2014 reading

Poor neglected blog.  Still, I did complete my PhD this year as planned, so something had to give. Here's this year's reading summary.

How many books read in 2014?
Only 30 books this year, which may be the lowest ever; there have been reading droughts if not actual incidences of the dreaded reader's block.

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
23 fiction and 7 non-fiction; one of the non-fiction books was David Miles's vast but very enjoyable The Tribes of Britain, which ought to count as about 3 books.

Male/Female authors?
13 books by male authors, and 17 by female authors.

Favourite book read?
Ali Smith's How to be Both and Evie Wyld's All the Birds Singing were both wonderful.  Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby is an absorbing blend of memoir and travel writing and extremely moving.  Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin was full of the unexpected.  Honourable mention to Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, a terribly sad book about the hideous politics of small town life, and to Hilary Mantel's astonishing Beyond Black.

Least favourite?
No real stinkers this year.  A couple of slightly dull novels, but I didn't hate them enough to name them here.

Oldest book read?
Pilgrimage 1, by Dorothy Richardson - Pointed Roofs was first published in 1911.

Newest? 
Ali Smith's How to be Both and Michael Cunningham's haunting The Snow Queen, both published this year.

Longest book title?
The Man Who Went Into the West, a life of the irascible poet and priest R.S. Thomas by Byron Rodgers.

Shortest title?
Sylvia Townsend Warner's witty account of Somerset.

How many re-reads?
Just one - Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?

Most books read by one author this year?
A December binge on Phil Rickman's marvellous Merrily Watkins books means I've read five books by him this year.

Any in translation?
Death and the Penguin, and Tove Jansson's story collection Travelling Light.

And how many of this year’s books were from the library?
Six library books, four of those borrowed as e-books.

Resolutions next year are to read more, and definitely to blog more.

Pilgrimage 1 by Dorothy Richardson

I have submitted my thesis, so what could be a better way to celebrate than to start on Dorothy Richardson's modernist epic, a roman fleuve of 13 novels delineating the outer and inner lives of one Miriam Henderson?  Pilgrimage has a reputation for being difficult, heavily reliant on interior monologue or, as May Sinclair famously called it in her review of the early novels in the sequence, stream of consciousness.  Richardson's work influenced other novels I admire and enjoy, especially Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Sinclair's own Mary Olivier: A Life, and to be perfectly honest I was starting to feel slightly guilty for not having attempted it - so here we go.

The Virago edition of Pilgrimage 1 contains three novels: Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb.  Pointed Roofs has a lot in common with other early twentieth-century fictions of women's lives, showing us in the early chapters a rather awkward Miriam and her rather hilarious sisters, their in-jokes and little rituals.  Miriam is preparing to leave home to go to work in a school in Germany; her father has lost the family money in unwise speculation, and the girls are having to find work.  Miriam takes to Germany, especially the beautiful old town of Hannover, although she remains uncertain about teaching.  In fact she is hardly a teacher at all; she is a mixture between a paid English-speaking companion and a friend to the older girls.  Miriam has, rather shockingly for the time (the first three books are set during the 1890s) tendencies to atheism, and some of the tension of the first novel comes from her relationship with the school's intensely pious headteacher, Fräulein Pfaff.  Miriam was educated at a school run in line with the philosophies and ideas of Ruskin and Darwin, and really this makes her fairly ill-fitted to be a teacher in more conventional establishments.  In Backwater she is back in London and teaching at a girls' school in North London, where she attempts to cure a sense of isolation by long walks in the park and a diet of sensation fiction from a penny library.  Despite forming close relationships with the spinster sisters who run the school, Miriam leaves to go to work as a governess.  In Honeycomb, she is living with the Corries in their country house, caring for two small children and trying to fill the uncomfortable position of one who is not quite a servant and not quite a member of the family, until her mother's ill health means that she has to leave.

In the background to all this are more typical events in the life of a late Victorian young woman.  Miriam, when at home, goes to dances and parties, and meets possible young men; one of her sisters marries, and the family is rescued slightly from poverty by her new husband.  Events happen off-stage, and are mentioned obliquely; a man that Miriam has been fond of dies, but we only find out about this when Miriam is reassuring a potential employer that she does not intend to marry.  The circumstances and events of her mother's depressive illness are similarly obscure.  Because everything is shown from Miriam's point of view, we can only know what she chooses to think about, or finds important, and often her thoughts are happenstance and disconnected, as thoughts tend to be.  Dorothy Richardson used the materials of her own life to try to document and capture the unfolding development of a consciousness, a huge project that demanded this massive, finely detailed text.

In narrative terms the earlier volumes use a more traditional approach, with clearly signalled changes into the stream of consciousness mode.  By Honeycomb, much of the narrative is being expressed through Miriam's thoughts and impressions.  Does this make it difficult?  I wouldn't say it is as difficult as parts of Joyce, but the allusive and obscure style meant that I needed to read attentively if I wanted to know what was happening, and it was easy to miss key sentences in the middle of a long internal monologue.  But the attention paid off, and the book is highly enjoyable.  I found Miriam and her negotiations with the world fascinating and very real, and the way that significant events emerge from her internal monologue can be very moving.   The Pilgrimage series is in print, all four volumes being published by Virago.

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

This short novel tells the story of Siss, a young Norwegian girl who finds herself strangely drawn to the new girl in her class, orphan Unn who has only recently come to live in their isolated little town.  The two girls spend an evening together that becomes freighted with meaning for both of them when Unn indicates she has a secret that cannot be spoken.  The next day, excited about her new friend, Siss rushes to school, but Unn is nowhere to be seen; as excited and moved as Unn, she has taken the day off and gone to visit the titular ice palace - a waterfall frozen into fantastic caves and shapes.  When Unn does not return, the local people searching for her put pressure on Siss to tell them everything that she knows - but what, really, does she really know about Unn?  and will Unn ever come home?

There are lots of mysteries at the heart of this book, and Vesaas's style is often oblique and self-contained, not really giving anything away, but it also ranges to the poetic (one short chapter is actually in poem form) and to expansive interior monologue.  We hear a lot of Siss's thoughts, and are invited to suffer with her as she, her parents, friends and neighbours, all try to resolve the feelings that arise from Unn's disappearance.  The descriptions of the snowy Norwegian winter and the astonishing ice palace are lyrical and evocative.  There is not much dialogue, and what there is is either direct and to the point, or deliberately vague and evasive.  Vesaas weaves together a coming-of-age narrative with stories of friendship and of loss, producing a novel which is satisfyingly interesting even while it retains its own mysterious ambiguity.

I'm slightly ashamed that I first knew this story through the 1987 film of the same name, which I saw years ago without having any idea that it was based on a novel.  Thanks to an episode of BBC Radio 4's A Good Read, however, where it was the choice of the writer Gabriel Gbadamosi, I realised that there was a novel and my kind partner bought it for me for Christmas.  It's an excellent winter read, brief but very resonant, and will repay re-reading. The film doesn't seem to be available to buy, which is a shame - I remember it as extremely beautiful.

My 2013 reading

2013 has been a thin year for both reading and blogging.  I plan to submit my thesis in the spring, so both should pick up a bit during 2014.

How many books read in 2013?

39 books read in total; I haven’t counted books where I only read one or two chapters. 

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?

18 fiction and 21 non-fiction; leisure reading has been mostly non-fiction this year, probably because reading fiction takes me straight back to thinking about my thesis.  Where I have read fiction for pleasure it has mostly been crime fiction.

Male/Female authors?

14 books by male authors, and 25 by female authors.  Most of the non-fiction was written by men and I only read a couple of novels by male authors, notably Richard Aldington’s Women Must Work.

Favourite book read?

I can’t pick a favourite even from a paltry total of 38 books, but I very much enjoyed Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes and The Franchise Affair, Simon Armitage’s Walking Home, Nan Harvey’s The Living Mountain,  Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Rachel Hewitt’s marvellous biography of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation.

Least favourite?

I usually like P.D. James, but Death Comes to Pemberley was a rather dull disappointment, and a waste of some of the wittiest characters in English literature.  I bought it from a charity shop and it returned there, however, so there was some modest benefit to my having read it.

Oldest book read?

Grania: the Story of an Island, by Emily Lawless, which first appeared in 1892 and has recently been republished in a critical edition by Victorian Secrets (disclaimer: I'm a co-director of Victorian Secrets which is mainly run by my partner).  Grania, set on the Aran Islands, is the dramatic story of a young woman's resistance to the norms society expects of her, evoking a very powerful sense of a particular time and place.

Newest? 

Again, thanks to Victorian Secrets I read Carolyn Lambert’s The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction before it was published late in 2013.  I don’t know much of Gaskell’s work beyond Cranford, but this was still an absorbing and accessible critical work.

Longest book title?

This is also The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction  which just pips Erica Brown’s Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel, another enjoyable critical work which deals with Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor.

Shortest title?

Counting spaces as characters, Rose Macaulay’s Potterism was the shortest.

How many re-reads?

Five this year, three E.M. Delafield novels and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, for thesis purposes.  I read Nan Harvey’s The Living Mountain twice, a few months apart; I should really try to write a post about this book.

Most books read by one author this year?

If I don’t count the EMD re-reads, it’s P.D. James this year, with two of the Inspector Dalgliesh novels as well as her Jane Austen sequel.  

Any in translation?

Nothing this year.

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

Four library books, one borrowed from a friend, and 5 books read on my e-reader.

E.M. Delafield

It is 70 years ago today that E.M. Delafield died, much too young, at her home in Devon.  She had been ill for some time, enduring the rather primitive treatments for cancer that were available in the 1940s, but had kept up her cheerful spirits almost until the end - Kate O'Brien remembers her climbing a fig tree in the garden in September 1943, and according to Maurice McCullen she was giving a lecture in Oxford just days before her death.  I had the great privilege of visiting the Delafield archive at the University of British Columbia earlier this year, and of reading the opening chapter of the novel she never finished, an appetising combination of marital disharmony and intergenerational conflict spiced with wartime tensions.  It was impossible not to imagine the witty and moving book this could have made, and the picture of wartime Britain that it would have left us, and then all the other novels that EMD might have written.  By the late 1930s she was really in her stride as a writer; where would her work have gone next?

EMD has been the topic of my PhD thesis and I've spent the last four years reading her novels, short stories, journalism and plays.  When I started the thesis I was slightly nervous of focusing it on her work, wondering if I would get sick of it after several years' intimate acquaintance.  Thankfully, I haven't at all; sometimes I find her work frustrating, sometimes challenging, but always and endlessly interesting.  Middlebrow fiction is supposed to be slight and amusing, but Delafield's work repays re-reading with a careful eye; there can be an awful lot going on in her most frivolous works.  One of the things that is usually going on, of course, is humour, and her jokes also stand up to repeated scrutiny.  The more I read, the more I find to admire, and the more of her journalism I read the more I am amazed by her work ethic.  How on earth did she find the time to write all that?

One of the reasons that I love EMD and the women writers of her generation is that really, they weren't supposed to be there.  A whole generation of women - Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, Vera Brittain, May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, the list goes on and on  - who were brought up in the vague expectation that they would probably marry, who scraped up what education they could get, often against the wishes of their parents, and who somehow transformed themselves into writers, critics and campaigners.  Instead of disappearing from view into respectable matrimony, they left us their books. Anyone who has suffered from impostor syndrome (probably nearly everyone) can take heart from their lives.

There is a particular significance to the seventieth anniversary of a writer's death; in the UK at least, their works come out of copyright in the following year.  I expect we'll see a lot more new editions of Delafield next year, which is good news for her fans.  But I really wish she'd made it to her eighties, and written the novels she probably had planned.

Women Must Work by Richard Aldington

"I want a life that is full and interesting.  I should like to work at something which had a purpose beyond mere money-making.  I should like to mix with people who would make my life fuller.  I want to live with or near a man I love and who would love me, and I think I'd like to have a child, but I don't want that in squalor and misery.  As jam for it all, I'd like to live part of the time in London and part in a lovely place [...] I would try to do things to help other women."

Etta Morison is a plucky Edwardian heroine from a dull seaside town who wants more from life than providing companionship to her narrrow-minded parents and possibly marrying one of the boring young men local society finds acceptable.  Supported by her suffragette friend Vera, she manages to learn typing and shorthand and - by denying herself new clothes and books - saves enough to run away to lodgings in London, where she begins the dispiriting business of trying to find a job.  Her first success, working at an export company, is achieved not because of her skill but because of her good looks: the manager Mr Drayton picks her out of a line-up of young female job-hunters.  When Mr Drayton's interest in her becomes more (or less) than professional, Etta resigns, but is rescued from penury by Ada Lawson, another suffrage campaigner she has met through Vera.  Living as secretary at Ada's London house and at her beautiful country retreat, Dymcott, Etta gets to know Ada's nephew Ralph, and the two fall in love in the summer of 1914.  The war will affect their relationship - and Etta's aspirations for the future - in unexpected ways.

As the quote above suggests, Etta is a forward-thinking young woman, who rejects the tie of marriage and the tiresome constraints of respectability in pursuit of her own life, a pursuit that takes her through war work, a disastrous retreat to a farm, motherhood, and into the dubious world of business.  Richard Aldington is best known for the First World War novel Death of a Hero, which exposed the effect of war on a male protagonist: here he shows how women - especially successful war-workers like Etta, who were criticised for profiting from the war - were maimed and altered by conflict.  The novel has a lot in common with books like Radclyffe Hall's The Unlit Lamp, Winifred Holtby's The Crowded Street  and E M Delafield's  The Heel of Achilles, all novels in which middle-class girls seek some other sort of life than that of a traditional wife and mother  Aldington's novel differs in that he sees his heroine through the war and the twenties, and also in the greater sexual frankness that he has Etta express.  The focus on sexuality also suggests a revisioning of Wells's Ann Veronica, and indeed one contemporary reviewer makes that exact comparison, not to Aldington's advantage.  None of the reviews I found seemed bothered by the sexually explicit content, even though there had been a row over the censorship of Death of a Hero when published in 1929.

The theme that struck me when I thought back over the book was how much Etta is helped out by women, often feminist women.  Ada Lawson gives her a job; a friend in later life, Kitty Mendip, helps Etta to get into the world of advertising; and the indefatigable Vera not only helps Etta to set out on her independent life but props her up throughout, particularly during their futile experiment at 'real living' on a smallholding.  Etta often reaches rock bottom, but it is invariably a female hand that is held out to lift her up again.  The conclusion of the book, in which Etta gets what she wants in some ways, but is compromised in many others, makes a rather ironic mockery of all this sisterly support, especially if we think on to what Etta's life might be like after the novel closes.  I think you could read the novel as a prequel to Delafield's Faster! Faster! and those of you who've done so (or who don't mind being spoilered by my review) will know how well things turn out for Delafield's hard-working heroine.

Etta is sometimes attractive, sometimes infuriating, sometimes sympathetic, and generally well-rounded. Some of the minor characters are a little two-dimensional, although Vera and Ada Lawson do achieve a fuller characterisation - Ada in particular is often defined by what she doesn't do or say, in a strangely effective way - and I also liked the characterisation of stuffy Mr Morison, Etta's father.

Aldington is known as a modernist but the prose style in this novel is straightforward, the timescale in standard chronology, with only the occasional bit of stream-of-consciousness to hint at a modernist approach. I found the narrative voice, which points out when Etta is deceived or deceiving herself with some emphasis, rather like Hardy but without Hardy's sustained ironic tone.  I'm now interested to try Death of a Hero for a point of comparison.  Women Must Work is out of print and there are no electronic copies around, although second-hand ones are available.

Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay

This is a very difficult book to write about, and it's particularly difficult to explain why it is such a good and enjoyable book without giving away its secrets, secrets which are part of why it is so enjoyable.  Rose Macaulay's novel has to do with identity, its construction and presentation, and its sudden dissolution.  Half-sisters Daisy and Daphne Simpson are modern young women in 1920s London; Daisy is the illegitimate daughter of an upper-class man, now dead, and the expansive, lower-middle-class Lily Arthur, now married to a painter and decorator in East Sheen.  She feels every bit of the awkwardness of her position, aware that the upper-class family who employ her are being deceived, equally aware that her much-loved mother knows Daisy is slightly ashamed of her.  Daisy supplements her income by writing novels and journalism under the name of Marjorie Wynne.  Marjorie dutifully turns out articles on various "Woman Questions": can women have genius?  can they have children and a career?  Daisy rather despises this debate, and the way her editor constantly forces her to consider the 'human question'; she dreams of writing about "inhuman things, about books, about religion, about places, about the world at large, about things of which intelligent people had heard".   Macaulay is very funny at the expense of her own profession and gets well stuck in to the debates about highbrow and lowbrow writing that were prevalent when she published this book in 1928.

So the novel plays with ideas and conflicts about class, gender, and literary status, which makes it sound very serious, but the tone is Rose Macaulay's usual one of arch humour, and consequently it is very funny.  The Folyot family - upper-class progressive intellectuals - are very cleverly drawn, just stopping short of caricature, and Daisy's mother Lily is a complete joy, and a terribly attractive character, with her fondness for a little nip of brandy and her sympathetic understanding of her daughter's position.  The frightful (to Daisy, at least) scene where the Folyots and Daisy's East Sheen family are brought into uncomfortable proximity is painfully hilarious.  The narrative asides are also very witty: I particularly enjoyed Macaulay's observation that Lily achieves "comfort in her ugly house  [...] in the only way which it is ever achieved, by extravagance".  So true, and so elegantly expressed.

This novel is out of print, but there are secondhand copies around, as there was a Methuen paperback reprint in the 1980s.  Simon has reviewed this at Stuck in a Book and there is also a review here at Reading 1900-1950 -  do note the spoiler warning at the top!  However, if you do inadvertently read a spoiler (as I did, because the Methuen paperback includes one on the very first page) it shouldn't affect your enjoyment of this book.

Walking Home by Simon Armitage

This is Simon Armitage's account of his attempt to walk the Pennine Way, travelling against the wind and with the sun in his face from North to South, towards his home village of Marsden in Yorkshire.  Kindly strangers offer him a bed for the night, transport his luggage (a vast suitcase nicknamed the Tombstone) between stops, or simply walk with him along this most demanding of paths.  Every evening, he gives a poetry reading, in venues that range from pubs to village halls to people's sitting rooms, and the trip is funded by the donations people leave in a (clean) hiking sock.  Armitage has written and spoken a lot about walking, and recently was part of the Stanza Stones project, writing  poems to be carved into rocks in the hills between Marsden and Ilkley.

The links between writing and walking are well-explored, not least in Rebecca Solnit's marvellous Wanderlust, but this book adds a great deal more to our understanding of the connection between these two fundamental activities, and of the importance of walking to an individual writer.  It's also a compelling account of what it's like to walk a difficult, arbitrary long-distance path, of the fears and doubts that pull at the sense of achievement.  At the outset of his walk, Simon Armitage realises that he is "the weakest link" in the chain of strangers and friends who are making his walk happen: "Failure seems unavoidable, with humiliation and shame the inevitable consequence".  Lost in the mist on Cross Fell, "a truly terrible place" pitted with shafts from old iron workings, he experiences "the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud".  Near the end, however, he contemplates the possibility of not finishing the Way, a deliberate act that transforms apparent failure into "the triumph of personal accomplishment over public affirmation".

A lot of books about long walks are not terribly well-written and can't avoid the obvious label of pedestrian.  This is not one of those books.  It is beautifully written with an attention to the details of the walks, the readings, the spare rooms of strangers, and especially to the textures of the places Simon goes.  Here is a typically precise and evocative description of walking through a forest:

Stumps of old trees are footstools upholstered in velvety green moss.  Pine resin is the first thing I've smelt for hours.  Except at the very top where their tips bend and flex like fishing rods in some mad struggle, the evergreens absorb the bruising gusts and deafening surges of wind, so there's nothing but static and stable air at ground level where I walk.  And somewhere above me, where their coats are thickest and fullest, the trees have absorbed all suggestion of rain, so down here it's dry and cushioned, every footfall received and relaunched by a thick mattress of spongy,brown needles.  A form of twilight gathers under the canopy, a cloistered stillness.

As well as being beautiful, it is also very funny, attentive to the bathetic moments that inevitably follow feelings of achievement; Armitage is comically self-deprecating about his performance at the readings, something he describes as "little more than a man in a creased shirt holding a book in his hand for three-quarters of an hour".  Every turning-out of the sock after the evening's reading is a source of humour.  I love walking, and have dabbled with shorter long-distance paths, but even if you never want to walk further than the corner shop, this is a really rewarding book, absorbing, funny and moving.

Simon Armitage is undertaking a similar walk on the South West Coast Path in August and September this year, so there will be another book to look forward to soon.