It’s not all that long til the next issue of Shiny New Books and I am very behind with linking to reviews I wrote in the last issue. And I did want to point out a few – starting with The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. It’s all about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Liddell, and Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll. And Robert Douglas-Fairhurst just happened to my undergraduate tutor. So this review sort of covers both those things… starting with this paragraph to lure you in. Read the whole thing over at Shiny New Books!
There are few children’s literary characters who are as well known as Alice et al. From Alice bands to Mad Hatters, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, and more, these creations have passed beyond the original two books they appeared in and into the wider consciousness. By finding themselves there, the connection to their author has grown hazy and uncertain over the years – was, indeed, always hazy and uncertain. Even the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is more likely to be called Alice in Wonderland. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has the unenviable task of disentangling myth and rumour, finding the roots of Alice in an academic’s room in Oxford – and what he has produced is an enchanting maelstrom of facts, accounts, and possibilities… in which Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) remains, somehow, a little elusive.
Letters! Diaries! Oscar Wilde! We’ve got it all – well, those three things – in episode 17 of Tea or Books?, which has taken a bit of time to arrive, for which I apologise. But we are as rambling and bookish as ever. Do let us know which you’d choose in each category, and any suggestions you have for great collections of letters of diaries.
Ooops for the moment where I said Virginia Woolf when I meant Jane Austen. Sorry Jane.
Next week we’ll be getting into all things Agatha, pitting Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot against each other. That one should be fun. Do, do, do let us know any suggestions you have for future episodes – we love getting them. Listen above, or visit our iTunes page (or use your podcast provider of choice). You can even rate us on iTunes if you so please.
Here are the books and authors we mentioned this week:
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst The Small Miracle by Paul Gallico Moranifesto by Caitlin Moran The Prose Factory by D.J. Taylor The Years by Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Night and Day by Virginia Woolf Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff What There Is To Say, We Have Said by William Maxwell and Eudora Welty The Element of Lavishness by Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters ed. Charlotte Mosley The Letters of Elizabeth Myers ed. Littleton Powys A Well Full of Leaves by Elizabeth Myers More Was Lost by Eleanor Perenyi The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore Sylvia and David: the Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters Bloomsbury’s Outsider by Sarah Knights Lady Into Fox by David Garnett The Letters of Virginia Woolf The Letters of Jane Austen A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf Nella Last’s War by Nella Last A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt ed. Simon Garfield A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip ed. Alexander Masters A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
I’m back! In fact, I’ve been back for a while, but took a bit of an extended break so I could pretend that I was still by the seaside. And life is a bit busier than usual at the moment, so I might not be springing back into full flow just yet (can one spring into flow??)…
BUT I wanted to give people the opportunity to read all about Guy Fraser-Sampson’s Death in Profile (2016) over at Vulpes Libris. Here you areeeeeeee.
First things first… happy 90th to Queen Elizabeth II!
I’m taking a bit of a blog break for a couple of weeks, as I’m off to Brighton for two days, then down to Cornwall (via Somerset and Sherpa!) for a family holiday. I’m pretty excited about reading these two enormous books…
Before I disappear for a bit, here are a few completely unrelated things to share…
1.) I’m taking part in Brooding About the Brontes with a guest post over at Girl With Her Head in a Book. I get all defensive about Anne Bronte and I quote Iggy Azalea, so there’s that to look forward to.
3.) So sad to hear about the far too early death of Victoria Wood. I don’t know if her audience was as international as it deserved to be, but she is undoubtedly a national treasure here in Britain – and I heartily recommend you spend an evening looking up her best bits of YouTube. Although her highlights would take a week to watch. She was such a master of language.
4.) If you like the ‘Tea or Books?’ theme tune as much as I do, you might have wondered what it was. I don’t think anybody’s ever actually asked, but I’m going to assume it’s the great unspoken question. Anyway, I got the clip from a copyright-free site, and it’s the lovely 1928 recording of ‘Smiling Skies’ by Benny Meroff. Hear a bit more of it in the video below…
Winnie-the-Pooh vs Wind in the Willows is perhaps the most animal-strewn debate we’ve had so far, as well as being more or less inevitable that we’d get to this one eventually – especially given my tendencies to shoe-horn A.A. Milne into any discussion.
But before we get to that, we tackle the less-animal-strewn battle between series of books and books that are standalones (or ‘one-and-done’; thank you Jennys for that piece of terminology). I rather suspect we’ve missed out lots of classics.
Do let us know which you’d choose from each pairing – and let us know any topics you’d like us to cover, of course! Check us out on iTunes or via your podcast app of choice or, indeed, above.
Here are the books we chat about in this episode:
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham The Blessing by Nancy Mitford The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde The Case of the Constant Suicides by John Dickson Carr The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker Antidote to Venom by Freeman Wills Crofts Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling William series by Richmal Crompton Sweet Valley High ‘by’ Francine Pascal The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan Orlando by Virginia Woolf Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks Twilight by Stephenie Meyer Grey by E.L. James (!)
Agatha Christie Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim Elizabeth in Rugen by Elizabeth von Arnim Mapp and Lucia series by E.F. Benson Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson
Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle
Waverley novels by Walter Scott The Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope
Marcel Proust Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson The Lark by E. Nesbit Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Provincial Lady series by E.M. Delafield Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Not That It Matters by A.A. Milne Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame Dream Days by Kenneth Grahame Toad of Toad Hall by A.A. Milne The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Wow, everyone! What a great week it’s been. The contributions, both in their enthusiasm, number, and variety, have far exceeded everything Karen and I were hoping for.
I’ve been collecting all the reviews on my announcement post, do go and explore them fully; there is much food for thought. Reviews were still coming in late on Sunday, including one from Our Vicar’s Wife of a Stella Gibbons novel, for those who look out for her bookish thoughts.
Do let me know if I’ve missed your review, of course. Between us we covered an astonishing 52 books this week, with quite a few of those getting more than one perspective. It was great to get (alongside literary fiction) children’s books, crime, spy, sci-fi, literary non-fiction, political non-fiction, and more. From big names to people I’d never heard of, this gives such a great overview of the year.
What have we learned about 1938? I think my main takeaway was how the spectre of war didn’t seem all that present in the bulk of what we read – there was plenty of humour, reflection, family drama, murder (!), but less focused on the dramas in Europe than I might have imagined.
Thank you so, so much for participating. There are many books I want to read now – didn’t 1938 turn out to be a stellar year for books? – and I feel as though I understand 1924 and 1938 much better than I did a year ago. And… where’s next?
Karen and I wanted to keep the momentum going by announcing the next Club year today. In October, we warmly invite you to the 1947 Club. We shan’t keep jumping a decade every time, but it was irresistible to see how things have changed soon after the war. And it felt time for an odd number.
Obviously we’ll remind you closer to the time, and there’ll be another badge, but I’m excited already. Roll on 1947!
When I told family and friends that I was co-leading the 1938 Club, I encouraged anybody who was interested to contribute their own review. A few of my IRL friends have indeed been doing 1938 reading along with us, and my friend Sarah has written this fantastic review of one of my faves, Rebecca. Do make her welcome!
I have strong memories of watching Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Rebecca as a kid – the atmosphere, all in black and white, Maxim driving the heroine around in Monte Carlo, and the fancy dress party at Manderley. A few years ago I read du Maurier’s collection of short stories including The Birds – she has clearly made several strong contributions to the public consciousness.
So I came to Rebecca with some expectation, and also a sense that I knew the story. Neither mattered (and my feeling that I knew what happened was wrong, in any case!) as I was instantly drawn in. I love it when a book is so easy to get into, and you feel like you’ve been reading it for much longer than the first few pages. At various points along the way the book would bring back elements of the story that I remembered, but this didn’t bother me and I happily followed it, expecting some things and being surprised by others.
While the nameless protagonist and narrator is in many ways annoying, I found her very easy to empathise with in the first half – perhaps because I can remember being an awkward, shy girl, but also I think du Maurier does a fantastic job of bringing her character to life and making her inner monologue realistic and relatable. She goes off on involved fantasy daydreams at the drop of a hat, thinks (tamely) bitchy thoughts about her obnoxious employer Mrs Van Hopper, and for me is just the right mix of awkward, hopeful, embarrassed, daydreamy, and sullen, with bouts of confidence that then get shot down. I’ve made her sound awful! She’s not, she’s really quite endearing. And her first love/obsession for Maxim de Winter, the handsome stranger who shows her kindness and attention and entertains her in the absence of any friends at all, is really understandable and well drawn. Of course as readers, you feel that something’s not quite adding up, but it’s how du Maurier wants you to feel. You buy it; you’re along for the ride and eagerly waiting to see what will happen when they get back to Manderley.
The not-quite-right feeling that you get from the start of the relationship between Maxim and the narrator is continued and built upon once we get to Manderley, with the creepy staff, the disused wing of the house, the ‘blood red’ rhododendrons, and the obsessive references to Rebecca – for a good portion of the book it feels like she is mentioned on every page, which is obviously a device to make you feel like our narrator – to feel the oppressive, overwhelming force of Rebecca everywhere and in all the characters you meet. Here, I started to feel slightly frustrated by the spinelessness of our narrator, and the crappy attitude of Maxim (I don’t care if you’re Troubled and Brooding, you can pull yourself out of it enough to know you’re being horrible), but it didn’t really matter as I was invested in the story. I found myself trying to second guess the plot developments and the truth about Rebecca – but in an enjoyable way; trying to pick up on clues and events to work out what they meant. That sustained suspense is what du Maurier has done really effectively in this novel.
There are some lovely observations that stand out as being very much of their time – like when a dead body is discovered and an investigation must take place – and part of the ensuing chaos is that the lady of the house misses lunch, and decides they won’t change for dinner that evening. Similarly, when her husband comes under suspicion of murder, and our narrator frets that his scone is going cold. The party they host, too, sounds fabulous – if you had servants to run it for you in your stately mansion – hundreds of people in fancy dress dancing to the live band in the ballroom, with food and drink laid out, games rooms, fairy lights throughout the extensive grounds, and a fireworks display; all cleared away by the staff first thing in the morning.
In the end, the characters are not completely believable (although maybe they were more so in 1938; but I’m still genuinely puzzled by facts such as that Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter actually seem to love each other), and much of the plot is a little thin (why did Maxim marry Rebecca in the first place? Are we to believe that the sole reason why Rebecca was so despicable, so wicked, was simply that she was sleeping around and threatening to bring shame upon Manderley?! Why doesn’t Frank, Maxim’s confidante who shows the most kindness to our narrator, tell her the truth about Rebecca?).
The writing isn’t brilliant or outstanding, but it’s really good – solid, clean writing with enough description and atmosphere but that doesn’t get bogged down, and feels more modern and fresh than a book that’s nearly 80 years old.
It’s not the scariest or thrilleriest thriller that you’ll read, but despite all of the misgivings above I found it really enjoyable – a well written, compelling, interesting story that has left a fresh impression on me. I think it will continue to stand out as leaving a lasting memory, even if it’s just a sense of the suspense created, the atmosphere of Manderley, or some of the characters, like I had from watching the film around 20 years ago. I’ll definitely look forward to reading my next du Maurier.
As with the 1924 Club, I thought I’d see how Virginia Woolf started the year in 1938 – and, unrelated, found this beautiful 1938 painting by one of my absolute favourite artists: ‘Magnolias’ by Stanley Spencer. 1924 started well for Woolf; 1938 is a rather different matter. This is the first entry she wrote that year.
Sunday 9 January Yes, I will force myself to begin the cursed year. For one thing I have ‘finished’ the last chapter of Three Guineas, & for the first time since I don’t know when have stopped writing in the middle of the morning.
How am I to describe ‘anxiety’? I’ve battened it down under this incessant writing, thinking, about 3 Gs – as I did in the summer after Julian’s death. Rau has just been, & says there is still a trace of blood: if this continues, L. will have to go next week to a nursing home & be examined. Probably it is the prostate. This may mean an operation. We shall know nothing till Tuesday. What use is there in analysing the feelings of the past 3 weeks? He was suddenly worse at Rodmell; we came up on Wednesday: – the 28th or thereabouts; since when its been a perpetual strain of waiting for the telephone to ring. What does the analysis show &c? He went to the hospital to be X rayed; habitual, dulled; but only laid under a very thin cover. I walk; work, & so on. Nessa & Angelica & Duncan all at Cassis, which shuts off that relief, but why should she have this forced on her? Anyhow, they come back in a fortnight I suppose.
Harry Stephen, Judith, I think our only visitors. A dead season. No one rings up. Fine today. And the result of writing this page is to make me see how essential it is to steep myself in work; so back to 3 Guineas again. The the time passes. Writing this it flags.
This review is part of the 1938 Club: add your reviews to the comments here.
I read the Persephone, but couldn’t resist sharing this Puffin cover.
According to the pencil note inside of my copy of The Children Who Lived in a Barn, I bought it on 18th June 2009 in London, though whether that was at the Persephone shop or not, I couldn’t tell you. As I said before, one of the lovely things about this sort of theme week is that it gives me the opportunity to take down books from my shelves that I have left too long neglected – and The Children Who Lived in a Barn was precisely the sort of book I wanted to read over the past few days, feeling sorry for myself with a cold.
Eleanor Graham isn’t one to cloak the story of her book. It is, indeed, about children who live in a barn. The children are Sue, Bob, Joseph, Samuel, and Alice – in that age order, with Sue the eldest at 12. Joseph and Samuel are twins known as Jumbo and Sambo, or Jum and Sam, and are the sort of storybook twins who speak in unison and share a single character. As for the rest, Sue is resourceful and domestic, Alice is feminine and a little spoiled, and Bob is adventurous and a bit stubborn. Graham hasn’t reinvented the wheel when it comes to the children’s characters. She is particularly, if not surprisingly, old-fashioned when it comes to gender roles (“Why on earth were we made girls, Al? Boys can always run off and do things outside, but we always have to tidy up indoors”.) But her premise is rather unusual.
The children’s parents are called suddenly away to visit an ailing relative – and are taking the then-modern and relatively unusual step of flying there. But the children don’t hear back from them… and then they are evicted by the obstreperous man who leases their house… There are threats from local busybodies (more on them soon) that the children will be divided up, until a kindly local farmer offers them the use of his barn. And they take him up on it.
The barn is a bit less basic then one might imagine – it has a stove, a tap, and other bathroom requirements are mysteriously never mentioned. Still, it stretches credibility a touch to believe that parents would blithely leave five children of 12 and under to their own devices, even without the possibility of eviction on the horizon. But this, of course, is fantasy – and nobody (in 1938, at least) turned to children’s literature for gritty realism.
There are some locals who share my mistrust of the situation – but the District Visitor (‘the D.V.’) and her ilk are treated with short shrift by Graham. Without exception, they perform their duties with rudeness and rigorous unkindness. Here’s Mrs. Legge in action:
“We have been working very hard indeed on your behalf and have now decided on a plan of action. Oh, yes, you got here first – but we had actually arranged for you to do something of the sort, for a time at least. The summer lies ahead of us and you won’t suffer any great hardship in camping out here for a few weeks or even months. You must not, of course, just run wild. But we shall see that that does not happen. We must know that you are observing the decencies of life, that the place is being kept clean and in order, that you have enough to eat and that you are attending properly to hair, teeth, nails,and so on. So for the present you may stay here and we have appointed Miss Ruddle to come here and inspect every Friday at half-past-four.”
It is clear that the reader is supposed to cheer on the situation of the children living in the barn, looking after themselves, and I was more than willing to suspend disbelief and everything else, and get behind Sue et al. It was just too enjoyable and charming a story not to.
Once they’re in situ, the book is quite episodic – as many children’s stories of the period were. So we see Alice’s interactions with poor Miss Blake (who spends a great deal of time making her an ugly frock; the ugliness and Miss Blake’s strict manner are enough for us to dispose of her pretty swiftly), Bob’s apprenticeship at a barber’s, Sue’s education in washing clothes – and they are all dealt with and left behind as the next adventure rears its head. I don’t recall the twins doing much besides speaking in unison, but presumably they had their own adventures at some point.
The one that everyone seems to remember, and which I had come across in the Persephone Quarterly (as was) and other discussions was… the haybox! Apparently this is a legitimate way to cook things, more or less like a slow-cooker, and has beguiled generations ever since the book first came out. I was more interested in ‘Solomon’, a passing tramp whose use of any and all wise saws earns him his nickname. Graham wrote him wittily, and I have a penchant for characters who use aphorisms willy-nilly.
Being a 1930s children’s book, it perhaps won’t surprise you that nothing particularly awful befalls any of the children and (spoilers) the parents turn out to be fine too – but the events and stakes scarcely matter. If Journeying Wave was a comforting rollercoaster for adults, this is the same for children. I can see myself reading and re-reading this delightedly had I first come across it as a child – and, to be honest, I’d happily revisit it now. The Children Who Lived in a Barn is charming fun, and must have been very welcome respite at a time when the world was clearly about to change.
This review is part of the 1938 Club: add your reviews to the comments here.
I’ve written about her a few times now, but Richmal Crompton still feels like an author who lives chiefly in my pre-blogging days. In those heady days, probably around 2002-4 mostly, there were few enough authors on my radar that I could afford the luxury of delving into everything a single author had written. In Crompton’s case, it wasn’t everything – partly because so many of her books were unfindable or unaffordable; partly because I read about twenty over a short space of time, and needed a bit of a breather. My blog may not have reviews of all the many Crompton novels I read and loved, but it’s beginning to reflect what a substantial part she played in developing my reading life: I went into that in more depth in a blog post entitled ‘Richmal Crompton and me’.
Journeying Wave is now readily available, thanks to Bello, but I have actually had a 1938 edition on my shelves for a little while. The 1938 Club was an excellent excuse to take it down, and I even read it a few weeks ago in an effort to be super prepared. Naturally that means I’ve forgotten some of the finer details – but, truth be told, I’d forgotten some of them before I’d even got to the end of the book. On the scale of Crompton novels, I’d place it in the top half – it was quite moving and very gripping in that must-read-on-even-though-there’s-not-really-any-tension way that Crompton was expert in – but, gosh, what a lot of characters and plotlines.
The event that kicks them all off is the revelation of Humphrey’s affair. Crompton’s theme here – thesis, even – is the ‘journeying wave’ that a single action can create. I think she made up the term ‘journeying wave’, but it’s essentially the butterfly effect. How will Viola asking Humphrey to leave affect their children and wider families?
The same ‘types’ of many Crompton novels are here. There is the studious young woman who never thinks about men (until one particular man makes her rethink her priorities). There is the man who is in business when he would be better suited for the rural world. There is the selfish mother who uses her children as props to her own social success.
And, most typical of all for Crompton, there is the pair of women, one dominant, one weaker; the dominant one is controlling the life of the other, always thinking it is for her own good. In this instance, it’s elderly twins Harriet and Hester. Hester clings to the recollection of the one day she could call her own, and starts to rebel. It’s curious that an archetype as specific as this sort of pairing should recur in almost every Crompton novel, but there it is – and it is just as moving as usual.
For some characters, the discovery that Humphrey could have a child from an adulterous affair rocks their sense of trust. For others, it shows that life can change, and that they need to grab opportunities. For others, simply having Humphrey or Viola on the scene, offering a fresh perspective, changes things that way. The ‘journeying wave’ motif is quite cleverly done; it makes it more realistic that so much would change in the lives of so many characters over a relatively brief period. In Crompton’s novels, often the same number of things (and sometimes exactly the same things) happen to as many people, but with less obvious justification for such a meeting of incident.
The one unusual portrait in Journeying Wave is Humphrey himself, and he is perhaps the least successful portrait at the same time – because he seems both too decent and too simple to commit adultery. Not ‘simple’ as in stupid; he just comes across as plainly happy with the life he has, and unwilling to rock any sort of boat. He has to, in order to set off the motions of the novel, but it never seems quite believable that he would have done.
But credibility hardly matters. More important is the joy of being in the surrounds of a Crompton novel. Nobody writes as captivatingly as she does, though even when the stakes are high for the characters, they feel low for the reader. We race through the novel, but we know that the high drama is happening in some sort of relief; there will probably be a happy ending and, even if not, very similar characters will appear in the next Crompton novel we read. But as soon as that first page is opened, and I get an opening paragraph like this…
The light filtered softly through the drawn curtains, grew stronger, and flooded the big square bedroom, which, despite the up-to-date furnishings, still retained a vague suggestion of Victorianism. The bay window, the high ceiling, the ornate marble mantelpiece, struck the note of more settled spacious days, and the chintz pelmeted curtains and chintz skirted dressing-table seemed tactfully to bridge the gap between the old and the new.
…I know that I’m going to have a wonderful few days of reading, and will enjoy every moment.
(Oh and, somewhat to my surprise, someone else read Journeying Wave during 1938 Club week! Do go and read the thoughts of the aptly-named RichmalCromptonReader.)
It’s not all that long til the next issue of Shiny New Books and I am very behind with linking to reviews I wrote in the last issue. And I did want to point out a few – starting with The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. It’s all about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Liddell, and Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll. And Robert Douglas-Fairhurst just happened to my undergraduate tutor. So this review sort of covers both those things… starting with this paragraph to lure you in. Read the whole thing over at Shiny New Books!
