regshoe

The Pillars of the House by Charlotte M. Yonge (1873). I enjoyed The Heir of Redclyffe and I'd seen this one recommended too, so I now decided to launch into it without appreciating at first just how long it is. Well, it's about five-sixths of a Les Misérables long and took me a good couple of weeks plus a break between volumes, but a) it fully justifies the length and b) it is very good. The book takes place over nearly twenty years and follows the lives of the thirteen siblings of the Underwood family, some of whom are more main characters than others but all of whom get at least some focus, and there's a large and colourful cast of side characters, friends, neighbours, extended family, love interests, clergy (lots of clergy)—hence the size. Near the beginning the Underwoods' saintly clergyman father dies; their mother becomes an invalid and shortly afterwards also dies; and the children are left to make their own way in the world. The 'pillars' are the eldest siblings: Felix (sixteen at the start of the book), who gives up his academic and professional opportunities to support the family by working for a provincial newspaper, and fifteen-year-old Wilmet, who teaches at the local girls' school as well as keeping house. (Yes, Wilmet is an amusing contrast to her namesake in A Glass of Blessings.) Yonge was a major literary force in the Oxford Movement, and this is much more specifically evident here than in The Heir of Redclyffe. The Underwoods are committed Anglo-Catholics and there's a lot of discussion of why that's the best and most sensible thing to be, and while Yonge is sometimes surprisingly well able to be clear-sighted about taking things too far in the way of rigidity and snobbery (especially through Clement, the brother who goes to be educated at a very High church in London and eventually becomes a priest himself), she is also utterly awful about Dissenters, Low Church Anglicans, Latitudinarians, anyone who disagrees with her objectively correct and highly important opinions about church aesthetics, etc. etc. Two of the siblings are disabled—Geraldine, one of the older girls, has a bad ankle very much like Charles in The Heir of Redclyffe, and Theodore, the youngest boy, is intellectually disabled—and there's a lot of interesting period attitudes to disability, some good and some bad. I've barely touched the surface of this book, which is really very long and has an awful lot going on in it. It's always an enjoyable read—Yonge's writing has a lovely liveliness, and she is especially good at developing the varied relationships between the siblings—and for the rest, she writes about people, relationships, society and life in general with a mixture of kindness and bigotry, contempt and compassion, which is kind of bewildering if also somewhat sadly familiar.

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (1941). Well, after weeks of that I wanted something a bit different, and I chose this on the basis that Carson McCullers was probably about as far from lengthy, sentimental Victorian piety as I could get while still being firmly within the sphere of things I like. It worked! This book is about a group of people on an army base in the US South—two officers and their wives (where one officer and the other wife are having an affair), a private soldier who becomes obsessed with one of the wives, and the other wife's servant—and the events leading up to the murder of one of these people by another (McCullers tells you this near the start; it's not a book of great surprises). It's weird and miserable in exactly the way I like from McCullers's writing, and I liked it very much. It's also quite openly and matter-of-factly queer, albeit in the way where queerness doesn't get any more happiness or fulfilment than anything else in a Carson McCullers book.

By Honour Bound by Bessie Marchant (1925). I had high hopes of this school story, which is about Honour and terrible dilemmas thereof. The book opens with the main character, Dorothy, going clothes shopping on the way to her new school; she sees another girl shoplift a jumper and is so frozen with horror she says nothing, and then of course it turns out that the shoplifter goes to Dorothy's school and is her main opponent in competing for the terribly important scholarship to Cambridge that Dorothy has set her heart on. Should she say anything?? But then Dorothy finds out something about her own family's past that means—by its strictly honourable rules—that SHE might not be eligible for the scholarship! Should she say anything??? So, great premise; but unfortunately a) Dorothy wavers and worries, but never has the Windhamesque strength of principle or depth of agony that would make her dilemmas really compelling, b) the writing and characterisation are so flimsy and dull that it all has very little effect. Eventually the plot is resolved by, to put it politely, a massive cop-out of a twist which I'm afraid I was uncharitable enough to guess in advance. The girls' school of the setting forms half of a pair with an associated boys' school, which Dorothy's brother attends; while I'm sure this is an interesting window into the history of education and gender, it did mean more male characters and implied potential het than I like in my girls' school stories.

Re-read The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula le Guin (1972). So, in search of some beautiful prose and solid thought, I decided to continue the Earthsea re-read, and I really enjoyed revisiting this one! I liked how it was a sort of outsider-POV with respect to A Wizard of Earthsea, I really liked the setting and worldbuilding in the early chapters* and I thought the main story sustained the essential kindness of Le Guin's writing much better, really, than the first book. Especially in being less sexist, which is kind of surprising for a book whose basic plot could so easily have been conveyed in a very sexist way indeed, but it's not, really. (I was only slightly distracted by wondering whether you could grow all those apples in a desert climate, and by the way the lovely intricate drawing of the Labyrinth at the front of the book didn't quite match the descriptions in the text.)

*Now there's an idea: school story with totally ordinary low-stakes school-story plot and drama, but set among the novices in an extremely messed-up fantasy priestess-hood serving the great powers of evil. Hmmm.

Other books read on holiday and since...

The Happy Return/Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester (1937; different titles when published in different countries). My first attempt at getting into Age of Sail fandoms! I can't say I enjoyed this one hugely, but I have only myself to blame for that, because I had heard from Hornblower fans that reading the books in publication order is a bad idea and then decided to start with the first-published anyway. (I read the Discworld books in publication order when I was twelve and it didn't do me any harm...!) However—this is a very detailed story of sailing, imperial politics and highly questionable personal decisions set in/off the coast of Central America during the Napoleonic wars; Our Hero, Captain Horatio Hornblower, has to navigate commanding his crew, following difficult orders from the Admiralty, negotiating with some very strange local rulers, more than one suitably dramatic sea battle and an encounter with the strong-willed and somewhat improper Lady Barbara Wellesley (a fictional sister of the future Duke of Wellington). Hornblower would very much like to be a human person with feelings, idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, but he is absolutely convinced that this would be the most unpardonably un-captainlike thing he could possibly do, and so he tries his utmost to conceal his entire character beneath a facade of hard, featureless naval perfection. All his crew love him for it; my reaction to the extremes of this was a sort of cringing horror mixed with annoyance. I think the worst/best bit for me was where Hornblower thinks about how he hasn't discussed his orders with his officers, even though he isn't required to keep them a total secret, because he loves talking and gossiping about everything and is terrified of saying too much and spoiling his reputation. I feel sorry for him, but he does make it difficult! There were also some hints of where people get their slash shipping for this fandom from (I gather that the popular pairing is Hornblower and Bush, the first lieutenant with whom he can't possibly discuss his orders), which was entertaining, but not more than a few hints as yet.

sanguinity tells me that the mood of the books and the portrayal of Hornblower as a character shifted considerably over the course of Forester's writing career, and that the later books are much better. I'm planning to try Lieutenant Hornblower, her recommendation from the later books, next, and then if I like it I may go back and read the rest. I'm also going to try the Aubrey-Maturin books, which I gather are better-written and have some natural history in them.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911). A classic which I somehow managed to miss out on reading as a child—I think I saw a film adaptation of it at some point, but I can't remember the details. Anyway, I think this book is basically the idea of 'oh, go and get some nice fresh air, you'll feel better!' incarnated as a novel, an impressive achievement. Ten-year-old Mary Lennox, having grown up in the stultifying climate of India, loses her parents to cholera in one of the more horrifying opening sequences to a children's book I've read in a while and then finds herself sent to Yorkshire to live with her uncle in a big house next to The Moors. She is moody and unpleasant, but gradually transforms under the influence of Good Yorkshire Fresh Air and, most importantly, the garden of the title. This belonged to her uncle's wife, and he heartbrokenly abandoned it after her death years before; Mary is shown the door to the garden, all overgrown with ivy, and the key, buried in the earth, by a helpful local robin who befriends her, and sets to work restoring the garden alongside Dickon, the young brother of Mary's maidservant and a sort of local slightly-magical-nature-spirit friend to all animals (it's just occurred to me to compare him to Thomas Godbless, which seems like an interesting idea). Her cousin Colin, who has spent his life being hidden away in the house and convinced that he's hopelessly ill and surely won't live to adulthood, also joins in and is restored to perfect health. I thought all the Wholesome Fresh Air stuff was, er, just a little bit OTT—apparently it originated from Hodgson Burnett's Christian Science beliefs, which perhaps explains the sense of religious fervour in it. But I did enjoy the book overall, and especially all the nature descriptions, magical friendly animals and slightly absurd adulation of the general concept of Yorkshire. The attitudes to health in this context were certainly wobbly, however—I thought Hodgson Burnett convincingly argued that Colin's illness in particular was the result of persuasion and expectations rather than an actual physical disability and could plausibly be 'cured' by fresh air etc., but I was left with a certain suspicion that she wouldn't be especially ready to accept the idea that many disabilities are not that. Also, I remember

ethelmay commenting on one of my posts about Juliana Horatia Ewing that a lot of the stuff in this book was ripped off from Six to Sixteen, which, yes, it totally was!

(Looking it up now, FHB not only never lived in Yorkshire, she was actually born in Lancashire. Who'd have thought! o_O )

Emily Davis by Miss Read (1971). Read towards the end of my holiday, when I was getting tired and wanted some comfort reading—the next Fairacre book is always a reliable choice for that. This one begins with the death of Emily Davis, one of the older generation of teacher characters, and shows various friends, former pupils and other members of the community reacting to the news and reminiscing about Emily and her influence on their own lives—helping them, guiding them in their choices, reacting to and wisely overlooking various transgressions and generally being a good influence. It's solidly good in the way of Miss Read books—gentle, perceptive and sympathetic. I especially liked the significance which Emily Davis's life as a single woman gets to have—her fiance left her due to his WWI trauma and she never married, living happily in retirement with her lifelong best friend Dolly Clare, and the portrayal of this situation is lovely; regretting what didn't happen, but living a full and happy life nonetheless. I also sympathised especially with one of Emily's former pupils, who's now living in London for work and, thinking about her old teacher, realises how awful the city is (crowded, noisy, unbearable in a heatwave, etc.) and decides to go back home to the country.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940). I had been meaning to read this one for ages—the library's copy was bizarrely determined to evade me, but it does prove to exist after all—and I'm glad I got round to it now. It's a more or less plotless novel following the lives of various characters in a mill town somewhere in the US South just before the Second World War; the central figure is John Singer, a deaf and mute man who becomes the unlikely friend and confidant of several very different characters variously hurt and unsatisfied by their lives. Basically it's a story about the human longing for connection and meaningful purpose, as the other main characters seek in Singer someone who will understand their troubles: a thirteen-year-old girl from a poor and overcrowded family who cherishes a passion for classical music and dreams of becoming a composer; a doctor striving to improve the lot of his fellow black Americans, who ultimately fails to make the changes he wants even in his own family; a young man who comes to the town as a sort of vagrant and finds work at a carnival while determined to spread the word of his Marxist ideals to the workers of America; the owner of a cafe (incidentally, defined in the same oddly broad way as in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) which the other characters frequent, who deals with various personal troubles and lonelinesses surrounding the death of his wife. But Singer is not really the friend the others all seek in him—his muteness and the resulting lack of actual communication between them impede real understanding while allowing them to project whatever they need onto him. And Singer too has an ideal friend, another deaf-mute man who is carted off to an asylum at the start of the book; his loss is a source of great pain to Singer throughout, and none of the other characters ever understands or even, I think, actually knows about it, but Singer's relationship with his friend ultimately seems as self-created and unreal as the others' friendships with him. The whole thing is an oddly dislocated book. It's very, very good! McCullers portrays highly varied and complicated situations, emotions and reactions in brilliantly precise detail, and sums up her characters' predicaments with understanding and sympathy; but it is somewhat grim and very pessimistic about the potential for real connection between people, and I think this gloominess was a bit too much for me in the end.

The Diaries of Anne Lister, volume 1, edited by Helena Whitbread (written 1816-24, published 1988). I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and decided now was the time to get round to it. It is absolutely fascinating! Anne Lister writes about all sorts of things in her journal, and it's full of terribly interesting and useful historical detail on e.g. the practicalities of travel, details of food, the unstable political situation of the period, the social life of early-nineteenth-century Halifax and York, etc. etc. A lot of the detail she includes is not the sort of thing that often made it into fiction at this time, so that even the non-coded sections of the journal feel very immediate and down-to-earth in a way period writing written for publication doesn't tend to. And then there are the coded sections, of course! Really, really fascinating stuff—both the personal details of the relationships described and the generalities of how Lister managed to live in the world as a lesbian in a way that made sense to her and which she made legible to the women she was interested in, and also her thoughts on the subject as a whole. I was surprised in a few places by how 'modern' some of her ideas and reasoning seemed, and yet they are very much of their time, and the journal really is an invaluable source on how people in the past thought and talked about these things even when they didn't normally write about them. Sometimes Lister is annoyingly vague about exactly what happened or what was said, at other times she's startlingly detailed. Occasionally the editing annoyed me—it's not really clear just how much selecting and cutting Whitbread has done, but it's obviously quite a lot, and at times she steps in to summarise things that I'd quite like to have read in detail in the original—but mostly I'm just impressed by her achievement. On the other hand, reading this has confirmed me in my opinion that Anne Lister was really not a very admirable person, either generally or in how she conducted her relationships—the volume opens with her seducing her girlfriend's sister while they're both accompanying the girlfriend on her honeymoon, which is more or less representative; she's frequently dishonest and duplicitous, a pretty massive snob and, despite her own socially unconventional life, extremely conservative politically (I think her particular outlook/set of ideas is a very interesting one, but it's not a good one). Nevertheless I enjoyed reading about her life, her thoughts on it and her emotional experiences, aside from the historical aspects of the journal. I look forward to the second volume!

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers (1951). Another one I'd had on the to-read list for ages, and finally managed to find at the library recently. The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange little novella about an eccentric, reclusive woman who opens a 'café' (it seemed more like a pub to me, with the evening opening hours and the alcohol—are American bars not normally like that?—but never mind) in her tiny Southern US town with the help of the hunchbacked cousin who turns up mysteriously one day, and how ruin and tragedy eventually overtake them. The whole story is written in a fairytale-ish style, and told with very much a fairytale logic, and I loved it—McCullers makes that fairytale logic make perfect sense in a fairly modern American setting, and does so with a constant compelling strangeness which is really rather beautiful despite the equally strange tragedy of the story itself. And Miss Amelia herself is a highly memorable character who I liked a lot. Collected together with it are various shorter stories, which I didn't like so much—they're very good, but tend to focus on unpleasant and depressing aspects of life in a style that reminded me of some of the other mid-twentieth-century American stuff I've read and generally react to by just thinking I'm not interested in reading stories like that, and they're not at all in the same style or mood as the title story.

Far Away and Long Ago: A History of my Early Life by W. H. Hudson (1918). Something a bit different! I'd previously enjoyed some of Hudson's nature writing about the wildlife and countryside of England, where he lived in later life; this is his account of his childhood on the pampas of Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century, and the various human and animal sights and dramas surrounding him. He spends a lot of time describing the wildlife of the pampas, especially the birds, and I enjoyed these sections the best—Hudson has such a talent for vivid, imaginative description of the natural world and for finding the significance and beauty in descriptions of wildlife. But the historical stuff was also interesting—he describes the general state of life and society in nineteenth-century Argentina, both the remote countryside of his home and Buenos Aires as experienced on visits, and how some major historical events like the ongoing civil wars and the overthrow of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852 appeared to him as they happened. I knew nothing about any of this, and it was interesting to read about a new historical setting, brutal as some of the details were. I could have done without the racism, and the book is rather amusingly poorly paced (at one point Hudson says, whoops, I should have included this in an earlier chapter but I forgot, it'll have to go here instead; apparently editing just wasn't an option for him?), but on the whole a very enjoyable read.