Recent reading
Jan. 18th, 2021 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeJill by Elizabeth Amy Dillwyn (1884). This is one of those meandering first-person Victorian novels, narrated in highly engaging style by our heroine Gilbertina 'Jill' Trecastle, a bold and unscrupulous young lady who runs away from home after being mistreated by her stepmother and undergoes various dramatic adventures on her subsequent career as a lady's-maid. I really enjoyed it! The first-person narration is lively and Jill—daring, selfish and outrageous as she is—is great fun as a protagonist. The plot is episodic and not particularly serious, and many of the episodes are very funny—but it does also manage to touch on serious issues like medical abuse and sexual harassment of domestic servants. Most interesting was Jill's relationship with Kitty Mervyn, her distant cousin and later, when Jill is working in disguise as a maid, her mistress. Jill, who usually prides herself on not caring about other people, can't at all fathom why she suddenly feels so strongly about Kitty and everything to do with her... all great fun, and I thought the ending was very much in need of some femslash fix-it fic. This is the first of Dillwyn's novels I've read, but she sounds like a fascinating figure—I will definitely be reading more of her stuff in future.
The Bull Calves by Naomi Mitchison (1947). Well, to start with I'm glad I read this one after all those Jacobite history books last year, because otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on! The book takes place over two days in the summer of 1747, when Naomi Mitchison—Naomi Haldane, I ought to call her—imagines a group of her historical ancestors gathering at the family estate of Gleneagles in the Ochils. Their conversations, relationships and conflicts are the vehicle for what feels like a complete account of the author's thoughts and opinions on Scottish historical development in the context of the years following the '45 Jacobite rising. Actually a lot of the specific biographical detail is fictional (including most of what we hear about the two main characters, Kirstie Haldane and her new second husband William Macintosh of Borlum—apparently they weren't really married and both of them died years before the book is set), but the characters' discussions of their pasts and presents brings in all sorts of historical subjects.
There's the Jacobites, of course—what there is of a present-day plot involves some members of the family deciding to hide a Jacobite fugitive in the attic, and the resulting conflicts when others who have official duties not to permit things like that find out about it, and there's a lot of tension over who was 'out' when and who knows what about whose past political activities. There's Highland and Lowland, with the Highlander William having married into a Lowland family and meeting various amounts of distrust. There's agricultural improvement and the terribly hopeful striving for progress after a history of conflict and poverty, potatoes and turnips (and some more surprising crops too—melons and grapes, really?) and all. There's class conflict—I hadn't realised how widespread serfdom still was in Scotland at this period, and the stuff about mining and miners was both interesting and a bit harrowing. There's religion in its personal and social-political aspects—quite a lot about the Quakers, besides the various aspects of the Kirk and the situation of Episcopalians, which was interesting. There's colonialism and relations between natives and colonists in America. There's Mitchison's idiosyncratic Jungian-psychological take on witchcraft. And so on and so on—all absolutely fascinating, although it is very dense and not always the easiest to follow and I'm sure I missed a lot of the subtleties. But I very much enjoyed it! The book itself is followed by more than a hundred pages of detailed and sometimes rather rambling notes in which Mitchison explains some of her sources, the thought behind the book and the background for specific details, all of which was also very interesting—and I've picked up some more possibilities for historical reading from it!
The Bull Calves by Naomi Mitchison (1947). Well, to start with I'm glad I read this one after all those Jacobite history books last year, because otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on! The book takes place over two days in the summer of 1747, when Naomi Mitchison—Naomi Haldane, I ought to call her—imagines a group of her historical ancestors gathering at the family estate of Gleneagles in the Ochils. Their conversations, relationships and conflicts are the vehicle for what feels like a complete account of the author's thoughts and opinions on Scottish historical development in the context of the years following the '45 Jacobite rising. Actually a lot of the specific biographical detail is fictional (including most of what we hear about the two main characters, Kirstie Haldane and her new second husband William Macintosh of Borlum—apparently they weren't really married and both of them died years before the book is set), but the characters' discussions of their pasts and presents brings in all sorts of historical subjects.
There's the Jacobites, of course—what there is of a present-day plot involves some members of the family deciding to hide a Jacobite fugitive in the attic, and the resulting conflicts when others who have official duties not to permit things like that find out about it, and there's a lot of tension over who was 'out' when and who knows what about whose past political activities. There's Highland and Lowland, with the Highlander William having married into a Lowland family and meeting various amounts of distrust. There's agricultural improvement and the terribly hopeful striving for progress after a history of conflict and poverty, potatoes and turnips (and some more surprising crops too—melons and grapes, really?) and all. There's class conflict—I hadn't realised how widespread serfdom still was in Scotland at this period, and the stuff about mining and miners was both interesting and a bit harrowing. There's religion in its personal and social-political aspects—quite a lot about the Quakers, besides the various aspects of the Kirk and the situation of Episcopalians, which was interesting. There's colonialism and relations between natives and colonists in America. There's Mitchison's idiosyncratic Jungian-psychological take on witchcraft. And so on and so on—all absolutely fascinating, although it is very dense and not always the easiest to follow and I'm sure I missed a lot of the subtleties. But I very much enjoyed it! The book itself is followed by more than a hundred pages of detailed and sometimes rather rambling notes in which Mitchison explains some of her sources, the thought behind the book and the background for specific details, all of which was also very interesting—and I've picked up some more possibilities for historical reading from it!
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Date: Jan. 18th, 2021 08:57 pm (UTC)I remember being quite sad when I read that the main characters actually died as children, because I'd gotten attached to them. But I'm glad Mitchison gave them full lives in the book...
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Date: Jan. 19th, 2021 04:49 pm (UTC)I also thought William's historical father sounded like a pretty interesting person. Didn't you read his book on agricultural improvements? I was thinking of having a look at it, but I can't find it anywhere downloadable and it looks a bit long to read online. (I have found this, however!)
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Date: Jan. 22nd, 2021 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 22nd, 2021 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 19th, 2021 09:54 pm (UTC)I must get around to reading some Naomi Mitchison -- she sounds like a really interesting to figure. I thought of you today because I've been reading Autumn Term (Antonia Forest, 1949), a boarding school book, in which the characters read Flight of the Heron and two declare themselves to be "frightfully in love" with Ewen Cameron!
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Date: Jan. 20th, 2021 05:07 pm (UTC)Naomi Mitchison seems to have written a ridiculously wide variety of books—I've only read two so far, starting with Travel Light, which I absolutely loved, and will certainly be reading more.
Ooh, the Marlows books! I've been vaguely thinking of reading those for a while, but (possibly apart from Autumn Term) they seem to be very difficult to get hold of. I'm delighted to know there's a FotH reference, anyway. Is Autumn Term good so far?
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Date: Jan. 22nd, 2021 12:55 pm (UTC)The Marlow books are hard to get hold of -- my library system has various volumes of the series, and I've found some that way, though our libraries are sadly closed at the moment. Autumn Term is definitely the easiest to buy. The Marlow series is interesting because out of the ten novels, only four are actually school stories, so you see the characters in lots of different context. They're worth tracking down if you can!
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Date: Jan. 22nd, 2021 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 22nd, 2021 11:41 am (UTC)Awww, what a delightful reference!
Seconding the rec for Naomi Mitchison.