Recent reading
Jun. 6th, 2023 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeStill catching up...
Deephaven and Selected Stories and Sketches by Sarah Orne Jewett (1877-1884). This is a collection including the sort-of-novella Deephaven and a series of shorter pieces of writing. Deephaven, very much like The Country of the Pointed Firs, is narrated by a lady from Boston who goes to spend the summer in an old port town on the coast, gets to know the locals and writes about the place and people in lovely descriptive detail—but it adds the interesting new element that our narrator takes this holiday with her dear friend, another young single Bostonian lady whose family come from the town, and the descriptions of Deephaven itself are occasionally interrupted by passages about this friend's many admirable virtues. I really enjoyed it, and it's historically fascinating in several ways. The stories and sketches are a bit of a mixed group, mostly more descriptive writing about settings and people and similarly beautiful. Of course I wasn't expecting a story called 'Tom's Husband' to be anything other than het; in fact it's about a married couple who swap gender roles with mixed success, and has an interestingly ambivalent ending.
Kirsteen by Margaret Oliphant (1890). Oh, I like Margaret Oliphant. I like her a great deal indeed. Subtitled 'The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago', Kirsteen is about the Douglas family, who live in Argyll in the early nineteenth century, and the daughter Kirsteen's adventures as she escapes from the house ruled by her tyrannical father and makes her own way in the world. It's a fascinating moment in Highland history, when the effects of the Jacobite past are still keenly felt and yet the Highlands are increasingly integrated into the wider British and imperial society. Kirsteen's grandfather was out in the '45 and the resulting loss of the family's old lands obsesses her father, who has regained something of a fortune through slavery and now sends his sons out to postings in the East India Company (while ignoring his daughters); the Duke and Duchess of Argyll (carefully never named, but it's clear who they are) are important side characters, and their worldly success is contrasted with the Douglases' obscurity—but all the Douglases, including Kirsteen, are absolutely sure in their old Highland pride that they're as good a family as the Campbells. Kirsteen ends up running away from home and making her fortune as a mantua-maker in London, which provides an opportunity for some complicated class difficulties, besides obviously being an interesting and unusual thing for a female character in her position to do. And then there's the other really interesting, unusual and admirable thing about this book, which its romance. The insightful, precise emotional descriptions of Hester are here too, and overall it is a really, seriously good book and you should read it.
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie (2019). Picked up from browsing the nature-writing-adjacent selection at the library. This book is a collection of essays, a mixture of shorter descriptive pieces about specific moments from Jamie's experiences significant in a small or large way, and a few longer pieces. I found the shorter stuff difficult to get on with—Jamie is primarily a poet, and I don't have the kind of brain for modern poetry, and I think these were a bit too much like it for me—but I enjoyed the two longer sections on archaeological digs which Jamie has visited. One is in a remote village in Alaska, where the local Yup'ik people are involved in an excavation of their ancestors' five-hundred-year-old settlement; the other is a Neolithic/Bronze Age site in Orkney, along similar lines to the more famous Skara Brae. Lots of fascinating stuff about both of them and their meaning in the world, highly worth learning about and beautifully written about here.
Worrals Goes East by W. E. Johns (1944). The fifth book in the Worrals series and another terribly dramatic adventure. Here Worrals and Frecks have travelled out to Syria to investigate a Nazi propaganda-smuggling operation suspected to be being carried out by women—hence, women are best placed to investigate it. The superior officer who's supposed to be overseeing the investigation perhaps doesn't really grasp this point, because he keeps trying to undermine Worrals and Frecks's efforts on account of they're just girls, what can they possibly know or do or etc., but happily Worrals and Frecks are more than a match for both the enemy and sexism. Given the setting there's a certain amount of period racism, but besides that the adventure plot is exciting and devious as ever. It's also quite a bit more violent than previous Worrals books; Worrals actually shoots a man dead at one point, and the climax of the book is a battle between our heroes and the propaganda gang. There is an excellent Worrals/&Frecks moment where Worrals saves Frecks from eating a poisoned sweet at the last moment and reacts like this to learning that Frecks is all right: Worrals got up, and with a hand that trembled poured herself a drink of water. “I don’t think I ever came nearer to losing my head in all my life,” she said in a strained voice. Definitely a good idea to keep going with this series!
Deephaven and Selected Stories and Sketches by Sarah Orne Jewett (1877-1884). This is a collection including the sort-of-novella Deephaven and a series of shorter pieces of writing. Deephaven, very much like The Country of the Pointed Firs, is narrated by a lady from Boston who goes to spend the summer in an old port town on the coast, gets to know the locals and writes about the place and people in lovely descriptive detail—but it adds the interesting new element that our narrator takes this holiday with her dear friend, another young single Bostonian lady whose family come from the town, and the descriptions of Deephaven itself are occasionally interrupted by passages about this friend's many admirable virtues. I really enjoyed it, and it's historically fascinating in several ways. The stories and sketches are a bit of a mixed group, mostly more descriptive writing about settings and people and similarly beautiful. Of course I wasn't expecting a story called 'Tom's Husband' to be anything other than het; in fact it's about a married couple who swap gender roles with mixed success, and has an interestingly ambivalent ending.
Kirsteen by Margaret Oliphant (1890). Oh, I like Margaret Oliphant. I like her a great deal indeed. Subtitled 'The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago', Kirsteen is about the Douglas family, who live in Argyll in the early nineteenth century, and the daughter Kirsteen's adventures as she escapes from the house ruled by her tyrannical father and makes her own way in the world. It's a fascinating moment in Highland history, when the effects of the Jacobite past are still keenly felt and yet the Highlands are increasingly integrated into the wider British and imperial society. Kirsteen's grandfather was out in the '45 and the resulting loss of the family's old lands obsesses her father, who has regained something of a fortune through slavery and now sends his sons out to postings in the East India Company (while ignoring his daughters); the Duke and Duchess of Argyll (carefully never named, but it's clear who they are) are important side characters, and their worldly success is contrasted with the Douglases' obscurity—but all the Douglases, including Kirsteen, are absolutely sure in their old Highland pride that they're as good a family as the Campbells. Kirsteen ends up running away from home and making her fortune as a mantua-maker in London, which provides an opportunity for some complicated class difficulties, besides obviously being an interesting and unusual thing for a female character in her position to do. And then there's the other really interesting, unusual and admirable thing about this book, which its romance.
Spoilery discussion:
At the beginning of the book Kirsteen has an understanding with a lad from a neighbouring family who, like her brothers, is going off to India to fight in imperial wars. She waits faithfully for him... and then he's killed in battle. And she swears she'll remain single all the rest of her life, and then she does just exactly that. And—this relationship is genuinely important to Kirsteen, and she's devastated by her lover's death and it's treated as a real tragedy for her; and yet Oliphant is pretty clearly strongly suggesting, through her descriptions of Kirsteen's own life and her reactions to the more conventional lives of other female characters, that Kirsteen is ultimately happier and better off in her single life than she would have been had her lover lived and she married him. The book ends with her as a successful and happy old maid in Edinburgh years later. This is farther even than Hester went, and I really, really admire Oliphant for writing it! I wonder what contemporary readers made of it.Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie (2019). Picked up from browsing the nature-writing-adjacent selection at the library. This book is a collection of essays, a mixture of shorter descriptive pieces about specific moments from Jamie's experiences significant in a small or large way, and a few longer pieces. I found the shorter stuff difficult to get on with—Jamie is primarily a poet, and I don't have the kind of brain for modern poetry, and I think these were a bit too much like it for me—but I enjoyed the two longer sections on archaeological digs which Jamie has visited. One is in a remote village in Alaska, where the local Yup'ik people are involved in an excavation of their ancestors' five-hundred-year-old settlement; the other is a Neolithic/Bronze Age site in Orkney, along similar lines to the more famous Skara Brae. Lots of fascinating stuff about both of them and their meaning in the world, highly worth learning about and beautifully written about here.
Worrals Goes East by W. E. Johns (1944). The fifth book in the Worrals series and another terribly dramatic adventure. Here Worrals and Frecks have travelled out to Syria to investigate a Nazi propaganda-smuggling operation suspected to be being carried out by women—hence, women are best placed to investigate it. The superior officer who's supposed to be overseeing the investigation perhaps doesn't really grasp this point, because he keeps trying to undermine Worrals and Frecks's efforts on account of they're just girls, what can they possibly know or do or etc., but happily Worrals and Frecks are more than a match for both the enemy and sexism. Given the setting there's a certain amount of period racism, but besides that the adventure plot is exciting and devious as ever. It's also quite a bit more violent than previous Worrals books; Worrals actually shoots a man dead at one point, and the climax of the book is a battle between our heroes and the propaganda gang. There is an excellent Worrals/&Frecks moment where Worrals saves Frecks from eating a poisoned sweet at the last moment and reacts like this to learning that Frecks is all right: Worrals got up, and with a hand that trembled poured herself a drink of water. “I don’t think I ever came nearer to losing my head in all my life,” she said in a strained voice. Definitely a good idea to keep going with this series!
