Good Night, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas

Good Night, Mr Holmes is the first in a series of mysteries chronicling the adventures of Irene Adler, opera singer and amateur sleuth. As Sherlock Holmes fans will know, Irene Adler is the woman who outwits Holmes in the story “A Scandal in Bohemia”. I expected Good Night, Mr Holmes to be a retelling of this story from Irene’s perspective, but in fact Carole Nelson Douglas begins her novel many years before the incident with the King of Bohemia. There are references to other stories in the Holmes canon (and even an appearance by Jefferson Hope from “A Study in Scarlet”), but for a great part of the novel Holmes is just a secondary figure of limited importance: more than anything else, this is Irene Adler’s show.

One of the most interesting things about Good Night, Mr Holmes is that Nelson Douglas mirrors the narrative structure of the Sherlock Holmes stories: enter Miss Penelope Huxleigh, who is Watson to Irene Adler’s Holmes. Miss Huxleigh is a parson’s daughter who falls on bad times, and who is saved from homelessness and destitution by Irene. From then on, the two live together and collaborate on the occasional investigation. Miss Huxleigh is very prim and proper and easily scandalised – an unlikely match for the very unconventional Irene Adler, but in fact the two get along famously. What Caroline Nelson Douglas does with the narration reminded me a little of the Drusilla Clack section in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Penelope is a far more likeable narrator, of course, but there’s plenty of humour in the clash between her values and Adler’s free-spirited existence.

As Penelope and Irene grow closer, they begin to realise that they’re far less different than they’d have imagined. The main difference between them is that Penelope, like most of her contemporaries, is extremely concerned with appearances, while Irene barely spares a thought for what others think of her. Of course, this indifference is a luxury that most Victorian women would not have been able to afford, but Irene Adler is in a position that makes it possible.

There’s some social commentary in Good Night, Mr Holmes, but this is more of a fun romp than a ponderous novel. However, I have to say I was charmed by its implied feminism – Irene may not spent a lot of time protesting against social constraints, but the deep conviction that women are human beings and shouldn’t settle for being treated as anything less is implicit to her whole life. One aspect of the novel that gave me pause was Caroline Nelson Douglas’s handling of the concept of “adventuress” – a term Holmes uses to describe Irene Adler, and which has clear connotations of sexual disreputableness. This Irene Adler is in fact as chaste as any Victorian woman was expected to be. My own preference would be for a more in-depth questioning of the double standards that make Holmes’ accusation so damaging, but I know from my readings about Victorian feminism that it was in fact often accompanied by a rigid attitude towards sexuality. Irene Adler’s convictions, then, do fit the profile of heroine Nelson Douglas has created.

Good Night, Mr Holmes takes place over a relatively long period of time, and I did feel that the first half of the novel meandered a little bit. But I was too busy enjoying the humour, the characters, the period atmosphere, and the cameos by the likes of Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde to mind too much. Mary Russell will probably always be my favourite Holmes-inspired heroine, but Nelson Douglas’ Irene Adler and Miss Huxleigh are certainly worth getting to know.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

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Dreamers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham

Those women who invented so much have been partially forgotten because they were not at the centre of power, nor were they engaged in heroic acts or glitzed with glamour. But societies are recreated in more ways than meet the eye. The mundane, the intimate, the individual moment of anger, the sense of association: all contribute to the fabric of daily life. The rediscovery of their lost heritage is revelatory, and not only because these energetic innovators dreamed up so much that we take for granted in the world. They also staked our a remarkably rich terrain of debates around questions which are equally vital today.

Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century is a history of political ideas and social changes envisaged and brought about by women between the 1880’s to the 1920’s. Many of the women Sheila Rowbotham introduces us to in these pages fit the definition of the “new woman”, but they come from a variety of backgrounds and have very different goals and political convictions. Rowbotham writes about relatively well-known names such as Emma Goldman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, Annie Bessant, Mary Church Terrell or Eleanor Marx, but also plenty of more obscure ones: women whose contributions to “inventing the twentieth century” have mostly been forgotten.

Dreamers of a New Day is slightly reminiscent of Among the Bohemians, but whereas Virginia Nicholson’s focus is largely biographical, Rowbotham mostly emphasises ideas and political history. Her focus is on labour, economics, everyday changes, and their ideological implications and practical consequences, which was particularly interesting to me because I don’t read about this kind of thing enough. Dreamers of a New Day also deals with changes in gender roles and their impact on sexual relationships; with contraception and motherhood; with very recognizable topics such as vegetarianism and ethical consumer choices; and with the debate surrounding eugenics that dominated much of the early twentieth-century and its very troubling class and race implications. Another thing that was particularly interesting to me, someone whose history reading tends to be very Europe-centric, was the fact that Rowbotham focuses on what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic.

I have a great interest in the time period covered in Dreamers of a New Day, so I knew from the beginning there was very little chance this book would fail to interest me. Whenever I read about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I’m left with the impression that this was a time of staggering possibilities, not all of which came to be realised. Rowbotham’s historical analysis only added to this impression, particularly the chapters that dealt with the questions raised by sexual freedom in a time of even bigger sexual double standards than we have today, and when the stakes were so very different for men and for women. This is a topic I’ll never tire of reading about, and I was pleased that Rowbotham doesn’t adhere to the disturbingly common trend of deciding that women who had an interest in experimenting with new romantic or sexual arrangements were only doing so because they had been duped, rather than out of any real conviction.

As I was saying before, the women in Dreamers of a New Day are by no means a uniform group. They have very different motivations, for starters: some were rebelling against very restrictive backgrounds and upbringings; others were acting out of religious motivations; others still because of political beliefs. As Sheila Rowbotham says,

The potpourri of rebels and reformers dreaming of a new day did not compromise a cohesive group or even a ‘tendency’. Their revolt arose from disparate sources: they were driven by fear of moral and social disintegration, by anger against injustice, by visions of utopia and by a resolve to improve everyday living and relating. Nor were they united in outlook or intent. Some aspired to alter existing culture, others to transform the world; some wished to regulate and improve, others to release and liberate. They were, moreover, shaped by dissimilar social backgrounds. Some were upper middle class and keen to cast off privilege; others were members of the growing in-between strata, educated yet not quite ‘ladies’, uprooted, mobile, and liable to be iconoclastic. Among their ranks, working-class women striving for solidarity stood alongside African-American women linking gender to their emancipation as a race.

She does an excellent job of bringing together all these separate movements and showing what they had in common without painting any of them with broad strokes. She also never fails to acknowledge that gender does not erase differences and doesn’t render other categories of identity meaningless: “they might be women, but they were also free thinkers, anarchists, socialists, feminists, communists, moral and social reformers, liberals, progressives, labour movement women, bohemians, sexual radicals or eugenics enthusiastics.”

As much as ideas are the focus of Dreamers of a New Day, the personal side of history is also acknowledged. The book includes moving personal stories and anecdotes, such as a description of the excitement experienced by Olive Schreiner, Edith Ellis and Eleanor Marx on seeing Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for the first time. The three friends felt electrified: Nora’s choice at the end raised possibilities that had never been seriously considered before.

More than anything else, this is a book that will show readers the cost of things we now take for granted: it illustrates just how huge some seemingly simple shifts really were. Anything from labour rights to contraception to changes in dress code to the right to leave the house alone, without chaperonage, had a huge battle behind it. The personal costs of the freedoms we now enjoy can be difficult to appreciate, but they were very much felt by these women. Dreamers of a New Day also shows us that change does not come from a single source; progress is anything but a straight line. Sometimes for every step forward there were two steps back.

It’s amazing just how current and relevant this book is, and just how many of these are questions we still struggle with today. This was indeed a period that defined the twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries, and Sheila Rowbotham does it justice.

A few more interesting excerpts:

To revolt against the conventions of appearance meant putting oneself into an unprotected space. Critics sneered at the plain shirtwaisters and ties worn by Russian-Jewish immigrant working-class new women who sat in cafés debating marriage, the family and working conditions. One hostile observer in the 1890’s derided the ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular women’ for whom ‘the time of night means nothing until way into the small hours.’ To dress, act and think differently upset cultural assumptions about gender that were deeply embedded.

Greenwich Village’s idealization of ‘outsider’ groups had focused initially on ethnicity and class. However, by the 1920’s jazz and the blues were transporting a lyrical and metaphorical sexual imagery from the culture of poor blacks to fashionable white audiences. Much was lost in translation; it passed through a prism of incomprehension. The white intelligentsia, in casting off their Protestant guilt, was inclined to envisage a uniform black American which they constructed as a primitive ‘other’. This put educated black women seeking independence and sensual expression in a difficult predicament. Erotic affirmation could simply confirm racist stereotypes.

Mothering as a social metaphor could constrict as well as expand the parameters of social citizenship. The dreamers who sought to make women, as a group, the catalyst for change continually stumbled against the problem of how to devise alternative perspectives without restricting women’s options for autonomous diversity. Again and again, in proposing ways in which women could cohere around their specific interests, dreamers slid into yet more restricting demarcations. Stella Browne made a valiant attempt to introduce a concept of collective agency by making reproductive control for women the equivalent of worker’s control for men. This rephrasing of anarcho-syndicalism in relation to the body did offer a dynamic fusion between the individual and a wider social context; unfortunately it also introduced a theoretical categorization which implicitly excluded women from the workforce and men from sexual reproduction. What is more, the dreamers found themselves at odds with one another. Awakened they might be; in agreement they were not. The sacrificial redeemer present in both social purity and social mothering jarred with aspirations for assertive cultural transgression and power. The supporters of protective legislation wanted to regulate women’s work; the egalitarians wanted unrestricted equality.

Reviewed at: The F Word

(Have you read it too? Let me know and I’ll be happy to add your link.)

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The Sunday Salon – On Reading Important Books

Photo Credit

The point of departure for today’s post was the recent National Book Awards fiasco, which involved Lauren Myracle’s Shine being nominated for and then withdrawn from the young adult category because it turned out someone had mistaken it for Franny Billingsley’s Chime. You can read about this in more detail here, if you happen to have missed the whole debacle.

I have read and loved Chime, but have not yet read Shine. However, my opinion of these books isn’t really what this post is about. Plenty of reactions to this incident disappointed me because they focused not on the mistake and how it was handled, but on which of the two books was more worthy of being a National Book Award nominee with basis on its subject matter: a book about a hate crime against a glbtq teen and its impact on a community, or a (vapid, silly) book about a teen witch. Amy, as usual, wrote a very sensible and eloquent post about this at the time, so I’ll point you towards it rather than carry on about it.

The sad thing is that even now, over a month later, plenty of people hear the title Chime and think “book I’ve heard bad things about”, when in fact Billingley’s novel got almost universally stellar reviews, and these “bad things” predominantly came from people who have not read it, but dismissed it because they’re outraged about the situation. I don’t want to minimise the fact that the situation was very upsetting, of course, but it saddens me more than I can say that so many people have focused on comparing the two books, which is completely beside the point, rather than on the awards process and what was wrong with it.

The reason why I’m writing about this over one month after the fact is because I’ve been thinking about the whole process of pitting books against one another and deciding which one is better, or more worthier of consideration for an award¹, based on their subject matter alone. Having read Franny Billingsley’s Chime, I can tell you that it’s a book that deals extensively with gender, female creativity, and how categories of identity are made sense of in small communities (among other things). These are all topics I deeply care about, as are glbtq rights. But my interest in arguing about which of them are more important is absolutely zero. This is a question that benefits exactly no one and gets us exactly nowhere. In feminist circles, this process is known as playing oppression Olympics and is a well-known form of derailing. Deciding that a book about glbtq rights is automatically more worthy of an award than one about gender (or the reverse) has a similar effect: it draws attention away from more interesting and useful questions about inequality in literature.

Now, this is where this post gets tricky and I have to proceed carefully, because I really worry I’ll sound like I’m saying the exact opposite of what I mean. Critiques of the “importance argument” are often used to dismiss appeals to diversity in literature, but the reason why I care about this is actually because I do care about diversity; because I think that yes, we actually do still need these reminders and appeals. The thing is, stories that offer different perspective, that feature protagonists or are written by authors who are not straight, male, white, or able-bodied, do not all have to be “issue books”. They won’t necessarily be “important” in this very limited sense of the term, and they certainly don’t have to be stories we make concessions for because they are Good For Us and teach us something. There are more than enough good books out there by members of any of these groups that they can be held to the exact same literary standards each of us holds all other fiction to, regardless of the importance of their subject matter.

Again, I don’t mean any of this as an argument against readers making a conscious effort to read more diversely – quite the opposite. It’s not a level playing field out there, and this means we do have to go out of our way to find stories from perspectives other than the very limited ones we’re trained to think of as universal – see Eva’s post on this topic, which says everything I could possibly say (only better). However, I think that focusing exclusively on the “importance argument” reinforces the erroneous idea that to read diversely is to lower one’s literary standards. I don’t want people to run with the idea that any glbtq book that wins a major book award, for example, has won it just because it’s a glbtq book. Yes, there can be value and interest in a book that is not particularly well-written or brilliantly plotted, but is the only one, or the first one, or one of very few, written from a certain perspective. But overall, we don’t need to make concessions – there are more stories out there than we know; enough that to seek them out does not have to require us to give up anything else that we also value.

We don’t have to read diversely just because these books are important. Yes, of course they are; of course we should put an end to underrepresentation; and of course that ethical and social justice considerations matter and are often taken into account by readers. But none of this means we’ll be making a sacrifice. All stories are important; all human issues are of significance, and life will be more interesting if we, as Raych once put it, expand the limits of what we like. We can also read diversely for this reason, then - because it’s a pity that so much should be left out of mainstream fiction and of the range of experiences that are presented to us as all-encompassing. And because these are good stories, with the same power to amaze, delight and illuminate as the dominant perspectives most of us are used to.

¹ Of course, when I say this I am not thinking of specialised book awards like the Orange or the Lambda, which yes, I do think are necessary for these reasons, and whose recipients are anything but uniform in terms of subject matter.


ETA: I just wanted to clarify (as I did in the comments, but I know not everyone reading this from a feed reader will necessarily click over) that although I didn’t get into that in detail here, I absolutely don’t subscribe to a single valid definition of “literary quality”, and I completely agree that the way we have been trained to think of and recognise markers of quality is culturally constructed and far from politically neutral. Literature does different things for different people (and for the same person at different times), and whether or not a book tells a story that needs to be told is a perfectly valid criterion by which to judge its success. As anyone familiar with this blog will likely know, my own readings are often influenced by social and political considerations, and I don’t think this is something we should be apologetic about. What troubles me about these discussions, though, is that sometimes the underlying assumption is that we must give up other things if we are to make room for stories that haven't been told before, because they won’t satisfy on more than one single level, or the level at which they satisfy is not as valid in a strictly literary sense. Expanding our understanding of the world and making us see things from someone else’s perspective are among the things I personally value the most about literature, so they certainly do go into my own definition of “literary quality”. But I would also argue that there are very few books out there that only do one thing.

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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own was the May choice for the Year of Feminist Classics project, and although I was supposed to be leading the discussion, life happened and I only got around to writing about the essay in full this month. Better late than never, right? As I said in my introduction, A Room of One’s Own was first published in 1929, and it’s based on two lectures delivered by Woolf at Newham and Girton Colleges in 1928. Virginia Woolf’s central argument is that “every woman needs a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year”, that is: without economic independence and the freedom it allows, women’s achievements in the arts and in literature will forever lag behind.

A Room of One’s Own uses this central premise as a point of departure to address topics such as women’s access to education (or the lack thereof), literary history, the social circumstances surrounding women’s writing, androgyny, and the taboos concerning lesbian writing – a topic that was surely at the front of everyone’s mind only one year after the obscenity trial about The Well of Loneliness.

This was my second time reading Woolf’s famous essay, and now as then I was particularly moved by the third chapter, in which she tells the fictional story Judith, Shakespeare’s sister. Reading that chapter for the first time many years ago caused one of my first “click” movements regarding feminism – it made me understand sexist oppression better than I ever had before, and it caused me to begin to join the dots.

Regarding the position of a woman like the fictional Judith, Woolf says:

To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.

The words “twisted and deformed” are pretty loaded: they hint at centuries of shaming women and deeming any deviant gender performance “unnatural”. Therefore, it’s a little hard for me to read something like this without wincing. I disagree with Woolf here, and also later on when she makes a similar point about Jane Eyre. A lot has been written about Woolf’s stance on female anger, so I won’t dwell on that too much – I’ll just say that yes, anger is a perfectly valid emotion for a woman to experience and is certainly worth writing about. However, as Woolf develops her argument I begin to see her point. She goes on to say:

But, nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her ‘the opposing faction’; she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex.

As much as I don’t think that anger makes women’s writing twisted or deformed; as much as I think that resistance to oppression is a perfectly valid topic, I do want women’s writing to contain the full human spectrum. I don’t want every book by a woman to have to be an outcry against sexism, but that’s only possible if they live in a world where sexist restrictions and limitations don’t consume their whole attention. In this sense, I can understand what Woolf was trying to say.

Another frequent point of discussion about A Room of One’s Own is Woolf’s theory of the androgynous mind, about which Emily wrote a fabulous guest post back in May. I particularly liked Emily’s point about gender being real in the world as it is today – therefore, even if one rejects gender essentialism the gender binary remains very useful as a lens of analysis. Woolf accepted essentialism to a far greater degree than I’m comfortable with myself, but I can certainly see value of her ideas despite that.

Reading A Room of One’s Own was an eye-opening experience for my younger self, and revisiting it some years later was a real pleasure. Of course, this isn’t to say that the text is without its blind spots and shortcomings: Alice Walker has written a famous critique based on Woolf’s exclusion of women of colour, and in her review from a few years ago Memory made some excellent points about why the essay is problematic from a class standpoint. All of this is true, and I completely respect the fact that different readers have different limits regarding how much is too much. In my case, A Room of One’s Own’s limitations didn’t detract from a deep appreciation for what it does achieve. As with many other simultaneously problematic and illuminating texts, I was left with the desire to read it alongside other works, so that a fuller picture of the gender issues faced by women in the early twentieth century could emerge.

A Room of One’s Own packs a lot of ideas despite its brief length, and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface of everything it does or doesn’t do. I’ll finish this by saying how much I loved the voice Woolf uses here: she does sarcasm brilliantly, and despite the serious subject matter there are some wonderful moments of humour.

The final paragraph, in which she returns to Shakespeare’s sister, really moved me. I wonder what Virginia Woolf would make of the world as it is today? So much has changed, so much has stayed the same.

You can read A Room of One’s Own online here.

Memorable excerpts:

So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day’s work. I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laid asleep — prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand — not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late.

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this.

I really love it when she gets sarcastic.

Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

So true, even today. As is this Bechdel Test-esque bit:

Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.

They read it too: Stella Matutina, Amy Reads, Notes from the North, Literary Musings, Rebecca Reads, Eclectic/Eccentric, Chasing Bawa, The Reading Life, Musings, Silver Threads, Booked All Week, Bonnie’s Books, Nose in a Book, Reading' and Dreamin', Read Irresponsibly

(Have I missed yours? Let me know and I’ll be happy to add it.)

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Thank Heaven Fasting by E.M. Delafield

Much was said in the days of Monica’s early youth about being good. Life—the section of it that was visible from the angle of Eaton Square—was full of young girls who were all being good. Even a girl who was tiresome and “didn’t get on with her mother” was never anything but good, since opportunities for being anything else were practically non-existent.

The title of E.M. Delafield’s 1932 novel Thank Heaven Fasting comes from a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “But mistress, know yourself; down on your knees, / And thank Heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love”. It tells the story of Monica Ingram, the only daughter of a well-to-do family. When the novel opens, Monica is about to become a débutante and have her first ball. Thank Heaven Fasting follows Monica’s attempts to do the thing every girl of her social sphere was raised to do: secure herself a respectable husband.

Thank Heaven Fasting takes place over an unspecified period in the early 20th century. There are no overt mentions of WW1, but there are plenty of references to there not being “enough men to go round”, which suggests it could be the post-War period. Then again, there are also some references to the suffragette’s campaign. In any case, this is a time when the marriage market is still in full swing, and when the options available to a girl like Monica are painfully limited.

E.M. Delafield revisits the themes of her earlier novel Consequences here, but from a different angle: Thank Heaven Fasting is not so much about money and the destitution that would most likely befall a woman who didn’t marry (Monica is well aware of this, of course, though as a single child she would fare better than most), but about the psychological aspects of the marriage market.

In this novel, Delafield mostly focuses on the sense of failure and humiliation experienced by women who failed to be “attractive to men”. And as this is something that has changed far less than the economic angle, Thank Heaven Fasting is not really a novel that invites a sight of relief or a pat on the back about how far we’ve come – not when we remember the stigma that still surrounds single women, the dominant cultural myths about failure and frustration and dreadful, inevitable unhappiness, the incredibly loaded term “spinster” and all that it still implies.

Much like Alex in Consequences, Monica is not a rebel, but that was exactly what made her experiences so interesting to me. The sexist ideology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not make a feminist out of every woman who suffered its consequences – some, like Monica, were too fully immersed in it to question the system, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t pay its price. Much of the power of Thank Heaven Fasting is in what it does not say; in what the characters don’t realise but the reader does. The final section of the novel, titled “the happy ending”, is particularly chilling in this regard. There’s no doubt that yes, Monica is happy, but there’s such tragedy in her final wish never to have a daughter.

Another interesting aspect of Thank Heaven Fasting is its analysis of the constraints the marriage market dynamics put on truly intimate relationships between men and women. How could they ever emerge when there were so many rules that had to be obeyed; so many games to be played? This aspect of the novel reminded me a little of To The Lighthouse. Take, for example, Monica’s mother’s litany of rules concerning how to act around men:

“Never make yourself cheap, darling. It doesn’t lead to anything, in the long run, to let a man know that you like him or want him to like you.”
“Don’t talk about being ‘friends’ with a young man, my pet. There’s no such thing as a friendship between a girl and a man. Either he wants to marry you, or he doesn’t. Nothing else is any good.”
“A girl who gets herself talked about is done for. Men may dance with her, or flirt with her, but they don’t propose. She gets left.”
“Never have anything to do with a young man who’s familiar—asking if he may call you by your Christian name, or write to you, or anything like that. A gentleman doesn’t do those things to the kind of girl that he respects, and might want to marry.”

These rules are actually not too far removed from the rules I remember from my own upbringing, though the emphasis was less on marriage and more on “respectability”. Even though socio-economic circumstances have changed, these ideas still very much shape how we perceive female sexuality and what is or isn’t appropriate gendered behaviour. As a result, women are still expected to play this sort of game. The saddest thing of all is that the narrative eventually (and almost inevitably) proves Monica’s mother right: she’s right in the sense that yes, this is how the system works. And the more people obeyed it, the more real it became.

Thank Heaven Fasting is a powerful and very moving novel. As enjoyable as The Diary of a Provincial Lady is, it’s actually a shame that it’s Delafield’s best-known book and that it overshadows works like this or Consequences.

A few more memorable passages:

She could never, looking backwards, remember a time when she had not known that a woman’s failure or success in life depended entirely upon whether or not she succeeded in getting a husband. It was not, even, a question of marrying well, although mothers with pretty and attractive daughters naturally hoped for that. But any husband at all was better than none. If a girl was neither married nor engaged by the end of her third season it was usually said, discreetly, among her mother’s acquaintances, that no one had asked her.

Before the tidal wave of pain and humiliation that had risen on the horizon of consciousness had actually broken, engulfing her youth and her confidence in herself and in life, Monica had time for that flash of astonished conviction:
Her mother had been right all the time.
It was a conviction from which she was never again wholly to free herself.

Reviewed at: Verity’s Virago Venture, A Work in Progress, Book Snob, Desperate Reader, Bunny Stuff, Books as Food

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Westwood by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons’ Westwood is mostly set in Highgate Village and Hampstead during WW2, and it tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a shy, intense young woman from an unhappy family background who has just moved to London. Margaret’s life has been one of dullness and quiet desperation – until one day, when walking on Hampstead Heath, she finds a lost ration book belonging to one Hebe Niland. When she returns it, she comes into contact with the families of Alexander Niland, a painter, and Gerald Challis, a playwright she idolises.

This bohemian circle (and Westwood, the Highgate mansion where the Challises live) seems to embody everything Margaret has always aspired to – excitement, possibility, art, a fuller life. But the more time she spends with them, the more her common sense alarm bells begin to ring. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Margaret, her old school friend Hilda starts seeing Mr Challis, who gives her the false name of Marcus and pretends to be a bachelor. Will the inevitable discovery of the situation make the scales fall from Margaret’s eyes? And at what cost?

Westood is only the third Stella Gibbons novel I read, but already she has a firm place among my favourite authors. The main reason why I haven’t read more of her work is the fact that until very recently, only two of her novels were in print – but thankfully Vintage Classics has rectified the situation. Westood, which was reissued this past August, combines the wistfulness of Nightingale Wood with the humour of Cold Comfort Farm, and displays the full depth and range of Stella Gibbons’ writing.

Somewhat to my surprise, Westwood turned out to be a novel of a kind I’m constantly on the lookout for: one that deals with longing and idealisation from a female perspective. The early chapters, which are mostly about Margaret’s family and unhappy home, told me right away this was a book I was going to adore. They’re at once unflinching and compassionate; they give the characters a depth that resonates throughout the whole novel. Margaret, who is all loneliness and longing, could easily have come across as very silly, but because readers have been made to understand what lies behind her earnestness, intensity and yearning, this never really happens. Westood is very much a comedy, but it’s not one where the humour comes at the expensive of its protagonist, no matter how many comedic situations she finds herself in.

For example, the chapter where the Gerard/Marcus situation is unveiled is possibly one of the most hilarious things I have ever read, and yet it simultaneous manages not to lose its emotional punch – even among the laughter, the reader feels for Margaret, whose illusions have suddenly and painfully come crashing down. When all is said and done, Margaret thinks to herself:

It was not as if [his plays] expressed a despairing admiration for integrity and tragedy and strength, obviously written up by a weak but aspiring soul; no, they were written down, as if by a lofty soul that already possessed integrity and the tragic sense and strength, and believed everyone else should possess them too. What was he doing sniffing (yes, sniffing was the word Margaret used to herself) at people with commonplace longings for happiness?

Gibbons does of course take full advantage of the humour of the situation, but all the same she acknowledges that this is a painful process for Margaret.

Speaking of Gerard Challis, I need to tell you what a brilliant creation he is, and all about how pretty much all his sections had me laughing out loud. Mr Challis is pompous, completely devoid of a sense of humour, a fervent believer in his own genius and importance, and more than a little impatient with all the inferior intellects that surround him. Stella Gibbons also tells us that “like most seekers for an ideal woman, he did not really like women, believing that they disappointed and failed him on purpose.” The introduction to this edition reveals that Challis was based on the writer Charles Morgan, and Gibbons’ sarcasm and impatience with his kind of drama are only too visible. Take this description of Gerard Challis’ masterpiece, for example:

For another two hours the tragedy of Kattë unfolded, marching towards its inevitable end over the souls and bodies of her friends and relations. Her father shot her mother, for having borne him such a daughter, and then jumped into the Danube. Her crippled brother’s character was corrupted by the young officers who bribed him to carry notes to his sister for them and pleaded their cause, and he became a pimp. Her younger sister went insane with jealousy when she believed that her own lover had deserted her for Kattë, and the final blow was struck when the old nurse, with whom Kattë had lived since the break-up of her own home, was forced to sell the pet goldfinch to buy a little goulash for their supper and burst into sobs during the meal, blaming Kattë for the loss of the bird.

Or this bit of internal monologue:

Why could not his wife and daughter lead poetic, solitary lives, reading in the library or wandering in the shady garden, and keeping out of his way? That was what his own heroines always did (not that anybody ever wanted them to keep out of the way, of course; people, especially men, were always looking for them). Why must they rush about and laugh and talk such a lot? It created an exhausted atmosphere, and one unfavourable to the creative spirit.

Or this conversation with his wife:

‘Gerry dear,’ said his wife gently, turning to him as he stood by the door with the sunlight on her face, looking like some Julia or Dianeme from a poem by Herrick. ‘I don’t mean to butt in or be rude, and of course I do know everyone says you’re such a marvellous psychologist and I’m not highbrow or anything, but honestly you don’t know much about women. The women in your plays are such hags, darling; absolute witches and hags, if you don’t mind my saying so. I don’t know any women like them and I’ve known hordes of women. Some of them were witches and some were hags, but they weren’t witches and hags in that way – so highbrow and pleased with themselves and not having any young, or any fun, or anything natural.’

Stella Gibbons is an amazing satirist: she can be absolutely biting, but even at her sharpest she’s not devoid of humanity and warmth. She gives her character their due – even Gerard eventually reveals that he is nicer than he believes himself to be – and as a result they never become caricatures. She injects a healthy dose of compassion for their foolishness into her gleeful sarcasm, and that makes all the difference.

The ending of Westood, much like that of Nightingale Wood, was a delightful surprise. Gibbons eschews all the conventions of romance and puts Margaret in a position that is far more subversive than it may initially seem. Margaret comes to understand “The Gentle Powers” than give the novel is alternate title – “Beauty and Time and the Past and Pity – and Laughter too”. She’s had enough of the Nilands and Challises, and of being taken advantage of, but not of the things they represented for her.

Giving up this fashionable circle does not mean that Margaret gives up all the things she’s come to love and opts for a more conventional life. She continues to love music and drama and literature and history; she continues to love wanting things, and slowly realises that she finds happiness in longing. The ending quietly acknowledges that there are forms of happiness beyond the most conventional paths, and that these are perfectly acceptable for a young woman – which, in 1946 as now, is no small thing.

Westood sometimes shows its age in things like the social acceptability of expressing revulsion for a disabled child, for example, but overall this is a remarkably current, hilarious, tender, and delightful story. I desperately want all the newly available Stella Gibbons novels.

A few more of my favourite bits:

‘I mean free in spirit,’ he said sharply, frowning, ‘Freedom of the body is nothing.’

Now Margaret had a strong vein of common sense and sense of duty to her fellow beings which was inherited from her commonplace ancestors; and, in spite of the delightful confusion of her feelings, her immediate response to that authoritative Freedom of the body is nothing was a vehement Rubbish! which, unuttered, caused the blood to rise to her face and thoughts of the prisoners in camps all over the world to rush into her mind with a sensation almost of audibility, as if she heard millions of voices imploring for liberty.

I could have bet his favourite flower would be roses, he’s so absolutely ordinary. I wonder what his favourite flower is? – if he has one.
(Mr Challis, should the reader care to know, favoured orchids. They are difficult to obtain, sophisticated, and expensive, all qualities which he liked. They also – if a flower can – look perverse, and he liked that, too. He was always failing to notice exquisite ordinary objects under his nose, and so he never noticed the tiny wild flowers which are perhaps the loveliest thing in the world; at once study and delicate, with their pure scents that seem half wilderness itself; the very breath and spirit of meadows distilled in a cup a quarter of an inch wide. But had the corncockle measured six inches across and cost half a guinea a spray, no one would have admired the corncockle more than Mr Challis.)

It was strange to stand at her window and look out across the orchard, were the apple trees glimmered in the starlight and Mars flashed low and red upon the horizon, to feel herself surrounded by that sleeping childish loveliness, and to realise that far out across the meadows and little woods and darkened cities of England, beyond the calm spring sea, men were fighting; that the game the children had played in the garden was a pantomime of the horror in Europe and Asia. Half the world, he thought, is fighting tonight; and yet here there are still people who are going to bed peacefully, with children asleep near them and candlelight making shadows on the wall and their beds looking comforting and quiet. And suddenly, for the first time in her life, she felt that she loved both the good and the wicked; she loved all her fellow-men.

Reviewed at: Vulpe Libris, Stuck in a Book, Secluded Charm, Desperate Reader

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One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn: A Jolly Murder Mystery is the second novel in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series (the first being Case Histories). Former investigator Brodie is in Edinburgh for the Festival, as his girlfriend Julia has a part in a play. Shortly after he arrives he witnesses a violent road rage incident – and so do a number of other characters which Atkinson then follows for the rest of the novel. The people involved include Martin Canning, a somewhat reclusive mystery author with secrets of his own (and who for some reason looks exactly like Watson from the recent BBC Sherlock series in my head); Gloria Hatter, wife of dubious construction millionaire Graham Hatter; Paul Bradley, a man on a secret mission and the victim of the incident; and Terrence Smith, his attacker. There’s also Detective Sergeant Louise Monroe, who becomes involved in the investigations and consequently in Jackson Brodie’s life.

The several plot strands in One Good Turn slowly come together to reveal a story to which there’s far more than initially meets the eye. Atkinson’s plotting here is far more intricate than in Case Histories, and although I preferred the first novel I appreciate just how many balls she managed to juggle without letting any of them drop (not too noticeably, at least). But as elaborate as the plot may be, at its heart One Good Turn is still very much a character-based novel – and more than anything else it was the characters that kept me reading compulsively.

Case Histories left me with the impression that Kate Atkinson was absolutely brilliant at characterisation, and One Good Turn only confirmed it. Over the course of the novel, we get to know each of the characters intimately, and as a result their humanity becomes undeniable regardless of their actions. There are no bogeymen in Atkinson’s novel; only people, even if some of them happen to be very unpleasant people. She’s all about shades of grey, and One Good Turn doesn’t go for the clear-cut division between the lawful and righteous and the wicked and lawless that can sometimes be found in mystery novels. Readers don’t know who’s guilty or innocent (or of what) until the very last page, even if they think they do.

In addition to being great at characterisation, Kate Atkinson is also very funny in a subdued sort of way. The subtitle “A Jolly Murder Mystery” is pretty accurate, as One Good Turn is full of instances of subtle sarcasm and dark humour that I absolutely loved. Another thing that made this novel extra fun for me was the Edinburgh Festival setting – having been there just this summer, the geography was very fresh in my head and I could picture all the places perfectly.

One Good Turn can probably be read as a stand-alone novel, as the plot will make perfect sense on its own, but readers will be more invested in some aspects of the story, namely Jackson and Julia’s relationship, if they start with Case Histories. Not to mention that as enjoyable as One Good Turn is, the first Jackson Brodie will give you a better idea of just how good Atkinson can be.

Has anyone watched the recent BBC adaptation of Atkinson’s series? What did you think?

What other readers had to say: Shelf Love, If You Can Read This, Mysteries in Paradise, Novel Insights, An Adventure in Reading, The 3Rs

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Ain’t I A Woman by bell hooks

bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism was first published in 1981, and it takes its title from Sojourner’s Truth famous speech from 1851. As hooks points out, Sojourner Truth is an example of an early black feminist campaigner who up until then had been erased from the history of feminism. One of the main arguments of Ain’t I a Woman is that “the struggle to end racism and the struggle to end sexism are naturally intertwined”, as both facets of human identity cannot be divorced; but hooks also deals extensively with racism within the feminist movement.

One of the things bell hooks does is draw attention to the racism inherent to the assumption that white experience equals universal experience. It is common to find books where “women’s history” is implicitly taken to mean “white women’s history”; it’s only if another group is discussed that ethnicity is specified. The feminist movement seems to be more inclusive now than it was in the early 1980’s (no doubt thanks to the work of bell hook and other activists over the past few decades), but in no way does this mean that racism has been eradicated or that Ain’t I a Woman is not still as relevant as ever.

For example, the original reading list for the Year of Feminism Classics did not include any books by non-Western women or women of colour. We were happy to correct this once it was pointed out to us (and one of the books we added was this one), and I like to think we wouldn’t make the same mistake again in the future. But the fact that this blind spot was at all possible is an excellent reminder of the relevancy of hooks’ points: we are trained to think that what is in fact a distorted and very limited picture of reality is natural and all-encompassing.

On a similar note, bell hooks highlights the fact that the word “woman” is taken to mean white woman, and the word “black” black men. This implicit reading of the terms reveals the fact that racist and sexist oppression are often conceptualised in terms of either/or; a conceptualisation that completely erases black women. This is what makes problematic comparisons between the status of women and “blacks” at all possible – and such comparisons are far from being a thing of the past.

The implications behind these readings of the terms tie in with racist and sexist stereotypes that date back to slavery and are still current today. These include the stereotypical image of the black man as a sexual predator and a threat to white women in particular; and of the black woman as either not properly feminine (an idea that has to do with the fact that black women were forced to do hard labour during slavery) or as hypersexual and universally available (which, also during slavery, was used as a justification for sexual exploitation). bell hooks draws links between these stereotypes and a devaluation of black women that continues until the present day.

Although Ain’t I a Woman predates Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work and the coining of the term “intersectionality” [pdf], it’s nevertheless one of the best illustrations of the concept I’ve come across so far. In very accessible writing, hooks communicates ideas that are crucial to an accurate understanding of contemporary feminism, sociology, and cultural studies. Ain’t I a Woman invites readers to question their assumptions, and hopefully it will help those of us who are privileged enough to remain unaware of these issues to avoid some of the most common racist traps in the future.

Memorable bits:

Although the women’s movement motivated hundreds of women to write on the woman question, it failed to generate in depth critical analyses of the black female experience. Most feminists assumed that problems black women faced were caused by racism – not sexism. The assumption that we can divorce the issue of race from sex, or sex from race, has so clouded the vision of American thinkers and writers on the “woman” question that most discussions of sexism, sexist oppression, or woman’s place in society are distorted, biased, and inaccurate. We cannot form an accurate picture of woman’s status by simply calling attention to the role assigned females under patriarchy. More specifically, we cannot form an accurate picture of the status of black women by simply focusing on racial hierarchies.

Sexist historians and sociologists have provided the American public with a perspective on slavery in which the most cruel and dehumanizing impact of slavery in the lives of black people was that black men were stripped of their masculinity, which they argue resulted in the dissolution and overall disruption of any familiar structure. (…) To suggest that black men were dehumanized solely as a result of not being able to be patriarchs implies that the subjugation of black women was essential to the black male’s development of a positive self-concept, an idea that only served to support a sexist social order.

It in no way diminishes our concern about racist oppression for us to acknowledge that our human experience is so complex that we cannot understand it if we only understand racism. Fighting against sexist oppression is important for black liberation, for as long as sexism divides black women and men we cannot concentrate our energies on resisting racism.

They read it too: Eclectic/Eccentric, Howling Frog Books

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Gifts for Book Lovers: A Guide to a Very Bookish Holiday Season

As the holiday season approaches, gift buying guides of all kinds begin to proliferate around the Internet. I thought I’d try my hand at one this year, for the simple reason that making lists is fun and is the next best thing to giving or receiving any bookish gifts.

The holidays are the perfect excuse to treat our loved ones (or ourselves) to a luxury edition of a book they already own. The Everyman Library edition of His Dark Materials is a perfect example: it has a gorgeous cover, a new introduction and preface, and Pullman’s memorable story in a single volume.


I Capture the Castle tote bag from the Literary Gift Company. Need I say more?


The Literary Gift Company offers plenty of other bookish treats. I love pretty much all of these Penguin Classics mugs, but if I had to pick a favourite A Room of One’s Own would be it.


Bookmarks are probably my favourite bookish accessory, and Etsy is a perfect place to find unique ones. They have everything from this luxury cat bookmark to paper book monsters that can easily be mailed with a Christmas card.


One of my favourite Etsy artists, Adorapop, sells a range of Victorian, literary and fairy tale inspired accessories. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but this pendant, celebrating Darwin’s bicentenary, particularly caught my eye. “I think…” are the words Darwin scribbled on his notebook above his first evolutionary tree in 1837.


One last Etsy item: “Yay! Books!” pendant from ASnailsPace.


The What The Dickens? Writing and Literary Gifts shop sells a collection of “literary teabags” with quotations.


I imagine they’re even better if served from this teapot or in one of these mugs:



Over at Neverwear, Neil Gaiman fans can treat themselves to several accessories and other items. I particularly like this Anansi Boys t-shirt, but there’s plenty more where that came from.


Speaking of t-shirts, Kate Beaton, of Hark! A Vagrant fame, has the very best ones ever. The one I received last year is now one of my dearest possessions. But I also quite like this one:


Or this one, which is very popular among book bloggers:


Lisa Snellings’ Poppets are also very popular among book bloggers, and in the early days of blogging they even became a sort of unofficial mascot. They’re not for every pocket, but they’re beautiful and look perfect decorating a bookshelf.


And look! A Mary Shelley rat:


Returning to what I was saying earlier about beautiful editions, who can resist these gorgeous Virago Modern Classics Hardbacks? Or the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions? Or these Clothbound Classics? I want them all:


I couldn’t of course end this list without including a seasonal book: Vintage’s reissue of Stella Gibbons’ Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm sounds like the perfect holidays read.


Finally, let us not forget seasonal DVD watching: as I found out only last year, The Muppets Christmas Carol is a cult classic for a reason; the Cranford BBC series just feels Christmasy; and there’s always the TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (starring Michelle Dockery, aka Mary from Downton Abbey, as Susan Sto Helit - this discovery led to much excitement around these parts), which I plan to watch this Christmas.


Are you planing on giving (or hoping to receive) any bookish gifts this holiday season? Do any of these appeal to you?

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Enchanted Hunters by Maria Tatar

In Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, Maria Tatar attempts to answer the question, “What happens to children when they read?” As Tatar explains in the introduction, her attempt to answer this question is based on the recollections of adults looking back on their experiences as child readers rather than on insight from current children. The former does not replace the latter, but it is valuable and telling in itself.

What Enchanted Hunters does, then, is attempt to

track those enchanted hunters, focusing above all on the question of affect and effects. To be sure, I will not ignore questions about morals, message, and values in childhood reading, nor will I neglect aesthetic issues touching on style and structure. But I want first and foremost to get at how literature touches us when we are young, moving and transforming us with its intoxicating, enthralling, and occasionally terrifying energy. How do the stories that constitute our collective cultural inheritance change our lives, defying the laws of time and space by resonating within our minds long after we have put them down?

The result is a mixture of literary analysis, cultural history, and insight into what drives young readers, which is reminiscent of the works of Francis Spufford and Jerry Griswold. Tatar’s style also slightly reminded me of Alberto Manguel, in the sense that both are extremely learned and are very successful at bringing together unlikely threads of knowledge in ways that generate new insights.

When applied to literary analysis, Tatar’s ability leads to unlikely connections between, say, Maurice Sendak and Marcel Proust that are as surprising as they are a joy to read. Tatar’s perceptive analyses were probably my favourite sections of Enchanted Hunters. The books she covers here include classics such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Phantom Toolboth, The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web (this section in particular made me appreciate E.B. White’s work more than ever, in that unique way good critics have of making you see familiar books in an entirely new light), The Secret Garden and the works of Dr Seuss; but also more recent works such as His Dark Materials and Harry Potter.

A.S. Byatt said of this book:

Perhaps Tatar's most original contribution to thought about children's stories and what they do to their inhabitants is about how the addicted readers are also learning (most of them) to deal with growing up. The great powers of the mind in the world of children's books are a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity. The writers feed both with colours never seen on sea or land, with moons and stars and gold and silver and monsters and dangers. But they are also teaching mastery of language which is the stuff of thought and necessary to growing up when the time comes.

Which sums it up perfectly, really. There is a deep appreciation here for what stories do not only as narratives, but as novel and exciting ways of using language to make sense of, organise, and expand our world.

Maria Tatar was recently the focus of a lot of attention in the book blogging world due to an article which I agree misrepresents contemporary Young Adult literature. But I do hope readers will not let their opinion of that piece keep them away from Enchanted Hunters — this is a perceptive, informed and extraordinary book.

Memorable passages:

If there is a lesson to be derived from these meditations on childhood reading, it lies in the power of words to serve as magical wands. Words have not just astonishing capacity to banish boredom and create wonders. They also enable contact with the lives if others and with story worlds, arousing endless curiosity about ourselves and the places we inhabit. Such passion promises to keep us, at least intellectually, forever young.

Deeply invested in creating sensory stimulation that enlivens, animates, and transforms, the authors of children’s books stockpile arsenals of beauty and horror to construct “peak experiences” – memorable moments that offer up the exquisite, the terrifying, and everything in between.

Our curiosity about the interior lives of others, coupled with the exhilarating sense of fathoming the complex minds of those who are not at all like us, keep us reading.

More akin to wanderers and creators than to gluttons and addicts, readers lead a nomadic existence that requires mental agility and the capacity to pursue leads and follow trails. Not all hunter return from those literary travels with their creative instincts sharpened, but they all bring back some kind of quarry, souvenirs of those lures that keep them hot on the trail. They preserve those souvenirs as precious talismans that are memorized, burnished, and preserved until they become their own. As they appropriate and internalize words, readers use those same words to construct their identities, changing them in ways so subtle that they often escape conscious attention.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

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Letters from a Lost Generation edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge

Letters from a Lost Generation is a collection of WWI letters between Vera Brittain, her fiancé Roland Leighton, her brother Edward Brittain, and their close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow. The collection opens with letters dating from 1913, which gives readers a glimpse of the carefree Edwardian world the correspondents inhabited. In their early letters, Vera and Roland discuss Olive Schreiner’s feminist novel The Story of an African Farm, a book close to both their hearts, and dream of a future together at Oxford – their greatest worry at the time was whether Vera would do well on her admission exams.

However, the beginning of the war in 1914 changes everything. Roland immediately enlists, and although Vera initially goes to Oxford she quickly decides to postpone her studies to become a V.A.D. nurse for the duration of the war. Letters from a Lost Generation covers the war years in their entirety and ends on a heartbreaking note in 1918 when the last of Vera’s correspondents was killed.

Those who have read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth will already be familiar with the facts these letters cover (though I can’t imagine that making Letters from a Lost Generation any less interesting, since the point is not what happens but how the people involved experience it). However, as this was my introduction to Brittain’s work even the facts themselves took me by surprise – and often gave me quite a shock. The circumstances of Roland’s death, for example, could not have been more cruel for Vera. After many attempts they finally managed to get leave simultaneously, but he died just the day before his leave began. With means of communication being what they were, Vera did not hear until they were due to meet, so when she was called to be told the news she thought she was being called because he had finally arrived.

But returning to the letters themselves: this Virago edition is beautifully edited, and as a result Letters from a Lost Generation reads much like a work of narrative nonfiction. Furthermore, the letters are of both historical and literary interest – all the correspondents were talented writers, particularly Vera and Roland, and the final effect is similar to that of the Brownings’ letters. I expected Letters from a Lost Generation to be a somewhat slow read, but in actuality I could not put it down.

One of the most striking things about these letters is how very young the writers were – only 18 or 19 when the war begins – and how much they change in such a short period of time. Roland goes from saying that war is “very ennobling and very beautiful” to writing, “there is nothing glorious in trench warfare. It is all a waiting and a waiting and taking of petty advantages – and those who can wait longest win. And it is all for nothing – for an empty name, for an ideal perhaps – after all.” Readers can see the sense of futility we now associate with WW1 slowly emerging. And Roland was the first to die, only two years into the conflict. Reading these letters, it’s really no surprise that Vera Brittain went on to become a lifelong pacifist and activist.

The first half of the book is mostly devoted to Vera and Roland’s correspondence, and you can see their relationship developing against the backdrop of the war. The letters thus combine the anxiety of budding romance with the anxiety of war. A week without a letter could mean many things to Vera – that Roland had been killed, yes, but also that their relationship was cooling, or that he had neglected to write with no thought for how very anxious Vera and his family would be. And of course, she had no way of knowing the real reason until the next letter arrived. There was nothing to do but wait. Vera’s letters are full of suppressed feelings bubbling just under the surface – constant worry, of course, but also anger and frustration. You can easily imagine just how much she was holding back. As she writes to Roland,

One cannot be angry with people at the Front – a fact which I sometimes think they take advantage of – and so when I read ‘We go back into the trenches to-morrow’ I literally dare not write you the kind of letter you perhaps deserve, for thinking that the world might end for you on that discontent note…

Add to this the delay of early twentieth-century communications, and the result is a state of continuous anguish that hardly bears imagining. Not only did the correspondents wonder and worry between letters, but they also continued to worry when a letter dated from a week or ten days before arrived – could the writer had been killed in the meantime?

Letters from a Lost Generation includes weeks of silence where you can sense just how Vera must have been feeling, and also letters written after the intended recipient had already been killed. The result is a collection of amazing immediacy, rich in historical detail, and as horrific as it is beautifully written.

Memorable bits:

Yesterday I saw the name of a man among the killed with whom I have done a considerable amount of amateur acting – & there was another the other day with whom I have often played tennis, & met out. I feel as if I shall soon have no acquaintances left, to say nothing of friends. I told you people at college had on the whole very little direct connection with the war, but only to-day a girl I know quite well went home because her brother had just been killed in the Dardanelles. He was also in a Lancashire Regiment… I feel as if I were standing on a lovely & dismal shore, watching the tide gradually surround and cut me off, & I am almost sure that it will not turn before it has reached me.

(Vera to Roland, 1915)

This afternoon is glowing with the languorous warm of the dying Summer; the sun is a shield of burnished gold in a sea of turquoise; the bees are in the clover that overhangs the trench – and my superficial beauty-loving self is condescending to be very conscious of the joy of loving. It is a pity to kill people on a day like this. In a way, I suppose, it is a pity to kill people on any kind of day, but opinions – even my own – differ on this subject. Like Waldo I love to sit in the sun, and like him I have no Lyndall to sit with.

(Roland to Vera, 1915)

Public opinion has made it a high and lofty virtue for us women to countenance the departure of such as these & you to regions where they will probably be slaughtered in a brutally degrading fashion in which we would never allow animals to be slaughtered. This, I suppose, is the ‘something elemental, something beautiful’ that you find in War! To the saner mind it seems more like a reason for shutting up half the nation in a criminal lunatic asylum.

(Vera to Roland, 1915)

All Roland’s things had just been sent back from the front through Cox’s; they had just opened them and they were all lying on the floor. (…) There were His clothes – the clothes in which He came home from the front last time – another set rather less worn, and underclothing and accessories of various descriptions. Everything was damp & worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone else who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards & the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was though it were saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time. All the sepulchres and catacombs of Rome could not make me realise mortality and decay and corruption as vividly as did the smell of those clothes.

(Vera to Edward, 1916).

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A Literary Tour of the North West

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been visiting several literary places in and around my current city of residence. Most of them are places I kept meaning to go to for the past year or so, but somehow or other I kept putting it off. I thought I’d share a few pictures from these visits with you.

First of all, a couple of weeks ago fellow bloggers Iris and Amy came to stay with me for a few days – and could there be a better excuse to go to some of these places than having bookish friends come visit? One of the places we went to was Chetham’s Library, which dates back to 1653 and is the oldest public library in the English speaking world. The library is also famous for being a regular meeting place for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; a sign marks the table where the two used to sit and work. Chetham’s Library is certainly a must see for history lovers, as well as for anyone interested in libraries:














We also went to The Pankhurst Centre, the former house of Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst (the latter is often left out, but after reading Rebel Girls I have to include her) and “the birthplace of the suffragette movement”. The centre houses a small but informative museum, as well as an area that recreates the Pankhursts’ parlour. Stepping into it really made their history come to life for me. Also, our visit was very appropriate, since Amy, Iris and I are hosting The Year of Feminist Classics together this year – if only our fourth knight Emily Jane could have joined us too!













Another place I visited (sadly sans Amy and Iris) was Knutsford, a Cheshire village sometimes referred to as “the real Cranford”. This was the place where Elizabeth Gaskell spent part of her life, where she died while writing Wives and Daughters, and where’s she’s buried alongside her husband William. Furthermore, Knutsford was the inspiration for Cranford, and even today it’s easy to imagine Miss Matty and Miss Deborah walking down the street. Here are a few glimpses of the village:


















The building now houses a bookshop, which seemed only appropriate.


Tatton Hall and Park, also visited by Elizabeth Gaskell.









Finally, this past weekend I went to visit Elizabeth Gaskell’s House on Plymouth Grove, her Manchester residence and the place where writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens visited her. After several decades of neglect, the house was acquired by the charitable trust that now manages it in 2004, and for the time being it’s only open to the public a few times a year. Its past misfortunes include being rejected when offered to the city council for not being “of sufficient historical interest” (this was in the 1970’s apparently, and is really quite revealing of how a novelist’s reputation changes over time), and at one point being painted bright pink.

The trust’s goal is to have it be permanently open – not exactly as a museum, as not enough of the Gaskells’ furniture and belongings remain to make that possible, but as a cultural, educational and public space that is open and usable but nevertheless recreates what the place looked like during Elizabeth Gaskell’s lifetime. Of course, before any of this is possible a lot of expensive restoration work is necessary. The house looks quite derelict at the moment, particularly the upper floors, but it was nonetheless very interesting to see it in its current state. It was a reminder of what could have been permanently lost if not for the recent efforts to save it; and also a very different experience than visiting the Brontë Parsonage, for example, which has a clear museum/shrine feel to it. Even in its current state, this house seems much more human and liveable, which – probably not coincidentally – really fits what we know of Elizabeth Gaskell. Here are a few pictures:














The used bookshop on the ground floor.


Tea and cake at the Gaskell’s.


Clocktower down the road from the house.
Last but not least, my purchases from the used bookshop. I really shouldn’t have, but they were all books I wanted, they were incredibly cheap, and all proceeds go towards the house’s restoration. How could I say no?

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