Nicola reminds me that I offered to email people my dissertation on Katherine Mansfield and Olive Schreiner, and that I STILL haven’t done so. I’d be very happy to, and have email addresses for Clare, Ruth and Becca who were interested – Jennifer Dee and Nicola, you’ve both expressed interest, but I don’t have your email addresses, I don’t think. Could you post them below, or email me at simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk, if still interested?
All
All Woolfed Out
You know I like to share it with you when I’ve been shopping. Over the past few months I’ve been gradually replacing my very tatty 1980s Woolf paperbacks, all beiges and browns and yellowy pages falling out, with beautiful new Oxford World’s Classics editions. True, these don’t have page references for passages about clothing, the legacy of my undergraduate thesis on Woolf in those old paperbacks, but these are proper scholarly editions better befitting a student. And they have pretty covers.
So here they are. I must confess the Night and Day cover is frankly terrifying, and it’s still the only Woolf novel I haven’t read – nice to save up something. The same reason I still haven’t read Sanditon or The Watsons by Jane Austen – it would be very sad to think I’d reached the end of the available texts.
And, because it was buy-one-get-one-free, I also bought the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Evelina by Fanny Burney today. Although she’s on my 50 Books… list, I didn’t actually own a copy – it seemed like a good opportunity.
My only fear is that these Woolf editions will date, and I’ll want pretty new ones next… but I shall be strong.
In case you can’t tell from the pictures, in these editions I have:
Between The Acts
To The Lighthouse
The Waves
Mrs. Dalloway
Jacob’s Room
Orlando
Night and Day
A Room of One’s Own / Three Guineas
The Voyage Out
Commenting…
Just to say, since there has been a recent influx of spam comments from people willing to fill in the wrod verification, or perhaps having found a way around it, comments on posts older than 3 days will be subject to my approval… i.e. they won’t appear immediately, but please do keep commenting (if you’re not spamming me, of course…) – just want to keep the blog clutter-free.
Automobiles, Anecdotes, and Age Limits
What an interesting day… ‘interesting’ in an entirely euphemistic way, you understand. It’s all my fault for being lazy and driving to the supermarket, instead of going on the 40 minute walk. I chose to drive – and here’s the irony – because I wanted to get it done quickly. And then the car broke down in the Tesco car park.
Not just in the car park bay, of course, but when I had reversed out of the bay, and was at an angle that hemmed in about twelve cars. The car stalled, and then just wouldn’t start (not the first time it’s done it). And then the steering wheel immobiliser decided to do its thang, so that I couldn’t push the car back into a bay. I was left with a straight line in which it would move, pushing it forwards when someone behind wanted to get out; backwards when someone in front wanted to.
And it was raining.
The nice AA man came eventually, and sorted out the starter motor, and off I went home… and had my lunch at 4pm. What a fun use of an afternoon… but it did restore my faith in mankind, as they say: at least half a dozen people stopped and offered to help me.
In Tesco I noticed that new regimes are being brought in about the Under 18 goods – cigarettes and alcohol and whatnot. Currently if the checkout person or shop owner thinks you look under 21, they’ll check (it’s wittily called Challenge 21 – or, as our local shop calls it, Challange 21). From Monday, they’re check if you look under 25. As a 23 year old, I’m a little disgruntled. 25 is seven years over 18. That’s over a third of an 18 year old’s life that they’re counting in as a margin of error. What would people say if 40 year olds were asked if they were senior citizens? I don’t usually use this blog to whinge about things, but I thought my days of being ID-ed were over….
And finally, because this is a book blog after all, I’ve just read Faulkner’s interview with The Paris Review Interviews (in volume 2) – it’s mostly nonsense, very pretentious and arrogant, but I did enjoy this exchange:
INTERVIEWER: Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they have read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
FAULKNER: Read it four times.
Cheerful Weather For The Wedding
I finished Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather For The Wedding the other day – I’m reading short books in snatches w
hile writing my dissertation, and this is one of the Persephone Books is one I’ve meaning to read for a while. Elaine at Random Jottings gave it to me many moons ago, but somehow it’s only just worked its way to the top of the pile.
Well, I’m very glad Elaine could spare it, as I loved every second! This short novel (120pp) all takes place on the wedding day of Dolly and Owen. And it’s very, very funny. There is a semi-serious romance storyline through the centre of it (should Dolly be marrying Owen? Will they actually get married?) but it is the host of secondary characters which make this novel (or perhaps novella?) so amusing. My favourites are brothers Robert and Tom – the latter spends the entire novel trying to persuade the former to change his emerald-coloured socks: “Robert, your mother would desire you to go upstairs instantly to take off those bounder’s socks, Robert, and to change into a respectable pair. Will you go, Robert?” He is distraught lest their schoolfellows – ‘men from Rugby’ – be at the wedding and witness this calamatous social faux pas. Robert’s iterated response is “Go and put your head in a bag.” I kept hoping these two would crop up, even though they essentially said the same thing every time they appeared, it was done so amusingly and accurately that I could have read pages of Tom’s serious monotone and Robert’s complete lack of care.
And then there’s dotty Nellie-from-the-village, one of the ‘help’:
“The gentleman that come to see about the hot pipes out in the lobby, said to me, ‘ have two of my own,’ he said, ‘what are both of them big strapping great boys by now. And oh… good golly! – what devils and demons they do be!’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘my son Teddy is exactly the very same thing over again,’ I said. ‘All the time this cigarette-smoking, they pointed boots, and all of it, why, devils and demons isn’t in it with such as they are,’ I said. No. Very decidedly not!”
The whole family, and especially servants, are very funny characters – slightly ridiculous, but not too exaggerated as to not ring true. I suppose that’s why the humour is so good – rooted in the actual. Sort of a 
less-hyperbolic PG Wodehouse, perhaps. Crossed with Virginia Woolf.
According to IMDB there is a film of Cheerful Weather For The Wedding due in 2010. The only information about it at the moment is that Sinead Cusack is attached – I suppose she’ll play Mrs. Thatcham. I’m not sure the novel will make a good film, actually – sometimes lines which are great written down lose everything when spoken. Still, I’ll keep an open mind until I see it, which I undoubtedly will.
If you’re wavering on Cheerful Weather For The Wedding, I encourage you to give it a go (though this comes with a warning that not everyone agrees with me: see this review by Vintage Reads) – it’s recently been released in the beautiful Persephone Classics edition (pictured) which should make it more easily available… and I might just have to get myself a copy of that one too. I think it’s entered my Top Five Persephones, and since I’ve read all or part of over thirty, that’s not bad at all.
Decades
Well, I was going to write about The Hours by Michael Cunningham today, which my book group is reading. Tonight I went along, having re-read the novel, ready for the evening – which was to involve watching the film first, then discussing the novel… only to discover that I’d got the week wrong. So look out next Tuesday…
Instead, I’m going to have a crack at something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. A favourite book, per decade, for every decade from 1800s onwards… doesn’t that sound like a fun idea? I’ll see how far I get, and then will wait hopefully for other people to give it a go. Requires a little bit of research, but mostly should be a matter of slotting my favourite books into a timeline (my problem being that almost all my favourites are from 1920-40)… and then I should, much like my namesake on Blue Peter, have produced something fun and interesting and good. But not ‘here’s one I made earlier’. Cos I haven’t.
Here goes… do have a go. Don’t worry about leaving gaps – I have, and did on my alphabetical list too. But if I find anyone using an apostrophe in their decades, I’ll… well, I’ll wince and frown and cross you off my Christmas card list.
1800s:1810s: Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1820s:1830s:1840s: Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
1850s: Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
1860s: The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
1870s: Through the Looking-Glass… – Lewis Carroll
1880s: Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
1890s: The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1900s: Lovers in London – AA Milne
1910s: Literary Lapses – Stephen Leacock
1920s: Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
1930s: The Diary of a Provincial Lady – EM Delafield
1940s: Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker
1950s: Frost at Morning – Richmal Crompton
1960s: The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
1970s: The Bookshop – Penelope Fitzgerald
1980s: Deceived With Kindness – Angelica Garnett
1990s: The Winter Book – Tove Jansson
2000s: Speaking of Love – Angela Young
Leftover books?
My friend Sherry, in an online book group I’m in, pointed out this link. Possibly an idea if you have books you don’t want, good balance, and not too much self-consciousness.
In other book groupy news, there is a new Persephone Reading Group recently started up in Oxford. It’s meeting every six weeks, I think, and the next one (which will be my first) is June 4th, reading Flush by Virginia Woolf. I’m excited to meet other Oxford-based Persephone lovers – and if anybody reading this lives in or near Oxford and would be interested in meeting to drink wine and talk Persephone, for just £5 a meeting, then let me know! I don’t know if the organiser, Claudia FitzHerbert, would want me broadcasting her email address – so if you’re interested, email me on simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll put you in touch.
Mixed Media
I wrote about independent and feminist publishers a bit last term, and Pluto Press very kindly agreed to send me a copy of Simone Murray’s Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics. I enquired about it 
not simply because the Bodleian inexplicably didn’t have it (since it’s published in the UK, they should have…) but because I thought readers of Stuck-in-a-Book might also be interested.
As the title suggests, this book is about feminist publishing, and though an academic text, it is extremely accessible and very, very interesting. Though sadly with no mention of Persephone (and the book was first published in 2004, so Persephone could have been mentioned) this is more or less the only omission I’ve noticed in the chapters I’ve read. With these sorts of texts, I always find it easiest to give chapter titles – the topics are so wide and the chapter headings so comprehensively descriptive, that my paraphrasing will be pretty pointless. So here they are:
1. ‘Books with Bite’: Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion
2. ‘Books of Integrity’: Dilemmas of Race and Authenticity in Feminist Publishing
3. Opening Pandora’s Box: The Rise of Academic Feminist Publishing
4. Collective Unconsioucs: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing
5. ‘This Book Could Change Your Life’: Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of Mainstream Publishing
Though I imagine Murray must be a feminist (though whether first-, second- or third- wave, I wouldn’t be able to say) Mixed Media isn’t didactic or polemical. Not that those things are inherently bad – there’s no point in writing if one can’t be a little didactic now and then – but this book is a fairly objective reading of certain publishing situations. I find the whole background to publishing houses extremely captivating, especially, it must be said, Virago. The first chapter of Mixed Media discusses the origins of Virago, and also the indications of an independent feminist press being bought by a conglomerate (Little, Brown & Co.) – but, importantly, there is an underlying affection for the books themselves, which makes Mixed Media both scholarly research and accessible reading.
Mixed Media isn’t, I should add, for the completely casual reader. It’s not every page-turner which includes Darnton’s Communication Circuit, after all. But for anybody seeking a little extra information behind the phenomenon of feminist publishing, Murray’s book is fascinating. The publisher’s online catalogue isn’t currently working, but their books can be bought from Amazon – and while the hardback is quite dear, the paperback could certainly be within some people’s budget – or encourage your library to get a copy, perhaps.
Foxed
Someone at Oneworld Classics has been reading my dissertation notes, methinks… I mentioned them in a big everything-piled-in-together post a little while ago, and I 
was expecting them to send me a certain book… instead The Fox by D.H. Lawrence arrived in the post the other day. Did the good people at Oneworld know that I was writing on 1920s novels? And that one of them was David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox (more here) published in 1922, the year before Lawrence’s? Serendipity often crops up in my reading life, but rarely with such happy results that I can read something for pleasure, for reviewing, and for my dissertation all at the same time. Talk about multi-tasking.
The Fox is under seventy pages, but rather powerful. Nellie March and Jill Banford (usually known by their surnames) are in their late-twenties, and live together on a farm in Berkshire and try, with limited success, to make a profit out of poultry and a cow or two. This is DH Lawrence rather than Stella Gibbons, so the mishaps are irksome rather than something narsty in the woodshed. Worst among these problems is a fox, slyly and unabashedly diminishing their livelihood.
And then a young soldier arrives. And stays. So fixated is March upon the creature ruining their farm: ‘to March, he was the fox. Whether it was the thrusting forward of his head, or the glisten of fine whitish hairs of the ruddy cheekbones, or the bright, keen eyes, that can never be said – but the boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise.’
How foxlike (or, indeed, vulpine) is the boy? And what effects will his arrival have upon the pair? The Fox is an excellent narrative of jealousy and disruption and wrestling over self-control, as well as having some wonderful moments of imagination and clever imagery. In the hands of any other author I would describe the novella as a passionate one, but by Lawrence standards it’s postively matronly. Which has to be a good thing, to be honest. When Lawrence isn’t showing off what a tough, sexual brute he is, he can actually write very beautifully.
And why choose the Oneworld Classics edition? (Which you can do here) Other than the gorgeous cover (well, I love foxes) the edition has a very thorough chronological guide to Lawrence’s life and works, four pages of relevant photographs including some manuscript, and even a select bibliography. Highly, highly recommended.
Making Conversation
Persephone Books very kindly sent me a copy of Making Conversation by Christine Longford to review, and I actually read it a month or two ago, but was waiting for it to be available on the website before putting down my thoughts here. And, of course, that means I’ll have to search back into the depths of my memory…
The novel follows Martha from childhood through school and into Oxford University. She is an awkward girl, and, as the Persephone website says, ‘her besetting trouble is that she talks either too much, or too little: she can never get the right balance of conversation.’ This is evident from the opening pages, where she marvels at the inexpensive price of the brooch given to Ellen, the cook-general. (“You little idiot.. Now she won’t think anything of it. People like that don’t, if you tell them the price.”) Very intelligent but equally detached, she seems to meander through school and interaction with ‘paying guests’ at home (very definitely not a hotel) – where her mother advertises as an ‘Officer’s wife’: ‘This was mostly true. The military connexion grew fainter with the years. It was some time since Major Freke had written too many cheques, and disappeared.’ Martha isn’t quite precocious, but her indifferent responses at school and habit of repeating what she doesn’t understand (“Miss Spencer pulled my hair, and said I had committed adultery”) might give that impression.
Time passes, and Martha becomes a student at Oxford University. This was the part of the novel I enjoyed most, reflecting on the ways in which things have changed. Not least, apparently, the propensity to send people down all the time, and the illicit parties at men’s colleges offer a glimpse of the past. By the time Martha gets to university, her personality seems to have completely altered – which is probably true to life, but a little off-putting in what is tantamount to a Bildungsroman. She is pretty outgoing, even vivacious; jokey, flirty and chatty.
The new introduction by Rachel Billington compares the novel to Cold Comfort Farm, at least in terms of being a classic of English humour. Well… I don’t quite agree. Making Conversation is an excellent portrait of a character not often depicted sympathetically in the early twentieth century – the female academic, the intelligent but quiet girl – but isn’t ever laugh-out-loud funny. Lots of diverting sections, and a certain amount of amusing turns of phrase (for example the quotation below) but I don’t think Longford’s priority is hyperbolic comedy, as Gibbons’ was.
‘She would renounce all the lusts of the flesh. It would save a lot of trouble, and as she wasn’t a success on the carnal side, she might as well give it up. In that case, there would be no need to marry and have a family; and she could become famous as a Homeric scholar.’
And, as always, the presentation of the book is perfect. We know what to expect from the outside, but the endpaper (yes, Col, I’m going to talk about the endpaper) is one of my favourites from Persephone yet, apparently from a 1931 dress silk.
In conclusion – another welcome inclusion in the Persephone canon, and with invaluable, and quietly amusing, insights into another aspect of a disappeared world.