Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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After a lovely time away – cue obligatory photo of Sherpa:

– where was I?  After a lovely time away, I am back in Oxford, and will be spending my weekend baking and reading.  Perfection!  But I shall leave you with some top-notch miscellaneous things today.

1.) The link – is a hilariously brilliant video from The Flight of the Conchords.  They’ve written a charity song, with the help of some children in choosing the lyrics… don’t forget to click through to Youtube and donate to the cause.  Or you can donate here. (The beginning might not make sense if you’ve not familiar with the excellent TV series, but give it a minute and you’ll be fine.)

2.) The blog post – was an easy choice this week.  Darlene and I had a ‘reading smack down’ (her words) – a race for Darlene to read something by my beloved Ivy Compton-Burnett, and me to read my second Elizabeth Bowen novel (having not loved my first) since Darlene adores Bowen.  Well, before I’d even pulled The House in Paris off the shelf, Darlene had read Manservant and Maidservant – and liked it!  Read her great review here, and congratulate her on her smack down victory.  It smarts.

3.) The book – I spotted that Erica Brown’s book on Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor, Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel, is out in December.  At £60 it’s probably not on for many private libraries, but if you hold any sway at your local academic library, then get a word in now!  More here.

When William Came – Saki

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If I mention the author ‘Saki’, you probably think of darkly funny short stories, if you think of anything at all.  If you were around during the brief spate where lots of bloggers were reading The Unbearable Bassington (which is exceptionally good) then perhaps that comes to mind.  What I have yet to see mentioned is his 1913 novel When William Came, which I have just finished.  The ‘William’ in question is Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and the ‘coming’ is his invasion of Britain.  Although such an invasion never took place, of course, Saki is essentially predicting the First World War – a war in which, in 1916, he would be killed.

If you’ve seen Went The Day Well? – a film based on a Graham Greene story about a similar invasion in the Second World War – then you might expect When William Came to have similar resistance and trauma as its keynotes.  In fact, the invasion is over, and much is continuing as ever before.  A lot of British people have fled to the colonies, but those that remain continue their social whirl with much jollity, only some of which is forced.  Cicely Yeovil is the chief socialite here, determined that a small thing like a new monarch and official language won’t prevent her surrounding herself by beautiful young pianists and gossipy older women.

“My heart ought to be like a singing-bird to-day, I suppose,” said Cicely presently.

“Because your good man is coming home?” asked Ronnie.

Cicely nodded.

“He’s expected some time this afternoon, though I’m rather vague as to which train he arrives by.  Rather a stifling day for railway travelling.”

“And is your heart doing the singing-bird business?” asked Ronnie.

“That depends,” said Cicely, “if I may choose the bird.  A missal-thrush would do, perhaps; it sings loudest in stormy weather, I believe.
Cicely’s husband, Murray Yeovil, is returning from lands afar, having picked up only bits and pieces of the news.  He is rather horrified by the response of those known as the fait accompli – who may have considered resistance, fleetingly, but have instead settled down to dinner parties and modern dance.

I don’t know what it says about me, but I much preferred the goings-on of the fait accompli to the anxieties of the patriotic, militaristic types.  My heart leapt within me whenever Joan Mardle appeared – she is described in one of Saki’s characteristically wonderful, brief descriptive entrances:

She cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with a top-dressing of hearty good-will and good-nature which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting to know her better they hastily rearmed themselves.
Always knowing what will most wound her acquaintances, but delivering these blows with disingenuous innocence, Joan Mardle would be a terrible friend, but is a wonderful character.  I love any b*tchy exchanges in high social circles – here’s another one I loved:

“I should have put on rubies and orange opals for you.  People with our colour of hair always like barbaric display -”

“They don’t,” said Ronnie, “they have chaste cold tastes.  You are absolutely mistaken.”

“Well, I think I ought to know!” protested the dowager; “I’ve lived longer in the world than you have, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Ronnie with devastating truthfulness, “but my hair has been this colour longer than yours has.”
Ouch!  But this is tempered with much more straight-faced reactions to the invasion and the possibility of Britain regaining its independent feet.  Here, for example, is someone arguing the point with Yeovil:

“Remember all the advantages of isolated position that told in our favour while we had the sea dominion is in other hands.  The enemy would not need to mobilize a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action; a fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our food supplies.”
In The Unbearable Bassington, Saki ingeniously balanced the comic and tragic, letting tragedy flow as an undercurrent to comedy until the climax of the novel.  In When William Came, I found the combination of insouciance and politics rather disjointed.  Comedy and tragedy are closely aligned, of course.  Anger and resignation could have worked in the same two-sides-of-the-coin way in When William Came, but the social merry-go-round didn’t really work alongside the militaristic angst.  The competing elements (in a very short novel) felt simply too different, and I ended up being a little disappointed.

Having said that, When William Came is worth reading if only for those parts of it I did love.  Nobody writes a social scene quite as bitingly as Saki, and few authors have his economy of words.  Once you’ve exhausted the short stories and The Unbearable Bassington, this is certainly worth reading, if only because we (sadly) have so little of Saki’s work to read.

Five From the Archive (no.8)

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It’s getting to the point where I can’t remember which books have featured in Five From The Archive and which haven’t, so I’m doing my best to think up new aleatory connections between the books in my review archive… and the one I came up with for today is definitely unusual!

Five… Books About Hands

1.) Halfway to Venus (2008) by Sarah Anderson

In short: Anderson runs a travel bookshop, and had an arm amputated after a severe childhood illness.  Halfway to Venus is a fascinating personal, social, and cultural history of amputation and limbs.

From my review: “It is to Anderson’s credit that Halfway to Venus brings out so many questions and reflections and reactions. A very honest book of autobiography, it is also a fascinating compedium, and with an engaging writing style which is all too often omitted from well-researched non-fiction.”

2.) The World I Live In (1908) by Helen Keller

In short: the counterpart to Anderson’s book, Keller explores the significance of hands when they provide the main sense-based interaction with the world.

From my review: “When I say that Keller’s worth as an author is not merely as a novelty, I mean that she should not be patronised, nor her writing viewed as some sort of scientific experiment.  She is too good and perceptive a writer for that.”

3.) Maestro (1989) by Peter Goldsworthy

In short: Eduard Keller is a Viennese refugee in Australia, teaching 15 year-old Paul the piano in an unorthodox manner – which begins with studying the importance of each individual finger.

From my review: “Their relationship isn’t romantic or fatherly or even particularly close.  Keller resists any sort of emotional connection, and Paul is far too full of youthful insensitivity to do anything but blunder into conversations in which he is too immature to participate, even if Keller were willing.  But what Goldsworthy builds between Keller and the Crabbes is still somehow beautiful.  The connection between people who never open up to one another; the legacies left behind a relationship which could not even be called a friendship.  Goldsworthy has done this beautifully.”

4.) Observatory Mansions (2001) by Edward Carey

In short: Francis Orme works as a living statue, but concentrates most of his efforts on an underground exhibition of sentimental objects he has stolen from residents of Observatory Mansions.  This book comes under ‘hands’ because Orme is very protective of his, always wearing white gloves, which he removes and archives as soon as they get slightly dirty.

From my review: “I probably overuse the word ‘quirky’, but no other description will do for Carey’s work.”

5.) Immortality (1988) by Milan Kundera

In short: Kundera’s postmodern narrative starts with him seeing a woman’s distinctive gesture with her arm.  He names her Agnes and invents a story around her, around that gesture. And then weaves it into a literary, historical intertextuality that darts all over the place, including Rubens, Goethe, Hemingway, Beethoven…

From my review: “I don’t know why postmodern stuff is so often annoying, but with Kundera, it isn’t annoying at all. He completely disrupts the novel form, and throws the reading experience into a whole new category, but it isn’t self-indulgent. His writing is so good, he is so very, very perceptive, that it works.”

Over to you!  A rather tricky category, but let me know if you have any suggestions…

Gossip From Thrush Green – Miss Read

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The first four or five days I was at home, I had a headache.  It’s related to a tooth problem, which hopefully will get sorted out, and I’ve become a cheerleader for various painkillers and antibiotics this week – but, more to the point, I needed something to read.  I couldn’t cope with anything stylistically sophisticated or experimental, or even anything which could be considered demanding in any sense of the word.  What could I choose?  Well, I’d never read anything by Miss Read, and she seemed to fit the bill.  I have three on my shelf, picked up cheaply somewhere, and so I chose one from the middle of her writing – Gossip from Thrush Green (1981).

Although I had never previously read a word by Miss Read, it was exactly what I expected.  Thoroughly enjoyable, and utterly forgettable.  It’s a little village where everyone knows each other, and cares for each other – the only differences being that some show this care, and some hide it.  Everyone gossips, especially the men, and a mischievous cat is about as traumatic as a burnt down vicarage (incidentally, not the most restful scenario to read whilst sitting in a vicarage!)

It’s been less than a week, and already all the characters and events are fading from my mind… I think the characters recur throughout the series of Thrush Green novels, so other readers might already be fond of blunt Ella, dotty Dotty, kind vicar’s wife Dimity etc.  I liked them all, but – differently though they were described – all of them spoke in the same warm, sensible way.  Miss Read (or Dora Saint, as she was called) writes in a very workmanlike way, getting the job done – which is perfectly good enough, because she clearly isn’t trying to be experimental.  With my headache, I was grateful.  Although set around 1981, when it was published, this was only clear because they talked about decimalisation.  Apart from that, it could easily have been 1950 or 1930 or even earlier.  It’s all bathed in nostalgia.  Villages still have these sorts of friendships and acquaintances – everyone is interested in each other – but they’re not quite so cut off from the rest of the world.

But how could I not warm to a novelist who takes it for granted that we know who the Provincial Lady is?

“‘When in doubt, don’t’, is my motto,” said Ella forthrightly.  “And as for love, well, you know what the Provincial Lady maintained.  She reckoned that a sound bank balance and good teeth far outweighed it in value.”
And how could I not nod my head to this?

“A quarter past three,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the bedside clock. “What a time to be drinking tea!””Anytime,” Harold told her, “is time to be drinking tea.”
All in all, this was the perfect book for me to read this week, but I think I’ll be keeping Miss Read to days when I can’t cope with anything else.  I know she has her besotted fans – Our Vicar’s Wife has read them all several times, I believe – but when I’m after comfort reading I’d rather run back to the 1920s.

Song for a Sunday

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Saturday night was a big barn dance for my parents’ wedding anniversary and my Mum’s birthday, with about 100 people coming.  Fun!  The celebrations continue today, and so I shall put up ‘their song’ – chosen some time into their marriage, but appropriate nonetheless.  Here’s Shania Twain and ‘You’re Still The One’.

Great British Baking!

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Some people were there when Dylan first went electric.  Some knew about Harry Potter before he hit the mainstream.  I, dear reader, was with The Great British Bake Off from series one, episode one.

Indeed, the whole first series watched without much comment – I loved it, and even toyed with entering the second series.  But then it suddenly became much better known, attracting higher ratings and being a heated topic of conversation in the Bodleian tea room.  I was even inspired to hold my own cake party.  I’m much enjoying series three (and watched the third episode with Mum this evening, on iPlayer) but the standard and difficulty have far exceeded anything I would be able to manage.  In case you haven’t watched it, the combination of Mel and Sue’s witty, irreverent-but-kind commentary, Mary Berry’s grandmotherly sweetness, Paul Hollywood’s gruff criticism, and a dozen nervous, jolly bakers is utterly irresistible.  I don’t know if the whole series’ episodes are available on iPlayer still, but if you can see the cakes in episode 1, they were amazing.  They had to bake cakes with patterns or pictures on the inside… exceptional.  Are you watching it?

And now for something completely different.  My very dear friend Lorna came to visit earlier in August and (despite she being a recently married uber-professional journalist, and me being… well, old) we made gingerbread and decorated it!  I only have two cutters, so they were gingerbread cats and gingerbread teapots.  And we didn’t stint on the squeezy icing…

The cutters are ready!

I’m clearly enjoying myself :)

mid-creation…

I couldn’t squeeze on ‘aged 26’.

I make a Colin cat (it’s a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt…) 

Harry Potter cat!  (Please don’t sue.)

Lorna hard at work – such concentration!

Lorna’s spread – spot the Parisian teapot, landmarks and all

My finished creations.
Now you see why I didn’t enter GBBO…

Am I My Brother’s Reader?

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I’ve been very ruthless over the past couple days, and weeded out over 100 books which have gone to Barrington (a local National Trust property with a book barn) or The Honeypot (an even more local secondhand book seller – my Mum in our garage, for the church!)  I haven’t been quite as ruthless as Rachel, but I’ve been stern with myself and certainly managed to make a bit of room… and then immediately filled it with the books I sent home with Mum and Dad when I moved house.  But, whereas I’d usually keep books I’ve read unless I hated them, now they’re out if it’s unlikely that I’ll want to re-read them for years.

One book which probably won’t be finding its way back onto my shelves is The Eye of the World (1990), the first novel in The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, which I finished on the train home.  In early 2010, my brother Colin and I set each other a reading challenge.  Our tastes our not similar at all, as you’ll remember from his My Life in Books interview, and I wanted him to sample the wonder of Virginia Woolf.  Since she writes normal, sensible length books – and Robert Jordan first volume OF FOURTEEN comes in at an astonishing 782 pages – Colin had to read Orlando and To The Lighthouse, and would still get off far easier in terms of length.  As it turned out, he struggled with Orlando and called it the worst book he’d ever read.  Read more here (scroll down to August 25th 2010 entry).  I was sad but not surprised, and let him off reading To The Lighthouse.  Virginia Woolf is too brilliant to be everyone’s cup of tea, so we’ll sweep that under the carpet.

Well, The Eye of the World isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but it did take me 2.5 years to read it.  I actually read over 500 pages on a trip to and from Paris in March 2010, because it was the only book I took with me, but I only read in dribs and drabs until, determined that it should feature on A Century of Books, I took it with me on a 3.5 hour train journey, and blitzed the final 200 or so pages.

Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve live in a jolly place called The Two Rivers, which is attacked by Trollocs (wolf-type creatures), and Rand’s father is killed.  I forget quite how this leads to the quest, but it does…. in fact, looking back, I can’t really remember ever being told what the quest actually was.  It certainly involved walking a very long way, outwitting Dark Forces, and seeking the elliptical wisdom of an Aes Sedai  – prophetess-type – called Moiraine, who is rather pretty, if memory serves.  They wanted to get to The Eye of the World, but I don’t really remember it being mentioned until they actually got there.  Perhaps they’re just on the run from the Trollocs and sundry evil things?

And on they go.  And on.  And oooonnnn.

I will mention, before I go on, that The Eye of the World was better than I thought it would be.  At no point was the writing laughably bad, although for the most part it was pretty pedestrian.  It doesn’t hurry particularly, and one of the reasons the book is so. very. long. is that Jordan doesn’t have any sense of economising.  Here’s an excerpt chosen entirely at random, to give you a sense of the pace:

The stone hallway was dim and shadowy, and empty except for Rand.  He could not tell where the light came from, what little there was of it; the grey walls were bare of candles or lamps, nothing at all to account for the faint glow that seemed to just be there.  The air was still and dank, and somewhere in the distance water dripped with a steady, hollow plonk.  Wherever this was, it was not the inn.  Frowning, he rubbed at his forehead.  Inn?  His head hurt, and thoughts were hard to hold on to.  There had been something about… an inn?  It was gone, whatever it was.

He licked his lips and wished he had something to drink.  He was awfully thirsty, dry-as-dust thirsty.  It was the dripping sound that decided him.  With nothing to choose by except his thirst, he started toward that steady plonk – plonk – plonk.
So, as you see, nothing dreadful, nothing in Mary Webb territory.  But since we’re comparing Jordan with Woolf (which I can’t imagine has ever happened before)… well, you can’t imagine anybody reading prose like that simply for the joy of reading beautiful writing, can you?  It’s serviceable, though, and unobtrusive, which is no mean feat.  Plenty of novelists would give their left arm for that.

A book’s merits can be considered in terms of plot, character, and writing style, broadly speaking.  What The Eye of the World lacks in writing style it almost gains in character.  Although it took me the first hundred pages to disentangle Mat, Rand, and Perrin (and that gap of two years in my reading entangled them all over again) I was impressed by the complex relationships between the central characters – with jealousy, admiration, affection, rivalry, loyalty, and frustration all playing their roles.  It’s not always the most subtle character delineation, but it’s a good deal more subtle than I was anticipating.  As usual, there are forces that are plain Evil, without redeeming feature or clear motivation, but the Good characters weren’t annoyingly bland in their pursuit of all that is pure.  They did all seem as though they were about 15 years old, whereas the cover suggests they’re a decade or so older than that…?

So, the plot?  It didn’t grip me, to be honest, because it seemed just to be walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, repeat as needed.  The heroes are trapped!  Will they die?  Er, no.  The heroes are lost!  Will they find their way?  Er, yes.  The heroes are trapped again!  Will they escape?  Can you guess?  When there are another thousand books in the series, you know that the main characters are going to live for at least another few books.

I love books where not much happens, as you know.  I love To The Lighthouse, for goodness’ sake, and bar a death and an argument or two, nothing really happens.  But The Eye of the World is so fixed on its quest plot, and its up-and-down attempts to heighten tension, that when it doesn’t grab a reader the foundations of the novel must collapse.  I think I’m just allergic to the artificiality of any quest-plot.  And – not that it’s relevant – covers like this.  Why do fantasy books so often have covers like this?  And silly names?  I’m put off when writers make up gibberish languages.  I think writers should be able to be creative within the bounds of the English language (or, y’know, whichever language[s] they speak.)  I don’t see how ‘Aes Sedai’ brings anything that ‘prophetess’ doesn’t, other than making me think (for some reason) of Anais Nin.

And while I’m moaning, goodness me, it’s slow.  Colin tells me that it’s the most pacey novel in the series – but no novel of 782 pages can claim to be fast-paced.  I think it could all easily be condensed into 300 pages, max.  I suppose part of the appeal to the sort of people who like lengthy fantasy series is that length. Perhaps it makes you feel like you’re on the quest too.  (It did make me chuckle that one of the cover quotations was “I read it in three days” – for most books, an indication of compulsive, compelling reading would be “I read it in three hours.”)  I was never hugely curious to find out what would happen next, partly because it was almost always glaringly obvious what would happen next and partly because it all happened at a glacial speed.

So, summing up… neither Colin nor I have converted the other to our much-cherished writers, but I fared better with Robert Jordan than he did with Virginia Woolf.  I shan’t be reading any other books in The Wheel of Time series, but I liked The Eye of the World more than I thought I would.  I just wish someone had hidden Jordan’s pen after 300 pages.

The Warden – Anthony Trollope

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In 2004, when I first joined the online book group which became dovegreybooks, and which I still love, everyone was talking about Anthony Trollope.  Over the course of the year, I managed to acquire all of the Barchester Chronicles & Palliser novels.  Fast forward eight years, and… I finally read something by Trollope!  And it wasn’t even one of the actual books I bought in 2004, although it was a duplicate of one of them – Penguin sent me their new edition of The Warden (1855) a few months ago, and I decided that was a good excuse to give Anthony T a go.

Verdict: Success.

Several people have told me over the years to skip over The Warden and start with Barchester Towers, because The Warden was dull or pedestrian.  My friend Will expostulated with some warmth about how much he’d hated it at school – but by then I was already halfway through the novel and LOVING it.

On the face of it, the subject matter isn’t of huge excitement and relevance to 2012.  A complicated combination of vague wills and inflation means that clergymen are benefiting from legacies intended for the charitable assistance of later generations.  Mr. Septimus Harding is one such clergyman – the warden of some almshouses, collecting £800 a year, and thus far more than the one shilling and sixpence given daily to the twelve old and infirm men who live there.

Now, I love the Church of England, but even I couldn’t call myself gripped by their financial workings 150 years ago.  At least, not in the hands of any other author.  In The Warden, it scarcely matters what the issue is – what matters is the way Trollope uses it.  While some people value Dickens as a social reformer rather than a comic writer (I am the reverse), I find Trollope’s touch much more palatable.  If this scenario had appeared in a Dickens novel, the warden would be called Mr. Grabsomecash, a cackling, acquisitive, unholy man.  And that would be fine, because he’d offset it with brilliant dialogue and hilarious grotesques, but it wouldn’t have shone any very realistic light upon the issue.  Trollope, ingeniously, combines his evident belief that reform is needed with a character who is the opposite of conniving, money-grabbing, or selfish.  At the start of the novel, after Mr. Harding has been accepting £800 a year for quite a long period, the idea that he is doing the wrong thing ‘has never sullied his quiet, or disturbed his conscience.’  Things soon change…

Heading the charge is John Bold, social reformer, who (despite his Dickensian name) is a subtle combination of forthright and bashful.  He isn’t directly affected by the almshouse dispute, but is the sort of left-wing gent who views all disputes as his personal business.  He is idealistic, but also (you would have seen this coming, had I mentioned that Mr. Harding has an eligible young daughter, Eleanor) in love.  Which gives excuses for wonderful honourable-young-lady speeches like this:

“Mr. Bold,” said she, “you may be sure of one thing; I shall always judge my father to be right, and those who oppose him I shall judge to be wrong.  If those who do not know him oppose him, I shall have charity enough to believe that they are wrong, through error of judgement; but should I see him attacked by those who ought to know him, and to love him, and revere him, of such I shall be constrained to form a different opinion.”  And then curtseying low she sailed on, leaving her lover in anything but a happy state of mind.
You can’t imagine Kim Kardashian or the cast of The Only Way Is Essex handling the situation in quite the same way, can you?

Septimus Harding has another daughter, Susan, but one not quite so close to his heart – largely because she is married to the ferociously logical and unpleasant archdeacon (she cannot bring herself to call him by any name other than ‘archdeacon’.)  There can be no character so frustratingly awful as one who uses ‘common-sense’ instead of compassion, logic in place of love – and the archdeacon, Dr. Grantly, is one of those.  He is Mr. Bold’s equal and opposite, forthright in defending Mr. Harding’s right to receive his £800 a year, brooking no compromise on the topic.  When Mr. Harding wishes to find out whether he is morally and legally entitled to the money he receives (which nobody really seems to know) Dr. Grantly blinds him with syllogisms and declares that Mr. Harding will be abandoning the church if he does not continue to accept the money.  Yet even with Dr. Grantly, Trollope is charitable, noting towards the end of The Warden that:

We fear that he is represented in these pages as being worse than he is; but we have had to do with his foibles, and not with his virtues.  We have seen only the weak side of the man, and have lacked the opportunity of bringing him forward on his strong ground.
And he goes on to list his virtues, alongside his vices.  For Trollope is scrupulously fair in The Warden.  Right and wrong are not clearly demarcated, and even the right things are done for wrong reasons, and vice versa.

The Warden is largely the exploration of Mr. Harding’s conscience, his craving for privacy, his sense of duty, and his love for Eleanor and the men of the almshouse.  It is all subtle and generous, and in a beautifully lilting prose.  I can see the threads of Jane Austen more clearly than I have in any other Victorian writer; Trollope values the balance and measure of sentences as much as Austen did.  The issue is no longer relevant, and perhaps never was to the majority of the country, but people have not changed.  Anybody familiar with disputes local or national will recognise the various characters here, or at least some of their traits.  At the centre of it is the wonderfully complex figure of Mr. Harding, thrust into a limelight he loathes and forced to defend a position he is beginning to consider indefensible.  If the rest of the Barchester Chronicles just gets better, then I’m excited to read on!

A Review Round-up

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It’s one of those posts where I post teeny tiny reviews of some titles for A Century of Books which (for whatever reason) don’t warrant full reviews.  It’s really just so I have somewhere to link from the main list, but do jump in with your thoughts nonetheless!

The Westminster Alice (1902) by Saki
It’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice, but re-imagined with various political figures from the turn of the century!  A fun idea, and some bits I found amusing, but mostly it went right over my head.  I’d heard of most of the people – Chamberlain, Balfour, Cecil etc. – but I don’t know the ins and outs of their activities in 1902.  But it was diverting enough, and under 50 pages…

What It Means To Marry (1914) by Margaret Scharlieb
For my next chapter, I’m reading a few different people discoursing on marriage from the 1910s and ’20s.  They mostly divide into the ‘marriage is holy’ and the ‘free love ahoy’ camps – this one falls in the former, but Scharlieb is always a bit of a doom-monger as well…

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret Murray
This was a rather credulous account of medieval witchcraft, which I read for my chapter on Lolly Willowes.  It was a speedy read because I skipped all the untranslated Latin and Medieval French…

The Corner That Held Them (1948) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I love Warner sometimes, but this novel covering decades in the life of a medieval nunnery really, really bored me.  And yet it was her favourite of her books, and I know some people who adore it.  Odd.