It’s official. I love Lost in Austen too much. This is utterly daft, but keeps getting better and better – after astonishing revelations concerning Georgiana Darcy and Caroline Bingley, I ought really to be writing to the scriptwriter ‘Damn you and damn every man who won’t light a candle in his window and stay up all night damning you’ (brilliant line!) but, as it is, I adore everything about this programme. In amongst the absurdities and nonsenses were some very genuinely moving moments. I might have to put the DVD on my birthday list – and can’t wait to see what Jemima Rooper will do next…
No need to be Saki
Our Vicar’s Wife and I, along with some local friends, are in the midst of a literature and arts week – one of Our Vicar’s Wife’s creation and assembly, that is. Yesterday it kicked off with sophisticated afternoon tea and an informal book group, where we all talked about what we’d been reading recently. Today started off with a book group on Mary Ann Shaffer’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Soceity, for which Our Vicar’s Wife had asked me to talk a little about the history of the epistolary novel… I was rather embarrassed and spoke too quickly, but didn’t go too badly. Always fun to mock Pamela a little bit…
In the afternoon we had a look round some of the studios and gardens open for Somerset Arts Week – saw some wonderful watercolours, exceptional animal sculptures, and fun designs with fabrics. Lots of things I’d have spent money on if I had it. A trip to a local book barn (not the Bookbarn) led to my buying Miss Mole by EH Young, and then we had a play reading of Noel Coward’s one-act play Ways and Means. Tomorrow we’re off to Lyme Regis to play at Persuasion and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
In the evening, not part of the schedule but coincidental, I flicked on to a repeat on BBC4, called Who Killed Mrs. De Ropp? I was so excited when we first got BBC4, the cultural channel supposedly crammed with programmes about literature and art and such like. Hmm. Hasn’t really happened – I’ve probably wanted to watch about three programmes in the three years we’ve had it. But tonight has added a fourth – Who Killed Mrs. De Ropp? According to IMDB it was first shown on 2 May 2007, so I’m hopelessly behind the times, but am very glad the
y chose to repeat it. The programme is based on three short stories by Saki, and stars the wonderful Gemma Jones. I’ve never read anything by Saki, but have had a collection of his work on my shelves for years, which I think Our Vicar’s Wife gave to me. Having had a sample of his work, I am now very keen to read them – and each story is so short that it would do before bed.
The three stories used for Who Killed Mrs. De Ropp? are ‘The Story-Teller’ and ‘The Lumber-Room’ from Beasts and Super-Beasts, and ‘Sredni Vashtar’ from The Chronicles of Clovis. Though with seemingly little connection, they are all linked by an overbearing female relative and mutinous children – so the makers of the programme assimilated these into one overbearing female relative and one group of mutinous children. What is most impressive about this programme is that it came directly from the books – almost nothing wass altered. Since Saki was a character, he did the narrative bits. And it’s wonderful – the stories are slightly macabre, they also have a deliciously light tone, almost EM Delafield-esque. For instance:
[On a train:] The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite ‘One the Road to Manderley.’ She only knew the first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use. She repeated the line over and over again in a dreamy but resolute and very audible voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though some one had had a bet with her that she could not repeat the line aloud two thousand times without stopping. Whoever it was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet.
Any Saki-lovers out there? I’m going to make a start on Beasts and Super-Beasts forthwith.
Old Friends
A while ago I emailed Danielle from SourceBooks, Inc. and she very kindly agreed to send me Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil G. Brinton all the way from America (available through their website, or Amazon – or in bookshops if you’re in the US). I first heard about this book on Elaine’s blog, Random Jottings, and knew that I’d have to read it at some point. For those who didn’t read that post on Random Jottings, I’ll fill you in – Old Friends and New Fancies is the first Jane Austen sequel ever written, back in 1913, but Brinton didn’t stop there, no sir. This book is a sequel to ALL the Austen novels – characters from each of the six crop up and meet each other and – well, just think of all the possible matches to be made!
They include a list of characters at the beginning for those not completely familiar with all JA’s oeuvre, or just because there are so many – have just done a quick count, and there are forty of Austen’s characters listed. Pride and Prejudice contributes the most, at fifteen, while Emma only offers two, but each is represented in some manner. We kick off with Elizabeth and Darcy, which is probably how it should be, but before long we are whirled off into the various interrelations between novels…
The central questions are – with Mary Crawford end up with Colonel Fitzwilliam? And, will William Price choose Georgiana Darcy or Kitty Bennet? What delicious choices. William Price and Georgiana Darcy were always two of my favourite background-characters, so to witness them dancing at a ball was quite something (even if Brinton does what Austen never did, and gives Georgiana dialogue). On an aside, whom would I have paired, or just occasioned to meet… Mr. Palmer and Mr. Bennet would be a joyous pair to eavesdrop. Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Jennings! Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton! Catherine Morland and Harriet Smith! Oh, endless, endless…
I wonder quite how Brinton made her decisions about central characters? Obviously the young, single folk were thrown to the forefront… but Mary Crawford is the oddest decision and portrayal. Brinton obviously didn’t love Mansfield Park that much; not only are Fanny and Edmund excluded from proceedings, we also have a volte face in how Mary Crawford appears. She is misunderstood, meek, sensible, kind and has none of the flirtatious, slightly selfish, overly loud persona Fanny distrusts in Mansfield Park… interesting.
Brinton doesn’t really try to write in the style of Austen – the period feel is more or less there, though it’s worth noting that we’re as far (time-wise) from Brinton now as she was from Austen then, but Brinton doesn’t attempt to echo Austen’s wit and narrative asides and general Austenness. Having said that, she doesn’t try to soak the characters in Brintonness either, whatever that would be like; she is content to set them loose together on a shared stage, and see what happens.
Old Friends and New Fancies, I would think, is for Austen-fanatics like myself. Without knowing all the characters beforehand it would lose a lot of its enjoyment factor – there are the odd comments to savour, such as ‘Mrs. Knightley’s matchmaking doesn’t always work out well’ or Tom Bertram’s ‘We only had one real failure in amateur dramatics’ (I paraphrase both). This shared knowledge is a reward and a treat whenever it appears. On the whole, this book (republished in 2007 by SourceBooks) is rather silly, a lot of fun, and very well managed by Brinton.
Danielle also sent me a couple of other Austen sequels, Pemberley Shades by D. A. Bonavia-Hunt (1949) and The Darcys & The Bingleys by Marsha Altman (2008) so… more to investigate!
Tess and the jeans-test
It’s been a while since I reviewed an actual book on here, hasn’t it? It’s partly because I’ve been busy doing lots of other things, like painting the bathroom and organising all my books, and partly because there are only so many posts I can write about Mapp and Lucia. So I shall turn to that inferior medium, the television.
We sat down, en famille, to watch the BBC’s latest costume drama – Tess of the D’Urbervilles. For a genre which had been declared dead by TV executives until Colin Firth et al blasted that theory out of the lake, they certainly push as many as possible onto our screens at the moment. Over the past couple years we’ve had Cranford, Lark Rise to Candleford, Sense and Sensibility, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Room With A View… I’ve probably missed some, but you get the gist.
Every time, we get columnists and bloggers and everyone talking about the pros and cons of costume drama – is it lazy scheduling or is it intelligently using a world of potential stories and well-loved characters? It’s very simple, to my mind. If the programme would work equally well without costumes and history, then it’s a success. Cranford, probably the best thing I’ve seen on television in years, would have phenomenal in any era and if Dame Judi was in jeans. So, the jeans-test for Tess…
Erm. Shall we say a strong maybe? The actors are great – Gemma Arterton will soon be everywhere, including Lizzie B in Lost in Austen, and was fantastic in Capturing Mary with Maggie Smith last year, and Ruth Jones is an inspired, funny casting as Tess’s Mum. The shooting is beautiful. But they still rely so heavily on wearing peasant costumes and waistcoats and having horses and saying “didn’t ought to” and speaking in a West Country, that it be, that if it were transferred to 2008, they’d spend hours staring at a wall. Somehow the relationships between the characters don’t feel *quite* real, they’re more textbook period drama and a little thoughtless – Alec, for instance, is obviously a cad from the second he sidles up smoking a cigar and smirking lasciviously. On the other hand, of course, we have the wonderful Anna Massey as his mother, who can do no wrong.
Perhaps I’ve been a little harsh. It is a very good programme and I’ll certainly watch the rest, just… once you’ve seen Cranford, you realise there are new heights which could be met.
Elaine’s Suggestions…
Just a quick post tonight to point you over to Elaine’s response to the Pride and Prejudice Musical – click here. Lots of suggestions for appropriate songs, and is bound to make you chuckle!
From the ridiculous to the sublime, I spent the evening at a rather different concert – no, not the last night of the Proms, but in Chiselborough church listening to Urban Voices, a choir from London. They were absolutely brilliant – all sorts of influences, from gospel to soul to rock to pop to R&B, and singing praises to God, alongside other pieces. A fun, friendly group providing an amazing evening.
Eliza Doolittle-Bennet?
Lyn from dovegreybooks Yahoo Group (not to be confused with Lynne from dovegreyreader blog) sent me another little piece of information today – I hope she won’t mind if I quote her email:
Just got home to find the latest issue of Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine waiting for me. Nice new smaller format, looks very good. I thought I’d give this a try for a year because I got a good deal on the sub through the JA Society here. Flicking through, I see an article on Lost In Austen & on the back cover, an ad for JA’s P&P :the new musical. Was there ever an old one? I feel myself growing faint, it’s coming to Broadway apparently. The tag line on the website is
The world has waited two centuries for this smart, song-filled & compelling investment opportunity (I’m not joking!)
If you click on the site, you’ll hear Darcy singing about Fine Eyes.
Lyn (feeling as though that particle exploder did something to the world after all & I’m in another dimension).
Well. Gosh. Of course, it does seem rather as though one can’t have anything on the stage without a song and dance accompanying nowadays, and it’s a miracle that Austenmania hasn’t led to this before. Bad as the 2005 film was in so many ways, at least it didn’t have Keira doing the can-can singing ‘It is a TRUTH uni-ver-salllllly ackNOWledged!’
But am I too quick to judge? Obviously I would go and see this, even if I expected it to be dire, and I imagine there are enough Pride and Prejudice addicts to make this sell out whatever the quality – but perhaps, just perhaps, it would actually be good? Stranger things have happened. And what if they took a selection of extant songs… how would that go… Lizzie could sing I Don’t Know How To Love Him then Learning To Love Him and finally Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man. Lydia could get I Could Have Danced All Night, and Sixteen Going On Seventeen, while Kitty would have to settle for You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun. And for Mr. Bennet, howsabout If I Were A Rich Man?
More suggestions in a similarly irreverent tone, please!
A Murder Is Announced
A Murder Is Announced was the first Agatha Christie novel I read, probably in 1998 or thereabouts, just as I entered my teenage years. It led to a brief passion for Christie (more particularly Miss Marple) which has rather subsided over the years, but only because I got steered onto other paths. I’m no Christie snob, and certainly rank her as the best plot-creator I’ve read (see Harriet’s recent post on Endless Night and a defence of Christie in style not just structure). I must return to her soon – The Carbon Copy is quite a Christie aficionado (spelt it correctly this time!) though more of a Poirot man.
Tonight Our Vicar’s Wife and I went to see A Murder Is Announced performed at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil – I’d spotted a banner advertising it when we drove past the other day, and we thought it sounded like a fun evening. Sadly Our Vicar couldn’t make it, and The Carbon Copy isn’t coming down until next weekend, so it was just the two of us – and, horror of horrors, when we got there we found it was sold out! Nothing daunted, we asked whether we could have standing tickets, and the lovely people said we could, so long as we didn’t block any fire exits. So we stood.
What fun. Nothing like a good murder mystery, even if I did know whodunnit already. Actually, that’s what astounded me – I could remember the plot almost perfectly, nearly a decade after reading A Murder Is Announced. Not only did I know who’d dunnit, but I also noticed all the places where the play differed from the novel (quite a few, quite substantial, including one murder) – no great feat, perhaps, but there are books I’ve read recently about which I remember absolutely nothing. Not a thing. No names, plots, endings. Usually I’ve forgotten most details of a novel within a fortnight of finishing it, however much I enjoyed it – which has made re-reading Mapp and Lucia series immensely fun. Yet old Agatha’s work is crystalised in my mind – perhaps because it was one of the first Real Books I read, rather than Teen Fiction? Perhaps because it was my first detective novel? Perhaps Christie is just talented in this way?
Answers on a postcard… and any closet Christie fans, do spill. Favourite novel of hers, which should I read to reawaken my Christie passion, and, most importantly: Marple or Poirot?
Booker and Penelope
My friend Lyn emailed me an interesting link earlier this week – here it is – to an article about the Man Booker Prize. They managed to get a judge from each of the 40 years to talk about the process, the books, and the winners. Fascinating, and shows how utterly arbitrary the procedure actually is – in so many cases the judges simply picked a compromise. We all know how it is when we champion a book and no-one will understand our praise, or conversely, listening to someone eulogise about a novel we privately think excreable. Imagine those discussions when the world is waiting for your decision… and imagine having to read over a hundred books in a few weeks beforehand. Sounds fun, but reading to a deadline takes quite a lot of the fun out of things, and trying to power through that lot… the article certainly made me feel sympathy for them.
Second snippet of news is the new Penelope Fitzgerald website. PenelopeFitzgerald.com, succinctly enough. They spotted that I’d been reading The Bookshop, a gift from Lynne Hatwell, and have posted my review over on their affectionate and intelligent website. ‘All things pertaining to Penelope’, that’s their mantra, and a very intriguing collection of items it is. Articles, especially to do with Letters; newspaper mentions; Penelope Fitzgerald’s visual art – looks like an excellent site to bookmark and pop back to. In the same line as Blogging Woolf, also always worth a visit.
Bookbarn Spoils
There is a place of wonderment in Somerset, it is called The Bookbarn. We stumbled across it by accident about four years ago, just saw a sign saying ‘Used Books This Way’ and, naturally, went that way… wow. The biggest secondhand bookshop in England, a barn filled with literally millions of books. Literally millions. www.bookbarn.co.uk.
They’ve since gone a little techy (see the website) and large amounts of them are now on a database, and only accessible physically to staff – but there are still hundreds of thousands which you can browse. And that’s what we did today. I always feel a little panicky when I leave the Bookbarn, because there is never enough time to look at all the books, obviously. What gems could I be walking away from? I tend to take some letters of the alphabet, and look at those shelves (fiction is loosely alphabetical, but not within the letter, e.g. all the authors beginning with ‘A’ are together, but not organised within ‘A’). Today I looked through C, P and B. Dad covered the plays, with my reading list for British Drama Post-1945, and I tried to gather up some Literature and Empire books… and got distracted, of course.
Well, here they are. Astute readers will spot quite a lot of overlap with yesterday’s list.
Under Western Eyes – Joseph Conrad; not on the list, but should be handy
Youth and other stories – Joseph Conrad; ‘other stories’ happens to include a little tale called Heart of Darkness
In The South Seas – R.L. Stevenson; any Stevenson fans able to tell me whether this corresponds to the Stevenson South Sea books on the list from yesterday’s post? We assumed it did.
Screens Against the Sky – Elleke Boehmer; not on the list, but Elleke Boehmer is the tutor for the course, so might prove interesting
Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand; another one on the list…
The House of Dolls – Barbara Comyns; this is where I *might* just have wandered from the reading list… having loved some Comyns last year, and very much liked some others, I felt I needed to stock up
Sisters by a River – Barbara Comyns; did someone mentioned Barbara Comyns?
Bloomsbury Pie – Regina Marler; now we’re back on Masters territory – this was recommended when I asked for a good guide to the Bloomsbury Group, and looks fascinating
Kim – Rudyard Kipling; only read a couple of short stories by Kipling, and Kim has always been at the back of my mind…
Our Country’s Good – Timberlake Werternbaker
Arcadia – Tom Stoppard
A Taste of Honey – Delaney
All building towards my British Drama Post-1945 module, which I’ll share more about in due course. Won’t be until January that I actually start it.
The Familiar Faces – David Garnett, non-fiction work by the author of Lady Into Fox (see 50 Books… on the left) this will, again, hopefully provide more Bloomsbury background.
All in all, a good day’s searching – and we got to see The Carbon Copy!
Have I Read You Somewhere Before?
I think one of the Booking Through Thursday topics in the past has been about re-reading books, but my current re-read of the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson has made me think about it again… I always thought I wasn’t much of a re-reader. So many books, so little time was my mantra – but… it appears to have all changed this year. Since January began, I’ve re-read the following:
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day – Winifred Watson
Year In, Year Out – A.A. Milne
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Speaking of Love – Angela Young
The Love Child – Edith Oliver
The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
The Twins at St. Clare’s – Enid Blyton
The O’Sullivan Twins – Enid Blyton
Summer Term at St. Clare’s – Enid Blyton
Second Form at St. Clare’s – Enid Blyton
The Provincial Lady Goes Further – E.M. Delafield
Queen Lucia – E.F. Benson
Miss Mapp – E.F. Benson
Lucia in London – E.F. Benson
Gosh. Last year, as I found out whilst doing this meme, I only re-read six books; this year I’m on sixteen already. I wonder why…
Partly it’s because I don’t have books to read for university (or haven’t, until this point), but on the other hand I have lots of books to review for Stuck-in-a-Book which are neglected whilst I re-read. Perhaps I’ve come to the point in my reading life, which only really started properly in 2000, where I want to dip back into the past. Maybe I just want a guaranteed good read – but partly it’s because I’ve realised just how subjective an experience with a book can be, and how short. I read a book in, say, four days. It might – like quite a few on the list above – be one of my favourite books. How odd that it should be on a favourites list for years, and have only occupied that amount of time in my life… so a re-read is to test the waters and see if they still make for pleasant paddling.
So much has been said about re-reading; I must get around to reading Anne Fadiman’s book on the topic. I don’t really know where to throw in my tuppence worthy, other than to say that re-reading this year has brought me more pleasure than almost anything else I’ve read – but I can’t *quite* shake the idea that I should be reading something new. What do you think?