Brothers and Sisters by Ivy Compton-Burnett

In common with most Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, this 1929 book revolves around the secrets, evasions and general awfulness of Edwardian family life.  In the first chapter, old Andrew Stace, head of the family, is discussing the disposal of his property with his daughter, Sophia, and his adopted son, Christian.  The two young people tell their father that they wish to marry; he forbids this, but after his death they marry anyway.  The scene jumps forward thirty years, and Sophia and Andrew are living with their adult children, Dinah, another Andrew, and Robin, in the family home.  Sophia dominates the household, seeking to control everything that happens within the family, demanding a perpetual tribute of attention and love from her children,  and enjoying the status of domestic martyr.  This is a typical Sophia outburst: "I don't know what things are coming to, when I can't claim a little attention in my own house.  How am I to get on with my work of organising everything, if I am to be left entirely without help?"

The atmosphere of the novel is claustrophobic from the outset; the narrow social group of the Staces does nothing to enlarge their world, since it is made up of other pairs of brothers and sisters.  Dinah and Andrew become engaged to one of these pairs, Gilbert and Caroline Lang, who have recently moved to the village.  However, these engagements are quickly broken off when it emerges that elderly Mrs Lang is the mother of the adopted Christian Stace, and Dinah and Andrew realise they are engaged to their own uncle and aunt.  Mrs Lang dies suddenly, Christian Stace even more suddenly, and the possibilities of escape for the Stace children open and close as more and more secrets are revealed.

There is a chilly frivolity about this novel, like a very bitter and cynical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, as the pairs of brothers and sisters form and re-form into different pairings.  ICB's usual style persists; plot and character are developed mainly through dialogue, and we never step outside the Staces' village.  However, I enjoyed this a lot more than most of the other ICBs I have read; the Stace and the Lang children are sympathetic characters, and there is a lot of ironic humour in the characterisation of Sophia herself, monstrous though she is.  There are lots of other interesting themes within the novel, too, especially class and the position of servants - Miss Patmore, once the children's nurse and still living with the Staces, is a key character and a very interesting one in terms of how the family maintains its equilibrium.

Disappointingly, this one is out of print, although there are secondhand copies around.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane evolved a mission: to escape, for brief periods, his decidedly unwild Cambridge home, and to explore the wild places of Britain and Ireland.  Initially he defines 'wild' as remote, unlit, and "where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent".   The effect of his travels, however, will be a new conception of 'wild' and a new appreciation of the qualities of wild places.  In particular, he comes to see the "evidence of human presence" pretty much everywhere, and indeed this can be what makes some of the wilder places tolerable, even if the evidence is historical or archeological.  And he comes to recognise the overlooked wildness of unexpected places: "The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these were wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake".  I'm always fascinated by the wildness in the edgelands, forgotten or abandoned places where nature's vigour is overtaking the signs of human endeavour, so Macfarlane's inner journey was designed to appeal.

Macfarlane is an incredibly energetic and enthusiastic companion, with a taste for sleeping out in a bivouac bag, swimming in cold water, and exploring some deeply inhospitable places.  I quite often read books like this with a mounting envy of the journeys made and the things seen, but I read this book feeling quite sure that I don't want to spend a night on Ben Hope, or attempt to scale the well-named Inaccessible Pinnacle, and Macfarlane's account of swimming up a sea cave made my skin crawl:

I swam to the biggest of the caves.  Holding on to an edge of rock, and letting the swell lift me gently up and down, I looked inside.  Though I could not see the back of the cave, it seemed to run thirty or forty feet into the cliffs [...] As I crossed the shadow cast by the cave's roof, the water grew cold.  There was a big hollow sucking and slapping sound.  I shouted, and heard my call come back at me from all sides [...] Further back into the cave, the light was diffused and the air appeared powdery.  The temperature had dropped, and I sensed the whole gathered coldness of the unsunned rock around and above me, pushing out into the air and water.  I glanced back over my shoulder.  The big semicircular mouth of the cave had by now shrunk to a cuticle of light.  I could only just see out to the horizon of the see, and I felt a sudden involuntary lurch of fear.

You and me both, Robert.  The powerful sense of claustrophobia this evokes is a good example of the way Macfarlane conveys a textured, detailed impression of the places he visits; sound, smell, temperature, surface and colour all combine in his writing to take the reader with him to the wild places.  His language is also fresh and attractive; I love that "unsunned" and the "cuticle of light".  He is also frank about his other lurches of fear; as it turns out, he doesn't want to climb the Inaccessible Pinnacle either.  Alongside his evocations of place are lots of detours into the history of the places he visits and of the people who frequented them.  Some of these are famous - Coleridge, Ivor Gurney - others much less so, like W.H. Murray who wrote about the Scottish mountains, on blank loo paper, while a prisoner of war during World War II.  His historical and biographical writing is detailed and confident, and balanced elegantly against his evocation of place.

A key figure in this book is Roger Deakin, author of Wildwood and Waterlog, and a cherished friend of Macfarlane's.  They travel together to explore the Burren in Ireland and the holloways of Dorset.  But the book pivots around Deakin's sudden illness and untimely death; he is in many ways the inspiration for Macfarlane's journeys, and the second half of the book is in some ways an account of recovering from this loss and a celebration of Deakin himself.  I particlarly enjoyed the passing reference to the three different varieties of moss Roger Deakin proudly points out, growing in the footwells of his ancient car.  Robert Macfarlane has a book just out called The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot which sounds very enticing and has just slipped onto my Amazon wish-list.

Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins

Harriet is the tragic story of a young woman's exploitation.  Based on a real case, the 'Penge Mystery' that gripped 1870s London, the novel explains how Harriet, a woman with what we would now call a learning disability and also a three thousand pound legacy, falls into the hands of Lewis Oman and his brother Patrick.  Patrick is an unsuccessful artist with a wife, the beautiful Elizabeth, and two small children; Lewis works as an auctioneer's clerk and is, at the start of the novel, romantically involved with Elizabeth's sister Alice Hoppner.  Harriet is living with her mother, Mrs Ogilvy, who genuinely loves her daughter and has cared for her as best she can; Harriet likes the theatre, nice clothes and shoes, is fastidious, and can hold simple conversations.  However, she is not easy company and her mother occasionally sends her away for a few weeks as a paying guest.  The Hoppners are cousins of some sort, and it is while staying with them that Lewis meets Harriet.  Discovering the extent of her fortune (Harriet's wealth would have the purchasing power of over a million pounds today) he determines to marry her.  Mrs Ogilvy's attempts to prevent the marriage by legal means fail, and Lewis and Harriet marry.  For a while, they live together in London; Mrs Ogilvy attempts a reconciliation with her daughter but is rebuffed.  When Harriet becomes pregnant, Lewis uses this as a pretext to bring Alice to live with them, but once the child is born he decides to take things even further.

Elizabeth Jenkins makes a compelling and horrifying novel out of this story.  As Rachel Cooke's  Afterword to the Persephone edition explains, she stuck very closely to the source material, barely changing the characters' names and keeping the suburban south London location for much of the action.  What the novel does so well is show how people slip by degrees into crime, how acquiescence turns to commission, and how much guilt can be ascribed to those who see what is happening, but choose not to understand it.  Much of this narrative focuses on Elizabeth, who agrees to house Harriet and her child and, slowly, is drawn into perpetuating her neglect.  Midway through the novel, she realises that Alice has taken one of Harriet's beautiful dresses and unpicked it to remake for herself, but she "looked away without saying anything".  This connivance is the foundation for Elizabeth's eventual conception of Harriet as inhuman: "It wasn't, after all, as if Harriet felt anything" and her collusion is fuelled by her overpowering love for her husband, Patrick.  The network of relationships between Lewis, Patrick, Elizabeth and Alice is deeply intense, the brothers in particular shown as enmeshed in a folie à deux that clearly cannot end well.  What is most troubling, however, is the four's calm acceptance of the luxuries provided by Harriet's money while she is imprisoned and neglected upstairs.  In this scene, Patrick has just announced that he has boarded up Harriet's window:

"They all stretched out their feet to the comforting glow; the afternoons were drawing in fast, and the firelight turned them in their afternoon drowsiness to Egyptian figures, ruddy and black."

Patrick and Elizabeth can hardly afford coal under normal circumstances; the news that Harriet can no longer see out of the window, or have her bare room ventilated, does not disrupt their comfortable afternoon drowsiness in any way.  But Jenkins, while she is convinced of the guilt of the Omans and Alice, also carefully notes those who could have done something, but did not; passing tradesmen who saw Harriet, the servant Clara, Mrs Hoppner, the police and other authorities to name a few.  However, she also shows their reasons for not acting on their suspicions, particularly in the case of naive and powerless Clara.  This reminded me a lot of the debate around various recent and ghastly child abuse scandals, and the debate around individual and collective guilt for crimes of this sort.   I also really enjoyed Jenkins's writing style, which is lucid, expressive and powerful.  Here, suburban Alice, rejected by Louis for Harriet,  has her first encounter with the delights of a Kentish spring:

"But when in one of her solitary walks she came across a thicket of whitehorn, standing in ethereal brillance against the dark wood-side, it gave her a pang of such sharpness that she almost felt her unhappiness had never really come upon her until this moment.  She retraced her steps in horror, and from that time she half unconsciously shunned anything beautiful in scent or sight or sound that the countryside offered [...] when the time of the full moon grew near, she would wake within the narrow space of four bare walls, the patches of radiance reflected on the wall as if through prison bars, and the great golden face gazing in upon her, forbidding her to sleep; forbidding her, in that strange silence and light, to cry."

Jenkins cleverly evokes the early signs of Spring, which most readers would find pleasurable, to explore Alice's psychology; her rejection and fear of natural beauty helps establish her as someone who might well reject prevalent moral standards.

This book is without a doubt disturbing, without being in any way gratuitous, but, as I said above, entirely compelling.  I've not read any of Jenkins's other work but will be seeking it out.  The Persephone edition is, as always, beautifully produced, and the Afterword is enlightening on the real case that inspired the novel.  Desperate Reader and Harriet Devine have both written interesting reviews of this book, and there is an Observer piece by Rachel Cooke about the real case behind the text.

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I've been put off opening this, even though I read it before years ago, by my experience with Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, but really I needn't have worried.  This is a short novel-length return to Cold Comfort Farm, converted, in post-WW2 austerity, into a conference centre managed by a trust.  All the Starkadders except Reuben have disappeared, mostly to South Africa, and Reuben himself has been moved out of the farmhouse and into a rude hut on Ticklepenny's Field, the last bit of land remaining to him.  Flora, summoned by Mr Mybug to help run a conference at Cold Comfort, including modernists, advanced thinkers and high-ranking examples of the new managerial aristocracy, immediately sets about putting things right.

Like the original novel, the narrative is slightly speculative, with some sort of managerialist government in power and everyone conscripted into useful work. Flora is now the mother of five, so has a government-assigned spiv to act as au pair; Reuben has been soundly ripped off by a combination of the Ministry of Agriculture and a body analagous to the National Trust. Gibbons has lots of fun with the modernist artists and their output, the managers and their machinations, a set of dipsomaniac scientists, and the enduringly ridiculous Mr Mybug, still married to Rennett and with three sons, who have "fixations" on their parents which take the form of "liking to be with us, wanting to be kissed goodnight, and that sort of thing.  We've tried everything - it only gets worse".  Adam Lambsbreath reappears, apparently immortal and still longing for his little mop, and there is a moving reunion between Urk and the water-voles.

Flora has lost none of her capability or her charm but is perhaps slightly more assertive.  One of my favourite moments in Cold Comfort Farm is when Mr Mybug eats the little cake that Flora had wanted for herself, and it chokes him.  This time, he is firmly prevented from stealing her hot milk.  I cannot help thinking that Stella Gibbons' own experience informs Flora's thoughts on receiving confidences: "years and years of listening to people had taught her that if she just kept quiet and sipped or sewed and never looked shocked, there was literally no limit - no limit at all - to what people would tell her".  I suspect many of us can endorse that.

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm is short, sharp and funny, and highly recommended to cheer up a damp cold Bank Holiday or other dreary circumstances.  Also recommended is I Prefer Reading's review.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson

The title of this book is a question posed to the young Jeannette by her adoptive mother, and this memoir tracks the boundaries of happiness and normality, slipping over the border into misery and unreality.  The book is in two parts: the first part retraces, in memoir form, the story already told in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit; the second - after an intermission in which Winterson explains she will be leaving out 25 years of her life - tells the story of her search for her birth mother.  Anyone who has read Oranges will know that Jeannette Winterson's early life was strange, funny, and deeply troubling, and all of those adjectives apply to this book too.  Often, though, she insists on the normality of her life alongside its extraordinariness, drawing out the typical aspects of a Northern working-class upbringing within her own life.  For me, this just made the extraordinary aspects even more so.  Winterson is unflinching in explaining how her upbringing has affected her, especially in terms of the way she subsequently treated others; violence, lack of trust and lack of an ability to believe in the continuity of love have all marked her, and the people who were close to her.  She has also achieved what seemed to me a very generous understanding of both her mothers, particularly the monstrous Mrs Winterson, who she comes to see as "too big for her world, but she crouched gloomy and awkward under its low shelf, now and again exploding to her full three hundred feet and towering over us.  Then, because it was useless, redundant, only destructive, or so it seemed, she shrank back again, defeated".

Inevitably, the question of truth or fiction arises in this text.  Winterson tells us she is often asked what is "true" in Oranges and what was invented.  Part of this memoir shows us how books supported and constructed her idea of self, and it is to other, similar texts, that she turns to consider the "authentic" and the "fictional" selves:

Woolf and Stein were radical to use real people in their fictions and to muddle their facts - Orlando with its actual photos of Vita Sackville-West, and Alice Toklas, the supposed writer, who is Stein's lover but not the writer ...
For me, fascinated with identity, and how you define yourself, those books were crucial.  Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

It seems to me that reading yourself as a fiction is also a way to make the intolerable tolerable, through constructing alternative realities and futures.  I found all of this book, the hope and despair, terribly moving even while it was funny; the humour is, perhaps, another construction that keeps the narrative open.

The Vicar's Daughter by E.H. Young

The Vicar's Daughter is an Edwardian (or possibly late Victorian) family drama set in the small community of a fishing village, Old Framling,  lately annexed by New Framling, a modern seaside resort.   Edward Stack is the vicar of the title, but his wife Margaret, a loving, energetic and manipulative woman, is the protagonist.  At the start of the novel they are away on holiday with their daughter Hilary, and Edward's cousin Maurice Roper is acting as a substitute vicar. While the family are away, he has done a little meddling of his own.  Caroline, a young woman from their childhood home. has come to see Edward; Maurice puts two and two together and decides she must be Edward's daughter from an earlier relationship.  Opposite the Stacks live John and James Blunt, local businessmen, and their housekeeper is ill; what could be more convenient than for Caroline to take over?  When the family return, Maurice lets slip to Margaret, whom he once loved, his suppositions about Caroline's origins.  The novel revolves around Margaret's efforts to manage this complicated situation and resolve it without damaging her much-loved daughter.

Margaret is, in many ways, rather like Young's Miss Mole, particularly in the clever way she works other people to her own ends; like Miss Mole, she can be secretive and devious, but also like Miss Mole, she is an attractive character, saved from outright cynicism by her love for others.  We see Edward mainly through Margaret and Maurice's eyes, and he remained a little two-dimensional to me.  Maurice is that difficult thing, a really well-achieved unsympathetic character, with depth and breadth.    Young makes interesting use of the topography of the town and the Vicarage, placing and moving her characters carefully through spaces to achieve intimacy or the reverse of it.  However, for me this lacked the punch of Miss Mole; as in William, the narrative pace is slow, and the drama protracted.

Even so, there is quite a lot of interest here.  I've been reading a lot of interwar novels about mothers and daughters lately for study purposes, and the genuinely warm and loving relationship between Margaret and Hilary is highly unusual in this context.  Margaret herself is a fascinating portrayal of a woman of immense capability who had no option in life other than marriage, but has devoted her energies to making that option a success: "Marriage and motherhood were the only arts she had been able to practise, and what creative impulse she possessed she had spent on Hilary and Edward".  Margaret embraces this position, but the narrative makes clear how much it costs her to do so. The contrast between authentic old fishing village and its brash new tourist resort neighbour is such a staple of middlebrow fiction that surely somebody is writing a book about it, but its effect is subtle in this text.

Like Young's other novels, this one is out of print, but secondhand copies of the Virago edition are cheap and abundant. 

The Oakleyites by E.F. Benson

If you open The Oakleyites hoping to step into one of E.F. Benson's witty satires of upper-middle-class social life between the wars, you will not be disappointed.  But you will also get something unexpectedly serious as well.

Oakley-on-Sea is quite obviously Rye, or Tilling as it becomes in the Lucia books, and the Oakleyites themselves are a leisured, mainly female group centred around Dorothy Jackson.  Dorothy is cheerful, active and vigorous, and deeply involved in local life; she leads a Dante reading group, sits on the Art Society committee, and enjoys a good game of golf.  In her early thirties, she remains unmarried, having spent her twenties nursing her mother who died of tuberculosis.  The Oakleyites are happily involved in their clubs, their sport, and the engrossing business of letting their houses for the summer, but are disrupted by some new residents.  The first new arrivals are Wilfred Easton, a popular novelist, who takes a house in Oakley for the winter, bringing his mother to live with him.   Kindhearted Dorothy opens her house to her younger sister Daisy, fleeing an improvident marriage to an adulterous and violent, but titled, husband. 

So far, so proto-Lucia; but Dorothy has none of Lucia's guile, Daisy's motivations are simple and transparent, and while Wilfred may live with his mother he is miles away from Georgie.  The novel very quickly sets up a triangular relationship between these three people.  Dorothy, who had considered her chances of marriage entirely behind her, falls in love with Wilfred, and he begins to show signs of affection for her.  But Wilfred's heart was broken in his youth by a woman uncannily like Daisy; and Daisy herself seeks attention and affection from Wilfred in the aftermath of her failed marriage.  E.F. Benson manages to extract both humour and tragedy from this situation.  The narrative presents Daisy as fairly frightful, for example, self-interested and frivolous, but it does not suggest that she has not truly suffered in her marriage.  Dorothy often recognises the ridiculousness of her own situation even while it is making her miserable.  There are blackly humorous sub-plots that involve the three daughters of Dorothy's neighbour, Mr Audley, squabbling over his will - and the account of the annual Art Society exhibition is as funny here as it is in the Lucia stories.

Dorothy, Wilfred and Wilfred's mother Mrs Easton are all attractive characters, and Wilfred is particularly interesting as a portrait of the writer of popular novels in early twentieth century society - his books feature the wicked doings of Marchionesses who are no better than they ought to be  - who acknowledges that "my work has nothing to do with Art.  It is trade".  He and Dorothy discuss about the dilettante dabblings of the Oakleyites in art and literature, often to hideous effect, and compare this to his own production of decidedly unliterary fiction.  In addition to all this, there are some occasionally unexpectedly lovely bits of writing, especially about the beauties of Oakley itself:

"Outside, serene saffron-coloured lights hung in the West, amazingly luminous, so that though the sun had set, the illuminated sky still dimly outlined the shadows of chimneys and gables onto the westward-facing walls of houses opposite.  In the narrowing street up which Miss Dorothy walked briskly to her home, a clear twilight as of translucent water flowed deeper and deeper, but when, passing though the darkling house, she came out for a stroll in her garden, which stood on the very top of the hill-plateau, it was like emerging into some enchanted place.  A yellow unreal light flooded it, making the grass look orange-toned and the familiar and splendid hues of her October flowerbeds seemed as if they had been painted anew."

This is not what I usually expect from Benson, although his love of Rye and in particular this house, inhabited by EFB in real life and Dorothy, Miss Mapp and Lucia on the page, invariably characterises his books.  Expected or not, I found it very enjoyable to read.  It seems to be out of print, although there are facsimile versions around and it is available online.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

This was my first Dorothy L. Sayers, and for the first third of the book I thought it might well be my last.    Lord Peter Wimsey's daffy monologues irritated rather than charmed, the archness of the narrative annoyed me, the little self-referential footnotes got on my nerves.  But as I reached the middle section of the book it started to hook me in.  The novel - and the characters - seemed to genuinely care about the unfortunate murder victims; the narrative suddenly fleshed out Lord Peter, his valet Bunter, and the senior policeman Parker, giving them three-dimensional characters instead of vaguely throwing literary stereotypes onto the page; the atmosphere of 1920s London became breathable.  I also came to enjoy Sayers's style: the scene where a woman must try to identify her husband after he has been fairly thoroughly dissected in an anatomy lab, told almost entirely through dialogue, was particularly powerful.

The plotting is not terribly sophisticated, and it is fairly obvious from the early stages who the murderer is; the tension is built in the race to prove his guilt before he realises that discovery is imminent.  Sayers is very good at showing how many people are touched by the effects of a crime, how its impact radiates out through many layers of society.  I finished this book looking forward to reading the next one in the series.

This was also the first book I'd read on an e-reader.  A Kobo has come into my possession, and as yet I'm not entirely sure about it, although it is hugely convenient for travelling.  I missed the sensation of holding the book in my hands, and the Kobo didn't turn the pages quickly enough for my liking.  If you have (or acquire) an e-reader I highly recommend Girlebooks, who have a lovely range of women's writing, much of it free, in various e-book formats.

Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay

I'm not that familiar with Rose Macaulay's work, having only read The Towers of Trebizond which I enjoyed enough to re-read a couple of times.  Dangerous Ages, first published in 1921, is very different to that book both in theme and in style.  The dangerous ages concerned are all the possible ages of woman, as experienced in one English family during the summer of 1920.  Neville Bendish celebrates her forty-third birthday in the opening chapter; Neville is married to Rodney, a Labour MP, and has two fairly grown-up children, Gerda and Kay.  Neville has two sisters: Pamela, a social worker who lives in London with a woman friend; and Nan, the youngest, who works as a writer.  Their mother, Mrs Hilary, is sixty-three and very bored and fretful; she lives in a seaside town with her mother, in her eighties and always known as Grandmamma in the text.  Gerda, Nan, Neville and Mrs Hilary will all go through forms of crisis during the novel, while Pamela and Grandmamma seem to have the secret of enjoying life without despairing over it.

Neville's crisis is over her need for work.  She was a promising medical student when she married, and determines to return to her studies, desperate to avoid becoming like Mrs Hilary.  Her family are generally discouraging and assume she won't be able to do it; there are lots of portentous comments about the inability of a woman in her forties to do serious "brain-work".  I'm even older than Neville, and frankly I found this discouraging.  Family circumstances, as well as her decrepit brain, scupper Neville's plans, but the novel ends with a glimmer of hope for her.  Most of the women in the novel, even old-fashioned Grandmamma, are keen on the idea of work (paid or otherwise) as a means to promote energy and interest in life; Mrs Hilary's tragedy is that she feels the need of this, but has not the intellect or the drive to achieve it, and sinks into ennui while criticising her daughters for dissipating themselves in social work or literary endeavour.   She hopes for rescue through psychoanalysis, an expensive form of attention-seeking at a guinea a session.  Nan, a successful writer,  and the ingenue Gerda have a shared crisis over the rather unlikely love object Barry Briscoe, energetic administrator of the Workers' Educational Association; this crisis provokes another, as Nan flees to Rome and the attentions of a married, consumptive artist, and her mother seeks to repair the damage.

Rose Macaulay's narrative tone through the novel is archly humorous, mocking her characters when they deserve it, and shining a light on their petty egotisms and vanities.  Sometimes this goes a bit far; her handling of Gerda, who writes awful poetry (we get to read a little of it) and is firmly committed to a set of fashionable principles, was not unlike an upper-middle-class version of Cold Comfort Farm's Elfine.  I wasn't sure if Gerda was really supposed to be that ridiculous.  Compared to The Towers of Trebizond, the novel is considerably more detached and ironic, although that may be because of the third-person narration, and the mostly English setting gives fewer opportunities for quirky comedy.  The satire of Mrs Hilary's psychoanalysis is, however, extremely funny, as is Nan's hazardous challenge to Gerda's love for Barry.  There is a lot more detail in the text than I've been able to do justice to here, as Macaulay lets her satirical eye rest on the tastes and choices of four generations of women.

Great War Fiction reviews this novel favourably, as does Frisbee: A Book Journal.  Unfortunately, the book is out of print, but it is available online at Project Gutenberg.

Do Shrimps Make Good Mothers?

Delafield fans will remember the Provincial Lady asking herself this odd question, and I came across another reference to it yesterday in Winifred Holtby's Women and a Changing Civilisation and was finally inspired to look it up.  "Do Shrimps Make Good Mothers?" turns out to be the title of a comic song that was popular in the 1920s.  Here are the Two Gilberts (neither, apparently, actually called Gilbert) singing it, from 1924:



As you'll hear, the answer to the question is an emphatic "Yes, they do".

Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit

An expansive, exhilarating history of walking, Rebecca Solnit's book encompasses walking as transport, as pastime, as pilgrimage and as protest.  She moves between her own experience of walking, theories of the evolution of walking and philosophies of walking, stopping off to look at the key thinkers and writers who have shaped our understanding of this everyday activity.  Inevitably, a history of walking also becomes a history of the places we walk, and the people who did (and didn't) walk there.

The breadth and depth of her research is remarkable and she pays close, critical attention to the theories she reviews, drawing out some of the ironies of trying to think about walking as well as presenting her own theories of the symbolism of walking.  She describes artists who have used walking to form their works, as well as writers who have relied upon walking to drive their literary endeavours, with a whole chapter devoted to The Legs of William Wordsworth.  Walking in streets, parks, gardens and the wider countryside are all considered.  Walking can seem elemental and free, but has of course been as much constrained as any type of activity; Solnit tells the story of the struggle for access to the countryside and the struggle to preserve urban environments that can be walked.  She also links the act of walking very strongly to the notion of narrative, and to the narrative of human history in particular: "Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker.  They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens and reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist [...] Roads are  a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there."

This notion connects walking intimately to the idea of creativity, and the book reiterates its insistence on the psychological value of walking as a means of producing contentment, understanding, creative energy and new ideas.  "Musing" she writes, "takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been ploughed, developed or put to any immediately practical use.  Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop.  The same is true of the meadowlands of the imagination; time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated.  The fight for free space - for wilderness and for public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space." Solnit does not over-stress her argument, but her passing references to unwalkable places - towns that have no pavements or no road crossings, or places that have lost their walkers and are perceived as dangerous as a result - show us the consequences of marginalising such a fundamental activity.

Solnit's prose is elegant and her arguments compelling.  I enjoyed this book hugely, and found I was quite envious of her for having written it, for being able to combine a pleasurable activity with a fascinating research process.  Any admirers of Roger Deakin or Robert MacFarlane's books on similar themes will get a lot out of this book.  Solnit has written several other books which I look forward to exploring.

The New House by Lettice Cooper

It is 1936, and Rhoda Powell and her widowed mother Natalie are moving from their large family home, Stone House, to a smaller house in the same northern English town.  Rhoda's younger sister Delia comes to help on moving day; she is about to be married and will therefore be leaving her job in a London laboratory. She suggests that Rhoda should apply for it and leave home.  Rhoda initially dismisses the idea of leaving her mother, but gradually she realises how much she wants a more independent life.  Will she take this opportunity, or will her sense of loyalty and duty prevail?

The novel is set over a single day and follows the Powells as they pack, dispense cups of tea to the removal men, and unpack in their new house.  As well as Rhoda and her mother and sister, we also meet her brother Maurice, struggling to run the family engineering business; his wife Evelyn, hungry for social success and more money; and Aunt Ellen, Natalie's sister who never married and cared for their mother all her life.  Natalie is outraged by the circumstances of the move; petted and spoiled all her life, she cannot understand why Rhoda and Maurice are allowing this to happen.  Rhoda's sudden expression of her wish to leave home knocks her even further off balance: she takes Rhoda entirely for granted as her helpmeet and companion, fretting when Rhoda fails to put her needs first, jealous of Rhoda's friends and other interests.  There is a loving mother hidden inside Natalie, but she is mainly suppressed by the demanding child that is the personality she shows the world.  As well as the drama unfolding between Rhoda and her mother, two sub-plots run through the novel: the difficulties emerging in Maurice's marriage, and the stoical existence of Aunt Ellen, who suppresses thoughts of her unmet needs and counts her blessings.

This family drama is set firmly in its social context.  Maurice is troubled by his increasing sympathy with the principles of socialism, a sympathy entirely unshared by his wife.  A colleague has made the radical decision to pay himself what he pays his employees, but Maurice knows that Evelyn would never accede to such a redistribution of wealth.  Stone House will be sold to a property developer and its large garden accommodate better housing for the working class.  Natalie is appalled to realise that she will be able to see her neighbours' laundry from her new house; the new house, by the way, is an enlarged lodge that once belonged to the local manor house, and sounds delightful.  Both Natalie and Evelyn are disturbed by the emergence of the poor from their slums where they were decently hidden from sight, and by the new power of tradesmen, and no amount of chaffing by the rest of the family will shift them from this position.  Lettice Cooper also makes a definitive link between the oppression of the poor under capitalism, and the oppression of daughters like Rhoda within the family; Rhoda is well aware of her position, poised between the accepting dutifulness of Aunt Ellen and the greater independence of Delia.

If this all sounds rather worthy, it isn't; it's made entirely pleasurable by Lettice Cooper's lovely writing.  Maureen Duffy's introduction to the Virago edition makes the link with Jane Austen, which is a good comparison, but as well as light irony, fairness and lucidity runs through her prose.  There are also passages that are just straightforwardly beautiful, like this one, in which Rhoda contemplates the nature of change:

It was the newness of the seaside when you went out after tea the first evening; the newness of your bedroom in a friend's house, when you were shown into it, your bag there, just brought up, and the jug of hot water covered with a towel; the newness of your first foreign journey, walking from the boat to the train through strange voices, thinking, I'm in France!  It was precious because it went too soon.  Other things succeeded, but never that particular enchantment.  This fragile bloom was on the whole house, the rooms they had not slept nor eaten in, the garden where they had picked nothing, and the tangle of neglected flowers not of their growing.

Cooper is also good at dropping in little epigrams, little comments about life, which are so clear and obvious you wonder why they have never occurred to you before.  When Rhoda, for example,  remembers a moment of childhood epiphany, she suddenly realises that "it was these moments that made you disinherited; you were homesick in life because there were so few of them".  The Manchester Guardian called this novel Chekhov in Yorkshire on its first publication, which gives you an indication of its beauty and insight.

Lettice Cooper's writing career lasted over sixty years, and she lived to see her work be reissued by Virago and reach a new audience.  The New House is still available from Persephone, and there are secondhand copies around of her other nineteen novels, which range in theme from 1930s Yorkshire to stories set in Florence and a novel about the 1972 miners' strike in Britain.

The Island by Naomi Royde-Smith

It was possibly a mistake to pick this up after Henry Green since this 1930 novel is decidedly heavy on the exposition, avoiding subtle indicators of character or tone in favour of huge symbols and signs that direct the reader firmly towards full understanding of Naomi Royde-Smith's vision.   The novel is subtitled A Love Story, and its protagonist is the orphaned Myfanwy Hughes, known as Goosey.  Living with her aunt and uncle on a farm in North Wales, she falls in love with pretty, sophisticated and rather amoral Flossie Priestman, known to Goosey as Almond.  Flossie/Almond likes Goosey's attention more than she likes Goosey herself, and after she marries, Goosey is rather glad to see the back of her.  Goosey moves to the seaside town of Rockhead with another aunt, a milliner, who has taken her on as apprentice; marriage to the local draper becomes a possibility.  But Almond, a disruptive force, runs in and out of Goosey's life, leaving her husband and returning to him, but always keeping Goosey's devotion at a rolling boil. Goosey eventually, comes to see Almond as the person who has led her into a life of irredeemable sin, leading to a permanent breach between them and the decline of Goosey's rather tenuous hold on sanity.

This book was written at the end of 1929 and published in 1930, and it reads rather like a response to, and repudiation of,  Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness.  In its way, it is as frank as Hall's book;  if you are thinking that the Well is not particularly explicit you are probably right, but reading dozens of interwar books about lesbianism has warped my perspective. However, while The Island accepts notions of lesbian identity, and - interestingly - explores the way these are constructed by mainstream society, the conclusion of the book is the antithesis of the Well.  Stephen Gordon prays to her God for a right to live in her own way; Goosey sets herself against her God among the forces of the damned.  The only thing worse than being a lesbian in most interwar novels on this theme is being bisexual: Almond sits alongside Angela Crossby from the Well as a classic fictional bisexual stereotype, manipulative, duplicitous and self-interested.  She retreats into heterosexual respectability while poor Goosey retreats into madness. 

A lot of this book is really quite silly - apparently, you can become a lesbian through being snubbed by a man riding a horse across a marsh - and the narrative's attitude to its characters is often ambivalent.  Goosey is both pitied and blamed for her fate.  Like Radclyffe Hall's novel, it's also terribly earnest; although there are elements of the arch comedy that I enjoyed in The Tortoiseshell Cat, these sit awkwardly with the tragedy of Goosey's life. The writing is also quite variable in quality.  However, it is also interesting, mostly because it looks at Goosey and Almond's relationship in its context, showing the reactions of those around them,   Compared to other similar characters, Goosey and Almond are rooted in ordinary life, working, marrying, raising children; they are not rich, cultured or creative.  Royde-Smith also opens up the question of how much we should try to help the bewildered and lost when we meet them, of whether there is a wider responsibility for Goosey's despair.

The novel has been out of print for years, but second-hand copies are not that expensive.

Loving by Henry Green

It's Henry Green Week in literary blogworld, prompted by winstonsdad, and my choice from Green's nine novels is Loving, a 1945 novel set in an Irish country house during the Second World War.  Like most Irish country houses at that time it is owned by an English family, the Tennants, and mainly staffed by English servants.  Only widowed Mrs Tennant, her daughter-in-law Violet and Violet's two little girls are in residence, since Violet's husband Jack is serving in the British forces.  This little family requires a small army of servants to care for them and the house, and the narrative shows us much more of downstairs life, the adult Tennants being in England for a good stretch of the text.  At the start of the novel the butler, Mr Eldon, dies; his place is taken by the footman Raunce, much to the disgust of the housekeeper Miss Burch.  Housemaid Edith is not so repelled by Raunce, however, and the novel traces the development of their relationship through the tensions and anxieties of wartime life.  If you are being reminded of Downton Abbey at this point you are not alone, but don't let that put you off.

Tensions run high at the house; there are fears of German invasion, fears of the IRA, and many of the servants struggle with the guilt of having evaded war service in England.  Raunce is disliked by many of the servants; Kate, another maid, is jealous of her friend Edith's closeness to him, and Albert the pantry boy suffers both from unrequited love for Edith and from serving under Raunce.  The cook's nephew, another Albert, who comes to stay as an evacuee, is a powerfully disruptive force.  A valuable ring goes missing just before the Tennants leave for England; the combination of this loss with the prevailing wartime tensions creates an atmosphere of intense paranoia.  This is brilliantly evoked in Green's unique narrative style.

Green apparently disliked being called a modernist, but I'm not sure how else I would describe his prose.  There is no internal monologue; we only very occasionally hear a character's thoughts; and the narrative voice is flat, never commenting on how characters say or do things, simply describing plainly what they say and do.  Winstonsdad quotes James Woods on Green, showing how this was a deliberate strategy:

Green was obsessively concerned with the elimination of vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers : he never internalized his characters thoughts hardly ever explained a characters motive ,and avoids the authorial adverb, which so often helpfully flags a character’s emotion to the reader (“she said grandiloquent” ). Green argued that dialogue is the best way to communicate with one’s reader and that nothing kills “life ” so much as explanation”.

As the reader, you are set down in the middle of dialogues or situations that you may not fully understand, where speech alludes to something you cannot know. The novel builds up layers of allusive meaning that you must interpret, driving the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps and colour the narrative with detail.  For me, this made the novel a compelling and satisfying read.  Green's prose might be flat but it is also frequently beautiful.  I particularly enjoyed the description of Albert the pantry boy playing blind man's buff:

Then it was his turn.  There was only Edith tall enough to tie him and as 'I love you I love you' was knotted over his eyes he quietly drew a great breath perhaps to find out if Edith had left anything on this piece of stuff.  He drew and drew again cautious as if he might be after a deep draught of her, of her skin, of herself.  He was puffed already when his arms went out to go round and round and round her.  But she was not there and for answer he had a storm of giggles which he could not tell one from another and which went ricocheting from stone cold bosoms to damp streaming marble bellies, to and from huge oyster niches in the walls in which boys fought giant boas or idled with a flute, and which volleyed under green skylights empty in the ceiling.  He went slow.  He could hear feet slither.  Then he turned in a flash.  He had Edith.  He stood awkward one hand on her stomach the other on the small of her back.

Blind man's buff is a fairly good metaphor for the position of the reader in this text, unable to see, needing to pay attention and interpret confusing sounds and actions.  The setting for this scene, a mock Greek temple, also brings out another aspect of Green's writing; throughout the novel I had the sense that there was a symbolic meaning to most of what I was reading, although like Albert I'm not sure that I grasped the half of it.  

Karyn at A Penguin a Week has also reviewed Loving.  Six of Henry Green's novels are still in print, in two compendium volumes published by Vintage.  I have Living and Party Going still to enjoy.

Mary Olivier: A Life by May Sinclair

This 1919 novel is a strongly autobiographical Bildungsroman that takes Sinclair's heroine from rural Essex in the 1860s, the youngest child of middle-class parents, to middle age in Edwardian Yorkshire.  On the way she will live through the difficulties of getting an education, the possibilities of marriage, and above all the demands and complexities of family life.  Mary has three older brothers and her mother has hoped for a dutiful daughter, encouraging her from the early pages of the text to give up her own will.  But Mary is never entirely convinced that God really wants her to give up her will, and begins to speculate that it is more her mother's idea.  Despite her tendency towards autonomy, Mary is never entirely able to separate herself from her mother; they live on together through Mamma's widowhood, loving and hating each other in fairly equal measure.  But Mary, in her way, succeeds in preserving her own sense of self, and the novel closes on a personal, triumphant epiphany.

There is a lot to enjoy here.  There is the character of Mary herself, who turns from an engaging child to an engaged woman, and is never less than interesting, with her individual view of the world and her strong sense of beauty; there is a whole range of other fascinating characters, some who appear only briefly but still make their mark; there is the impact of philosophy and psychology, particularly Freud, on the text; and there is May Sinclair's prose.  The novel is structured episodically, in short sub-chapters that tell of key events in Mary's life and sometimes of dull, insignificant days.  Sometimes years pass in a few pages; other periods of time are expanded and considered in minute detail.  The narrative switches between Mary's first person interior monologue, another interior voice which uses the second person, and a third person narrator who is nonetheless narrating from Mary's point of view.  May Sinclair is known for her early engagement with modernism, both as critic and as artist, and the evidence of this is clear in this novel.  But she is not simply dabbling; her techniques are effective and sustained.

As Jean Radford points out in her introduction to the Virago edition, the novel is a bit long, possibly due to autobiographical fidelity, and some of the Freudian references seem a bit obvious to the modern reader.  While I'm not sure if the way Mary resolves her difficulties with life is a way I would choose myself, she remains for me an entirely believable and rather admirable character.  This is partly due to the remarkable number of difficulties that she has to face through her forty-five years, difficulties which often make the book rather sad reading.  Mary's story does provoke both pity and anger, particularly as the narrative reveals how much she has been betrayed by those who claim to love her.  However, the ending is redemptive for Mary, and left me with a sense of hope about the second half of her life. 

The Virago edition of this book is still in print and still has the same lovely George Clausen painting on the cover; there are also secondhand copies easily available.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

This collection, aside from the title story which takes us back to Howling before Flora Poste tidied up the unruly Starkadders, is rooted in the middle-class world of 1930s England.  Spinsters retire to country cottages, bohemian types are satirised, fey girls find suitable husbands, and intergenerational tensions simmer in suburbia.  This might be to do with the magazines that first carried these stories; The Lady, Good Housekeeping and Bystander were not - and are not in the case of the first two - known for their social radicalism.  Although the volume first appeared in 1940 there is no reference to the war, nor any intimation of it; I wonder if the book had a nostalgic appeal for those readers who opened it on publication.

There are two Christmas stories here: as well as the hilarious return to Cold Comfort, in "The Little Christmas Tree" novelist Rhoda Harting's first Christmas in her country cottage is interrupted and then taken over by some children who spin her a yarn about their wicked stepmother.  Stella Gibbons is rather good at awful but somehow charming children. I also enjoyed "Golden Vanity", in which a dreamy library assistant discovers that her favourite author, handsome Geoffrey Whithorne, is really a middle-aged woman called Alice Little, not least for its echoes of Secret Lives.  The stories have excellent shape and structure, and if the narrative voice is sometimes a little archly superior, it is never without humour.

However, I was slightly disturbed by the story called "Cake", in which modern career girl Jenny meets ageing militant suffragette Maud Allworton, and is inspired by her to take back her slightly drunk and adulterous husband so that they can have children.  I've read it twice now to try to work out what is going on.  The narrative point of view switches between Jenny's own, which shifts from complacently judgemental through utter self-doubt into hectic resolution through the story, and the omniscient narrator who is wearing an audible frown.   The narrator disapproves of Jenny, who initially cares only for money and self-advancement; Jenny and the narrator both disapprove of Miss Allworton, who gave up the chance of marriage for the suffragette cause.  Jenny is sarcastic about the gains made for women by the suffragettes, thinking them "such fools", but the suffragette's life story precipitates her rush to Victoria Station to take back her husband before it is too late.  She gets him back, but he rewards her change of heart by slapping her face - which she acknowledges she deserves.  This seems to me to be more than the small c-conservatism that Nicolas Lezard noted in his review of the book.  However, Jenny's nascent friendship with Miss Allworton, a mutual liking that transcends the prejudices of both women, warms what could be a chilly, depressing tale.  The ironic tone and ironic evolution of the characters make this story puzzling even when I find elements of it distasteful.  The title comes from Jenny's belief that 1930s women can have their cake and eat it too; unhappiness like Miss Allworton's comes from inefficient cake-management.

This seems to be a general problem I'm having with Stella Gibbons - the writing might be beautiful, the story well-crafted, and the jokes good, but there always seem to be things that make me wince studded through her work, like finding a bit of nutshell in a mouthful of well-managed cake.  For some alternative views, here are Desperate Reader and I Prefer Reading on the same book.

Secret Lives by E.F. Benson

This 1932 comedy of manners is set in Durham Square, a respectable if not yet fashionable London address populated with exactly the sort of people you might expect to find in an E.F. Benson novel.  Chief among these is Mrs Mantrip, who owns most of the freeholds in the square; her clergyman father, with reformist zeal and deep pockets, bought up the property in order to evict the prostitutes who were lowering the local moral tone.  Her neighbours (who are often also her tenants) include Elizabeth Conklin, who breeds Pekinese dogs; playful Jimmie Mason, with his extravagant musical parties and exotic guests; and lately Miss Susan Leg, who has furnished her house extravagantly and is irritating the Square with her love of writing to the accompaniment of very loud gramophone music.  The source of Susan's apparently vast income, like her social origins, is obscure.  Mrs Mantrip is the highbrow social arbiter of Durham Square but she nurtures a secret passion for the decidedly lowbrow works of Rudolph da Vinci which feature kidnappings, swarthy foreigners and an unusually large amount of flagellation.  Through a complicated dance of pseudonyms, impersonations and revelations, Rudolph's true identity will eventually be revealed.

Besides this main narrative runs a series of sub-plots extracting the maximum humour from the Square's residents, their snobberies, allegiances, quarrels and reconciliations.  Benson has a lot of fun with a campaign to enforce the rule against walking dogs in the Square's private gardens, as the opposing sides canvass opinion, co-opt supporters, and rig ballots, as well as depicting a vast number of dogs, some of which are made of wood and have wheels.  The Square has its fair share of quirky eccentrics: there is Mr Gandish with his overwhelming enthusiasm for badminton, Lady Eva who can see a halo around the head of any person, and read their character accordingly, and the Vicar who is devoted to yoga and theories of reincarnation.   All this will be familiar to readers of the Mapp and Lucia books; if this book doesn't reach the comic heights of those works, it is still very funny, and it also reaches beyond the upper-middle-class householders, bringing in Susan's admirable butler Bosanquet and her erstwhile colleague Minnie Mimps as players in the comedy.  Benson is particularly good at showing how forgiveness of slights and offences is much easier when it is socially expedient, because a neighbour has influence or just a very good cook.

Most interesting to me is the way Benson deals with lowbrow writing in a comic middlebrow text. His depiction of the self-important MP and literary critic Arthur Armstrong, who denounces Rudolph da Vinci's Rosemary and Rue in the strongest terms, suggesting it should be "annihilated", and is rewarded with a satirical portrait in Rudolph's next novel, is both funny and ironic, pointing out the hollowness at the centre of Armstrong's loudly-voiced opinions.  Rudolph's publisher reflects sadly that it would never do if his author "began to long for the appreciation of educated people, and in the effort to attain it might seriously imperil the gusto with which [he] wrote".  Even the lowbrow writer, Benson suggests, hopes for critical endorsement, although critical censure proves to be much better for sales.  By the end of the novel Mrs Mantrip's secret shame about her reading preferences is no longer, and she is able to speak frankly about her love for the works of Mr da Vinci, and remove the little curtain that has kept them out of sight in her library.

This book seems to be out of print although copies of the Hogarth Press paperback are available secondhand.

2012 Reading Challenge

A happy new year to anyone reading this.  New Year's Day has turned my thoughts to good resolutions.

While adding my Christmas book bounty to LibraryThing, I've been made forcibly aware of the number of unread books in my collection.  There are 138 of them in a library of just under 1100 books - so about 13% of my books have yet to be read.   I've selected 50 of these titles to read during 2012.  Some of them are relevant to my PhD studies; some of them are linked to holidays I hope to take during 2012, in Venice and Suffolk; others are just things I thought it was really time I read.  I've included a few novels by male writers, definitely a neglected category in my reading.

The other side of this challenge, of course, is to acquire fewer books during 2012 so that the percentage definitely goes down as a result of my efforts, and to Make Better Use of the several libraries at my disposal.  We'll see how that goes.

There's a widget showing a random selection of the chosen 50 on the right, and I'll post quarterly updates, but here is the full list:

Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth
Julian Barnes, Arthur and George
Deirdre Beddoe, Discovering Women's History: A Practical Manual
Adrian Bell, Corduroy
E.F. Benson, Secret Lives
Edward Frederic Benson, The Oakleyites
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice
A. S. Byatt, Ragnarok: the End of the Gods
A.S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale
Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen
Denis Diderot, The Nun
U.A. Fanthorpe, Selected Poems
Joanna Field, A Life of One’s Own
Tibor Fischer, The Collector Collector
H.W. Freeman, Joseph and His Brethren
Stella Gibbons, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons, Westwood
Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, No Man's Land v.1: The War of the Words
Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, No Man's Land v.2: Sexchanges
Sandra M. Gilbert, & Susan Gubar, No Man's Land v.3 : Letters from the Front
Henry Green, Loving; Living; Party Going
Radclyffe Hall, Adam's Breed
Barbara Hardy, London Rivers
Gerry Holloway, Women and Work in Britain since 1840
Sheila Kaye-Smith, Susan Spray
Molly Keane, Young Entry
Madame de Lafayatte, The Princesse de Clèves 
Beatrix Lehmann, Rumour of Heaven
Penelope Lively, City of the Mind
Margaret Llewellyn (ed), Life as We Have Known It
Michael Longley, Snow Water
Rose Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances
Keith Miller, St Peter's
John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice
V.S. Pritchett, The Essential Pritchett: Selected Writings of V S Pritchett
Angelique Richardson (ed), Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914
E. Arnot Robertson, Cullum
Joan Shelly Rubin, Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s
Robin Skelton (ed), Poetry of the Thirties
Liz Stanley, Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison
Andrea Weiss, Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank
Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks
Evelyne White, Winifred Holtby as I Knew Her
Leonard Woolf, Autobiography: Volume 1
Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle
E.H. Young, The Vicar's Daughter

End of Year Book Meme

It's time to accept that I'm not going to finish another book before the end of the year.  Here are 2011's facts and figures:

How many books read in 2011?

75, 35 of which are reviewed here.  
Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?

45 fiction, 30 non-fiction; I've read more non-fiction this year.

Male/Female authors?

14 male authors and therefore 61 female authors; about the same proportion as last year.   The books by male authors were almost all non-fiction.

Favourite book read?

Books that have really resonated with me this year include Anna Richards' Little Gods, Olivia Laing's To The River, Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell and E.H. Young's Miss Mole.

Least favourite?

Vita Sackville-West's The Dark Island, although its preposterousness was quite enjoyable in some ways.

Oldest book read?

F. Anstey's Vice Versa, a favourite of E.M. Delafield's, first published in 1882 and now available again from Victorian Secrets (disclaimer - my partner runs Victorian Secrets!)

Newest?
A tie between David Waller's The Perfect Man and Barbara Hardy's Dorothea's Daughter, both published by Victorian Secrets in December 2011.

Longest book title?

Not counting titles with post-colon suffixes, it is a tie:  Diana Athill's Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, which I see I have failed to review but is excellent and highly enjoyable; and another Victorian Secrets title, Notable Women Authors of the Day by Helen C. Black.

Shortest title?

Taste by Kate Colquhoun, a history of British food.

How many re-reads?

10 re-reads among the 75.

Most books read by one author this year?

Oddly, it's Sue Limb, since I read all four books in her Bad Housekeeping series.  Susan Hill comes next with three titles.  But no single author has particularly dominated this year.

Any in translation?

None this year. 

And how many of this year’s books were from the library?

About 20, which is fewer than last year.  I have been better about relying on libraries for frivolous reading material, however - and have read and enjoyed a few books I'd probably never have bought.

The Tortoiseshell Cat by Naomi Royde-Smith

This is the first novel of the prolific Naomi Royde-Smith, who published a large number of novels, plays, non-fiction and anthologies, as well as working as a reviewer,  but now appears to be pretty much forgotten; she doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.  Royde-Smith was part of interwar London literary society, intimately involved with Walter de la Mare and Rose Macaulay, making the obligatory appearance in Virginia Woolf's diary (Woolf didn't like her).  In her fifties she seems to have made a lavender marriage with a rather younger actor, which was by all accounts a success.  All in all, she sounds like a quirky character, and this certainly comes across in The Tortoiseshell Cat.

The novel concerns Gillian Armstrong, a young woman trying to make a career out of no particular skills or aptitudes, living with her sister Lilac at the Mordaunt Club, a Chelsea residence for unmarried or widowed women.  Gillian has travelled a great deal with her late father, but is thoroughly innocent; watching Lilac work to fascinate her young man, she is both faintly shocked and uncomprehending.  Her first job, at the rather shambolic Pelham House school for girls, comes to an abrupt but anticipated end when the headmistress finds she has been quoting Theopile Gautier to the girls; her next job, as private secretary to nouveau riche, eccentric Lady Bottomley, is more successful.  A Pelham House pupil, Jane Bird, has a crush on Gillian; after Jane has left school, she seeks Gillian's friendship and introduces her to Larry Browne, an artist and his flatmate, Heinrich.  The eponymous cat helps Gillian meet a fellow Mordaunt Club resident, Victoria Vanderleyden, and V.V. in turn to meet Peter and Heinrich.  After Lilac makes a successful marriage to Lady Bottomley's son Toby, a complicated web of relationships will be woven between Gillian, V.V., Jane, Larry and Heinrich that Gillian will find increasingly difficult to understand and to unravel.

Gillian feels strongly, and has a powerful sense of her need to make her own life, but has little comprehension of the origin or meaning of her feelings, or of the effect their expression will have on others.  She is powerfully drawn to V.V., but luxuriates in feelings of affection and V.V.'s tender attentions without examining them.  She is fascinated by the fey Heinrich, who tames sparrows and mice, but is unable to understand the seriousness that lies beneath his faun-like persona.  Only when tragedy marks her life will she begin to understand the implications of her actions and the decisions she has made.

Royde-Smith's novel is written for the most part in a sharply entertaining style which reminded me of Ronald Firbank; the humour is often constructed by Gillian's surreal environment and the odd, oblique ways in which the characters express themselves.  There are some very funny individual characters, particularly the incomprehensible headmistress of Pelham House, who cannot construct a full sentence, and the epitome of bad taste, Lady Bottomley, whose Knightsbridge house is full of the ugliest objects and who has filleted the saucy bits out of her son's copy of Swinburne with a sharp pair of scissors.  The twist into tragedy is a little awkward in this context.  The book's depiction of lesbian and gay characters is fairly explicit, especially to the modern reader - V.V.'s endless series of friends with men's names is a rare pre-Well of Loneliness reference to lesbian subculture - but like other novels of the period, the conclusion is essentially conservative.  However, it's still an enjoyable novel that would appeal to admirers of early Evelyn Waugh (another Firbank fan) and Stella Gibbons's satires of bohemian life.  There is a print-on-demand edition of this novel currently available but Royde-Smith seems ripe for wider rediscovery, and an obvious choice for a Persephone edition.

The Blotting Book by E.F. Benson

This little 1908 novel is the story of a murder; rather unexpected from E.F. Benson who I know best for the Lucia books.  Morris Assheton is a young man from a wealthy background; his inheritance is held in trust until his twenty-fifth birthday, unless he marries before that date.  The trustees are Mr Taynton and Mr Mills, the family solicitors.  Mr Taynton is an agreeable, avuncular sort; charitable, religious and fond of his routines, he contrasts with the much pricklier Mr Mills.  Beneath the surface, however, they are more alike, since they have made some ill-advised speculations with Morris's money, hoping for personal profits.  When it becomes clear that Morris is in love, and likely to marry, Taynton becomes alarmed.  Can he buy enough time to restore Morris's inheritance, ensure his reputation and his prospects for a comfortable retirement?

The novel is set in Brighton, where I live, and many of the locations are still recognisable, although the murder scene, a quiet path over the downs from Falmer to Brighton, is much less rural nowadays and probably less conducive to violent crime.  Benson's book is not really a whodunit - it's fairly obvious who the murderer is - but it still makes use of typical tools of the genre.  Letters, railway timetables, calendars and the eponymous blotting book are all either clues or misdirections.  Again, while the book doesn't include the psychological analysis you get in Golden Age detective fiction, it is interested in the boundaries between fantasy, memory and forgetting.  

I thought Benson could have done more with the character of Mrs Assheton, Morris's mother - she felt very undeveloped to me, particularly in the context of Benson's more famous female characters - and the mouth-breathing Superintendent Figgis is a caricature.  But the social milieu - upper-class luxury on the Edwardian scale - is very well evoked, and the book is an enjoyable, if slight, read.  The Blotting Book is available in a print-on-demand edition - but the very nice Hogarth Press paperback can be had for a penny on Amazon.   Or you can find it on Project Gutenberg.

Love Has No Resurrection by E.M. Delafield

This 1939 anthology was Delafield's last collection of short stories and comprises a varied selection - some short, funny squibs, some longer pieces both comic and tragic,  and a rare Delafield outing into crime fiction.  Like a lot of writers, Delafield extended her range in short fiction, so as well as her familiar territory of matrimony and domesticity, these stories cover boarding-houses, beaches and even a film set; in "O.K. for Story" a writer, employed by a film studio, successfully manages to repackage The Merchant of Venice as an outline for the studio's next production.  The employees of the studio are of course too lowbrow to spot the reference.

"My Son Had Nothing on his Mind" is Delafield at her humorous best, describing young Gilbert Catto's escape both from his overbearing mother and his intended bride two days before the wedding.  Mrs Catto is a triumphantly awful Delafield matriarch and Rhoda, Gilbert's fiancée, a perfectly ghastly "very feminine, very old-fashioned girl".  Gilbert is rescued by Shirley, a rather hard young medical student, who is decidedly not old-fashioned and sports a perm and plucked eyebrows.  Unusually for rather hard young women in fiction, Shirley is the heroine of the piece, telling Gilbert frankly that he ought to run away and get a job if he dreads the marriage so much.  Equally unusually, there is no romantic conclusion, since Shirley finds Gilbert's passivity rather insufferable.  As well as confounding reader expectations in terms of plot, this short story also sees Delafield experimenting with narrative time, cutting back and forth between past and present.


The story "Opportunity", conversely, is as sad a depiction of an unhappy marriage as you might hope to find.  Fan Hancock - not a euphonious name - has been enduring marriage to dull, pernickety Harry for some years.  Her sister Millie, visiting from America, seizes the opportunity to tell Harry that he is perpetually "nagging and grumbling and petty bullying" and that he could make Fan's life much better by helping her and praising her occasionally.  For a moment, it looks as if Harry will take the opportunity offered, but by the last paragraph he is back in full tedious, self-centred flow.  There is no hope for Fan, who is too trapped by her love for her children and years of accreted loyalty to her husband to assert herself.


The final story, "They Don't Wear Labels", is set in a boarding-house and concerning charming, helpful Mr Peverelli and his neurotic wife.  They are recent arrivals, and Mr Peverelli dotes on his wife with apparent uxoriousness, but it emerges that she is in fact terrified of him and convinced that he is trying to poison her.  The story is narrated by the boarding-house keeper who initially accepts Mr Peverelli at face value, but who comes to doubt his motives.   Rather like Hitchcock's Suspicion, the story sets up possibilities and undermines them, creating an atmosphere of sinister uncertainty among banal domestic activities.  The story concludes at Christmas, and would make a good spooky fireside winter treat.

Unfortunately, if you fancy that treat for yourself you'll either need to be extravagant or patient, as there are very few copies of this book about.  Perhaps we will see it reprinted when Delafield comes out of copyright in 2014. 

Miss Mole by E.H.Young

Miss Mole was a kind present from Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book, who discovered I'd never read it, happened upon a secondhand copy straight away, and sent it to me.  He thought I would enjoy it, and he was entirely right.

Hannah Mole is a forty-year-old spinster, the daughter of a Somerset farmer who has earned her living by working in that ambiguous, intermediate form of service that comprises governesses and companions to fretful old ladies.  At the start of the book she is about to lose her position, having told a small fib to her current old lady to gain some much valued free time; but that scrounged free time leads her to commit a brave and impulsive act, an act that will change her circumstances entirely.  Her cousin Lilla, who has married well, finds Hannah a job as housekeeper to the widowed minister of the local Baptist chapel, Reverend Corder.  Caring for him also involves caring for his daughters: scruffy, fearful Ruth, and Ethel, a fretful young woman trying to find her place in life.  Their household includes Wilfred, a cousin studying to be a doctor, and Howard, Reverend Corder's son who is intended for the ministry himself.  Hannah - unmarried, thin and dowdy with a markedly long nose - should be an invisible woman, working away in the background, making little mark on the world.  But Hannah has remarkable powers of imagination and hope; confronted with obstacles, she makes lateral moves that confound her opponents and advance her plans; and she is able to extract the maximum amount of joy from the most unpropitious circumstances.   However, she is also a Woman with a Past, and the tension of the novel is created by the possibility that, despite her natural optimism, her Past will rise up and vanquish her.

The novel stands or falls on the characterisation of its protagonist, and for me Hannah Mole succeeds brilliantly.  E.H. Young can be oblique; we do not always know all that Hannah knows, and narratives are revealed to us in layers, whenever Hannah feels like peeling another one off.  This keeps the text taut and the reader intrigued.  Miss Mole - liberated by her social position from the class constraints that beset cousin Lilla - can be unexpected in both thought and deed.  As much as she can find beauty in any townscape or landscape, she can find interest in any people, including (and perhaps especially) the socially undesirable.  For Hannah, human relationships can be an amusing game in which she can gamble as much of her reputation as she likes:

"This was better sport, and the rules of the game demanded that she should take risks, but save her life.  She had an exquisite enjoyment in watching for the feints of her adversary, and into her mind, stored with detached, incomplete pieces of information, there darted all the fencing terms she had ever heard, those bright, gleaming words with the ring of steel and the quick stamping of feet in them.  She had the advantage of him.  She knew what she was going to do, and she felt that she had him on her point, but, behind the temporary excitement, there was waiting for her the moment when she would have to tell herself that, for all its outward gallantry, this was a sorry, sordid business."

Hannah is no middle-aged Flora Poste, always serenely confident that she is right; her negotiations with life have a cost, and E.H. Young makes sure we know this.  This serious undercurrent enriches the novel and gives it substance, while the wit of the dialogue and especially Miss Mole's ironic reflections - some of which are only audible to the reader - give it sharpness and bite. 

Other enjoyable aspects are some very thoughtful passages about the nature of work and service; the lyrical portrayal of Bristol, here called Radstowe, which Miss Mole prizes extravagantly; and the representation of the gradations of middle-class social life in a provincial city.  The narrative, like the characterisation, is not always straightforward; we may know something has happened, but it will be a few chapters later before we find out exactly what it is.  I also liked the way the characters were balanced. The text seems to ascribe to almost all the characters, including some that we never see, a fair measure of gravity, of mass; individual characters do not dominate more than the action requires.  As in William, the pace here is fairly slow, but since Miss Mole's mind moves so quickly, I noticed it less.  I really need to read this book again to get the measure of it and it is definitely a book that will bear re-reading, a book that can be lived in. 

Here is Simon's own review of this novel and another one from Harriet Devine.  Sadly, this book appears to be out of print at the moment, although there are secondhand copies around. It's worth seeking out.

Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons

This novel, the fourth that Stella Gibbons published, is a sort of reverse Cold Comfort Farm.  Miss Bertie Linsey and her Pa have been living in a village just outside London and running a greengrocer's shop for years.  But the shop has failed, due to competition from more modern retailers and the departure of Bertie's brother Sam - the business brain of the family - to South Africa.  They have to leave their little house and move to London.  Bertie appeals to her uncle, Mr Petley, and his son Len, who have a tobacconist's shop near the Caledonian Road, for help in finding lodgings.  Mr Petley - who has a generally low opinion of women - considers Bertie to be the interfering sort, and tells Len to take rooms for them with the Fells along the road.  Mr Fell is a half-mad giant who cares only for caged birds; Mrs Fell is no better than she ought to be.  Miss Linsey and Pa find themselves established in two dirty basement rooms which they must share with a variety of insects.  But Bertie Linsey is strong and energetic and determined to make the best of things.  At first, things go well; she finds a job as a cook-housekeeper for two Bloomsbury literary ladies, and Pa enjoys the urban delights of cinemas and museums and begins to make friends with the Fells.  Like Flora Poste, Bertie cannot keep from interfering, and when she begins to scheme to break up her employers' household by fostering the romance of pretty Miss Lassiter with her handsome doctor, much against the wishes of possessive Miss Hoad, things begin to go awry.  Bertie is resilient, however, and will go on to interfere with modern notions of child-rearing and in the affairs of cousin Len, who still nurses an affection for a French girl he met at the end of the first World War, who disappeared without trace.  Bertie's resilience is tested not only by her frequently unemployed status but also by Pa, who spends rather a lot of money cheering up Mrs Fell, and by the unexpected dangers of urban life.

Gibbons has her satirical eye on Bloomsbury this time, making fun of the household of Miss Hoad and Miss Lassiter and their sophisticated metropolitan friends.  Dorothy Hoad is a literary relative of Radclyffe Hall's Stephen Gordon, given a boy's upbringing, independently wealthy, and fond of collars and ties.  Her passion for Edna Lassiter is unrequited; Miss Lassiter, a novelist, has accepted her financial support, but is now chafing under the control exerted by Miss Hoad in return.  Miss Hoad's portrait is a decidedly hostile one and she is made to behave extraordinarily badly by her creator, although I'm bound to say that it is all highly entertaining.  Miss Linsey's second job, as a nurse to a child being brought up according to avant-garde principles, allows Gibbons to take a few well-aimed shots at modern parenting and modern marriage.  The chapter in which two couples, on the brink of reciprocal adultery, go away to a damp Essex cottage to "talk things out", is particularly amusing - although shamefully Gibbons allows the best row to happen off-stage, and tells us about it afterwards.    This is Mr Mybug's world, one of strenuous sexual freedom and cultural experimentation, and - as with Mr Mybug - Gibbons squeezes a great deal of humour from it, and from Bertie's efforts to restore simple, straightforward values to a modern urban world.

This novel is fairly unusual in its context, both putting working-class characters at its centre and making them fully-rounded and interesting.  One of the (many) faults of Miss Hoad is to consider Len and Bertie to be "automata", unreceptive to their environment and to the finer things in life.  However, both are well-developed characters with a full range of emotional responses - and not necessarily those stereotype might suggest - to their circumstances.  Bertie's bravery, her fear of "going down", of financial ruin, are very real and very affecting, as are her responses to loss and to tragedy.   Len's slow progress towards finding his lost love is engaging. Pa himself - although there are faint echoes of Adam Lambsbreath in his fey, vague qualities - is open-minded and capable of the unexpected.  Gibbons also includes a black character, another lodger at the Fells; the portrayal of Mr Robertson is fairly racist, and the characters react to him with (probably entirely realistic) hostility or, in Mrs Fell's case, by eroticising his exotic difference.  There are points, however, when the narrative empathises with his position and draws out the connections between him and Bertie, both strangers in an unwelcoming place.  Gibbons makes good use of her affinity with the fairy tale in this book, resolving the plot through miraculous reappearances and discoveries, and restoring Miss Linsey, like a ransomed princess, to her rightful place.

This book is still funny and entertaining, although it shares with other Stella Gibbons works the problem of making the modern reader wince at its casually expressed prejudices.  There is a lot in the text to interest enthusiasts for interwar writing.  Unfortunately, it's also very hard to get hold of.  It's not among the Gibbons titles recently re-issued by Vintage, and secondhand copies are few and expensive.  I believe Vintage bought the rights to her whole back catalogue, so perhaps it will appear in due course. 

In My Father's House by Miranda Seymour

Subtitled Elegy for an Obsessive Love, this memoir tells the story of Miranda's father George and his lifelong, demented, all-consuming passion for a Nottinghamshire manor house, Thrumpton Hall - and of Miranda's childhood and upbringing in the context of that passion.  George was parked with a childless aunt and uncle, Charles and Anna Byron, at Thrumpton when he was a small child; his father, a diplomat, had been posted to South America.  George was felt to be too fragile to endure La Paz, so Thrumpton it had to be.  He drank in his Uncle Charlie's old-fashioned manners and attitudes, and his love for Thrumpton; the snobberies of his mother and grandmother - a distant, wrong-side-of-the-blanket descendent of Charles II - produced a sense of entitlement that led to school essays detailing how he would be a marvellous squire of Thrumpton when he grew up.  Uncle Charlie liked to tease, and sometimes leaned towards leaving the house to George, sometimes towards his Byron nephews.  When they both died in the Second World War, the path seemed to be clear for George - but things went awry, and George and his wife Rosemary eventually had to raise an enormous loan in order to buy Thrumpton.

Having installed himself, George began to realise his grandiloquent childhood dreams, but was, of course, permanently thwarted by the tendency of people not to conform to plan.  His children disappointed him; the villagers were unimpressed by his lordly ways; a power station was built just down the road that could turn a summer day to winter, belching out black smoke.  The House (it's always capitalised in the text) consumed vast amounts of money, energy and time.  George martyred himself to the House, and he wanted his martyrdom recognised and admired.  When his family - particularly his wife and daughter - failed to come up to the mark in this respect, he undermined them in turn, criticising their appearance, their clothes, their hair.  Miranda wore a wig for much of her teenage years since her own hair didn't meet George's standards.  And when his children were grown up and better able to resist his control, he sought admiration from younger, working-class men.

Miranda Seymour has used her father's diaries and letters - he was a prodigious letter-writer and would complain of being neglected if he didn't get a letter by return of post - her mother's memories, and her biographer's skills to construct this memoir, an effort to "make my peace by trying to understand the kind of man he was".  She is unflinching in her scrutiny of her father and of herself, often to the distress of her mother, whose voice punctuates the book as a kind of chorus, complaining when Miranda goes too far or is too indiscreet, defending her husband and her marriage.  She is often very funny, and there is a lot of humour here, usually caused by George's outrageous behaviour or by Miranda's outraged reactions.  One argument culminated in the (adult) Miranda pelting her father with boiled potatoes and then biting the table-leg.  But I found this book profoundly sad; George's lonely childhood leads inevitably to his overvaluing of heredity and property, his adult failures, and his tempestuous relationship with his children.  In some ways he is a less likeable Mortmain, and perhaps Miranda's story is Rose's version of I Capture the Castle rather than Cassandra's.  He also has much in common with Alison Bechdel's father in Fun Home, another house-beautiful obsessive with a taste for younger men.

This is a remarkably skilful book, compelling and complex, written with great frankness but also delicacy and insight.  The paperback has an awful pastel-tinted cover and looks like misery lit.  Don't be deceived - there is a real treat inside.