![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Recent reading
Jan. 29th, 2021 05:30 pmWork is pretty full-on at the moment (the usual busy season plus some extra bits—all very interesting but hard work) and my brain is more or less fried this evening, but I'm attempting a books post anyway...
The Small Room by May Sarton (1961). This book is set at a women's college in the northeastern US, where main character Lucy Winter goes to work as a lecturer after breaking off her engagement. It's concerned with questions about how the academic and the personal interact, centring around Lucy's discovery that a star student has plagiarised an essay and a conflict amongst the faculty over whether the college should employ a resident psychiatrist. I didn't love it, but it was certainly interesting. I think certain aspects have aged poorly—the anti-psychiatrist characters seem to see their position as deeply emotionally important to their identities as teachers, but from a modern perspective they're just trying to deny healthcare to people who clearly need it out of a weird oblivious obstinacy. On the other hand, there's a lesbian relationship portrayed in a surprisingly modern way—neither character is especially likeable, but they're good characters and their relationship is quite casually dealt with and placed on a level with the het relationships in the book.
Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson (1937). Aaargh, this book is so good and I don't know how to describe how good it is. Right, so: it opens in 1936 at a bazaar for the benefit of a charity supporting 'distressed gentlefolks' (I wonder when those stopped being a thing?); an attendee meets one of the gentlefolks, an unassuming old lady named Grace Scrimgeour, is affected by the sight of her poverty and wonders 'how does this happen'?, and the rest of the book spends 450 pages answering that question. It follows Grace and her family of sisters from her birth in 1870 throughout her life, examining in detail exactly how a woman raised in an upper middle-class Victorian family ends up sinking slowly into inexorable poverty, unable to do anything to escape her fate or improve her prospects, and along the way a great deal else about the lives of women of that class and era. Ferguson has an amazing talent for conveying the atmosphere of a setting and the shape of a character's thoughts through perfectly-chosen details and brilliantly-crafted phrases—the helpless outrage of Grace's eldest sister after her marriage and first pregnancy shatter the sheltered innocence of her Victorian girlhood; the horrifyingly casual cruelty of the father who isn't, in intention, really a bad person but simply a natural product of what his society requires of men; the stultifying restrictedness of the lives of the unmarried sisters, and their gradual despair as they age through their twenties and thirties without the promised fulfilment and come to terms with how little they'll ever be able to have or achieve; many terrible moments of social awkwardness.
All the details of nineteenth-century life and society are brilliant and beautifully used, and Ferguson knows the subjects she's writing about very well indeed. This book is one of the best things I've ever read for conveying a sense of time passing, change and loss, amongst plenty of other things. She is eloquently, intelligently furious about sexism, and shows with brutal clarity how it plays out in the attitudes and actions of both men and women, how in a society-scale injustice like this the victims of the system are also its perpetrators and vice versa, and how it stunts and thwarts nineteenth-century women's lives. This book is so, so good—absorbing in the early sections, increasingly harrowing towards the end, by turns horrifying, embarrassing, tragic and funny, always beautiful and endlessly engaging. If it has a flaw, it's the attitudes towards class—those remarks about people knowing their place sit rather oddly alongside the rest of the book, but I can ignore them against everything it does so well. Anyway, it's really good! Highly recommended.
Letters of John Cockburn of Ormistoun to His Gardener 1727-1744, edited by James Colville and published by the Scottish History Society in 1904. A recommendation from Naomi Mitchison! John Cockburn, owner of the estate of Ormistoun in East Lothian, was a fanatical agricultural reformer; he spent much of his time living near London, and so wrote these letters to his gardener Charles Bell with instructions about the management of the gardens, farmland and plantations of the estate. The letters are full of fascinating historical and horticultural detail—Cockburn is remarkably forward-looking in his views of agriculture and economics, setting out some very modern ideas about economies of scale, creating markets for new products and such things, and the minutiae of managing fruit trees, vegetable seeds, the care of planted saplings, pigeons, etc. etc. are all interesting. I also enjoyed the letters for the sense they convey of the writer's personality—the tone is a mixture of earnest zeal for improvement and good work and obstinate impatience at how much less earnestly zealous everyone other than Cockburn is. (His frustration at how if only Bell would read his letters properly, the things that need doing would get done and he wouldn't have to keep repeating himself, was very amusing, and also very modern—I think a lot of people feel the same way about work emails...).
The Small Room by May Sarton (1961). This book is set at a women's college in the northeastern US, where main character Lucy Winter goes to work as a lecturer after breaking off her engagement. It's concerned with questions about how the academic and the personal interact, centring around Lucy's discovery that a star student has plagiarised an essay and a conflict amongst the faculty over whether the college should employ a resident psychiatrist. I didn't love it, but it was certainly interesting. I think certain aspects have aged poorly—the anti-psychiatrist characters seem to see their position as deeply emotionally important to their identities as teachers, but from a modern perspective they're just trying to deny healthcare to people who clearly need it out of a weird oblivious obstinacy. On the other hand, there's a lesbian relationship portrayed in a surprisingly modern way—neither character is especially likeable, but they're good characters and their relationship is quite casually dealt with and placed on a level with the het relationships in the book.
Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson (1937). Aaargh, this book is so good and I don't know how to describe how good it is. Right, so: it opens in 1936 at a bazaar for the benefit of a charity supporting 'distressed gentlefolks' (I wonder when those stopped being a thing?); an attendee meets one of the gentlefolks, an unassuming old lady named Grace Scrimgeour, is affected by the sight of her poverty and wonders 'how does this happen'?, and the rest of the book spends 450 pages answering that question. It follows Grace and her family of sisters from her birth in 1870 throughout her life, examining in detail exactly how a woman raised in an upper middle-class Victorian family ends up sinking slowly into inexorable poverty, unable to do anything to escape her fate or improve her prospects, and along the way a great deal else about the lives of women of that class and era. Ferguson has an amazing talent for conveying the atmosphere of a setting and the shape of a character's thoughts through perfectly-chosen details and brilliantly-crafted phrases—the helpless outrage of Grace's eldest sister after her marriage and first pregnancy shatter the sheltered innocence of her Victorian girlhood; the horrifyingly casual cruelty of the father who isn't, in intention, really a bad person but simply a natural product of what his society requires of men; the stultifying restrictedness of the lives of the unmarried sisters, and their gradual despair as they age through their twenties and thirties without the promised fulfilment and come to terms with how little they'll ever be able to have or achieve; many terrible moments of social awkwardness.
All the details of nineteenth-century life and society are brilliant and beautifully used, and Ferguson knows the subjects she's writing about very well indeed. This book is one of the best things I've ever read for conveying a sense of time passing, change and loss, amongst plenty of other things. She is eloquently, intelligently furious about sexism, and shows with brutal clarity how it plays out in the attitudes and actions of both men and women, how in a society-scale injustice like this the victims of the system are also its perpetrators and vice versa, and how it stunts and thwarts nineteenth-century women's lives. This book is so, so good—absorbing in the early sections, increasingly harrowing towards the end, by turns horrifying, embarrassing, tragic and funny, always beautiful and endlessly engaging. If it has a flaw, it's the attitudes towards class—those remarks about people knowing their place sit rather oddly alongside the rest of the book, but I can ignore them against everything it does so well. Anyway, it's really good! Highly recommended.
Letters of John Cockburn of Ormistoun to His Gardener 1727-1744, edited by James Colville and published by the Scottish History Society in 1904. A recommendation from Naomi Mitchison! John Cockburn, owner of the estate of Ormistoun in East Lothian, was a fanatical agricultural reformer; he spent much of his time living near London, and so wrote these letters to his gardener Charles Bell with instructions about the management of the gardens, farmland and plantations of the estate. The letters are full of fascinating historical and horticultural detail—Cockburn is remarkably forward-looking in his views of agriculture and economics, setting out some very modern ideas about economies of scale, creating markets for new products and such things, and the minutiae of managing fruit trees, vegetable seeds, the care of planted saplings, pigeons, etc. etc. are all interesting. I also enjoyed the letters for the sense they convey of the writer's personality—the tone is a mixture of earnest zeal for improvement and good work and obstinate impatience at how much less earnestly zealous everyone other than Cockburn is. (His frustration at how if only Bell would read his letters properly, the things that need doing would get done and he wouldn't have to keep repeating himself, was very amusing, and also very modern—I think a lot of people feel the same way about work emails...).
