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Recent reading
Feb. 6th, 2021 05:29 pmIt's been a slow couple of weeks—I've not been able to get out for walks at all recently and it's taking its toll on my mood, and I've not felt up to writing either, although I've been working slowly on one or two other fannish things. Anyway, better today, when I actually sat outside in the cold February sunshine for a little while. And there have been some interesting books to brighten things up a little.
A London Child of the 1870s by Mary Vivian Hughes (1934). Originally published as A London Child of the Seventies, and has remained popular for long enough that later editions had to change the title to clarify the century, which I think is charming. Anyway, this is the author's autobiographical account of her childhood in London in the 1870s, in an Islington household a few steps down the social ladder from the Scrimgeours of Alas, Poor Lady, with which it made a somewhat interesting comparison. Hughes and her family—mother, father and four older brothers—were evidently very happy, and she recounts games, outings, festivals, education, mishaps and so on with a lovely warm sense of humour which is great fun to read, as well as providing a lot of interesting historical detail on things from what riding in a horse-drawn omnibus was like to services at St Paul's Cathedral. Hughes wrote three more memoirs about her later years, which look very good and which have gone on the to-read list to continue with!
A Room in Chelsea Square by Michael Nelson (1958). This is a comic (?) novel about a group of queer men in 1950s London and the various schemes and dramas going on amongst them. It centres around the character Patrick (conspicuously lacking a surname), who is, as the opening line states wonderfully baldly, very, very rich, and his casual manipulation of the people around him, including the ex-boyfriend who's trying to start a fashion magazine and the not-so-ingenuous young journalist from the provinces who tries to manipulate Patrick back and fails hilariously. The introduction to the edition I read describes it as 'a shriek of vengeful and malevolent laughter', which is fairly accurate! Apparently it was closely based on some of the author's own experiences, and it seems outrageous enough to write about someone you really knew the way Patrick is portrayed here. The plot felt kind of pointless and I thought it dragged a bit in places, but it is very funny.
Still Glides the Stream by Flora Thompson (1948). Lark Rise to Candleford has been my favourite thing ever since I was about ten, so I'm not sure how it took me so long to get to this book, but here we go! The summaries and blurbs generally describe it as 'Lark Rise but fiction', which is basically accurate. Charity Finch, a retired schoolteacher, visits the north Oxfordshire village of Restharrow where she grew up, and reminisces about the people, places and events of her childhood, centring on the family of cousins who lived at the farmhouse of Waterside. Where Lark Rise is basically description and social observation with bits and pieces of story, this book is a slow, meandering and episodic story enlivened by a lot of description and social observation. I've long been fascinated by the lives of Flora Thompson's generation in particular—growing up as Victorians, and then living through an incomprehensible amount of historical change as the twentieth century unfolded—and this book conveys a very vivid sense of time passing and the world changing, as well as portraying with all Thompson's incredible descriptive and observational abilities the details of the main nineteenth-century setting. Really, really beautiful. (Also, the edition I read is gorgeously illustrated with a collection of paintings and sketches of English country life, as well as photographs of pressed flowers and insects—very nice!)
Continuing the mid-twentieth century theme, I think it might be time to re-read my favourite Barbara Pym book next.
A London Child of the 1870s by Mary Vivian Hughes (1934). Originally published as A London Child of the Seventies, and has remained popular for long enough that later editions had to change the title to clarify the century, which I think is charming. Anyway, this is the author's autobiographical account of her childhood in London in the 1870s, in an Islington household a few steps down the social ladder from the Scrimgeours of Alas, Poor Lady, with which it made a somewhat interesting comparison. Hughes and her family—mother, father and four older brothers—were evidently very happy, and she recounts games, outings, festivals, education, mishaps and so on with a lovely warm sense of humour which is great fun to read, as well as providing a lot of interesting historical detail on things from what riding in a horse-drawn omnibus was like to services at St Paul's Cathedral. Hughes wrote three more memoirs about her later years, which look very good and which have gone on the to-read list to continue with!
A Room in Chelsea Square by Michael Nelson (1958). This is a comic (?) novel about a group of queer men in 1950s London and the various schemes and dramas going on amongst them. It centres around the character Patrick (conspicuously lacking a surname), who is, as the opening line states wonderfully baldly, very, very rich, and his casual manipulation of the people around him, including the ex-boyfriend who's trying to start a fashion magazine and the not-so-ingenuous young journalist from the provinces who tries to manipulate Patrick back and fails hilariously. The introduction to the edition I read describes it as 'a shriek of vengeful and malevolent laughter', which is fairly accurate! Apparently it was closely based on some of the author's own experiences, and it seems outrageous enough to write about someone you really knew the way Patrick is portrayed here. The plot felt kind of pointless and I thought it dragged a bit in places, but it is very funny.
Still Glides the Stream by Flora Thompson (1948). Lark Rise to Candleford has been my favourite thing ever since I was about ten, so I'm not sure how it took me so long to get to this book, but here we go! The summaries and blurbs generally describe it as 'Lark Rise but fiction', which is basically accurate. Charity Finch, a retired schoolteacher, visits the north Oxfordshire village of Restharrow where she grew up, and reminisces about the people, places and events of her childhood, centring on the family of cousins who lived at the farmhouse of Waterside. Where Lark Rise is basically description and social observation with bits and pieces of story, this book is a slow, meandering and episodic story enlivened by a lot of description and social observation. I've long been fascinated by the lives of Flora Thompson's generation in particular—growing up as Victorians, and then living through an incomprehensible amount of historical change as the twentieth century unfolded—and this book conveys a very vivid sense of time passing and the world changing, as well as portraying with all Thompson's incredible descriptive and observational abilities the details of the main nineteenth-century setting. Really, really beautiful. (Also, the edition I read is gorgeously illustrated with a collection of paintings and sketches of English country life, as well as photographs of pressed flowers and insects—very nice!)
Continuing the mid-twentieth century theme, I think it might be time to re-read my favourite Barbara Pym book next.
