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Recent reading
Jun. 21st, 2020 07:22 pmThe Lyon in Mourning, collected by Robert Forbes, volume 1 (1747-8). This is a collection of letters, journals, speeches and other eyewitness accounts from the 1745 Jacobite rising, and is a really fascinating piece of history. Forbes was himself a Jacobite and was imprisoned during the rising, and he seems to have started recording accounts of the '45 for posterity as soon as he got out. The Lyon in Mourning remained secret during his lifetime, and this three-volume edition was published by the Scottish History Society in 1895—the whole thing is long enough that I decided to read it one volume at a time. The first volume is mainly concerned with the battle of Culloden and its aftermath—there are multiple eyewitness accounts of the adventures of Prince Charles in evading the Army, including one from Flora MacDonald herself. Other notable pieces include the last speeches of several Jacobites condemned to execution, some accounts of Charles's voyage to Scotland and the beginning of the rising and various miscellaneous letters, including one written by the Prince after Prestonpans in which he talks about his attitudes towards his own army and his enemies. It's all very interesting, and great to be able to read so much about the Jacobites in their own words—talk about bringing history to life! This book was one of D. K. Broster's sources for The Flight of the Heron (she quotes from it at the beginning of part 3), and I had great fun picking up on the familiar details: I reckon Captain Scott's horse being given to the Prince and Archibald Cameron's movements after Culloden came from here. Altogether very much worth a read, and I'm now planning to give Forbes a cameo in my next FotH fic.
The Girl from the Marsh Croft by Selma Lagerlöf (1908; translated by Velma Swanston Howard, 1910). Another collection of short stories. The title story is a novella about a 'fallen woman', written with a lot of sympathy, and with a really vivid and compelling opening scene—after that it's a much quieter story, but very hopeful. The other stories are Lagerlöf's mixture of mundane and not so mundane life in contemporary Sweden and more exotic settings, all written in a beautiful fairytale prose style—some of them are tales about historical figures like King Gustav III or Pope Leo XIII, which really adds to the folklore-ish feel, and there are loads of the wonderfully vivid, lovely and eerie moments which Lagerlöf is so good at. The fiddler crossing and recrossing the stream in the wood, and the ghostly garden blooming in the forest at Christmas, are especially memorable. The book also includes her account of how she wrote 'Gösta Berling', which is written in much the same fairytale style, about herself in the third person, and is an interesting piece of background on both that novel and the writing process in general. Another really good one, all round! I wanted to read The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, but unfortunately the only public-domain English translation I can find is abridged, which will never do—there are other translations, so I'll have to do some investigating...
Country Stories by Mary Russell Mitford (1837). This is more in the vein of 'Our Village', more or less random sketches and short stories about English rural life in the early nineteenth century. Mitford's arch sense of humour comes through strongly in her distinctive style, and there are some very funny moments, like the mystifyingly replicating 'London visitor' Mr Thompson. Besides this, she absolutely never ends a sentence if she can use a comma instead, and she loves rambling footnotes about history and gardening. (One of the footnotes, about the history of Reading Abbey, rambled so much that it turned into a 15-page appendix—but it was very interesting!) The stories in this collection felt a bit more modern than those in 'Our Village'—I got the sense from them that we're heading into the Victorian period here, rather than only recently out of the Georgian, and the little details of life in the past and the progression of history were all enjoyable.
The Girl from the Marsh Croft by Selma Lagerlöf (1908; translated by Velma Swanston Howard, 1910). Another collection of short stories. The title story is a novella about a 'fallen woman', written with a lot of sympathy, and with a really vivid and compelling opening scene—after that it's a much quieter story, but very hopeful. The other stories are Lagerlöf's mixture of mundane and not so mundane life in contemporary Sweden and more exotic settings, all written in a beautiful fairytale prose style—some of them are tales about historical figures like King Gustav III or Pope Leo XIII, which really adds to the folklore-ish feel, and there are loads of the wonderfully vivid, lovely and eerie moments which Lagerlöf is so good at. The fiddler crossing and recrossing the stream in the wood, and the ghostly garden blooming in the forest at Christmas, are especially memorable. The book also includes her account of how she wrote 'Gösta Berling', which is written in much the same fairytale style, about herself in the third person, and is an interesting piece of background on both that novel and the writing process in general. Another really good one, all round! I wanted to read The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, but unfortunately the only public-domain English translation I can find is abridged, which will never do—there are other translations, so I'll have to do some investigating...
Country Stories by Mary Russell Mitford (1837). This is more in the vein of 'Our Village', more or less random sketches and short stories about English rural life in the early nineteenth century. Mitford's arch sense of humour comes through strongly in her distinctive style, and there are some very funny moments, like the mystifyingly replicating 'London visitor' Mr Thompson. Besides this, she absolutely never ends a sentence if she can use a comma instead, and she loves rambling footnotes about history and gardening. (One of the footnotes, about the history of Reading Abbey, rambled so much that it turned into a 15-page appendix—but it was very interesting!) The stories in this collection felt a bit more modern than those in 'Our Village'—I got the sense from them that we're heading into the Victorian period here, rather than only recently out of the Georgian, and the little details of life in the past and the progression of history were all enjoyable.
