regshoe

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771). Found while trawling the 'classic fiction' shelf at the library for eighteenth-century stuff. This is an epistolary travel story: we follow a family party of Welsh gentry on a tour through England and Scotland via their letters to various friends: the grouchy old squire writes to his friend and doctor at home; his silly husband-hunting sister writes to her housekeeper; their nephew to an Oxford friend; their niece to her school friend; and the aunt's maid to a fellow-servant. Humphry Clinker is a mysterious and extraordinary servant/jack-of-all-trades/budding Methodist preacher whom they pick up along the way, and whose antics lead to various surprising adventures. Much of the humour comes from seeing the same scenes and events described in very different ways by the different characters: so, for instance, the young niece goes into raptures over the beautiful architecture and fashionable people to be seen at Bath, while her uncle complains about shoddy new buildings and intolerable social climbers. Apart from this Smollett's sense of humour and sensibilities in general are very much what you might call broad eighteenth-century, with a lot of toilet humour, mocking the less well-educated characters for misspellings and malapropisms and various ribaldry. Apparently in the eighteenth century you can get away with printing words like 'shit' and 'cunt' if you present them as the characters' mistakes for 'shirt' and 'count', who knew. Anyway, the descriptions of various different places—Bath, London, Yorkshire, Edinburgh, the Highlands, etc.—are all very enjoyable and historically interesting, with the different characters' perspectives giving a nice insight into different contemporary views on these places and their various aspects. (The Highland stuff was of particular interest, as a description from some time after the '45). And it all ends in sturdily eighteenth-century fashion with miraculously reunited relatives and multiple weddings!

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021). Taking a foray into up-to-date relevant political non-fiction! The authors are an archaeologist and an anthropologist, and the book is essentially their attempt to use the latest evidence in their fields to argue against the 'standard' view of how the development of human history works; they contend that society does not develop in a linear fashion from 'simple' hunter-gatherer societies to progressively more complex agricultural and urban civilisations but that forms of social organisation have always been highly variable, complex and to an extent freely chosen; and that increasing scale in society doesn't necessarily lead to the development of political hierarchy and the loss of freedoms for people in general. The emphasis on people being free to choose, experiment with and move between forms of social and political organisation obviously has political implications for the present and future! The arguments are complicated and bring in a lot of relevant material, which I won't attempt to summarise; but I was particularly interested by the accounts of evidence for early cities which apparently had fairly egalitarian social organisation, and for the very slow (rather than sudden, 'revolutionary') development of farming, with some societies apparently trying farming out for a bit and then abandoning it—including the ancient inhabitants of Britain who built Stonehenge! (There's also a bit about carefully-buried Stone Age remains with signs of disability, which I had come across before as evidence that disabled people were cared for and valued by these societies; but Graeber and Wengrow go further, pointing out that disabled bodies are actually disproportionately overrepresented amongst elaborate Stone Age burials, and this perhaps suggests that they had some specially valued place in society, perhaps of political and religious importance and relevant to these shifting social orders; this seemed a bit more speculative, but is a fascinating idea). They also examine where they think these myths came from in the first place, which brings in a lot of very interesting stuff about the influence of Native American ideas on the European Enlightenment. I suppose the problem with non-fiction like this is that, while I can appreciate the arguments and evidence to an extent, I don't have the expertise really to judge how good the case is (it's quite easy to argue convincingly for totally wrong ideas!), and apparently there has been some criticism of the authors' scholarship over various points; but, in any case, the book contains a lot of fascinating stuff and food for thought about the development of politics in general.

Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1891). Wanting something light to read in what's being a stressful week, I decided to treat myself to another EPS book—one which Xavier Mayne recommends as particularly slashy! The plot begins at one of those rural New England boarding-houses that seem to be so prominent in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century American fiction; twelve-year-old Gerald, staying at the hotel while his father goes gallivanting off to Canada, is rescued from a thief by seventeen-year-old Philip, who does odd jobs under the care of the hotel's owner after being left an orphan, and they immediately become BFFs. When Gerald's father summons his son to join him in Canada, it's arranged that Philip will accompany him on the journey—and from here, 'left to themselves' without adult assistance, it's down to Philip to protect Gerald and steer them both safely through the various perilous adventures they get into, including missed trains, attempted kidnappings, shipwreck, fever and storms. The whole thing is great fun, and the relationship between Gerald and Philip is adorable—a very sweet, earnest friendship with, yes, a certain amount of hinting that it might develop into something more when they're a bit older (the book ends with them at college, Philip having delayed entry so as not to be too far ahead of Gerald, and they're planning to go off on a gap year together after graduation—surely many more adventures beckon...). As seems typical of EPS's fiction, the plot is rather silly and relies heavily on contrived coincidence, but the book is so charming and fun otherwise that it doesn't really matter. Oh, and there's a great preface by EPS in which he argues against the dumbing-down of children's fiction, insisting that young readers can handle and often enjoy serious character and philosophical material in books!

Since my exchange fic for it has now been revealed, and speaking of well-written and suitably-serious children's books, I can also say that I re-read A Little Princess a while ago—wonderful again, I enjoyed it very much, and I like both Sara and Becky even better than when I read it the first time. :)

Here it is!.....

Many, many thanks to theseatheseatheopensea and luzula for all your help, support and encouragement. :)

Imre: A Memorandum, privately printed in 1906, is the story of two men—an English gentleman traveller and a Hungarian army officer—who meet in a cafe in a fictionalised Budapest and fall in love. It's a remarkable book! The discussions of Imre and Oswald's backstories and their respective eventual acceptance of their sexuality contain a great deal of detail on contemporary attitudes to and ideas about homosexuality (/similisexualism, Uranianism, etc.); and it's also a very sweet love story, with a decisive happy ending. I recommend it, and I'm especially pleased with having done something to make it more accessible to a wider readership.

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...

I'm working on turning Imre: A Memorandum into an ebook. Unlike my previous two ebooks, Imre was not published in the typical way (because of the subject matter, it couldn't have been); it was privately printed at an English press in Naples. This unusual history seems to have led to a bit of irregularity in the formatting, which I'm having an interesting time dealing with.

To begin with, there are a lot of the typical sorts of straightforward printing errors, which I generally correct as I go, although the actual missing words can be slightly tricky to figure out. More entertaining is the dialogue formatting: some of the dialogue is "like this" and some is «like this», sometimes switching back and forth within a scene. I think this comes from the Italian printing, because «angled quotes» are standard in Italian (Hungarian does dialogue „like this“—which format has, oddly, turned up in the book as well, but only once). Ellipses are another one—they contain anything from two to eight dots, apparently at random, and the spacing is very irregular. The book is in long sections rather than chapters, and these are broken up occasionally by blank lines between the paragraphs—but there also seem to be some random extra blank lines which, as far as I can tell, aren't intended to mark breaks, and it's a bit of headache trying to decide which ones are deliberate and which ones to remove.

I have to decide how to represent this in the ebook, which is an interesting question. Project Gutenberg's guidelines allow for some freedom with this sort of thing, and copying the original exactly usually seems to be allowed even if the original is non-standard. I quite like getting to see these idiosyncrasies, as part of the history of the original book as a physical object and process of publication, and I'm inclined to try to preserve some of the weirdness rather than standardising everything—but I think the switching quote styles may be a bit too confusing.

The actual quality of the printing is also not the best (though that may be partly the scans). Words are occasionally obscured, and it's very difficult to tell the difference between different accents on letters—which appear fairly often in Hungarian, German, a bit of French, etc. words, which I keep having to look up to make sure I'm getting them right. Happily—as I have learnt from trying to figure this out—Hungarian at least only uses acute accents, not grave or circumflex, so I know that fake-Budapest is correctly Szent-Istvánhely.

Anyway, in the midst of all this I'm very much enjoying the book itself. I think paying so much attention to the text is getting me to appreciate it more—the emotions in the first part are so quietly lovely, and I absolutely love how it sounds so exactly like how merely subtexual/slashy books from the same period often sound, using such similar phrases and details... but this time it stops being subtextual.

( A couple of favourite quotes, idiosyncratic formatting included )

I bought myself a bread machine last week, so besides reading I've been spending the weekend making and eating an excellent loaf of bread—absolutely delicious, this was a good decision.

Imre by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1906). This novella is the fairly structurally simple but emotionally fraught story of two men, a British gentleman traveller and a Hungarian army officer, who meet in a cafe in a thinly-fictionalised Budapest and fall in love. As you might imagine, it wasn't easy to publish this kind of thing in 1906, and Imre wasn't published as such—the author had it privately printed and distributed, presumably hence why it's not easy to find now. It is very much of its time, and I mean that in a not necessarily bad way—the book is pervaded by the medical-psychological attitudes to homosexuality of the turn of the twentieth century and uses words like 'Uranian' and 'invert' a lot, but it also strongly argues against the view of 'Uranianism' as a disorder, and for the beauty and happiness to be found in what Prime-Stevenson calls 'the friendship which is love, the love which is friendship'. The central relationship isn't the most substantial and there's not much of a plot, but there are some really lovely bits of description—both of Imre himself and their developing relationship by our adoring narrator, but also of the city of Budapest. Some pivotal scenes take place on this bridge, which is a suitably dramatic setting!

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (2012). I found this book both really good and very frustrating. It's set in some of the more dramatic bits of the Second World War—the main characters are a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary and a Special Operations spy—and the book, narrated in first person by each in turn, is supposedly made up of what they write down during their adventures and trials after a mission to France goes badly wrong. First, what I liked: it's really good to have this kind of historical adventure with a central intensely loyal (and pretty shippable) relationship between women—you don't see that often, and Maddie and 'JB-S' are great together. Not being eighteenth-century gentlemen, they don't have quite the same concept of honour that e.g. Keith Windham has, but that sort of thing is there too—I was somewhat struck by the similarity between the set-up for the big plot twist and the central problem of The Wounded Name, with a character appearing to have done something dishonourable but... Anyway, there are a lot of lovely relationship moments, and I enjoyed it all very much. The history was another highlight—the author has clearly done her research, even including a bibliography in the back of the book covering various details of the setting and plot, and there are lots of interesting (and sometimes fairly harrowing—we are dealing with spies and Resistance agents in occupied France) historical details scattered through the narrative.

And the things I didn't like. This book has a lot of plot twisting, and makes fairly heavy use of unreliable narrators, both things that I felt ended up getting in the way of the story and characters. I don't like the kind of unreliable narration that involves deliberately lying to the reader, and while it wasn't particularly surprising that a narrator writing something for the Nazis who've captured her to read would do so, the twist that follows was a bit of a let down. Some of the first things we learn about one of the characters—things that made me sit up and go, ooh, now that's interesting, I want to explore that and see how it develops—turn out to be complete fabrications, and I can't help feeling like that's cheating. The central relationship is, as I said, really good, but I didn't feel like it got room to breathe between the constrained narration and the Dramatic Twists—there's not enough substance there, and it's frustrating because it's such a good idea—there could have been!

(Also, the whole 'intense same-gender friendship where one character's textual love interest is the other's acceptably-gendered sibling, with lots of emphasis on how very similar the siblings are in appearance and personality' is literally how they did homoerotic subtext in the 1860s, and I cannot take it seriously in something published in the twenty-first century.)

However! This book was nevertheless very good, and if I think it had more potential than pay-off, that's what fanfiction is for. It does seem to be pretty popular, as well—nearly 100 fics on AO3. (That's my idea of 'big fandom' these days, anyway...)

Next I think I'm going to re-read South Riding, and I feel it may be interesting reading something both written and set in the 1930s after a WWII book. We shall see...