Month: January 2020

Exciting news! British Library Women Writers

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I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I had a secret project I was waiting to share – and I can finally share it. I shan’t bury the lede: I am the Series Consultant for a new British Library Women Writers reprint series!! Here’s what the first four look like… [they’re out in March and April]

And now for a bit more detail.

It must be about two years ago that I first got an email from Liz at the British Library, asking if I’d be interested in helping find books for a tentative, might-not-happen series reprinting women writers from the first half of the century. I’ll be honest, I thought it could be a hoax. Because surely it was too good to be true? It was basically my dream come true, and of course I leapt at the opportunity – and had some lovely phone conversations with Liz. She sadly left the British Library before the series came to full fruition, but I know she is cheering on from the sidelines.

The idea was, and is, to reprint about four every six months – I suppose for as long as it does well. Liz had already put together suggestions for three of the first titles – The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair, Bad Girl by Vina Delmar, and My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes. I’d read and enjoyed My Husband Simon; I really liked May Sinclair but hadn’t read that particular one, and I’d never heard of Delmar. Luckily all the books are great – and, when I was asked to suggest something for the 1940s, it wasn’t long before I landed upon E.H. Young’s Chatterton Square. I definitely thought that needed to be back in print.

To be a candidate for inclusion in the series, the book has to be by a woman, completely out of print, and have something interesting to say about women’s lives in the period. And – eek – I got to write afterwords to each of them! They were going to be introductions, but we decided they’d fit better at the end because then I could write about the plot – and we all hate introductions that give away the ending.

For each afterword, I linked themes from the novel with something affecting women’s social, political, or private life in the decade that the novel was written – exploring it through a reading of the book. For instance, I wrote about how the books people read linked with their class in my afterword to My Husband Simon.

I’ve already suggested the four books I’d like to see in the autumn batch of the British Library Women Writers series, and am waiting to hear what the editorial team think. Obviously I have MANY books I’d like to see back in print – but if you have any suggestions that match the criteria, let me know and I’ll see what I can do :D

I do hope you enjoy this series – and can you believe how lucky I am??

Conversation With Max by S.N. Behrman

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Yes, I’m still working my way through #ProjectNames reviews, and am likely to do so for a while longer! Conversation With Max is a 1960 book by S.N. Behrman, and if that name sounds familiar then you might have come across Duveen, which was reprinted a few years ago and which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. That was a biography of a bizarre art dealer, and this is a memoir of a friendship with Max Beerbohm – so Behrman is nothing if not eclectic.

Beerbohm is chiefly remembered today for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson, about a woman so beautiful that all the undergraduates in Oxford drown themselves. I’ve read a couple volumes of his essays and have many more, but I don’t think I really understood what a cultural figure Beerbohm was in the early twentieth century – or at least according to Behrman.

The structure of Conversation With Max belies the singular ‘conversation’, in that Behrman returns several times to Beerbohm’s house – to hear stories of his long writing career and his life. The former apparently started when he wrote an impassioned piece about make-up in an Oxford undergraduate magazine, which seems as unlikely a start to a writing career as any.

I have a soft spot for memoirs of writers that come from a specific and subjective angle – whether that be H.G. Wells from the perspective of his children’s governness, Walter de la Mare from someone who went to tea, or Ivy Compton-Burnett through the lens of her secretary. (Yes, those are all real examples of books I have actually read.) Behrman perhaps forges his own connection, as a fan and journalist, but there is a definite sense of sitting in Beerbohm’s home, hearing his stories, and being in the presence of a biographer who is happily overstating the importance of a single cultural figure. He is not pretending to be objective. Here’s the opening:

The hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye judges authors by the simple test of whether he has an impulse, after reading something, to call the author up. It seems to me that all my life I have felt like calling up Max Beerbohm. I first made Max’s acquaintance, one might say, in the Public Library on Elm Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts, when I was a boy, and I later deepened it in the Widener Library, at Harvard, so that long before the Maximilian Society was organized by his devotees on his seventieth birthday, in London, I was already a Maximilian. When, as a young man making my first visit to Italy, I looked out the window of my compartment on the Paris-Rome Express and caught a flashing sight of the station sign “RAPALLO” (the Paris-Rome Express does not stop in Rapallo unless you arrange it beforehand), I felt a quick affinity for the place because I knew that Max Beerbohm lived there. I felt like getting off, but the train was going much too fast. On subsequent trips to Rome, I always looked for the flicker of that evocative station sign. That I would one day actually get off at Rapallo for a prearranged meeting with its renowned inhabitant never remotely occurred to me. But life is seething with improbabilities, and so, in the summer of 1952, it came about.

(The book also seems to have appeared as a series of articles – the first is available online, if this opening has caught your attention.)

At the time, Beerbohm was known as much for his drawn caricatures as his writing. It’s hard to recognise the impact that individual caricatures could have, in this era where every public figure is open to ridicule or affectionate mockery at any moment of any day. I suppose, also, that the sphere of intellectual life was smaller and more insular. Whether or not you are interested in Beerbohm’s output in art and literature, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Conversation With Max presents one artist/writer’s life through nostalgia and anecdote.

And that’s what made this book special to me. Not so much the individual examples chosen, but that a book of this sort exists – affectionate, leisurely, and somehow revealing the life of a writer more intimately than the most tell-all biography. Because, by the end, we also feel like we have been invited into Beerbohm’s home, and have become his friend.

My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore

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It’s always exciting when Dean Street Press announce the next batch of novels in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, chosen by Scott at the excellent Furrowed Middlebrow blog. Every time I want all of them, and every time I only manage to read a handful – but thank you very much to the publisher for sending me a review copy of My Caravaggio Style (1959) by Doris Langley Moore. Don’t worry too much about the title – I’ll come onto that in a bit.

Quentin Williams is the narrator. He works in an antiquarian bookshop and is the writer of fairly unsuccessful biographies of people nobody much cares about. In a chance conversation with a passing American, he somehow manages to suggest that he has access to the memoirs of Lord Byron, believed to have been destroyed. One thing leads to another, and Quentin decides that he’ll give forgery a go.

Moore was a Byron expert and there is plenty of background detail about Byron here – or, rather, enough so that those of us who’ve never read a word of Byron don’t feel entirely adrift. She even does a good job of making you feel the significance these memoirs would be, though mostly because they’d be worth a lot of money. The cleverest thing is that we are always reluctantly on Quentin’s side when it comes to the forgery – because he is such an intensely dislikeable person.

I hope this was deliberate. He is arrogant, careless of the feelings of others, and particularly unpleasant to his girlfriend Jocasta. Every time he describes her, he talks endlessly about her beauty and stupidity. It’s the sort of viewpoint that is at the very worst edges of men-writing-about-women, so either Moore was impersonating a terrible man, or needed a quiet talking to. Let’s assume the former. This is the sort of thing Quentin says about Jocasta…

Such a vapid and unworthy comment quite irritated me. I had never regarded my beautiful Jocasta as an intellectual girl but she had been brought up by highly cultured grandparents, and I saw no reason why she should appear – no, I won’t say vulgar, for she had too little pretension ever to be that, but – I can only repeat – childish.

While we cannot forget the chief reason that he is dating her – she is so beautiful, y’all – it’s never clear what she sees in him. And, indeed, she’s very keen that they get married, despite him having no redeeming qualities at all. Quentin is rather easier to cheer for when he visits his great-aunt – by some convoluted reasoning, he needs some manuscript books from her attic and also needs her to witness him receiving them. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Moore can be very witty – particularly in these sections. For example…

It was curious that so much good will towards the human race should be combined in my great-aunt with an inveterate reluctance to allow any member of it whom she saw at close quarters to be comfortable.

To distract Jocasta from finding out about the forgery, Quentin sets her off doing a research project on Byron and animals. She gets really into it and starts to love reading Byron – rather ludicrously, Quentin gets terribly jealous that she should love Byron. His reasoning is fairly unhinged: Byron was a notorious womaniser and thus he doesn’t want his girlfriend falling in love with him. Despite, of course, Byron being long dead. And so he tries to write things in the forged memoir that will alienate Jocasta…

It’s all bonkers, but Moore manages to make the logic of the novel work well. I found that I wanted Quentin to succeed in his efforts, even as I wanted Jocasta to get as far away from him as possible. It’s always fun to read about literary obsessions taken to great lengths, and once different Byron scholars get involved (including ‘Doris Langley Moore’ as a character!) it’s all very amusing and dramatic.

And the title is apparently a reference to something Byron said about his own writing, though that does make it one of those slightly silly titles that only makes sense to the in-crowd. That aside, Moore did a great job of making this interesting to someone who doesn’t care at all whether or Byron’s memoirs are discovered.

Another success for Furrowed Middlebrow. Just as long as Moore knew she was creating an idiot and not a hero.

 

Some books I’ve bought in 2020

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The new decade is still very young, but I’ve been busying myself with buying books…  These aren’t all from the same shop, but represent trips to a couple of old reliable shops and a couple of books I bought online. The reliables are the bookshop in Wantage and Notting Hill Book Exchange. They’re both shops I’ve been to time and again, and they always turn up affordable gems. But the first two came from the great wide internet…

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
When I wrote about the wonderful O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Sarah said that she’d read and loved Proud Citadel. And so I had to have it, didn’t I? Watch this space.

Another Year by R.C. Sherriff
Every Sherriff novel I’ve read has been amazing, and so obviously I need to track down as many as I can. Watch this space AGAIN. Just keep watching spaces.

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden
I’ve already read and reviewed this one, so you know what I think about it and why I bought it!

Sing For Your Supper by Pamela Frankau
I loved A Wreath For The Enemy so much, and have been stockpiling Frankau ever since – but have yet to read any of the others on my shelves (though did read one in the Bodleian). Let’s throw another on the pile. Anybody read this one?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way by Nancy Spain
I’ve been keeping eyes out for this autobiography for a while because apparently it includes an account of meeting A.A. Milne. She was also a fascinating person for many reasons, so it’ll be fun to find out more about her from her own mouth.

Authenticity by Deirdre Madden
You know how much I loved Molly Fox’s Birthday, and I’ve now bought a couple of Madden novels to try next – the title is intriguing in a Milan Kundera sort of way.

Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
I definitely said I wouldn’t be buying any more Mackenzie novels until I’d read some of the ones I own. When I saw this, I thought ”I won’t buy this unless it was published in the 1920s”. And I picked it off the shelf and saw it was from 1927. The decision was OUT OF MY HANDS.

The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley
I have so many unread Hartleys and I don’t know anything about this Hartley novel, but it was only a quid so why not.

Present Indicative by Noel Coward
I’ve seen this one around a few times, and finally succumbed. Will Coward be as funny in his autobiography as he is in his plays?

Embers by Sandor Marai
I don’t know anything about this but I’m trying to read more translated fiction, after my all-time record of eleven last year. And this one looked interesting.

The Shadow of a Sorcerer by Stella Gibbons
Continuing the theme of this post, I have so many Gibbons novels I haven’t read – but it felt like quite a coup to stumble across one I haven’t even heard of. And there’s surprisingly little info about it online…

Have you read any of these? Any that should race up my tbr pile?

 

Three super speedy reviews

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The pile of books to review has been getting very high and threatening to topple into my fireplace. Which has an electric heater in it, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world – but, nevertheless, here are my quick thoughts about three books I read last year. All non-fiction, in fact. [Pun intended]

Shakespeare’s Library (2018) by Stuart Kells

Image result for shakespeare's library stuart kellsI got this as a review copy, for which many thanks to Text Publishing. As witnessed by Paul Collins’ The Book of William being my favourite read of last year, I love reading about William Shakespeare. More particularly, I love reading about his cultural reception. And so I did enjoy reading Kells’ book, however flawed it might be.

The main issue about a book called Shakespeare’s Library is that this isn’t really about Shakespeare’s library. Supposedly it’s about the hunt for any books Shakespeare used to own, and this comes up every now and then, but it gets rather muddled with more metaphorical interpretations of the word ‘library’ and a baffling amount of anti-Stratfordian theories. I.e. the idea that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s plays. This seems to be given more credence than necessary here, and Kells quotes books like James Shapiro’s Contested Will without addressing all the pro-Stratfordian arguments that Shapiro neatly condenses.

There is a fair amount of overview of the reception of Shakespeare, and the authorial question, over the years – but, to be honest, nothing you can’t find done better elsewhere. It was a nice idea for a book but I don’t think it really worked.

Book Girl (2018) by Sarah Clarkson

Image result for book girl sarah clarksonClarkson is one of the few authors I’ve mentioned whom I’ve seen – and seen quite often, as she used to walk her pram near my office quite often. I would have said I was enjoying her book, but once I started reading it I never saw her again, and now I work somewhere else.

Anyway, Book Girl is one of those books about the joys of reading that I can never resist. A couple of people had recommended it – Elizabeth was one of them, I think, so thanks – and my parents got it for me last Christmas. It’s aimed at girls and women, as the title suggests, but I’ve never been one for respecting gender divides when it comes to reading – and I’m glad I read this, as it’s a lot of fun.

Clarkson is a Christian, so a lot of what she writes includes that perspective. And, indeed, a lot of Book Girl consists of lists of books and why you should read them – which I’m certainly not going to complain about. So there’s ‘Books about Imagination: why you’re never too old for Narnia’, ‘Novels that kindled my delight in existence’, ‘Novels that helped me cope with a broken world’, etc. etc. There’s a lot of faith-based suggestions and a lot that aren’t, and I certainly made a little list – even if Clarkson’s taste runs more to fantasy than mine does.

My only issue with Book Girl is that Clarkson is obviously a much nicer person than I am. I often feel similarly when podcasting with Rachel. Clarkson, like Rachel, talks a lot about how reading can enrich you, can teach you, can help you appreciate the world. There’s not any space in Book Girl for reading that is snarky or savage or dry. The sort of book that lets you laugh at how absurd and sometimes unpleasant the people around you might be. I sense that she’d read Austen and see the benefits of self-growth rather than the take-down of pomposity. Both are there, of course, but I think I lean towards the latter.

Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners (2009) by Andy Merriman

Image result for merriman margaret rutherford coverWho doesn’t love Margaret Rutherford? What a wonderful performer she was, and how amazing it would have been to get to see her on stage. Thank goodness she put a fair few performances on screen.

Wanting to find out more about her life, I tracked down Merriman’s biography. I’m usually a bit bored by the childhood stories of famous authors and actors, and just want to get to the bit they’re best known for – but even I was a bit dazed when Rutherford was 40 by page 40. We see some tragic childhood experiences – or tragic experiences that impacted her childhood, because she didn’t learn the truth of her father for some time – and the we rush into her career.

This is a great book for giving a thorough overview of all of Rutherford’s plays and films, though it’s pretty apparent which films Merriman has seen and which he hasn’t. I’ve come away with a long list of films to track down, and can recommend ‘Castle in the Air’ [which you can find on YouTube]. And naturally I loved reading about Rutherford’s THREE portrayals of Miss Hargreaves – on radio, TV, and stage. How I wish I could see/hear any of those.

But somehow the whole thing felt a bit like an extended magazine article. I’m not sure quite what was missing, I just know that someone like Claire Tomalin or Ann Thwaite would have written something deeper, somehow. An invaluable resource, but perhaps in the way that a Wikipedia article is, rather than a work of art.

 

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden

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I love taking a trip to the secondhand bookshop in Wantage, which is less than half an hour from my house. It’s a real treasure trove, and I never come away empty-handed or anything like it. Among my recent haul was Return Journey (1954) by Barbara Goolden, and I was so taken by the premise that I started it immediately. But before I looked to see what it was about, I was drawn in by those stunning cover. Isn’t it a beauty?

It reminds me a lot of a village called Lower Slaughter that isn’t a million miles from me, and where I once accidentally gatecrashed a fete.

“You do not feel,” said the Assessor gently, “that you are altogether satisfied with your Record?”

“Most dissatisfied,” confessed the New Arrival. “I have the feeling, you see, that I am a complete failure.”

The Assessor take up a file. “You were, I think, an English spinster of the upper middle-class, living in the country?”

“Hampshire,” prompted the New Arrival, “the Surrey side, very convenient for London. Not that I myself liked town life, the traffic always confused me. I was killed, you recollect, by a tram. So bewildering. I thought it was going, when, in fact, it was coming.”

The ‘New Arrival’ is Veryan Meadows, and the place she has newly arrived is the Pearly Gates. Before her record is read, though, she is given the option of returning to Earth for any year of her life. And she can choose whether to have a change of heart, a change of mind, or a change of physical appearance. She chooses to go back to her youth, and to be beautiful.

Isn’t that a brilliant premise? Well, it swept me away, certainly.

As it happens, it was the most brilliant thing about Return Journey. I enjoyed reading the novel, but I feel that Goolden could have made more of the idea.

When she is sent back on her terrestrial way, the celestial powers that be decide to give her an added attribute, along with her beauty – the ability to express her opinions. She has always been rather shy and unsure of herself – which, coupled with plainness, led to an unhappy life as ‘an English spinster of the upper middle-class’. So here she finds herself again, the daughter of a minister in a small village. She is unused to having any male attention, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the sudden attentions of, among others, the curate. Any young gentleman is bewitched by her looks; any older man or woman seems to think she is unnecessarily odd. And you can sort of see their point. While the Assessor gave the ability to express her opinions, she does seem to be [a] pretty stupid and [b] bizarrely literal. Any turn of phrase is taken at face value, and her repeated questions madden quite a few people.

It’s unclear whether she remembers her heavenly adventure, or realises that she’s having a second lease of life. And that’s the major drawback of the novel for me. If we had Veryan reflecting on the differences this time around, or cynically thinking about how beauty has altered perceptions of her, it would be rather intriguing. What a lot to explain. Instead, it’s an enjoyable small-town novel where the heroine is unusually pretty and unusually dim. It’s good fun, but it rather wastes the initial premise.

Goolden is neither dim not literal, and she is rather good at one of my favourite authorial tricks – showing when characters are inadvertently revealing their true nature, or using quick narrative asides to send up the characters. Return Journey ended up being one of those novels that slightly frustrated me, because it could obviously have been better than it was – if Veryan had had an ounce of the wit and intelligence that Goolden has, it would have been much improved. More fun than seeing a virtuous innocent be virtuously innocent.

So, this has ended up one of those confusing reviews where I might sound more negative than I feel. Return Journey is fun and diverting. It’s only that I think it could have been truly brilliant. Maybe next time around?

Tea or Books? #80: Should Authors Only Write What They Know? and Agatha Christie vs Dorothy L Sayers

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A couple of Queens of Crime and an important question about what writers should be allowed to write…

 

In the first half of episode 80, we ask if writers should only write what they know – whether that means their race, gender, or experiences. In the second half we compare and contrast 4.50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie and Whose Body? by Dorothy L Sayers, and find out if I’ve got over my loathing of Lord Peter Wimsey.

We always love hearing from you – thanks to everyone who has sent in topic suggestions to teaorbooks@gmail.com. And if you have any requests for reading advice for the middle segment, do let us know.

You can see us at Apple Podcasts or by searching on Spotify, you can support the podcast at Patreon, and if you can work out how to rate and review us through your podcast app then we’re always grateful for that!

The books and authors we mentioned in this episode are:

The Book of William by Paul Collins
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Kate Atkinson
Alva and Irva by Edward Carey
Little by Edward Carey
My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore
Lord Byron
The Call by Edith Ayrton Zangwill
No Surrender by Constance Maud
Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith
The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold
Diary Without Dates by Enid Bagnold
The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair
The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
J.K. Rowling
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
William Shakespeare
The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Masters by C.P. Snow
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie
The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie
Loving by Henry Green
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

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The first book I started this year was one I bought for a treat in Woodstock’s independent bookshop – Ghosting (2004) by Jennie Erdal. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few review copies from Slightly Foxed, but hadn’t had this one – so it was a nice one to reward myself for… well, something last July. Who knows what.

All I knew about the memoir was that it was about ghostwriting, and that Slightly Foxed Editions pretty much never put a foot wrong. And Ghosting turns out to be no exception – what an extraordinary book.

Erdal was the ghostwriter for ‘Tiger’, a man who is not named in the book but who was apparently Naim Attallah. That name means nothing to me, but he is certainly a character and not in a particularly positive way. More on that later. And when I say that Erdal was a ghostwriter, it seems that she wrote more or less anything that Tiger needed to claim as his own – whether letters, newspaper columns, or full-length novels.

She got the job by having done some Russian translation – Tiger asked her to come on board at his publishing house, in charge of the Russian list. She doesn’t go into his backstory, so I don’t know how somebody as supremely unqualified as Tiger came to own a publishing house – but, dizzied, she does accept this role. She’s allowed to work from her home in Scotland, only occasionally coming down to London for meetings. When her role expands into writing up and editing interviews Tiger does with hundreds of women for a ‘book about women’, she finds that she has morphed into a ghostwriter.

I was ready to be fascinated by her account of ghostwriting and was a bit annoyed when she started talking about her upbringing. But, my goodness, she’s very good at it. Hers was a family where appearances mattered more than anything, and the abiding horrors of her parents were (a) shaming themselves before their neighbours and (b) Catholicism.

In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances – the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.

Erdal doesn’t treat the memoir chronologically, covering childhood before moving onto adulthood, but rather draws links between her background and what’s going on with Tiger. It’s all done very elegantly and impressively – though in the second half of the memoir, it’s just about Tiger and working for him.

Tiger. Good grief. What an appalling man. Erdal is never vituperative, and seems to have been under the spell of his apparent charm – but beneath this, the reader can see what a monstrous man he is. Tiger is completely selfish, expecting everyone to bend to his will. He is devoted to ‘beautiful women’, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered about their minds or personalities, or even what they think of him in return. The portrait of Erdal working with him isn’t far off an abusive relationship, particularly when she starts to want to change the arrangement.

And yet she treats it lightly, and Ghosting is often funny. Tiger is as ridiculous as he is awful. And Erdal focuses on the ridiculous when she starts writing a novel ‘with’ him. He seems to believe he has come up with the idea of it – because he says it should involve a passionate affair. That’s it; that’s the plot. It’s left to Erdal to craft something from that premise – and her description of the editing process is funny, frustrating, and bizarre. What’s so impressive is that she doesn’t give up trying to do well, and she writes brilliantly in Ghosting about the process of trying to satisfy Tiger’s whims while also satisfying her artistic nature.

The fact that I was writing as someone else – with a mask on, as it were – inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

Erdal writes so well about her inner philosophy – and, in the same volume, writing movingly about her childhood and her divorce, as well as drawing a portrait of the outlandish, absurd, and appalling Tiger. And she even finds pity for him.

Ghosting holds together many disparate elements brilliantly and it’s another success for the Slightly Foxed Editions series. A great start to the reading year.

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather

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Willa Cather has definitely been on my list of authors I’m stockpiling rather than reading – so I decided to rectify that a little. I picked up one with a name in it, mais naturallement, but it also turned out to be her first novel – Alexander’s Bridge from 1912. She apparently disowned it later in life, but I thought it was rather good.

The Alexander of the title is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who has specialised in bridges and secured a great deal of money and renown with his ambitious designs. We first see him through the eyes of a man who has known him since he was a boy, Professor Wilson, and is now visiting Alexander and his wife in their Boston home. Mrs Alexander is intelligent, warm and conscious of having made the choice to live in her husband’s shadow. I found Mrs Alexander the most intriguing character in the novel, and would have loved to spend more time with her. Cather is so good at memory and a feeling that is not quite regret, but wondering how life could have been different. But with a romanticism that has not been dimmed by this:

“The bridges into the future—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”

But Alexander isn’t just hanging around in Boston. He works in London regularly, and there he meets again a woman he used to romance… and picks up where he left off.

I found Cather rather less convincing in this part of the novella, and it doesn’t help that I find tales of adultery rather dull on the whole. She is still an excellent writer, but there felt like there was less truth and sincerity in these sections. Maybe that was why she wanted to disown it later. They’re not terrible pages, but they contrast poorly with how good she is elsewhere.

The novella ends with a very effective climax, beautifully described – and based on a real event from the news, though I don’t think Cather drew the characters from life outside this moment. I really enjoyed reading it and it’s given me a keenness to return to Cather’s portraits of small-town American life again before too long. A Lost Lady is better, but there is enough here for me to relish.

The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis

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The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) was the final book I read in 2019, and I read it pretty much in one go – not all that difficult, as it is just under a hundred pages. I hadn’t heard about it until I was reading someone’s favourite books in The Week – I don’t remember whose, but they chose several lesser-known books that I loved so I thought I could probably trust them on this too.

One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seigniorial houses of Gascony.

So the novella opens. Bertrande has only been told about the wedding the day before, and she is a little bewildered by what has happened – a match between two families that has been long planned. The wedding ends with her new husband pulling her hair and hitting her, but they are equally unsure of themselves as they retire to their new marital bed. Don’t worry, nothing unpleasant happens there – they are married but not expected to act as grown ups just yet.

As we move forward quickly in time, we see them about a decade later. They have a young son and love one another, though Martin is not an overly affectionate man. Rather, he is ambitious and rebellious. He is the sort of man who will choose to go bear hunting despite being forbidden from doing so, and doesn’t feel much chagrin when his father hits him across the face for it. A couple of teeth are broken, but this is the discipline he uncomplainingly accepts. His father is the dominant and violent head of the family, and that’s that.

So, when Martin decides to plant fields of crops without his father’s permission, he knows he’ll be in trouble. He tells his wife that he will disappear for a week, to give his father time to calm down. And so he goes, not telling her where – so that she isn’t lying when she tells the patriarch that she is ignorant.

But, after a week, he hasn’t come back.

And weeks turn to years without him. In that time, both his parents die and Martin’s uncle installs himself as head of the family. Betrande finds her place in it, but never loses hope that the man she loves will come back.

And he does, almost a decade after he left! All is forgiven and he settles back into life with Bertrande, and they have another baby together. But she can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t her husband. He looks the same, he knows about their life together, he even has the same two broken teeth – but he is kind and loving where her husband was ruthless and dominant. Eventually she can’t keep quiet, and asks that a court decide whether or not this man is her husband.

I shan’t spoil the end, though this is based on a real story, oddly enough. I hadn’t heard of it, though it’s been used many times in fiction. It’s certainly an interesting premise, but what makes Lewis’s novella so good is how deeply she takes us into Bertrande’s feelings – her uncertainty and insecurity. She is a very human character, and the book never falls into the trap that usually puts me off historical fiction, of seeing everything in costume. It feels real and eternal, and there aren’t heaps of period details to show off the research, or dialogue that sounds strange to modern ears. I call it the ‘jeans test’ – would it be as interesting if all the characters were wearing jeans instead of their historical outfits? And the answer here is definitely yes.

I’m glad it was so short. It was exactly right to focus solely on the abbreviated marriage and the dilemma that came afterwards. Anything extraneous would spoil it. So, thank you to whoever it was who recommended it in The Week!