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Recent reading
Sep. 8th, 2023 03:31 pmThe New Road by Neil Munro (1914). A tangential Jacobite novel, set in the 1730s around the building of General Wade's roads. The main character, Æneas MacMaster, is a young man from Inveraray who's sent on a business mission in the north for his merchant uncle, accompanying Ninian Campbell (a name changed from MacGregor), an agent of the Duke of Argyll carrying out political dealings in the Highlands. The book is largely about the question of historical progress, the 'civilising' of the Highlands and the new ways vs. the old, and its perspective is decidedly ambivalent, combining romanticisation of the old Highlands with a firm belief that Barbarism is Bad and Civilisation is Good. (It's also made me realise one curious thing about FotH; though Broster does romanticise the Highlands in some ways, there's one thing that most romantic-Highlands authors do that she never does, and that's talk about Ossian; the debates about the poems' authenticity seem to have been long-running and complicated, so I'm not sure how far this is because they had been conclusively determined to be fakes by her time but not by the time of earlier authors. Stevenson never mentions them either, of course.) All this is worked out through a complicated plot of mystery, adventure and political intrigue, in which the characters solve a decades-old murder mystery and an ongoing political tangle and meet various historical figures including Simon Fraser of Lovat and Duncan Forbes of Culloden. I was prejudiced against the book by the pretty clear fact that it owes something to Kidnapped, but a) both main characters are not only Whigs but Campbell-affiliated Whigs and b) any slashiness there might have been in the central relationship—and there might have been some—is safely defused via a love interest who makes them future father- and son-in-law. One of the early reviews of FotH compares Broster's skill to Munro's; there is certainly a lot of landscape description in this book, some of it very nice, but on the whole I think it feels more artificial than Broster's. Hmm. I will probably read more of Munro's books at some point—Doom Castle is a difficult title to resist—but I might leave it a while.
The Scouring of the White Horse by Thomas Hughes (1859). More from the author of Tom Brown's School Days; this book is based on Hughes's visit to the Uffington White Horse (pictured in my icon) during the semi-regular festival in which the chalk figure is cleared up or 'scoured' with the accompaniment of a big party, fictionalised as the account of a London clerk who goes to Berkshire on holiday. Hughes makes a lot of what was then apparently the most popular theory about the Horse's origin—that it was made on the orders of King Alfred to commemorate the Battle of Ashdown. It's now known that the figure is much older than that (the meaning of its origin is mysterious, but it dates to the Bronze Age), and all the banging on about Saxons is both a) frustrating in light of now knowing how irrelevant it is and b) definitely an avenue for the less savoury of the conservative-progressive Hughes's political views to get an airing. There's also a rather hilarious passage in which the characters vigorously defend the violent games played at the fair (a subject that also comes up in Tom Brown; the right of honest red-blooded Englishmen to give themselves severe head injuries was a subject about which Hughes felt passionately), and then, upon hearing that women used to run races at the fair, opine on how it's a jolly good thing all that's been stopped in these enlightened times. I say hilarious, but, despite the really interesting historical detail in this book, it's difficult to take Hughes very seriously.
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (1902). About a young woman who lives in a thinly-fictionalised Stoke-on-Trent under the rule of her miserly and subtly-tyrannical father. On turning twenty-one Anna Tellwright inherits a fortune, but the power this might give her to decide her own fate is denied her, not so much by outright rules as by her father's more pervasive oppressive influence and by the equally oppressive background of expectations for women that have between them shaped her character and constrained her options. She falls in love and gets engaged, but it becomes increasingly clear over the course of the book that this relationship is neither a very good thing for Anna in its own right nor any kind of meaningful escape; Bennett is refreshingly, if depressingly, clear-sighted. It's a beautiful and very, very sad portrayal of the complexities of how all these things work. I loved Anna herself (she's apparently been compared to Fanny Price, a long-time fave of mine, and I can see why), and I loved Bennett's writing style, which is both very detailed (about things like how much different types of houses cost to rent, what the characters eat for their meals, how the potteries work, etc.) and beautifully eloquent. A really good book, but not a happy one. (Incidentally, the conurbation of Stoke-on-Trent was actually formed from six towns; apparently Bennett decided 'the Five Towns' was more euphonious, so he got rid of one of them. That's much funnier than anything in the book.)
The Spirit of the Quakers, edited by Geoffrey Durham (2010). A varied and thought-provoking introduction; it's made up mostly of short excerpts from a wide range of writings from across the history of the Quakers, and while in some ways I was more interested in the seventeenth-century stuff than the modern writings, it was all meaningful in its way. And of course that structure means it's given me a lot of ideas for other things to look up and read!
Quaker-Shaped Christianity by Mark Russ (2022). Largely about the author's working out of his particular Quaker Christian theology. Frustrating in some ways (I liked the bit about not wanting to get lost in rational arguments in religion, but I feel you can't really do that and then base your faith on empirical beliefs that IMO require rational justification) and Russ is more of a Christian than I am, but it's an interesting and good perspective to have, and some of the theological ideas were especially interesting (though the book is very short, this stuff is complicated and it's doubtless all developed much more elsewhere).
The Scouring of the White Horse by Thomas Hughes (1859). More from the author of Tom Brown's School Days; this book is based on Hughes's visit to the Uffington White Horse (pictured in my icon) during the semi-regular festival in which the chalk figure is cleared up or 'scoured' with the accompaniment of a big party, fictionalised as the account of a London clerk who goes to Berkshire on holiday. Hughes makes a lot of what was then apparently the most popular theory about the Horse's origin—that it was made on the orders of King Alfred to commemorate the Battle of Ashdown. It's now known that the figure is much older than that (the meaning of its origin is mysterious, but it dates to the Bronze Age), and all the banging on about Saxons is both a) frustrating in light of now knowing how irrelevant it is and b) definitely an avenue for the less savoury of the conservative-progressive Hughes's political views to get an airing. There's also a rather hilarious passage in which the characters vigorously defend the violent games played at the fair (a subject that also comes up in Tom Brown; the right of honest red-blooded Englishmen to give themselves severe head injuries was a subject about which Hughes felt passionately), and then, upon hearing that women used to run races at the fair, opine on how it's a jolly good thing all that's been stopped in these enlightened times. I say hilarious, but, despite the really interesting historical detail in this book, it's difficult to take Hughes very seriously.
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (1902). About a young woman who lives in a thinly-fictionalised Stoke-on-Trent under the rule of her miserly and subtly-tyrannical father. On turning twenty-one Anna Tellwright inherits a fortune, but the power this might give her to decide her own fate is denied her, not so much by outright rules as by her father's more pervasive oppressive influence and by the equally oppressive background of expectations for women that have between them shaped her character and constrained her options. She falls in love and gets engaged, but it becomes increasingly clear over the course of the book that this relationship is neither a very good thing for Anna in its own right nor any kind of meaningful escape; Bennett is refreshingly, if depressingly, clear-sighted. It's a beautiful and very, very sad portrayal of the complexities of how all these things work. I loved Anna herself (she's apparently been compared to Fanny Price, a long-time fave of mine, and I can see why), and I loved Bennett's writing style, which is both very detailed (about things like how much different types of houses cost to rent, what the characters eat for their meals, how the potteries work, etc.) and beautifully eloquent. A really good book, but not a happy one. (Incidentally, the conurbation of Stoke-on-Trent was actually formed from six towns; apparently Bennett decided 'the Five Towns' was more euphonious, so he got rid of one of them. That's much funnier than anything in the book.)
The Spirit of the Quakers, edited by Geoffrey Durham (2010). A varied and thought-provoking introduction; it's made up mostly of short excerpts from a wide range of writings from across the history of the Quakers, and while in some ways I was more interested in the seventeenth-century stuff than the modern writings, it was all meaningful in its way. And of course that structure means it's given me a lot of ideas for other things to look up and read!
Quaker-Shaped Christianity by Mark Russ (2022). Largely about the author's working out of his particular Quaker Christian theology. Frustrating in some ways (I liked the bit about not wanting to get lost in rational arguments in religion, but I feel you can't really do that and then base your faith on empirical beliefs that IMO require rational justification) and Russ is more of a Christian than I am, but it's an interesting and good perspective to have, and some of the theological ideas were especially interesting (though the book is very short, this stuff is complicated and it's doubtless all developed much more elsewhere).
