Recent reading

[regshoe]

Hello! It's been a bit of a time with me lately, but I am back here again now. Have some books.

Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth von Arnim (1907). After I read Crossriggs and lamented Alex's lack of significant female relationships, edwardianspinsteraunt suggested the main character of this book, Rose-Marie Schmidt, as a possible girlfriend for her, and so of course I had to read it and see the speculative crossover femslash potential for myself. It's a one-sided epistolary novel, made up entirely of Rose-Marie's letters to her English briefly-fiancé and then friend Mr Anstruther, whom she met while he was lodging with her family in Jena on a year abroad in Germany. This is a fun structure—we learn a lot about Mr Anstruther and what he's saying without ever getting to read his words directly, and in the meantime enjoy Rose-Marie's accounts of her life in Jena as a spinster living with her obscure-book-writing father, her neighbours, her emotional ups and downs, her rather colourful and varied thoughts on life in general. On the whole I found the emotional shape of the book and the central relationship kind of uncomfortable—no, I don't think it was a good idea to stay friends and keep writing to him after they broke up—but Rose-Marie's character and narration are enjoyable, and yes, she certainly would make a good match for Alex, they have a lot in common.

Tyler's Row by Miss Read (1972). The next in the Fairacre series. Not one of the best, I think—the occasionally doubtful period-typical attitudes seemed a bit more in evidence here than they've been before—but still a good comfort read, and it's interesting to see Miss Read and Fairacre advancing further through time: somewhere between the 1950s beginning of the series and where we've got to now is the divide between 'recent history, but history' and 'just the old days', a vague line but a definitely different feeling.

Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill (2006). I spent a few hours in the library to escape noise at home and decided to take pot luck from the shelves while I was there. This was in a display, I went, 'ooh, seventeenth-century England, I like that' and it looked reasonably sensible/rigorous (on a subject about which a lot has been written and believed which is neither, hence wanting to be a bit careful), so I picked it up. It proved a really interesting read. It follows the big witchfinding campaign in East Anglia in 1645-6 led by Matthew Hopkins (the notorious 'Witchfinder General'—apparently a self-styled and unofficial title) and his associate John Stearne, placing it in the context of the Civil War and all the sense of social disorder, the world turned upside down etc. that was going on at that time, with some various background on the development of beliefs about witchcraft and witch-hunts. Really fascinating stuff. I was especially interested in how opposition to the witchfinders developed—doubt about whether witches existed at all was not particularly important, it seems, but there was a lot of more specific scepticism and criticism of the witchfinders' methods and the adequacy of their evidence, and the financial burden that witch-hunts placed on local governments and taxpayers was apparently a major source of opposition!

In Memoriam by Alice Winn (2023). Also found at the library; I'd been aware of it for a while but thought it would probably not be that much my sort of thing, but finding it now I decided to give it a try. I was right, it's not that much my sort of thing, but I'm glad I read it anyway. Various thoughts:

• The historical language: Not as annoyingly choppy and ungrammatical as some modern writing, but definitely modern. Some of the period language and dialogue felt quite convincing, some of it definitely not so, and the narration had a kind of jarring tendency to discuss its themes in exactly the same terms you'd use to talk about them in a blog post.
• The way the central relationship developed was not to my tastes—it usually isn't in this kind of thing, not a great fault—but I also didn't really like or get on with either of the main characters, which was more of a problem.
• The tone was kind of uneven—it's a pretty dark book in general, but with moments of humour and lighter adventure which didn't seem to sit well alongside the rest. And related to this, I suspect the book didn't develop or integrate its influences well enough—i.e. when bringing together lots of different influences into a story you need to do more than just cut bits out and stick them together in a new shape, and I think this book didn't, and hence you end up with weirdly-choppy, tonally-dissonant pieces everywhere. I say I suspect, because I'm not actually that familiar with any of the influences Winn describes in her afterword, but I could look at her accounts of them and see, ah, that's why that part of the book feels so different all of a sudden. (I did recognise some of the humour from 'Blackadder Goes Forth', which is a great show and very good at combining comedy with darkness, but it's not at all doing what this book tries to.)
• I liked the epistolary and in-universe document bits of the book. I thought the opening contrast between two issues of the school magazine—one from June 1914 with light-hearted accounts of school events, poetry and silly chatty editorial comments, then one from October which opens starkly with a list of the school's recent dead and wounded—was great (although it would have worked even better without the newspaper announcing the beginning of the war in between—the reader already knows that, or can infer it), and the Rolls of Honour are used to good effect later on too.
• And I liked some of the side characters and relationships. Gaunt/Sandys was messy in an interesting way, and I really liked Devi (and the whole prisoner-of-war camp section of the book in which he appears, jarringly different in tone as it is from the rest) and Maud, and would have liked to see more of them and their perspectives.

Comments

[sovay]

And I liked some of the side characters and relationships. Gaunt/Sandys was messy in an interesting way, and I really liked Devi (and the whole prisoner-of-war camp section of the book in which he appears, jarringly different in tone as it is from the rest) and Maud, and would have liked to see more of them and their perspectives.

May I ask about all of them? I'd heard about this novel earlier this year, but had not sought it out.

[regshoe]

Of course!

Sandys is an older boy at Gaunt and Ellwood's (the main characters) public school. He and Gaunt start a relationship, actually rather questionable and messed-up, but Gaunt presents it to Ellwood and others as outright abuse (of the sort that's largely acceptable in the public school culture) because he's deeply in denial about/terrified of actually having feelings for boys (not acceptable at all). They meet again as officers during the war and develop a significant, understanding sort of friendship.

Gideon Devi is Gaunt's prep school BFF who went to a different public school. They meet again in a POW camp, from where Devi—ever hopeful and inventive—keeps trying to escape, and Gaunt ends up going along on one of the escape attempts. He's likeable and lots of fun but also has interesting depths, especially vis-a-vis how he deals with the racism he faces as an Indian man in upper-class British society.

Maud is Gaunt's sister, whom Ellwood was planning to marry (because then he could stay close to Gaunt forever). She becomes a nurse in London during the war, and we see a lot of the letters between her, Gaunt and Ellwood. She's got an interesting sort of clear-eyedness, and her war experiences lead her to develop radical political opinions which she goes off to act on afterwards. She might have got along with Winifred Holtby.

[sovay]

Of course!

All three of these people sound really interesting to me!

[luzula]

Hello, it's good to see you, and whatever is going on in your life, I wish you all the best. : ) Take care of yourself.

the financial burden that witch-hunts placed on local governments and taxpayers was apparently a major source of opposition!
Ha, I love that detail.

[regshoe]

Hello, and thank you :)

[phantomtomato]

Glad to see your thoughts about In Memoriam! I like how you put this:

“…the narration had a kind of jarring tendency to discuss its themes in exactly the same terms you'd use to talk about them in a blog post.”

The example of this that I most remember is the one I quoted in my review, about which of the main couple tops (and how surprising it is that it’s not the bigger one). It was definitely jarring, and took me right out of the story and into the Fandom Discourse.

I’m glad that you got around to reading it! It feels like a good book to have read, at least in the sense of seeing what modern “literary fiction” (I quibble with that genre for this book, but that is how it was marketed) offers in the way of updated takes on the homoerotic classics of Victorian and Edwardian times. Genuinely, I think it’s an interesting read for examining why e.g. Maurice (one of Winn’s inspirations) works as both social commentary and romance, and the comparison between the novels helps me think about what pitfalls to avoid in trying to draw from those classics.

Hope you’re doing a little better now after a busy period!

[regshoe]

Yes, it's interesting from that point of view! Literary fiction, hmm, I'm not sure either (isn't historical fiction a perfectly good non-'literary' genre??) but never mind.

Ooh, what were your thoughts about the Maurice comparison (if you don't mind elaborating)?

Hope you’re doing a little better now after a busy period!

Thank you! A little better so far, I think :)

[phantomtomato]

Ooh, what were your thoughts about the Maurice comparison (if you don't mind elaborating)?

So, definitely forgive me being over a year out from having read either book! I think I’m being inherently unfair in comparing a first novel to anything by Forster, as he’s one of the all-time greats. Most people measure up poorly. Winn states her inspiration clearly and it’s not a fault that she admired Forster’s writing and brought some of its influence into her own work.

But, shortly: I think that Forster excels at making his books political/about social issues without making them blunt. His characters are simultaneously embodiments of their circumstances (usually class and gender, but notably also race in Passage and sexuality in Maurice) and extremely believable as individual personalities. He’s just so good at character work, and he’s also good at observing his own society, so you can feel how precisely these characters come out of their backgrounds, experiences, and upbringings. And so you can pick up which characters are meant to be understood as queer, or understand a character’s class before it’s explicitly stated, and so forth.

I don’t think that bluntness is a defect, it’s just also not really something that fits the mood of elegant, understated Edwardian prose. This is partly why I (and lots of critics) don’t like Maurice as much as his other novels—but even in that, he lets Clive have an entire crisis of identity and station without ever naming it as one. Winn, in contrast, usually had her characters name the thing they were facing. They said what they meant, unless they were saying exactly the opposite of what they meant (and the narrative made this very clear). Combined with the wishful-thinking happily accepting sensibilities of all the key characters, it felt sort of… clumsy, and as though the narrative were much too strongly being forced to serve modern views. Devi knowing all along that his friend was gay (and that he was cool with it!) is very trite, for example—contrast it with Maurice’s family continuing to blindly assume he’s interested in various women. I think that Winn pulled her punches on the issue of period-typical homophobia, and I think the (understandable) choice really firmly cemented the novel in the realm of escapist fiction, in a way that I’m not interested in.

Reflecting on it after having read all of Forster’s novels, I think that my reaction to the other bigotries in IM is just that there were too many to deal with deftly in the space of one book. Antisemitism and anti-German prejudice and anti-Indian racism and homophobia and class is a shitton. Forster has his Racism Book, his Homophobia Book, and then the rest are Class or Gender Books, mostly. I said back in my review:

The problem [of bigotry] mostly goes away, because they’re surrounded almost exclusively by good friends who see them as full people. I didn’t get a great sense of what these identities meant to any of the characters beyond that they didn’t enjoy being stereotyped or insulted based on their ethnicity, which, like, fair. Yes. But what, if anything, did they like about their heritage?

Class came the closest to being fulfilling to me, because I really liked how the relationship with Hayes developed.

This got a bit long, and I hope it makes some sense as a response. Again, I think I’m particularly unfair to compare Winn and Forster, and I wouldn’t make much out of it if she hadn’t cited him as an influence. Much of my critique, then and now, comes down to having gone into the book wanting something else—notably, I never read modern historical romance novels (like K. J. Charles), because their goals and my interests just aren’t the same! But in my own writing I’m aiming for more of a Forster than a Winn, and the comparison helped me think through the types of unpleasantness and misfortune that I want my own characters to face. It turns out that it’s less in the big dramatic events, like imprisonment and escape, and it’s more to do with how supporting characters exist on the page, both in relation to the world they’re in and in relation to the central themes of the story, as they impact behaviors towards other characters. And, yes, never having a narrative paragraph or piece of dialogue where the author weighs in on fandom-style discourse. 😂

[regshoe]

Thank you! This definitely makes sense, it's very interesting and I agree, especially about how good Forster is at writing characters who reflect their circumstances and are also plausible individual people.

Re. the happily-accepting sensibilities of all the other characters, I rather liked that with Maud because I thought Winn had done the work of convincing me that Maud was the sort of person who might be accepting in the historical context—she's into period progressive politics and thought, she's open to new ideas after having her worldview upended by her own war experiences—but it was unconvincing and unsatisfying for it to be everyone, and indeed one or a few such characters plausibly written would have had more effect if the story also showed most people, even otherwise nice and decent people, not being like that.