I'm going through a period where my attention span is all over the place, so I'm finding myself drawn to books that I know are going to be easy to read or short (or both).
Etty Hillesum is back on the shelf for now, but I
will finish it as soon as my concentration is strong enough. I love the writing of
Eva Ibbotson. I never read her children's books (but it's never too late to catch up!) and discovered her 'romances' at the end of my first year at uni (
A Countess Below Stairs being the first) and was completely smitten. I feel so lucky that I read that just as her other adult books were being re-issued as teen reads. It's so frustrating to fall in love with an author only to find that her work is out of print. Ibbotson's writing is repetitive in the same way that
Noel Streatfeild's is- the stock characters and morality lessons in which virtue is always rewarded.
The Dragonfly Pool forms a nice trio with
Journey to the River Sea and
The Star of Kazan- the magic tends to stem from the natural and enchanted worlds that Ibbotson creates through language and imagery, rather than the supernatural kind found in
The Secret of Platform 13, The Island of the Aunts etc. It's rather
Frances Hodgson Burnett-like. If you're familiar with Ibbotson, then you'll sort of know what to expect from this tale of plucky young Tally, who, on the eve of World War II, sent to a rather bohemian boarding school full of quirky teachers and pupils, and on a visit to the kingdom of Bergania, finds herself involved in a plan to rescue the crown prince from the Nazis. I don't think this one ultimately reaches the same heights as 'Journey' or 'Star,' (my favourite- I just love reading about old Vienna) but Ibbotson's writing is always beautiful and lyrical and poetic justice reigns supreme. It was also nice to meet an Ibbotson character with my name- unlike me, this Julia is a wonderful actress, but she also happens to be extremely shy...
Fortune's Rocks is a very strange book indeed. I find
Anita Shreve's
work to be of a rather mixed quality (her best by some distance being
Light on Snow), but her books in the very least are reliably easy to get into and quick to read and I've tended to consider her a better writer than she's often given credit for. It seems as if all bestselling women authors are treated with a certain amount of suspicion (which I find terribly unfair). This is the first of her books I've read that's set in the past and the blurb promised 'the kind of literary blockbuster we tend to associate with Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins... this is perfect reading for a winter night's fireside reading' (Glasgow Herald) and with a heroine comparable to Jane Eyre (The Times). That all sounded very promising. My problem with it? I can't for the life of me condone a relationship between a fifteen year old girl and a forty one year old (married) man (with children not much younger than his lust object). I
might have been able to suspend a bit more belief if she'd been eighteen, but
fifteen? It's like a daytime TV movie dressed up as something a bit more upmarket, with a few gruesome childbirth scenes thrown in for good measure. The heroine, Olympia Biddeforth, is beautiful, precocious and sheltered and on the verge of womanhood. Along comes her father's friend John Haskell, a doctor and writer with progressive ideas about the living and working conditions of mill girls. They fall passionately in love, are discovered having sex in the chapel at her sixteenth birthday party, she gives birth to his baby, which is sent away to an orphanage. There's no chemistry between the leads and yet we're supposed to root for them unconditionally. Olympia feels guilty about what they're doing for about five minutes, but because she's so enlightened and liberated from the ties of society, there's nothing shameful about it at all because they're soooo deeply in love. It isn't just that she's a well-bred Victorian girl- how could anyone not feel guilty about destroying a family regardless of how much in love you are? She also never has to stand on her own two feet- she enlists a sympathetic lawyer and her father has a change of heart and gives her the financial support she needs to carry out the custody battle. The one genuinely admirable thing she does is undermined in an epilogue that's so contrived that it's almost insulting. To compare Olympia to Jane Eyre... the very thought renders me speechless. On top of all that, the faux-Victorian language quickly becomes grating (did people
really never speak with contractions then?). A story about the lives of the mill girls Haskell was supposedly so interested in protecting would have been much more interesting. My favourite musical is
Carousel and I always got a sense that the girls in that have two options- work in the mill or get married. Julie Jordan's assertion that she'll never marry (until she enters into a brief, doomed marriage with carnival barker Billy Bigelow) is a bold one. There's the section in
Stonecutters Cut it on Stone where the girls compare marriage to domestic and sexual slavery. It makes you wonder if that, or the long hours six days a week in a dusty cotton mill is the lesser evil. Considering the conflict between the Yankee and French inhabitants, it's interesting that she's called Julie Jordan (Jourdan?) and names her daughter Louise... I know the Christian names come from Ferenc Molnar's
Liliom, but it's an interesting thought (to me at least).
The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a quietly shocking short novel, depicting an entire lifetime in a mere 184 pages (and it would probably be about half that if it was printed in a standard layout). Until
Virginia Woolf came along,
May Sinclair was considered the most distinguished woman writer of the first part of the twentieth century (she was the one who coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness'). It's surprisingly straightforward to read and it's laid out like a children's book with its large type and wide spacing. It makes you wonder how much Harriett really develops throughout her life as she's constantly stuck in the same mindset and the self-imposed shadow of the parents she idolises. It's ironic that it's her obsession with 'being good' and 'behaving beautifully' that makes her selfish and tyrannical and ultimately pitiable. Well worth a look, only takes an hour or two to read and more accessible than Mrs Woolf (I'm afraid I've never warmed to her, but I keep meaning to put that right). Harriett is exactly the kind of spinster I don't want to turn into! There's a very good review by
Stuck In A Book that discusses this novel far more eloquently than I could.
On the opposite end of the spectrum,
Wedding Season is a delightful confection. I'm not much of a fan of the chick-lit genre (I can never relate to the characters and so many of them are horribly written) and I hadn't read anything by
Katie Fforde before, but I have a feeling she may be a new favourite 'fluff' author. I love stories about weddings, even though in the very unlikely event that any man should want to marry me, I don't know if I could face having one of my own. I love reading about extravagance even if I wouldn't want it for myself. Fforde depicts a very (upper) middle class world full of people called Rupert and Fenella who own crumbling stately homes that I'm not sure really exists (maybe it does in the Cotswolds), but that kind of adds to the modern-yet-nostalgic fairytale like feel to the story. The only thing that stretched credibility a bit too far was how Elsa had to design and make a state of the art wedding dress and four bridesmaid dresses for the celebrity wedding, as well as doing over Sarah's sister's wedding dress and making her own Regency ballgown in only two months. When I was a bridesmaid for the first time, my aunt had to make my dress because I was at that awkward age where I was too old for a child's dress but still too small for an adult's and that took ages (she did an amazing job, with
very tricky fabric). But these are minor niggles. I liked how it was character driven with three well-drawn, sensible, likable heroines- wedding co-ordinator Sarah, dressmaker Elsa (my favourite) and hairdresser Bron. There are no skeletons in closets or evil diva bitch brides, just about everyone is supportive and the simplicity and the friendship between the women is refreshing. A book that's like a plate of chocolate chip cookies still warm from the oven. More like this, please.
The Children Who Lived in a Barn (first published in 1938) by
Eleanor Graham (founding editor of
Puffin Books) is one of those books I feel as if I must have read when I was younger, but in fact never did. A rather nice 1955 edition caught my eye at Oxfam as it's since been re-published by the delectable
Persephone Books and I love vintage children's fiction. The premise is certainly an unusual one- Granny is taken ill somewhere in Europe, Mother and Daddy have to rush to her side, leaving the five children alone ("Stop fussing about the children. They can manage perfectly well by themselves- and it's quite time they had a shot at it," says Daddy. For the record, the eldest, Sue is thirteen and youngest, Alice, is seven). The plane the parents are on disappears without a trace (a genteel 30s version of Lost, perhaps?) and the miserable landlord Mr Screech orders the children out of the house, but they're offered a barn by the sympathetic farmer, Pearl. A healthy amount of suspension of belief is required throughout- I found myself reminded of the way the Provincial Lady worries about Vicky and Robin's lack of emotion as the children's matter-of-fact acceptance of their parents' disappearance is a little unsettling. What makes it so interesting is seeing the way the children rail together against the disapproval of the beastly grown ups (especially that dreadful District Visitor) who think that children bringing themselves up without adult supervision is a recipe for disaster and develop their own very sensible set of rules and moral code. I thoroughly enjoyed this (and would love to try out a hay-box), but was a little disappointed that we never learn whether Granny dies from her illness or not...
(Endpapers from the Persephone edition)
On the subject of quick reads, I was quite sorry to see The London Paper go. Whilst it's no better than the London Lite content-wise (apart from having the adorable Pet of the Day feature), the layout and design is so much classier which makes me feel far less grubby reading it!
What can I say about American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, the novel that isn't-a-portrait-of-Laura-Bush-but-really-kind-of-is that hasn't been said already? I hate the Bush administration and everything it stands for and I've never been an admirer of Mrs Bush, but I nevertheless loved this book. I think it's because Sittenfeld writes so empathetically in the voice of a woman whose lifestyle and choice of husband few of us are ever likely to have much in common with. Alice Blackwell née Lindgren is presented as a sensitive, bookish child and teenager, whose life is transformed when she kills a classmate whom she has a crush on in a car accident, starts an affair with his dissolute brother and has an illegal abortion arranged by her (lesbian) grandmother. The often seedy side of life that we never hear about in relation to the (bloody) American Dream. She settles into a life as a spinster-ish elementary school librarian and unexpectedly falls in love with the charming ne'er-do-well son of the richest family in the state. I'm not sure if I can fully believe that Laura Bush is a secret liberal, but I could believe it of Alice Blackwell. I think it's important to separate the two. I like the cover, which is exactly how I imagine Alice to look, but I don't think she rides a bicycle once in the novel and the landscape looks far more Little House on the Prairie than small town Wisconsin...
At Mrs's Lippincote's, the first novel by Elizabeth Taylor is a finely written novel, but not one that really resonated with me. Although it is told from several different points of view, I found it difficult to really connect with any of them. My favourite character was precocious young Brontë-obsessed Oliver- I have to admit that I was a bit like that when I was younger. I was also ambivalent towards Angel, so I wonder what it is that's preventing me with connecting with a writer who, going by my usual tastes and preferences, I ought to love. I have a feeling Taylor is a writer who grows on you and I'm certainly not giving up.
I absolutely loved Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson, the best non-fiction work I've read in goodness knows how long. This is my great-grandmother's generation- she was one of four sisters born in the 1880s and 90s and she was the only one who ever married (one lived with her lover for years but never married him, another was a fairly well-known artist in lesbian Jewish avant-garde circles and I don't know anything about the fourth) and that was to her cousin. I loved just how readable, sympathetic and moving this book was, the analysis is sensitive and spot-on and the case studies are fascinating. They include the campaigner Florence White (not the same Florence White of Good Things In England fame) and her sister Annie who campaigned for spinters' rights and set up the National Spinsters Pensions Association, Gertrude Maclean who founded the Universal Aunts agency (a fantastic enterprise- women could finally get paid for something that had always been taken for granted), Caroline Haslett, the first director of the Electrical Association for Women (who was cremated by electricity- I love it), lady's maid Rose Harrison who when asked what she'd do if she could live again replied, "I would live my life over again," and countless others. Winifred Holtby's books have also risen rapidly to the top of my TBR pile. Nicholson isn't afraid to take on questions that are still controversial in the C21, such as whether it's possible to be happy and fulfilled without getting married and having children. If these extraordinary women are anything to go by, the answer should be a resounding yes. The First World War was undoubtedly a tragedy of immeasurable proportions that caused all sorts of damage and it's fair to mourn for a 'lost generation,' but it is easy to romanticise what might have been. If it hadn't happened, expectations of women's lives might have remained based on getting married and having babies. I wish my girlfriends and acquaintances who do nothing but whine about their boyfriends would read this book. It puts so many things into perspective.
