regshoe

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

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...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

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 don't remember much discussion of her specifically in Jen Manion's Female Husbands: A Trans History (2021), but the book does talk about women who married female husbands—there's an entire chapter titled "The Wives"—and it's neat stuff.

From:

regshoe

Ooh, that does sound interesting—I'd heard of the general phenomenon of female husbands, and had been reading a couple of articles on Rictor Norton's website about it, so a whole book would be very good. Thanks for the rec!

(By the way, on this topic—is your username from the 'female highwayman' folk song 'Sovay'?)

From:

sovay

Thanks for the rec!

You're welcome! I really enjoyed it.

(By the way, on this topic—is your username from the 'female highwayman' folk song 'Sovay'?)

(It is! And since my journal was founded as a kind of substitute author's website, as an online handle it has the added advantage of being a cousin of my own name. But I like the song on its own merits: I discovered it through Touchwood's version, which turned out to derive from Martin Carthy's, which derives from A.L. Lloyd's.)

Edited (supplemental information) Date: Sep. 4th, 2021 07:49 pm (UTC)

From:

regshoe

Oh, nice! Thank you for the links—it is a good song. :)

From:

luzula

I'd come across mentions of Hannah Snell as well, but not read the book. *downloads from Gutenberg*

What I'd really like is memoirs or letters by any of the women who were involved in the '45, for example Isobel Haldane, Margaret Ogilvy, or Anne Mackintosh. Margaret Ogilvy especially! I mean, she followed her husband in the war, was captured, then escaped from Edinburgh Castle and crossdressed as a man while traveling through England to France. At one point she was suspected of being BPC, and had to prove herself a woman. But sadly I suspect no such memoirs exist. : (

Interesting with the detective work around the Garvin book!

From:

regshoe

Aha, I have just ordered Maggie Craig's book about the women of the '45! Excited to find out more about Margaret Ogilvy and the others—that all sounds fascinating, although it is a shame if none of them did leave any memoirs or letters. There are some letters and accounts in The Lyon in Mourning by women, although most of the authors are men—if I remember correctly, Anne Leith's letters about the situation in Inverness after Culloden, here, are particularly interesting.

At one point she was suspected of being BPC, and had to prove herself a woman.

Meanwhile the Prince himself was dressing up as a woman to evade capture in the Western Isles—a nice bit of irony...

From:

luzula

I checked the references in that book, which is why I think no such memoirs exist--otherwise, they must surely have been listed there. But thanks for the Lyon in Mourning link--I never did finish reading it.

Meanwhile the Prince himself was dressing up as a woman to evade capture in the Western Isles—a nice bit of irony...

Ha ha yes, I didn't think of that!

From:

theseatheseatheopensea

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

I agree, it's such a lovely story! ♥ And he apparently really liked to include himself/his pseuds in his stories... sometimes it's very funny and clever... and sometimes very poignant and heartbreaking! (What did you think about "Once but not twice"?)

From:

regshoe

I liked 'Once but not twice' too, although it was terribly sad—very poignant and heartbreaking, as you say :( And, like 'Aquae Multae', continuing the theme of music as a queer thing which also appears in Imre—that was interesting.

From:

theseatheseatheopensea

Music connected to queerness seems to have been a big theme for him, right? "Once but not twice" is super sad indeed, more so because it's so autobiographical--I hope that writing it gave him some closure and comfort! <3

From:

regshoe

Oh, I didn't know it was autobiographical—did something like that happen to him? That does make it sadder.

From:

theseatheseatheopensea

Yes, EPS and the man he dedicated the story to had a romantic friendship in the 1880s-90s. Some of his early boys' adventure stories are also dedicated to him. Anyway, this man broke off their friendshp to get married, and basically broke EPS's heart. Many of the details in the story are from their life together (they were both super into music, etc). James Gifford's "Imre" intro has more info about it... but to me, this story is basically EPS moving on and forgiving him--he dedicated more stories to him in the 1920s, so it kind of makes sense?

From:

regshoe

Aww, that is very sad. (Killing off the character based on himself, while also sad, seems kind of OTT in a very EPS way). But it's nice that they apparently had a slightly happier ending in real life. Hmm, I have been noticing that each of the stories is dedicated to someone—this is making me wonder about what might have been behind the other dedications...