Crampton Hodnet to look forward to .