Recent reading
Jul. 30th, 2023 03:15 pmI've had a rough little while IRL; various stressful things are still going on, or at least looming in the background, and attempts at recovery in the last couple of days have met with mixed success. And I've had to slow down some of the fannish stuff I was working on—some very cool things for the website soon, I hope—which is frustrating. But I've managed some reading thoughts this afternoon, so here goes...
The Doctor's Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1864). Chosen at random from Project Gutenberg's collection of books by the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, both of which I really enjoyed. This one is more domestic drama than sensation novel—the one sensation-type element, which is hinted at early on and then comes back to play a crucial role in the conclusion, fits in badly, and I felt that that ending was a bit of a contrived solution to the otherwise irresolvable difficulties raised more interestingly by the rest of the book. The title refers to Isabel Sleaford, a highly dreamy and imaginative young woman who escapes her dreary lower-middle-class suburban life via novels; George Gilbert, a model old-fashioned country doctor, falls suddenly in love with her, and she accepts his proposal largely out of a belief that this love-affair will at last bring some of the dramatic romance she loves in fiction into her real life. It goes badly, as you might expect; and I was interested by how much of the blame the narrative/Braddon is willing to place on George for seeing Isabel as a sort of ideal woman, and acting on his feelings for that ideal, without acknowledging or trying to understand her as a person. Isabel falls in love with another man, a rich landowner and idle poet who appears far more really dramatic and romantic than George... and ultimately finds out that he's not what she thought him, either. But I think Braddon set up a good scenario and then couldn't come up with a good resolution, hence that contrived sensation ending. The other appearance of sensation novels in the book is through a side character who writes them, and who made for some entertaining satirical commentary on the genre.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67). Now this is a cool eighteenth-century novel! I think if it had been much more recent than 1767 I wouldn't have liked it at all—I don't have the brain for post-modern experimental weirdness, which this book is really remarkably like considering its age—but as it is I was able to appreciate the weirdness, firstly as illustrating a lot of interesting historical stuff (not least the language and phrasing of weird digressions in eighteenth-century idiom! but also domestic life, philosophy, attitudes to sex, contemporary warfare, Continental travel, etc. etc.) and secondly as an author playing with and making havoc of the conventions of an artistic form that was still relatively new and developing into the novel as we'd come to know it. To say that it's full of digressions feels misleading, in that it's not like some eighteenth-century novels where there's a framing story from which the narrative constantly wanders off into side stories; here there is an ostensible framing story (the life of the narrator) which in fact barely goes anywhere, as Shandy instead spends hundreds of pages going off on tangents, describing more or less relevant incidents in the lives of his family members and opining at length on pretty much everything. It's very entertaining. I especially liked Tristram's Uncle Toby, who—having been in the army and fought in many sieges—is obsessed with siege warfare, and meticulously makes little model copies of the various sieges of Marlborough's wars in his garden in real time.
Another Country by Julian Mitchell (play script, 1981). I watched the 1984 film recently, and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edwardianspinsteraunt, who had recced the film, also suggested checking out the script of the play on which the film was based. Both film and play are set at an unnamed public school in the 1930s, and show the events following on the suicide of a pupil who was caught having sex with another boy: vividly illustrating both the ubiquity of homosexuality at public schools and the hypocrisy surrounding it, and various other issues to do with power and (in)justice. The main character, Guy Bennett, is loosely based on the spy Guy Burgess; the play is in some ways less explicit about this than the film, which adds a prologue/epilogue set in the contemporary Soviet Union and showing Bennett's future life as a defector, but then there's more hinting at where his future might go within the play itself. It's very good; I would highly recommend both the play and the film to anyone who likes this sort of 'gay drama at public schools' fiction. I wish I could see the play on stage; apparently the most recent production was in 2016, so I suppose there's still hope of another at some point.
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart by Frank McLynn (1988). The definitive biography of BPC. Apparently some editions of the book have the alternative subtitle A Tragedy in Many Acts, which, yeah, that's about the size of it. Charles Edward Stuart's life was pretty awful in many ways, and so was he in many ways, and yet there is that constant tantalising idea of what might have been... The book is, as you might expect, full of fascinating historical detail. McLynn spends the most time (12 chapters out of 38) on the '45, focussing on Charles's role, his interactions with the other major figures of the Rising and why he made the choices he did; but there's also a lot about his life both before and afterwards: Charles's childhood and early experiences; his position in European aristocratic society (much of the book largely gives the impression that eighteenth-century European aristocratic society was just a really bad idea), and his relationships with various other people in it; his further Jacobite efforts after the '45; and his and Jacobitism's ultimate decline. I think the chapters on the years immediately following the '45 were the ones I found most interesting (partly because of their relevance to my current WIP, set among Jacobites in 1752-3); McLynn picks up on the events described by Andrew Lang in Pickle the Spy and fills in many details that Lang wasn't aware of or was mistaken about, and details Charles's further efforts at a Stuart restoration and how it all ended up failing, as well as his various doings in France and elsewhere in the meantime. I would very much recommend this book, with two caveats: firstly, in those chapters about the early 1750s, there's one big error regarding the Appin murder (as I noted when I started this book), and of course that suggests the possibility of other errors about which I didn't happen to know better; secondly, McLynn makes use of quite a lot of dodgy-sounding Freudian psychology in attempting to explain Charles's character.
The Doctor's Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1864). Chosen at random from Project Gutenberg's collection of books by the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, both of which I really enjoyed. This one is more domestic drama than sensation novel—the one sensation-type element, which is hinted at early on and then comes back to play a crucial role in the conclusion, fits in badly, and I felt that that ending was a bit of a contrived solution to the otherwise irresolvable difficulties raised more interestingly by the rest of the book. The title refers to Isabel Sleaford, a highly dreamy and imaginative young woman who escapes her dreary lower-middle-class suburban life via novels; George Gilbert, a model old-fashioned country doctor, falls suddenly in love with her, and she accepts his proposal largely out of a belief that this love-affair will at last bring some of the dramatic romance she loves in fiction into her real life. It goes badly, as you might expect; and I was interested by how much of the blame the narrative/Braddon is willing to place on George for seeing Isabel as a sort of ideal woman, and acting on his feelings for that ideal, without acknowledging or trying to understand her as a person. Isabel falls in love with another man, a rich landowner and idle poet who appears far more really dramatic and romantic than George... and ultimately finds out that he's not what she thought him, either. But I think Braddon set up a good scenario and then couldn't come up with a good resolution, hence that contrived sensation ending. The other appearance of sensation novels in the book is through a side character who writes them, and who made for some entertaining satirical commentary on the genre.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67). Now this is a cool eighteenth-century novel! I think if it had been much more recent than 1767 I wouldn't have liked it at all—I don't have the brain for post-modern experimental weirdness, which this book is really remarkably like considering its age—but as it is I was able to appreciate the weirdness, firstly as illustrating a lot of interesting historical stuff (not least the language and phrasing of weird digressions in eighteenth-century idiom! but also domestic life, philosophy, attitudes to sex, contemporary warfare, Continental travel, etc. etc.) and secondly as an author playing with and making havoc of the conventions of an artistic form that was still relatively new and developing into the novel as we'd come to know it. To say that it's full of digressions feels misleading, in that it's not like some eighteenth-century novels where there's a framing story from which the narrative constantly wanders off into side stories; here there is an ostensible framing story (the life of the narrator) which in fact barely goes anywhere, as Shandy instead spends hundreds of pages going off on tangents, describing more or less relevant incidents in the lives of his family members and opining at length on pretty much everything. It's very entertaining. I especially liked Tristram's Uncle Toby, who—having been in the army and fought in many sieges—is obsessed with siege warfare, and meticulously makes little model copies of the various sieges of Marlborough's wars in his garden in real time.
Another Country by Julian Mitchell (play script, 1981). I watched the 1984 film recently, and
edwardianspinsteraunt, who had recced the film, also suggested checking out the script of the play on which the film was based. Both film and play are set at an unnamed public school in the 1930s, and show the events following on the suicide of a pupil who was caught having sex with another boy: vividly illustrating both the ubiquity of homosexuality at public schools and the hypocrisy surrounding it, and various other issues to do with power and (in)justice. The main character, Guy Bennett, is loosely based on the spy Guy Burgess; the play is in some ways less explicit about this than the film, which adds a prologue/epilogue set in the contemporary Soviet Union and showing Bennett's future life as a defector, but then there's more hinting at where his future might go within the play itself. It's very good; I would highly recommend both the play and the film to anyone who likes this sort of 'gay drama at public schools' fiction. I wish I could see the play on stage; apparently the most recent production was in 2016, so I suppose there's still hope of another at some point.Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart by Frank McLynn (1988). The definitive biography of BPC. Apparently some editions of the book have the alternative subtitle A Tragedy in Many Acts, which, yeah, that's about the size of it. Charles Edward Stuart's life was pretty awful in many ways, and so was he in many ways, and yet there is that constant tantalising idea of what might have been... The book is, as you might expect, full of fascinating historical detail. McLynn spends the most time (12 chapters out of 38) on the '45, focussing on Charles's role, his interactions with the other major figures of the Rising and why he made the choices he did; but there's also a lot about his life both before and afterwards: Charles's childhood and early experiences; his position in European aristocratic society (much of the book largely gives the impression that eighteenth-century European aristocratic society was just a really bad idea), and his relationships with various other people in it; his further Jacobite efforts after the '45; and his and Jacobitism's ultimate decline. I think the chapters on the years immediately following the '45 were the ones I found most interesting (partly because of their relevance to my current WIP, set among Jacobites in 1752-3); McLynn picks up on the events described by Andrew Lang in Pickle the Spy and fills in many details that Lang wasn't aware of or was mistaken about, and details Charles's further efforts at a Stuart restoration and how it all ended up failing, as well as his various doings in France and elsewhere in the meantime. I would very much recommend this book, with two caveats: firstly, in those chapters about the early 1750s, there's one big error regarding the Appin murder (as I noted when I started this book), and of course that suggests the possibility of other errors about which I didn't happen to know better; secondly, McLynn makes use of quite a lot of dodgy-sounding Freudian psychology in attempting to explain Charles's character.
