6degrees

Whenever the Six Degrees of Separation tag starts with a book I’ve read, I try to join in – and this month’s starts with a favourite, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Find out more about the tag at Books Are My Favourite And Best – and let’s get on with the show!

Starting book: Which of us doesn’t love I Capture the Castle? I read it when I was about 17, and it wasn’t much later that the brilliant film came out. It tells of Cassandra and Rose – sisters living in a castle in the depths of Suffolk – and their eccentric family. A total delight, and Smith’s most assured success.

1st degree of separation: It has to be Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters, doesn’t it? So close to I Capture the Castle in plot and theme that it nears plagiarism – but more sisters, and a darker undertone. I think it’s even better than Smith’s book – one of those reading experiences where I had to pause after a couple of pages because I couldn’t believe quite how brilliant the book was.

2nd degree of separation: “How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters” is how Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went To Woolworths begins – she could have been talking about Guard Your Daughters (only it wouldn’t be published for a while) but it’s also exactly the sort of novel The Brontes Went To Woolworths is. An eccentric, close-knit family live halfway between reality and fantasy, never sure how much they’re making up and how much is real. I love it more every time I read it.

3rd degree of separation: Oh, how could I not put Miss Hargreaves in, if we’re talking about people making things up that become real? That is, of course, exactly how Norman Huntley accidentally conjures up the octogenarian wonder that is Miss Hargreaves in Frank Baker’s novel.

4th degree of separation: Where to go next? Well, since Margaret Rutherford played Miss Hargreaves on stage, let’s go for another Margaret Rutherford classic – her role as Madame Arcati the medium in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. This is, of course, a play – about a love triangle between a man, his wife and… his dead wife. A hilarious play which exactly matches Rutherford’s brand of comedy.

5th degree of separation: I’m quite pleased with this link. The title of Blithe Spirit is taken from Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ – and his sonnet ‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life’ is the source of the title of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. If I’m honest, I don’t remember masses about this, except that I liked it and it was a bit bleak.

6th degree of separation: And finally, a book published the same year as The Painted Veil: 1925. I could have picked big hitters like Mrs Dalloway or The Great Gatsby, but I’m going with a neglected one – William by E.H. Young. Even fans of Young don’t seem to talk about this one as much as others, and I think it’s up there with her best. It focuses on the fall-out of a woman running off for a very inappropriate marriage, and how everyone in the family reacts – particularly her father, William. It was also one of the first ten orange Penguins. And we’ve come full circle to eccentric families!

That was fun. I’d love to know your six degrees?

It’s not often that I’ve read the starting book for the regular meme of a Six Degrees of Separation post (from Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best) – but, when the stars align, I can’t resist joining in. As Kate says – ‘Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up.

Starting book: This month, things kick off with Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller. It was published in 2003, and for a while it was the book that every book group had to read – that’s where I read it. It tells of an affair between a female schoolteacher and a teenage boy, told from the perspective of an older schoolteacher who is a little prurient, and a lot possessive and lonely. It’s a tour de force.

1st degree of separation: One of Judi Dench’s Oscar nominations came for playing the older schoolteacher in the 2006 film of Notes on a Scandal – so my next choice is another role she got an Oscar nomination for (and, for my money, her best performance): Iris, based on Iris by John Bayley. It’s a biography of Iris Murdoch by her husband. It faced some criticism for exposing Iris Murdoch when she couldn’t give informed consent, but I think it is done with affection and courage.

2nd degree of separation: A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf has also attracted some criticism over the years – not for what Virginia Woolf wrote, but because it was edited by her husband Leonard. It’s all the diary entries that deal with writing from a much larger series of diaries (which has since been published in five volumes, unabridged). I can see why people thought Leonard was editorialising too much, but I think A Writer’s Diary is an extraordinary work. Woolf’s insights into writing are little short of miraculous, and her parallel preoccupation with external validation (and financial success) are a reminder that artistic genius doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

3rd degree of separation: You could go in any number of directions from Virginia Woolf, but I’m going to go for a novel that is also preoccupied with how novels are evaluated – how they are received by critics and by different echelons of the public: Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay. One of the main characters is a writer of low-to-middlebrow novels, who is fascinated by the way she is adored by some parts of society, ignored by others, and with seemingly no way to objectively determine quality.

4th degree of separation: Keeping Up Appearances got me thinking about novels about sisters who take different paths from each other – and that, in turn, got me thinking about The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. In it, we watch Emily and Sarah Grimes grow up, both drawn beautifully by Yates but both, as we are warned in the opening line, ‘Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.’

5th degree of separation: I’ve gone with another book that tells you in the opening lines that the book won’t have a happy outcome. This memoir (or heavily autobiographical novel) opens ‘This is a cautionary tale, and true. Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same.’ And the book is the brilliant A House in the Country by Ruth Adam – which is much more amusing than the Yates, or than the opening line might make you think.

6th degree of separation: And finally – a book where someone falls in love with an enormous house against their better judgement, though this story turns out more better: it’s Vita Sackville-West’s beautiful novella The Heir, inspired by love for her ancestral home Knowle (which, as a woman, she could not inherit).

What fun!