regshoe

Various odds and ends. I have been saving Henry IV Part II, which will be my last library book for some time, and am not quite feeling up to The '45 (although I have been idly flipping through the contents page and going 'ooh, that looks really interesting' at everything—it has all sorts of details, even a series of weather records for the year 1745-6, now that's good fic research material!), so here's what I've got to in the meantime...

Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858). I thought I'd go and read some more very early fantasy, and this is proper Victorian Faerie Romance. It doesn't have much of a plot: the main character, a young gentleman named Anodos, stumbles into Fairyland by means that are never really explained and the rest of the book chronicles the various adventures he goes on there, meeting good fairies, evil trees, Arthurian knights, various bewitchingly beautiful women, strange magic, and so on. All of this is described in vivid detail and at some length. There are a lot of ideas in this book, and a lot of appropriately strange images and descriptions of the magic of Fairyland (the image of the evil ash tree's fingers reaching out over Anodos, and the bit where he's followed by his shadow for days on end, stand out), but the meandering structure got kind of annoying after a while—it felt like for all the interesting ideas introduced, none of them ever got the depth it really deserved, and nothing really went anywhere. Perhaps there was some kind of Important Point I was missing, but it felt like a lot was wasted.

Consequences by E. M. Delafield (1917). 'Young lady grows up around the turn of the twentieth century and continues not to get married' is one of my favourite very precise genres of novel. They tend to be a bit on the depressing side—the best example is Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson, which is an incredible picture of slow, creeping, stultifying misery—but this one is something else. It follows the life of Alex Clare, the eldest daughter of a well-to-do English Catholic family living in London, from her childhood in the nursery, through schooldays in a Belgian convent, 'coming out' in society, a failed engagement, religion and various other trials, and it is miserable. It was a bit much, in fact, especially at this point. More than the material and social difficulties of the late-Victorian/Edwardian spinster's life, the big problems in this book are psychological: Alex's continually thwarted desire to be loved and seen for who she is, her growing conviction that there's something indefinably wrong with her and that she cannot have the easily happy normal life that other people fall into, her hopelessly asymmetrical relationships with the people she loves. These problems are never really solved, and parts of it felt like an uncomfortably precise and almost indulgent portrayal of some of the things my brain likes to worry me about on dark nights. A good book, but not really an enjoyable one. (Read 'Diary of a Provincial Lady' instead—the best known work of E. M. Delafield, who clearly had range as a writer!)

Round About a Pound a Week by Maud Pember Reeves (1913). Apparently my idea of comfort reading these days is Edwardian-era sociological studies, but this one is really interesting. This book is the result of an investigation, carried out around 1909-1912 by the Fabian Women's Group, into the lives of the people in their society living and raising their families on 'round about a pound a week', concentrating on the Lambeth area of London. It goes into great depth on how women, the wives of men steadily employed in various labouring occupations, contrived to keep their families housed, clothed and fed on these wages, and what sort of conditions they, their husbands and children had to endure as a result of the poverty they were subjected to. It's valuable both for the historical information—the amount of detail here would be an amazing resource for anyone writing about the period—and for the political context. The book is directed at the middle-class peers of its author and takes apart with devastating detail the view, apparently popular amongst such people, that the poor were poor due to their own laziness or bad management rather than the combination of lack of money and the effects of the resultant bad living conditions. Pember Reeves devotes the last couple of chapters to setting out ideas for how the state should improve this situation, and it's a fascinating bit of political history.