Search Results

It’s one of those times that I’m going to summarise a few recent reads – I don’t have a huge amount to say about them, for one reason or another, but wanted to give them a mention. Some of them will go on my A Century of Books list; some of the others are just here because… well, why not. Inspired?! On with the show!

If Only They Didn’t Speak English (2017) by Jon Sopel

I heard Sopel speak at the Hay festival, and he was very good, so I was pleased when I found a cheap copy of his book. The subtitle is ‘notes from Trump’s America’, but it’s really about the path that led to it – or trying to introduce non-Americans (specifically Brits) to the culture and identity of Americans that might have made way for so dreadful a president. (Sopel doesn’t quite say that Trump is dreadful, but he’s not far off.)

The title comes from the idea that, if Americans didn’t speak English, we Brits would find it easier to recognise that it’s a whole other culture. Sopel devotes chapters to guns, patriotism, race, exceptionalism, faith, and so forth. He assumes a complete lack of knowledge from his reader – even explaining who Rosa Parks is. I think Sopel is better when speaking than he is at writing (which is perhaps just as well, given that his job is reporting) but I still really enjoyed it. I’d love to read something similar about England, to be honest (I suppose Kate Fox’s Watching the English is pretty close.)

The Cat’s Cradle Book (1940) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This was a lovely gift from Jane a while ago, who knows that I (a) love Sylvia Townsend Warner and (b) love cats. Her novels are a mixed bag for me – I love Lolly Willowes but really dislike some others – but she is a wonderful short story writer.

This collection is framed as being a series of stories passed down the generations by cats – so they’re pretty Aesopian. A rather long introduction looks at how the framing narrator discovered the stories, and then goes into the stories themselves. It was fun to read it, but I think Warner is much better when she’s talking about the poignant or unusual moments of everyday life.

Concert Pitch (1934) by Theodora Benson

I liked Which Way?, which I read in the Bodleian years ago, and picked this one up in 2012 in Hay-on-Wye. It’s all about the romances and feuds of a bunch of actors, and… it’s not very good. I never quite managed to disentangle the characters, because they’re all very similar, and I found it a bit of a trudge to get through. Oh well.

None Like Him (2016) by Jen Wilkin

My church small group read this book together, over the course of many weeks. Supposedly it’s aimed at Christian women, but there isn’t really anything in it that would exclude men. Rather, each chapter goes through the attributes of God – eternal, omnipresent, infinite, sovereign, and so forth – and looks more into them. And each quality is slightly unnerving when you first think about it and, the more you read about it, the more you realise it’s amazing and joyous.

Any regular reader of Stuck in a Book between 2009 and 2013 will know that I was busy doing a DPhil in English literature, but I can never remember how much I wrote about it here. That’s partly because I found the first year quite stressful and almost quit, and partly because nobody’s interested in hearing how I didn’t manage to get to the library that day, and how annoying it is that no two fantasy theorists have the same definition of ‘fantasy’.

BUT – I shan’t bury the lede – my DPhil thesis is now available to read online or download, should you so wish. I requested a one-year embargo (the lowest available) and, hey presto, four years later it’s here! I still think the topic is fascinating, so you might enjoy reading it. (I don’t want to know about any typos…)

And it seems like a good opportunity to give a quick overview of what I did it in – starting with the title: ‘Dark, mysterious, and undocumented’: The Middlebrow Fantasy and the Fantastic Middlebrow. Yep, that’s a quote from Virginia Woolf – from Orlando, in fact, which was initially quite a substantial part of my thesis, but substantially cut after my first year viva.

Middlebrow fantasy

In brief, the ‘middlebrow fantasy’ was a bit of a conflation: the fake portrayal of middlebrow readers (in the 1920s and ’30s) as unthinking and unintelligent, and middlebrow literature as reductive and limited in scope (oh hi Leavises). I also used it to refer to the fantasy of the ideal middle-class home, without any problems – which was then subverted and challenged by fantastic strands in middlebrow novels.

Fantastic middlebrow

Upon hearing my thesis title (and saying “what?” and having it repeated), people often said “Oh, like Lord of the Rings?” No, not like Lord of the Rings. It doesn’t help that every fantasy theorist, as mentioned, uses the terminology differently – but I was only looking at novels that were based in the real world, but with an element of fantasy that intrudes. And people are surprised, otherwise it would be magical realism. Confusing, no? But this is how I define fantastic literature, and it’s the sort of novel I love – while fantasy novels, set in alternative universes with different natural laws, don’t interest me.

So, which books did I write about?

I was doing a thematic thesis, which meant defining my limits was really hard. I often envied single-author thesis writers, who could just say “I’ll do all their books”, or “I’ll do all their early poetry” or whatever using my pdf creator. I’m sure that comes with its own challenges. But I had to try to find every fantastic middlebrow novel of note in the 1920s and ’30s, often just through reading contemporary reviews or blurbs or publishers ads. It was a fun treasure hunt, but I lived in fear that I’d discover a massively important one when I finished the thesis. So far, I have not…

The main books I looked at were Lady into Fox by David Garnett, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Love Child by Edith Olivier, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker, Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser, The Venetian Glass Nephew by Elinor Wylie, and Her Monkey Wife by John Collier, with Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield as a non-fantastic counterpoint – but I also included bits on books by Virginia Woolf, David Lindsay, Bernadette Murphy, Rachel Ferguson, Stella Benson, Bea Howe, Rose Macaulay, May Sinclair, Rebecca West, G.E. Trevelyan, Herbert Read, Mary Pendered, C.M.A. Peake, and more.

These chapters were the most fun to write. I spent two years working on my chapters on the middlebrow broadly and on fantasy theory, with a lot on the influence of Freud too, and in the second half of my DPhil I could look at primary texts! Yay! Close readingggg! All of this was the most fun, especially as I felt on surer ground – having bedded myself in with all that theoretical reading.

How was it structured?

After those chapters looking at the middlebrow and the fantastic, I linked up manifestations of the fantastic with specific societal anxieties affecting the middle classes of the 1920s and ’30s. First, metamorphosis alongside the changing sexual role of women in marriage; second, creation narratives and childlessness; third, witchcraft and the increase in single women after the First World War.

This did mean I had to dispense with chapters on fantastic time and fantastic space (though the latter pops up quite a bit) because they didn’t seem to me to link to any specific anxieties, and that was the most productive way to structure my thesis.

Writing all this has made me feel rather pleased with how it worked out – and skimming over the contents page makes me want to re-read it. It does feel as though somebody has written the book that most matches my literary interests! It was a long, sometimes slow and painful, often exciting journey to get to the finished thing. And, if you fancy having a gander yourself, do please go ahead.

It’s International Women’s Day, and a good opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements around the world, as well as highlighting the areas where women still face disproportionate risk, disadvantage, or discrimination. If I were a better reader, I’d be able to suggest lots of books on those themes [EDITED TO ADD: Claire has basically made that list] – but, to be honest, my reading is so Anglocentric and from-the-past that I can’t pull together that list. Nor is there really any significant point in me highlighting women authors, since most of the books I read are by women and I wouldn’t know where to start.

So – instead, I’ve put together a list of great books by women that have a woman’s name as the title. No other words – just the name. It’s a way of commemorating the day, I suppose, though I also encourage everyone to sign petitions, go on marches, donate to charities, challenge discrimination, and so forth! This list are mostly the ones that came to me first, so I’ll certainly have missed many great ones – which would you suggest, with these criteria?

I’ve tried to avoid the most obvious ones – so, yes, I love Emma, Rebecca, and Mrs Dalloway – but here are some you might not be as familiar with.

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

Cluny is a wonderful character – a girl who is plain but has Presence, and disconcerts her Uncle Arn to the extent that he bundles her away from London, off to Devon to be a maid. She then gets embroiled in the household there. Sharp is quite unlike any other writer I’ve read, and Cluny is a frenetic joy. (I wrote about it here.)

Miss Mole by E.H. Young

Another joy of a character – a talkative, inquisitive woman who is a burden to her snobbish relatives. She heads off to be a housekeeper (if memory serves) and, yes, also gets embroiled in various other people’s lives. Also surprising pathos in the novel.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

I often talk about how much I love Gilead, but the whole trilogy is brilliant. The third book (though they can be read in any order) shows us Lila’s life – giving greater depth to the woman we have previously seen as wife and mother, seeing her as an disadvantaged child and as the young, desperate, quiet, confused woman she first was.

Mrs Harter by E.M. Delafield

Being honest, I remember very little about the novel – which I read about 15 years ago. But I always think of it as being rather like seeing heaps of crispy leaves on the ground in autumn. Make of that what you will.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Technically the character is called Laura, but some people call her Lolly, so I’m counting it. She is a neglected and burdened aunt, living in her brother’s house – but decides to escape and move to village isolation. It’s a truly excellent domestic novel – and then turns into something much stranger.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Quite unlike any of Taylor’s other novels, this shows the ruthlessly selfish and egotistical Angel from girlhood to her huge success as a Marie-Corelli-esque novelist: terrible, but unaware of it, and selling in her thousands. It’s a very brave portrait for a novelist to create, and flawlessly carried out.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

OK, this one is pretty well known – but I have to mention it, as it’s often neglected in comparison to the other Bronte sisters’ works. Agnes is a quiet, moral woman who gets a job as a governess with some terrible children – and then falls in love. It’s a simple but perfectly structured masterpiece.

Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers

If you’ve not read the book, please do. Travers’ character doesn’t have a lot in common with rosy-cheeked Julie Andrews. In the books, she is snippy, lies quite a lot, and stands no nonsense. And it’s all the better for it.

Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther

Speaking of characters who aren’t like the film – this Mrs Miniver is the quintessential British housewife of the 1930s, but the war hasn’t begun by the time the book ends. Light, observant, and a delight.