Wikipedia!

[regshoe]

As promised, here is D. K. Broster's article with an infobox and picture added (I went with photo 2 in the end, which won the poll and was also my favourite).

And here is a brand new shiny article for The Flight of the Heron! I am very pleased with this; writing this article has been an excellent opportunity to do some detailed research about the book and its history, and I hope that having the information nice and accessible on Wikipedia will bring more people's attention to this wonderful book.

I have turned up various interesting and amusing things while doing the research for the FotH article, and I'll probably make another post or two about these soon.

By far the hardest part of the article to write was the 'Themes' section, because of course if you ask me to write about the themes of my favourite book I will naturally try to bring in my own thoughts and judgements about it, but everything on Wikipedia has to be clearly linked to a cited source—'original research' is not allowed. Turns out there has been a decent amount of sensible stuff written about the themes of FotH, but arranging it all was a good challenge.

If there's anything there that's wrong, missing or if you have another fact that simply must be added, please go and edit it in! One important thing I haven't included is a picture; the main picture in a book's article is supposed to be the cover of the most significant edition, usually the first edition, but the first edition of FotH has a plain cloth cover and I'm not sure what else to do (besides just using the title page, which is a bit boring). Does anyone have a significantly early edition with some nice cover art that you'd like to use?

“Mr Rowl” already has an article (although the title is wrong; I mean to fix that at some point), so perhaps I'll do The Wounded Name next. :D

Comments

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Yay! Excellent!

[regshoe]

It is! And thank you for sending me some of the things that ended up contributing to this <3

[theseatheseatheopensea]

No problem! I love all those cool bits about her that pop up online! :D

[luzula]

Oh, great work! Glad you found a source to quote saying that FotH is homoerotic. : D

[regshoe]

Thank you! Yes, I was pleased to get that (it's an interesting argument, too) and it was very important to include it :D

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

Hooray! I really enjoyed reading the new article-- you can tell that a lot of research went into it!

Similarly, Country Life commented that ‘it is the love which grows between these two young men, the sacrifices and suffering to which it brings them, which give the book its fine quality... the romance of heroic fighting and loving—the love of David and Jonathan—lifts it far above the ordinary Well, this reviewer definitely sounds like a shipper xD

As a cool bit of fandom overlap, Gordon Jackson, who played Ewen in the first radio adaptation, later went on to play Hudson the Scottish butler in Upstairs Downstairs, one of my fandoms! An impressive range for an actor, since the two aren't at all alike (although Hudson is canonically a Jacobite...) :P

[regshoe]

It was a very enjoyable bit of research to do :)

Hee, that was my favourite of the reviews—I thought it was especially important to quote that bit...

And how cool that the same actor plays one of your butler faves—I hadn't realised that! In fact I didn't know any of the people involved in the adaptations, although I now especially like Bryden Murdoch, who played Ewen three times in different radio adaptations (including a partial one not included in the article).

[sanguinity]

Congratulations! Those are both very fine articles!

[regshoe]

Thank you :)

[osprey_archer]

Yesss I love that you quoted the review that praised FotH for "the romance of heroic fighting and loving—the love of David and Jonathan." That reviewer GOT the book, and I love that we have contemporary evidence from the 1920s that at least some people were totally reading it that way.

[regshoe]

Hee! That was my favourite of the reviews—I'm not sure the reviewer meant it quite like that, but between that and the praise for the landscape descriptions they certainly identified the really important things about the book.