First of all, thank you to everyone who replied to the post suggesting a Flight of the Heron read-along! The read-along will go ahead starting later this month—I'm thinking of putting up the first post, on the Prologue, around 25/26 September.
Secondly, some books.
As You See It by Viola Garvin (1922). This is the source for D. K. Broster's epigraph to The Flight of the Heron (...but the heron's flight is that of a celestial messenger bearing important, if not happy, tidings to an expectant people), and so I decided to read it for some context. It turns out to be a series of short descriptive essays and short stories, some set in France and some in Britain—'The House of Getting Better', the one Broster quotes, is a description of the surroundings of Duff House, an old stately home in Banff which was then a sanatorium. I can see why Broster liked this! The sort of pondering on place and history must have appealed to her, as well as the specific settings. The descriptive writing is lovely in an odd sort of way, although I was often left feeling like I hadn't really got the point.
Incidentally, I found a bit of a mystery around the author's identity. Wikipedia has a page on a Viola Garvin, which listed As You See It as her work; the scanned book on archive.org gives the author's name as '"V" (Mrs J. L. Garvin)', and archive.org itself as 'Garvin, Viola (Taylor), Mrs'. But the Viola Garvin on Wikipedia never married, and J. L. Garvin was her father's name. It turns out that J. L. Garvin also married a woman named Viola, apparently by coincidence—this was 25 years after the younger Viola's birth, so not the more obvious 'daughter named after her mother' explanation—and this Viola appears to be the V who wrote the book. As I was collecting the links to explain this here I found that the Viola Garvin Wikipedia page has, within the last few days, been edited to remove the reference to As You See It, presumably by an editor who spotted the stepmother-stepdaughter mix-up. All very entertaining to puzzle out!
The Female Soldier; Or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750). Women who disguise themselves as men to enlist as soldiers or sailors are a common theme in 18th and 19th century folk songs, but they were also very much a thing in real history, and Hannah Snell was a real-world example. She was deserted by her husband and decided to join the army to go and look for him, ending up on the edges of the 1745 Jacobite Rising in Carlisle; she later deserted and joined the marines instead, sailing to India and fighting at the siege of Pondicherry. She went through various adventures and hardships, at one point being shot in the groin and extracting the bullet herself (!) to avoid her sex being discovered. Eventually she learnt of her husband's death, returned to England and revealed what she'd done to her family and her fellow marines, and was apparently pretty much accepted and moderately successful. This book was written from her account (as explained in the book, Snell herself couldn't write, though she could read) of her adventures, I assume by the publisher, Robert Walker, and makes fascinating reading. It's written in an extremely eighteenth-century tone, with a rambling narrative that keeps skipping around the story, re-explaining things and going over the same events already told in more detail. There's a lot of Drama and a lot of eighteenth-century moralising; the latter mostly consists of praise for Snell's courage and strength for preserving her Virtue against the rapacious soldiers by whom she was surrounded, but what there isn't much of at all is any acknowledgement that a woman dressing in men's clothes or playing a man's role in society might be considered wrong in itself. I suppose the exaggerated praise for her feminine strength and virtue—she's presented as a model of admirable courage for women in general—might have been coming from a place of defence against anticipated moral criticism, but if so it's not explicit. Anyway, it's very interesting stuff. I wanted to hear more about the woman whom Snell apparently courted and proposed marriage to on her return to England—it's mentioned (again without any commentary on whether this might be considered immoral) and then never comes up again.
I've also been working my way slowly through the short stories in Her Enemy, Some Friends and Other Personages by Edward Prime-Stevenson—thanks very much to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theseatheseatheopensea for providing a readable scanned copy! This is a long and rather miscellaneous collection of short stories: comic stories, tragedies, fairytales, random incidents and so on. Some of them work, some of them don't really. It's interesting to see Edward Prime-Stevenson, who was American, actually writing in American settings, which I've not seen him do before. My favourite so far is "Aquae Multae Non—", a story about a seventeenth-century gay Italian composer whose boyfriend steals the credit for his musical masterpiece; it has an incredibly sweet happy resolution. The epigraph to this story is a line from Imre, credited to 'Xavier Mayne', which is the most EPS thing ever; Imre von N... himself also appears as a minor character in another story, which delighted me to see.
And I've also re-read Return to Night, which is excellent and weird as ever. I liked everything about it just as much as the first time, and Renault's writing is very much worth multiple readings to pick up on all the detail, or at least some of it. Much as I still like Julian I think my OTP is now Hilary/Lisa (from the coffee flask on, awww... <3)—hmm, Femslash Exchange is just coming up...
Secondly, some books.
As You See It by Viola Garvin (1922). This is the source for D. K. Broster's epigraph to The Flight of the Heron (...but the heron's flight is that of a celestial messenger bearing important, if not happy, tidings to an expectant people), and so I decided to read it for some context. It turns out to be a series of short descriptive essays and short stories, some set in France and some in Britain—'The House of Getting Better', the one Broster quotes, is a description of the surroundings of Duff House, an old stately home in Banff which was then a sanatorium. I can see why Broster liked this! The sort of pondering on place and history must have appealed to her, as well as the specific settings. The descriptive writing is lovely in an odd sort of way, although I was often left feeling like I hadn't really got the point.
Incidentally, I found a bit of a mystery around the author's identity. Wikipedia has a page on a Viola Garvin, which listed As You See It as her work; the scanned book on archive.org gives the author's name as '"V" (Mrs J. L. Garvin)', and archive.org itself as 'Garvin, Viola (Taylor), Mrs'. But the Viola Garvin on Wikipedia never married, and J. L. Garvin was her father's name. It turns out that J. L. Garvin also married a woman named Viola, apparently by coincidence—this was 25 years after the younger Viola's birth, so not the more obvious 'daughter named after her mother' explanation—and this Viola appears to be the V who wrote the book. As I was collecting the links to explain this here I found that the Viola Garvin Wikipedia page has, within the last few days, been edited to remove the reference to As You See It, presumably by an editor who spotted the stepmother-stepdaughter mix-up. All very entertaining to puzzle out!
The Female Soldier; Or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750). Women who disguise themselves as men to enlist as soldiers or sailors are a common theme in 18th and 19th century folk songs, but they were also very much a thing in real history, and Hannah Snell was a real-world example. She was deserted by her husband and decided to join the army to go and look for him, ending up on the edges of the 1745 Jacobite Rising in Carlisle; she later deserted and joined the marines instead, sailing to India and fighting at the siege of Pondicherry. She went through various adventures and hardships, at one point being shot in the groin and extracting the bullet herself (!) to avoid her sex being discovered. Eventually she learnt of her husband's death, returned to England and revealed what she'd done to her family and her fellow marines, and was apparently pretty much accepted and moderately successful. This book was written from her account (as explained in the book, Snell herself couldn't write, though she could read) of her adventures, I assume by the publisher, Robert Walker, and makes fascinating reading. It's written in an extremely eighteenth-century tone, with a rambling narrative that keeps skipping around the story, re-explaining things and going over the same events already told in more detail. There's a lot of Drama and a lot of eighteenth-century moralising; the latter mostly consists of praise for Snell's courage and strength for preserving her Virtue against the rapacious soldiers by whom she was surrounded, but what there isn't much of at all is any acknowledgement that a woman dressing in men's clothes or playing a man's role in society might be considered wrong in itself. I suppose the exaggerated praise for her feminine strength and virtue—she's presented as a model of admirable courage for women in general—might have been coming from a place of defence against anticipated moral criticism, but if so it's not explicit. Anyway, it's very interesting stuff. I wanted to hear more about the woman whom Snell apparently courted and proposed marriage to on her return to England—it's mentioned (again without any commentary on whether this might be considered immoral) and then never comes up again.
I've also been working my way slowly through the short stories in Her Enemy, Some Friends and Other Personages by Edward Prime-Stevenson—thanks very much to
theseatheseatheopensea for providing a readable scanned copy! This is a long and rather miscellaneous collection of short stories: comic stories, tragedies, fairytales, random incidents and so on. Some of them work, some of them don't really. It's interesting to see Edward Prime-Stevenson, who was American, actually writing in American settings, which I've not seen him do before. My favourite so far is "Aquae Multae Non—", a story about a seventeenth-century gay Italian composer whose boyfriend steals the credit for his musical masterpiece; it has an incredibly sweet happy resolution. The epigraph to this story is a line from Imre, credited to 'Xavier Mayne', which is the most EPS thing ever; Imre von N... himself also appears as a minor character in another story, which delighted me to see.And I've also re-read Return to Night, which is excellent and weird as ever. I liked everything about it just as much as the first time, and Renault's writing is very much worth multiple readings to pick up on all the detail, or at least some of it. Much as I still like Julian I think my OTP is now Hilary/Lisa (from the coffee flask on, awww... <3)—hmm, Femslash Exchange is just coming up...
