Sunday Poetry - William Wordsworth

Here's another of the 1802 sonnets by Wordsworth. This lovely poem is a plea to slow down & enjoy the present moment. The speaker sounds weary & longing for rest & a chance to catch his breath.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                        
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The Children of Henry VIII - John Guy

John Guy has written a beautifully succinct account of the lives of Henry VIII's children - Edward, Mary, Elizabeth & his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. There have been so many books written about the Tudors & I've read so many of them that another book about the family seemed a little redundant. However, I loved John Guy's award winning biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, My Heart Is My Own, which I read in my pre-blog days. I also have A Daughter's Love, the story of Thomas More & his daughter, Margaret, on the tbr shelves, so I decided that any book by John Guy was worth my attention.

It's a well-known story. Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 on the death of his father, Henry VII, the victor of Bosworth. The Tudors were still a new dynasty & Henry was determined that England would not be plunged back into the civil wars that plagued the 15th century. He had married Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess who was the widow of his brother, Arthur. Catherine bore Henry many children but only a daughter, Mary, survived childhood. Henry had many mistresses & may have fathered several illegitimate children. He only acknowledged one, Henry Fitzroy, born to Elizabeth Blount. Henry seems to have been genuinely fond of Fitzroy & he made him Duke of Richmond, giving his his own household in the north of England. His status was almost equal to that of Mary, his legitimate daughter. Mary, though, was a girl & Henry didn't believe that a woman could rule alone.

Catherine's failure to bear a son was an urgent problem. Henry may have considered legitimizing Fitzroy - after all, his own claim to the throne came through the illegitimate Beaufort line - but he longed for a legitimate heir, acknowledged by all. Anne Boleyn's refusal to become Henry's mistress & her promise that she would bear Henry a son if they were married, precipitated the crisis known as the King's Great Matter - the annulment of his marriage to Catherine. The proceedings dragged on for years as Henry's desire to marry Anne led to the Reformation & the break with Rome. Eventually, Henry & Anne were married although the longed for child, born in September 1533, was a girl, Elizabeth. Anne still retained her hold on Henry's affections although he began to look elsewhere for his pleasures. Anne's downfall began with the death of her great rival, Catherine of Aragon in January 1536. Anne miscarried a child soon after & the baby had been a boy. Henry's ominous words, "It seems that God will not give me male children" signalled the beginning of the end for Anne. Within four months, she was dead, executed at the Tower along with five men accused of being her lovers.

Henry had been courting Jane Seymour for some time before Anne's downfall. Jane was the opposite to Anne in every way. Meek instead of confident; modest instead of bold, Jane was coached by her family to be the perfect candidate for Henry's next wife. They were married just days after Anne's execution & Jane succeeded in giving Henry his long awaited heir when Edward was born in 1537. Unfortunately Jane died just days later. However, Henry had his heir & when he died in 1547, Edward succeeded him at the age of only nine.

One of the strengths of this book is the description of the relationships of the three children with each other (Fitzroy died young). Mary was displaced when Anne Boleyn was in the ascendant & she always resented Elizabeth as a consequence. Mary refused to acknowledge her father as head of the Church or to acknowledge the illegitimacy of her mother's marriage. As punishment, she was forced to live in the same household with Elizabeth who was now the acknowledged heir. When Anne Boleyn fell, Elizabeth was also made illegitimate & both girls removed from the line of succession.

Mary & Elizabeth always accepted Edward as heir to the throne & both had a loving relationship with him. Edward & Elizabeth were especially close, near in age & both brought up in the Protestant religion. Mary's Catholicism became a barrier between her & Edward as he & his advisers sought to consolidate the break with Rome. This policy culminated in Edward's Devise for the Succession, in which he removed both Mary & Elizabeth from the succession & appointed his Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as his heir. Mary & her supporters were ready when Edward died in 1553 & Queen Jane's reign lasted only a few days. Elizabeth very publicly arrived to support her half-sister at her triumphant entry into London & at her coronation but the spiky relationship between the two women would dominate Mary's reign.

Mary & Elizabeth were rivals from the start. Mary's desire to take the English Church back to Rome was out of step with her people's desires especially when she started burning heretics at the stake. Her marriage to a foreign prince, Philip of Spain, was unpopular, & her failure to have an heir meant that her legacy looked increasingly shaky. Elizabeth was lucky to survive Mary's reign. Seen as the saviour of Protestant hopes, Elizabeth was the focus of several attempted revolts against Mary's rule. She was clever enough to avoid any direct involvement with rebels although she spent several anxious months in the Tower. She also managed to avoid marrying any of the candidates put forward by Mary & Philip in a bid to sideline her. Eventually, on her deathbed, Mary had to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir, knowing that her first act would be to dismantle the religious settlement she had been determined to implement.

Elizabeth learnt many lessons from Mary's mistakes. Her reign was characterized by her desire to reach a moderate religious settlement without "making windows into men's souls". She refused to marry either a foreign prince or one of her own subjects & she refused to name an heir, knowing from bitter experience how men look to the rising sun if they're dissatisfied with the current monarch.

The Children of Henry VIII is a richly detailed story told with real flair & concision. John Guy has told a complex story with an enormous cast of characters in just over 200pp (in my ebook edition). It makes me wonder why any history needs to be longer.

I read The Children of Henry VIII courtesy of NetGalley.

Father and Son - John Barlow

My only problem with John Barlow's books is that it takes him a year to write them but it only takes me three days to read them! I was looking forward to Father and Son, the second book in the John Ray series (after Hope Road, reviewed here) & it didn't disappoint.

John Ray is called out very early one morning to a local bar owned by an old rival of his father's, Lanny Bride. He finds the body of Roberto Swales, one of his father's right hand men in the old days. Roberto was always around during John's childhood & John is shocked by his death & by the brutal nature of it. Shot in his legs & arms to incapacitate him, Roberto has been tortured with a broken bottle before his death. In Hope Road John helped track down the killer of Lanny Bride's daughter & now Lanny wants him to find Roberto's killer.

John's life is a mess. The white sheep of the Ray family, he went to Cambridge, became an accountant & moved to Spain. Unlike his brother, Joe, he didn't follow in his father's footsteps. Tony Ray was notorious in Leeds as a small time criminal involved in counterfeit goods & money. John never wanted to be involved in the family business which was neatly sheltered by the used car dealership Tony owned. John returned from Spain only to witness his brother's murder & reluctantly take over the used car business from his father, now in a nursing home after a stroke. The events recounted in Hope Road led to the breakdown of John's relationship with police officer Denise Denson. Den moved to Manchester & John's life has been a blur of alcohol & depression ever since. Tony Ray Motors is being run by John's step-cousin Connie, who owns half the business.

John's search for Roberto's killer becomes entwined with the story of a bombing in Leeds years earlier. Attributed but never claimed by the IRA, a bomb destroyed a supermarket. News coverage of the incident was dominated by footage of a young man staggering from the blast with the body of a baby in his arms. One of the men thought to be responsible for the bombing, Bernard Sheenan, has died & his last interview was with journalist Jeanette Cormac. Jeanette contacted John because she's also interested in writing a biography of Tony Ray. On the morning of Roberto Swales's murder, Jeanette had spent the night with John. When it emerges that Sheenan was murdered & in a similar fashion to Swales, John begins to wonder why these men were targeted & why they were tortured before their death in an obvious attempt to get information. The connection seems to be Jeanette's investigations &, if so, could Tony Ray be somehow involved? John's presence at Roberto's murder scene & his relationship with Jeanette attract the attention of local detective Steve Baron & he has to find the killer before the police arrest him - or before he, or someone close to him, becomes the next victim.

Father and Son is an edgy, fast-paced, breathless thriller. The action takes place over three days & I was reading as fast as my fingers could flick the pages. If work hadn't been in the way, I'd have finished it in a day. This is the most hardboiled series I read so if you prefer the cosier type of mystery, I should warn you that there are some violent scenes & the descriptions of the murder victims are quite detailed (I skimmed these bits). The plot is complex with strands reaching back to John's childhood & leads him to question how much he really knows about his father & his criminal activities. Denise Denson, visiting from Manchester, becomes involved in John's investigations & has to walk a fine line between helping the man she still loves but isn't sure she can trust, & not jeopardizing her career. Denise is a great character & I was glad to see her back in this book. She's wary of becoming involved with him again but doesn't want to see him dead. At the end of the book, John has reached another crossroads & I can't wait to see where John Barlow takes him in the next book in the series. I just wish I didn't have to wait a year to get hold of it.

Sunday Poetry - William Wordsworth

I've been reading Wordsworth's Sonnets of 1802 & I've decided I like the Wordsworth of these small, intimate poems. I've never been drawn to Wordsworth as I have to other Romantic poets. He always seemed rather a stuffy person, reneging on his radical youth to become a staid old man. Maybe Keats & Byron would have become staid too if they'd lived long enough.
I have Juliet Barker's biography of Wordsworth on the tbr shelves & a selection of his letters so I really should do some research. So for the next few weeks, I'll post a few of the 1802 Sonnets & read a little about his life.

With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,
Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;
Some lying fast at anchor in the road,
Some veering up and down, one knew not why.
A goodly vessel did I then espy
Come like a giant from a haven broad;
And lustily along the bay she strode,
Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
The ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover's look;
This ship to all the rest did I prefer:
When will she turn, and whither? She will brook
No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:
On went she, and due north her journey took.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2013 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. I planned to reread this most famous of books early in the year but there was so much hype about the anniversary that I put the book aside, knowing that the right moment would present itself sometime during the year.

That moment proved to be last week when I watched the 1980 BBC TV series of Pride and Prejudice for the first time probably since it was first broadcast. The overwhelming success of the 1995 version with Jennifer Ehle & Colin Firth has eclipsed this series & the BBC only seem to keep one version of their classic series available on DVD at any one time. I hadn't seen the 1980 series with Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul since it was repeated on television in the early 1980s. Remember, these were the dark ages, before VHS or DVD. You watched it on TV at the time it was shown or you missed out entirely. So, I was very pleased to discover that the 1980 series was available from Amazon UK in this Dutch packaged version. I've bought a couple of other series in this European packaging & as long as you remember to turn off the subtitles, it's fine.

I'm not going to tell you the plot of Pride and Prejudice. If you haven't read the book, I'd be surprised if you haven't seen one of the many film & television adaptations or read the sequels & clones that fill the romance section of any bookshop. The love story of proud Mr Darcy & prejudiced Miss Bennet is well-known. I thought I'd just quote some of my favourite lines & tell you about the 1980 series which was scripted by Fay Weldon.

I was intrigued by this version because Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, & author of a lovely book about Pride and Prejudice called Happily Ever After, considers it one of the best adaptations. I have to agree with her. It's in five episodes rather than the six of the 1995 version. Most of that extra episode was taken up with Andrew Davies' extra scenes for Mr Darcy. We see Darcy writing, fencing, searching London for Wickham & Lydia, surprising the eloping couple at Ramsgate &, most famously, emerging from that lake at Pemberley. In the 1980 version, Mr Darcy more prosaically appears around a hedge to confront Elizabeth, preceded by his dog. The 1995 version also has several scenes of Darcy & Bingley talking while playing billiards etc which never appear in the novel because, famously, Jane Austen never has a scene with only two men talking together.

The script is very close to the novel & there are only a few changes that I picked up. When Lydia's elopement is revealed to Lizzie in a letter from Jane, she is at the inn at Lambton where Darcy finds her in great distress. In this version, Lizzie runs to Pemberley, bursting into the drawing room in search of her uncle Gardiner. I thought that was ridiculous & not an improvement on the scene as written. The final scene is the second proposal & it fell rather flat. We also miss out on the scenes of astonishment when the Bennets hear that Lizzie is to marry Darcy who she has openly disliked for much of the novel. There certainly isn't the same chemistry between Garvie & Rintoul as there was between Ehle & Firth but I think they're both very good in their roles. I think I prefer Garvie as Elizabeth. She has all the vivacity & liveliness of Lizzie & there are several scenes where Garvie is heard in voiceover reflecting Lizzie's thoughts as we read them in the book. Darcy is a difficult role because he spends more than half the novel stalking around looking proud & disagreeable. It's not until he meets Lizzie & the Gardiners at Pemberley that we see him at ease. David Rintoul was very good in the first proposal scene & I much preferred the portrait of him at Pemberley to the one of Colin Firth in the 1995 series.

The rest of the cast are also very good. I loved Priscilla Morgan's Mrs Bennet & Irene Richard, who was Elinor Dashwood in an early Sense and Sensibility, was plain & sensible as Charlotte Lucas. Mr Collins was played by Malcolm Rennie in a beautifully smiling, fat, unctuous manner. Judy Parfitt was very aristocratic as Lady Catherine. She didn't even bother to acknowledge Mrs Bennet when she arrives at Longbourn to confront Lizzie about her intentions towards Darcy. This is an excellent adaptation & I think I prefer it now to the 1995 version. The production values may have been higher in the later version but there were fewer heaving bosoms & overt sex appeal in the earlier series & I think I prefer that.

So, my favourite scenes from the novel. There are so many witty lines that make me laugh out loud but here are a few scenes that give me a quieter pleasure.

When Lizzie goes to Netherfield to look after Jane who is ill, she has to contend with Miss Bingley's  snide comments & her attempts to ingratiate herself with Mr Darcy.

'Mr Darcy is not to be laughed at!' cried Elizabeth. 'That is an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintance. I dearly love a laugh.'
'Miss Bingley,' said he, 'has given me credit for more than can be. The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object is a joke.'
'Certainly,' replied Elizabeth - 'there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own and I laugh at them whenever I can. - But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without.'

When Darcy & Elizabeth meet at Rosings, he tries to explain away his rudeness at the Assembly Ball by saying that he didn't dance because he knew nobody outside his own party of friends & lacked practice in recommending himself to strangers. Lizzie doesn't allow him to get away with this, comparing his lack of social grace with her skill at the piano,

'My fingers,''  said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I have seen so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault - because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'
Darcy smiled and said, 'You are perfectly right. You have employed your timer much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.'

Then, at the end of the novel, we have another of Jane Austen's proposals when we don't hear the words spoken, only the gratifying effects,

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.

Heat Lightning - Helen Hull

All the moments since she had come to Flemington had been working toward that decision, hadn't they? Not a conclusion arrived at coldly, by balancing advantages; a necessity which was left after the agitation of the week had broken up her dull and apathetic surface. It was queer to feel more alive because of death and fear and hatred; perhaps intense feeling was a kind of electric disturbance in which old sluggishness and stupidity were consumed. Heat lightning, revealing flashes in a murky summer night.

Amy Norton returns to her childhood home in a small town in Michigan. She lives in New York with her husband, Geoffrey, & two children but she's at a crossroads in her life & her marriage & she runs away, back to her family. The week that she spends in her parents' house takes her away from her problems but also plunges her into the life she's left behind. Her father, Alfred, runs the family business, a factory that is struggling to survive in these days of the Great Depression. Amy's grandmother, Madam Westover, lives next door, presiding over the family, controlling & pulling the strings of her extended family. She has a few surprises to spring on them but is she as in control as she thinks? Amy's uncle, Dewitt, is in financial trouble & expects Alfred to help out yet again, straining their relationship. Aunt Lora, long since divorced from her philandering husband, irritates her children, discontented Harriet, lazy Tom & Laurence, happily married to Emma & totally absorbed in their family life. Amy's brother, Theodore & his French wife, Felice, are the most contented of all, more contented than sister Mary, who has just given birth to her fourth daughter & discontentedly grumbles about being left out of family life while her devoted but spineless husband, Henry, attempts to find a job. At the centre of the story is Amy's calm, nurturing mother, Catherine.

Amy discovers that her family is the same as when she was a girl but also different. Her grandmother is older but still indomitable, refusing to let age & the relentless summer heat stop her going about her usual routines. However, Dewitt's demands for money & Tom's reliance on his grandmother or any other member of the family bailing him out of trouble, are taking their toll. Amy is drawn in to everyone's problems from Tom's dalliance with her parent's maid, Lulu, to Mary's whining about Henry's bad luck in job hunting & her father's worries about the business (Mary reminded me so much of Mary Musgrove in Persuasion). Amy sees them all with an outsider's eye, all the time wrestling with her own problems, her fears that Geoffrey is having an affair or has left her altogether. She discovers a new respect & love for her parents who have a  beautifully supportive & loving relationship, the most satisfactory relationship in the novel. I love the scene when Amy & her mother talk about what's important in life,

"What is important?" Amy kept her arm around her mother's shoulders; in her mother's tone, in the acceleration of her speech, she felt a desire to communicate fully and quickly, as a fending off of approaching departure.
"To me, now, just two things. Your values alter so, as you grow older. You let go of lots of things you struggle at first to get.... Well -" she sighed, and swung open a secret door - "one is acting so I don't feel ashamed of myself, so I feel comfortable with myself. Sometimes I'm driven into saying or doing things I know I'm going to be ashamed of. The other - that's people. Loving them. Loving them enough, now, so you feel alive. Not a general vague love for everybody. That's nonsense. But for your special ones." The color lay bright on her cheekbones, her eyebrows lifted into the little triangle of concentration above her delicate nose. "I can't explain any better."
Amy was silent; words with rude breath might blur the surface of the treasure her mother exhibited so diffidently. With a shrug Catherine moved away from Amy's arm, swinging fast shut the secret door.

This is such a wonderful novel. I don't know how Persephone keep discovering books that are so essentially Persephone books. The latest Persephone Quarterly compares Heat Lightning to Dorothy Whipple's novels & I would have to agree. Both authors write books that are unputdownable. This is a completely absorbing family saga. The cast of characters is large but they're so well-developed & distinct that the helpful list of characters at the front of the book isn't needed for very long. The atmosphere of small town life with all its gossipy lack of privacy is portrayed so exactly. You would think there would be no secrets left in this community but there are several surprises for the Westovers that leave them rethinking their relationships & their place in the world. The oppressive heat weighs everyone down, even a rainstorm can't lighten the atmosphere for long. Amy's week in Michigan reveals her family to her in a new light & she realises that her problems are no different & no more important than those of the rest of her family.

On a purely aesthetic note, Heat Lightning is such a beautifully presented book. I think we've all become a little blasé about the beauty of Persephone Books & we don't always stop & notice their uniqueness in an age of cheap paperbacks & digital editions which may be convenient but don't feed the booklover's soul in quite the same way. I especially love the Persephones that reproduce the typeface of the original edition as this does. The endpapers (you can see them reproduced on the bookmark above) from a roller-printed silk fabric of 1929 have a feeling of heat haze about them. So, Heat Lightning is an absorbing novel in a beautiful package & I can't recommend it too highly.

Sunday Poetry - Mary Tighe

Mary Tighe was an Anglo-Irish poet, born in Dublin. She married young & moved to London where she was mainly known for her poem Psyche which was much admired when it was published in 1805. Mary Tighe died in 1810 aged only 28 after suffering ill health for some years. Psyche was reprinted after her death & secured her reputation & she was quite well-known in the early 19th century. This poem, Written at Scarborough, was written in 1799. I like the imagery of the roaring ocean & the waves breaking on the shore.

As musing pensive in my silent home
I hear far off the sullen ocean's roar,
Where the rude wave just sweeps the level shore,
Or bursts upon the rocks with whitening foam,

I think upon the scenes my life has known;
On days of sorrow, and some hours of joy;
Both which alike time could so soon destroy!
And now they seem a busy dream alone;

While on the earth exist no single trace
Of all that shook my agitated soul,
As on the beach new waves for ever roll

And fill their past forgotten brother's place:
But I, like the worn sand, exposed remain
To each new storm which frets the angry main.