Recent reading
Oct. 8th, 2022 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeAh, it's one of those nice satisfying reading posts with three dates in three different centuries—I do like those.
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (1766). Recommended by D. K. Broster via The Wounded Name! This pleasant, sentimental, morally edifying eighteenth-century tale follows the adventures of Doctor Primrose, the vicar of the title, a good and kind if somewhat silly man, and his wife and their six children. At the beginning of the book the Primroses lose their fortune and have to move their home and adjust to life on more limited means; later on they face even more challenges, from unscrupulous horse-dealers to seduction, from a house fire to imprisonment, and deal with these calamities according to their varying characters. Throughout all Doctor Primrose bears his misfortunes with patience and faith, and eventually, of course, he and his family are rewarded in suitable eighteenth-century fashion. I enjoyed it, though it's not the sort of thing that's easy to take completely seriously as a modern reader: fresh misfortunes pile one upon another in a fashion that becomes slightly ridiculous by the end, and there are plenty of happier contrived coincidences, long-lost relations and so on, to solve things. But it is good fun, and I liked the book's sense of humour. There was one moment of serious moral dissonance, where Olivia turning out to be actually married to the man who seduced her and tried to trick her into bigamy is presented as obviously a good thing and a happy ending for all concerned because it restores her reputation—although it sounds from the ending as though they're not living together, so perhaps that's not too bad an ending for Olivia as things go. And I never did figure out what Wakefield had to do with it; neither Doctor Primose's original neighbourhood nor the main setting sound anything like even a pre-Industrial Revolution Wakefield, and apart from a few context-free uses of the name it's never explained. Perhaps it's a fictional place with the same name?
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896). Virtually all the late nineteenth-century American fiction I've read so far involves this tradition where wealthy residents of Boston, New York etc. spend a long summer holiday lodging in some pleasant rural retreat; it's clearly an important custom! The nameless narrator of this book is one such Bostonian; she is a writer who comes to spend her summer in the village of Dunnet Landing on the coast of Maine. Lodging with Mrs Todd, a local widow well-versed in the lore of herbs and folk remedies, she observes the landscape and the people of her temporary home, gets to know her neighbours and writes—taking over the village's schoolhouse in its summer holidays as her private writing room. The book does not have a plot as such; it consists of the narrator's accounts of various episodes in her life at Dunnet Landing and particularly in her developing friendship with Mrs Todd. She hears tales of the good old days of sea voyages from an old captain who visits her in her schoolhouse; she accompanies Mrs Todd on a visit to her mother and brother, who live by themselves out on an island; she goes to a celebratory gathering of a big local family and hears about its various members; and so on, and so on. The whole thing is beautifully written, and there's a quiet brilliance of observation and detail in Jewett's descriptions of both the human characters and the landscape and character of the setting, and a lovely, deepening sense of what this place is, in every way—its history, its people, the rhythms of its life, its scenery and weather and plants. It's really, really lovely. Very much worth reading, and I'll definitely try and check out more books by Jewett in future.
Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore (1945). This is Moore's autobiographical account of his early life in Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire (thinly fictionalised as 'Elmbury') in the years before the Second World War, and a portrait of a world which—he knew even while writing the book in 1945—had vanished never to return. It's full of interesting social-historical detail—I was especially struck by the descriptions of social-architectural jumble, with fine big Tudor houses next to slums in the town centre, and of the men making a living doing different 'odd jobs' throughout the year, with no fixed employment but apparently doing pretty well for themselves. We hear about the lives of farmers, the effects of the Great Depression on an English country town, the characters of different pubs, local politics and many other things. I did not think so much of Moore's actual writing. His prose is very good, but it has a sort of conscious polish to the style which feels somehow untrustworthy, and the perspective from which he writes is very much that of a relatively privileged man who really only ever considers his own point of view of other people's lives. I don't know if this throws any doubt on the historical aspects! I was hoping this book might make an interesting comparison with John Halifax, Gentleman, which is set in the same area a century or so earlier; in fact the two settings don't have a huge amount in common, although there are recognisable details here and there (Craik apparently didn't actually know Tewkesbury very well, and I think is generally more interested in broader points about Victorian Britain than in local specifics). Moore wrote two further books about Tewkesbury and its surroundings, which I may read at some point.
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (1766). Recommended by D. K. Broster via The Wounded Name! This pleasant, sentimental, morally edifying eighteenth-century tale follows the adventures of Doctor Primrose, the vicar of the title, a good and kind if somewhat silly man, and his wife and their six children. At the beginning of the book the Primroses lose their fortune and have to move their home and adjust to life on more limited means; later on they face even more challenges, from unscrupulous horse-dealers to seduction, from a house fire to imprisonment, and deal with these calamities according to their varying characters. Throughout all Doctor Primrose bears his misfortunes with patience and faith, and eventually, of course, he and his family are rewarded in suitable eighteenth-century fashion. I enjoyed it, though it's not the sort of thing that's easy to take completely seriously as a modern reader: fresh misfortunes pile one upon another in a fashion that becomes slightly ridiculous by the end, and there are plenty of happier contrived coincidences, long-lost relations and so on, to solve things. But it is good fun, and I liked the book's sense of humour. There was one moment of serious moral dissonance, where Olivia turning out to be actually married to the man who seduced her and tried to trick her into bigamy is presented as obviously a good thing and a happy ending for all concerned because it restores her reputation—although it sounds from the ending as though they're not living together, so perhaps that's not too bad an ending for Olivia as things go. And I never did figure out what Wakefield had to do with it; neither Doctor Primose's original neighbourhood nor the main setting sound anything like even a pre-Industrial Revolution Wakefield, and apart from a few context-free uses of the name it's never explained. Perhaps it's a fictional place with the same name?
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896). Virtually all the late nineteenth-century American fiction I've read so far involves this tradition where wealthy residents of Boston, New York etc. spend a long summer holiday lodging in some pleasant rural retreat; it's clearly an important custom! The nameless narrator of this book is one such Bostonian; she is a writer who comes to spend her summer in the village of Dunnet Landing on the coast of Maine. Lodging with Mrs Todd, a local widow well-versed in the lore of herbs and folk remedies, she observes the landscape and the people of her temporary home, gets to know her neighbours and writes—taking over the village's schoolhouse in its summer holidays as her private writing room. The book does not have a plot as such; it consists of the narrator's accounts of various episodes in her life at Dunnet Landing and particularly in her developing friendship with Mrs Todd. She hears tales of the good old days of sea voyages from an old captain who visits her in her schoolhouse; she accompanies Mrs Todd on a visit to her mother and brother, who live by themselves out on an island; she goes to a celebratory gathering of a big local family and hears about its various members; and so on, and so on. The whole thing is beautifully written, and there's a quiet brilliance of observation and detail in Jewett's descriptions of both the human characters and the landscape and character of the setting, and a lovely, deepening sense of what this place is, in every way—its history, its people, the rhythms of its life, its scenery and weather and plants. It's really, really lovely. Very much worth reading, and I'll definitely try and check out more books by Jewett in future.
Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore (1945). This is Moore's autobiographical account of his early life in Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire (thinly fictionalised as 'Elmbury') in the years before the Second World War, and a portrait of a world which—he knew even while writing the book in 1945—had vanished never to return. It's full of interesting social-historical detail—I was especially struck by the descriptions of social-architectural jumble, with fine big Tudor houses next to slums in the town centre, and of the men making a living doing different 'odd jobs' throughout the year, with no fixed employment but apparently doing pretty well for themselves. We hear about the lives of farmers, the effects of the Great Depression on an English country town, the characters of different pubs, local politics and many other things. I did not think so much of Moore's actual writing. His prose is very good, but it has a sort of conscious polish to the style which feels somehow untrustworthy, and the perspective from which he writes is very much that of a relatively privileged man who really only ever considers his own point of view of other people's lives. I don't know if this throws any doubt on the historical aspects! I was hoping this book might make an interesting comparison with John Halifax, Gentleman, which is set in the same area a century or so earlier; in fact the two settings don't have a huge amount in common, although there are recognisable details here and there (Craik apparently didn't actually know Tewkesbury very well, and I think is generally more interested in broader points about Victorian Britain than in local specifics). Moore wrote two further books about Tewkesbury and its surroundings, which I may read at some point.
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Date: Oct. 9th, 2022 01:20 am (UTC)Glad you enjoyed The Country of the Pointed Firs! It's such a quiet interesting book, isn't it? I also enjoyed the chapters about the woman who became an island hermit because she was convinced that she had committed the unforgivable sin (not certain what her sin was, actually) and survived because people would throw things up on the beach to make sure she continued to have things like thread.
I'm sure I read something else that I liked by Jewett, but the only other thing I see on my journal is A Country Doctor, which was pretty dull... I think it was "The White Heron," a short story which also has that beautiful sense of place.
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Date: Oct. 9th, 2022 10:07 am (UTC)I got the recommendation from