Recent reading

I've been pretty busy recently between real life stuff and fic writing. However, I said I'd post about books, so here goes: some things I've been reading recently and my thoughts on them...

• Olive by Dinah Mulock Craik. I heard about this one from the Books and Things youtube channel (highly recommended for anyone who likes Victorian literature!). It was published in 1850 and it is very Victorian. It follows the life of Olive Rothesay, a disabled woman (she has a twisted spine) growing up in the early-to-middle nineteenth century, from her birth, through various trials and troubles, finding her vocation as an artist, and her eventual marriage. There's a lot of good stuff in here about period attitudes to 'deformities' like Olive's, particularly how that interacts with gender and one's place in society—it's implied, in some passages talking about Olive's work as an artist, that her disability, making her less like what a woman is supposed to be, allows her to transcend the limitations (um, as the Victorians saw them!) of women and develop her art further than she would otherwise be able to, which is a very interesting idea. It reminded me a little of George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, which also contains this idea that disabled characters, placed outside society by their differences, are in some ways also freed from restrictions by that other-ness. However, the book was a little disappointing in some ways: there were several times where it seemed to pick up really interesting themes and ideas, with a lot of potential, and then fail to develop them fully, largely because of the need to push things back onto the conventional track of Victorian morality. Another early Victorian book I read this year, Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau, did very much the same thing; apparently this is just a pitfall of being too Victorian (but it's good to be reminded of what some of those late Victorian authors I enjoy so much were reacting against!)
• Seasons of My Life by Hannah Hauxwell and Barry Cockcroft. I imprinted on Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford at an early age, and so I love all books that can be described as social histories of specific times and places, told through the reminiscences of an ordinary person about the now-historical time they grew up in. I found this one at a library book sale earlier this year. I hadn't heard of Hannah Hauxwell before—she was a farmer living and working alone in the northernmost and bleakest part of Yorkshire, who was suddenly catapulted to fame when Yorkshire TV made a documentary about her and it became an unexpected huge success. The book talks about her memories of life in the dale and how things changed over time, as people moved away and life got harder. It's fairly short, but a fascinating little bit of history, and I'm planning to find and watch the original documentary when I can.
• Tiny Luttrell by E. W. Hornung. After re-reading Raffles again, I'm gradually working my way through the rest of Hornung's books, or at least as many of them as I can find, in chronological order. This was the second. Being familiar with a favourite author's style from their later books, it's always interesting to go back to their earlier works and watch that style developing—Hornung's characteristic twist of phrase is very much present here, if not so much as later on! Like A Bride from the Bush, his first novel, this one follows a young Australian woman travelling to England to visit her family—but it takes the idea in a very different direction, and I really enjoyed it how it turned out. It's an interesting story that didn't go the way I expected it to, and Christina 'Tiny' Luttrell herself is a brilliant character—she makes bad decisions and then stubbornly refuses to put things right in such an engaging way. I love characters like that.
• Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym. This one was a comfort re-read. Having read all of Pym's novels once now I think I'll be going back to them when I want something to cheer me up for a while. Like most of her writing, this book is about the everyday lives of women in the mid-twentieth century: in this case, Jane, a vicar's wife, and Prudence, a complicatedly single office worker, and their friendship with each other and various interactions with the people around them. Barbara Pym has such a wonderful way of portraying the muddling inconclusiveness of everyday life with great sympathy and something almost like beauty—if you haven't read any of her books before, I can highly recommend them, and I think this is a good one to start with!

Next up is a seasonal re-read of Hogfather, and then my annual Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell re-read. :D