regshoe

False Goddesses by Rachel Ferguson (1923). This is Rachel Ferguson's first novel, and is about two things: firstly, the Edwardian-era theatrical world and the experiences of young middle-class women who go on the stage; secondly, lesbian crushes. If this sounds like a promising combination, the historical stuff is really pretty interesting—it's full of precise and thoroughly-observed detail, something which Ferguson is very good at, and she was writing directly from experience here—but the emotional side of the book did not really work for me. I think this was partly because I never really warmed up to Leah, the protagonist, and so couldn't really get into her relationships emotionally; and partly because Ferguson's writing style—which skips breathlessly between details and incidents, turns a sharply-elegant phrase and passes loosely and somewhat confusingly through time—while it works very well indeed in a novel like Alas, Poor Lady, is not so well suited to describing passionate emotions like those here. Altogether worth reading, but not what I might have hoped.

The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1885). This was another slightly strange partial disappointment! It's a sequel to New Arabian Nights, loosely defined, and is more of a coherent whole than that book, with the stories all interlinked and revealing a single overarching plot by the end. It is about Fenian terrorism—hence the dynamite of the title—and the strange characters who get involved in it, and I think I never really got into the book's mood. Either it can't quite make a definite statement in the detail the subject matter deserves, or decide how far it is a serious statement and how far a light-hearted satirical comedy, or I was missing too much of the social and political context to understand what the authors were saying. (Also I am slightly surprised, given his attitudes towards the Highlands in Kidnapped, to learn that RLS was apparently vehemently against Irish independence.) However, there are good things in it, especially its female characters: the book is in three parts, each of which could be summarised as, 'male protagonist meets a weird woman; she tells him her life story; drama and intrigue follow', and it is entertaining. Perhaps that's thanks to Fanny! At one point there's what looks like a parody of the 'sudden backstory Mormons' trope from e.g. A Study in Scarlet. Via the book's Wikipedia article I found this website, about an academic project using stylometry to analyse Louis's and Fanny's distinct writing styles and investigate the authorship of this book, which is fascinating. (

sanguinity, have the Holmestice people ever tried doing this to identify anonymous exchange authors???) For myself I couldn't distinguish any obviously different writing styles, either while reading the book or after learning which bits of it each of them apparently wrote—probably partly because RLS's style is so versatile that it's difficult to tell what's different because it's a different author!

And re-read The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster (1907) for RMSE! I read this book several times years ago and have loved it very dearly ever since I first did, but hadn't revisited it for a while, so that was a very good and also interesting opportunity. I think I'm much less mystified by Forster's writing than I was when I first read his books—I remember reading this and feeling amazed at its resonant significance but only getting a little way towards articulating what it was doing, and now I read it and I can see Forster making choices and achieving effects in the way a writer does, very skilfully but no longer mysteriously. Perhaps that's being a little older, perhaps it's having more experience writing myself? I do still think it's terribly significant! It's a weird, gloomy book with a tragic ending—a tragic ending that seems a little less inevitable than it used to, albeit on the straightforward 'how things could happen' level rather than the narrative level—and some of its ideas are very strange, and it never seems quite certain of how to deal with the significant questions it asks, but my goodness, who ever wrote about weird gloomy tragedy and uncertainty and failure more beautifully? I love this book, and I love Rickie. It's still meaningful in a way the triumphantly happy ending of a Maurice never could be. And, although the sadness and unresolution of the story are so important to me in some ways, I do think Rickie and Stewart could have been happy together if things had gone a bit differently...

The first reading post of 2022, and it's been a good, interesting and varied start to the reading year. :)

Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden by G. A. Henty (1887). Aha, thought I, another classic Jacobite book that I haven't read yet, I shall try it! This is an exciting Victorian historical adventure story following Ronald Leslie, the son of a Scottish Jacobite who went into exile after the '15, married a Frenchwoman for love against the wishes of her family and was immediately put in prison for twenty years (she was put in a convent) because the French are evil autocrats who hate love and liberty. Ronald is brought back to Scotland by Malcolm, a friend of his father's, and raised by Malcolm's brother and his wife. As a young man he gets into trouble over helping a Jacobite agent in Glasgow; accompanied by Malcolm, he runs off to France, joins the army, finds and frees his father and mother, witnesses some historically memorable battles in Flanders and then meets Charles Edward Stuart and gets involved in the '45, amongst other things. It's certainly an exciting adventure story, and the one thing I would say in its favour in comparison with the other Jacobite novels I've read is that the plot is more like the plot of an actual eighteenth-century novel than later fiction often is, complete with long-lost parents and morals about love. However, apart from that Henty is very much writing about the Jacobites from the perspective of the future, and won't let you forget it. His writing is didactic, self-important, determinedly Whiggish (in the 'interpreting history as inevitable and desirable progress towards the present' sense) and largely uninterested in letting characters have thoughts and perspectives grounded in their own time. It's also clunky, poorly put together and generally overly simplistic—the characters aren't very interesting and there are no really compelling emotions anywhere. Overall, an interesting look at one set of historical views of the Jacobites (and it might make an interesting comparison with Kidnapped, published just a year earlier and a much better novel), but not really worth reading for its own sake.

Men of War by Lou Faulkner (2019). Another foray into modern historical romance novels! Disclaimer that I know the author of this one—and perhaps I was biased in the book's favour by already knowing I like Faulkner's writing, but really I think I'm being as effusive as it deserves. Anyway—the book is set during the Seven Years' War of the 1750s-60s, and follows the romance between Henry Noble, a British naval captain, and Christophe, Comte de St-Denys, a French hydrographer and astronomer. Henry takes Christophe prisoner in a raid made on the French coast after the notorious Battle of Quiberon Bay; later, they go together on an expedition to observe the 1761 transit of Venus from Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, in an optimistic, forward-looking spirit of international scientific collaboration based on real expeditions actually made at the time. The book is full of highly specific historical detail—especially on the nautical side of things, and I did get slightly lost in all the sailing jargon, but Faulkner clearly knows their stuff and it did give a very vivid picture of the setting. There's also a lot about contemporary science—both the science itself and its social context; the description of the transit itself and what it means for the characters is utterly lovely, and I appreciated all the botany—and all sorts of other historical details, all of which give a great sense of assurance in the setting and a detailed picture of the story's context.

Then the characters are charming! I loved both Henry and Christophe, and especially liked the emphasis on characters being good at what they do, taking pride in their own work and admiring the other's. There are also some great side characters—Henry's spirited younger sister, the lieutenant of his ship, the member of the Hervey family with whom Henry has an affair... (I feel I should count the ships as characters, too; they are lovely, especially the Swan). And, of course, the development of Henry and Christophe's relationship is absolutely lovely—beautifully written and perfectly aligned with the tastes of my id, which is what we want from this sort of thing. It's at the 'soft' end of 'enemies to friends to lovers'—the emphasis throughout is on mutual liking and respect as well as attraction, with less tension than e.g. Flight of the Heron but still with a keen sense of the characters' countries being at war and what that means for them. Things develop through the early stages of realising feelings and playing a mutual game of 'is he or isn't he...?', then slowly growing closer and coming to understand and trust each other... by the time they make an actual confession they understand each other very well, so that the whole thing feels like a comfortable, happily inevitable homecoming (and is very romantic!). Awww. One does appreciate a happy ending occasionally. :)

The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson (1931). (Hey, I remember Woolworths...!) This is a deeply strange book. Part of it is a story about the power of imagination, as conveyed through the Carne family, three sisters and their widowed mother who inhabit a shared world of 'Sagas', making up elaborate stories about people they barely know and make-believing all sorts of details about their subjects' lives as well as their relationships with the Carnes. Rather like Barbara Pym did! Things threaten to get complicated when, through narrator Deirdre's day job as a journalist, the Carnes actually meet and begin a friendship with two of the subjects of their Saga, the judge Sir Herbert "Toddy" Toddington and his wife Mildred. Fantasy and reality collide, with hilarious consequences. However, this story is interspersed with sections from the point of view of the youngest Carne sister's governess, Miss Martin, a distressed gentlewoman driven to governessing out of economic necessity—very much like Grace in Alas, Poor Lady. She, and her eventual successor, are excluded from the Carnes' happy shared world of Saga-making through a sort of bewildered inability to understand what they're doing; this feels as though it ought to read as a moral lesson about People With No Imagination who Don't Get It, who are to be roundly mocked and despised, except it doesn't feel like we're meant to mock and despise the governesses quite as the Carnes themselves do. The portrayal of their precarious economic and personal situation is too detailed and sympathetic for that (never mind the knowledge that this is the author of Alas, Poor Lady, a book all about sympathy for women in their position). But neither does the intent seem to be really to criticise the Carnes for their callous social exclusion; and so the two parts of the book are left sitting oddly and uncomfortably alongside each other. Also, the ghosts of Charlotte and Emily Brontë are there. (Ferguson doesn't seem to think Anne counts, and I have to admit this lowered my opinion of her considerably). This has something to do with the world of imagination becoming real through the actual existence of ghosts, or something, and perhaps Ferguson, certainly aware of what the Brontës wrote about governesses, is trying to unite the other two strands of the book through them, but if so I didn't quite get it. A strange book, but I'm sure it's a very good one. The actual prose is as lively, brilliantly detailed and generally enjoyable as Alas, Poor Lady, and it is very funny.

Work is pretty full-on at the moment (the usual busy season plus some extra bits—all very interesting but hard work) and my brain is more or less fried this evening, but I'm attempting a books post anyway...

The Small Room by May Sarton (1961). This book is set at a women's college in the northeastern US, where main character Lucy Winter goes to work as a lecturer after breaking off her engagement. It's concerned with questions about how the academic and the personal interact, centring around Lucy's discovery that a star student has plagiarised an essay and a conflict amongst the faculty over whether the college should employ a resident psychiatrist. I didn't love it, but it was certainly interesting. I think certain aspects have aged poorly—the anti-psychiatrist characters seem to see their position as deeply emotionally important to their identities as teachers, but from a modern perspective they're just trying to deny healthcare to people who clearly need it out of a weird oblivious obstinacy. On the other hand, there's a lesbian relationship portrayed in a surprisingly modern way—neither character is especially likeable, but they're good characters and their relationship is quite casually dealt with and placed on a level with the het relationships in the book.

Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson (1937). Aaargh, this book is so good and I don't know how to describe how good it is. Right, so: it opens in 1936 at a bazaar for the benefit of a charity supporting 'distressed gentlefolks' (I wonder when those stopped being a thing?); an attendee meets one of the gentlefolks, an unassuming old lady named Grace Scrimgeour, is affected by the sight of her poverty and wonders 'how does this happen'?, and the rest of the book spends 450 pages answering that question. It follows Grace and her family of sisters from her birth in 1870 throughout her life, examining in detail exactly how a woman raised in an upper middle-class Victorian family ends up sinking slowly into inexorable poverty, unable to do anything to escape her fate or improve her prospects, and along the way a great deal else about the lives of women of that class and era. Ferguson has an amazing talent for conveying the atmosphere of a setting and the shape of a character's thoughts through perfectly-chosen details and brilliantly-crafted phrases—the helpless outrage of Grace's eldest sister after her marriage and first pregnancy shatter the sheltered innocence of her Victorian girlhood; the horrifyingly casual cruelty of the father who isn't, in intention, really a bad person but simply a natural product of what his society requires of men; the stultifying restrictedness of the lives of the unmarried sisters, and their gradual despair as they age through their twenties and thirties without the promised fulfilment and come to terms with how little they'll ever be able to have or achieve; many terrible moments of social awkwardness.

All the details of nineteenth-century life and society are brilliant and beautifully used, and Ferguson knows the subjects she's writing about very well indeed. This book is one of the best things I've ever read for conveying a sense of time passing, change and loss, amongst plenty of other things. She is eloquently, intelligently furious about sexism, and shows with brutal clarity how it plays out in the attitudes and actions of both men and women, how in a society-scale injustice like this the victims of the system are also its perpetrators and vice versa, and how it stunts and thwarts nineteenth-century women's lives. This book is so, so good—absorbing in the early sections, increasingly harrowing towards the end, by turns horrifying, embarrassing, tragic and funny, always beautiful and endlessly engaging. If it has a flaw, it's the attitudes towards class—those remarks about people knowing their place sit rather oddly alongside the rest of the book, but I can ignore them against everything it does so well. Anyway, it's really good! Highly recommended.

Letters of John Cockburn of Ormistoun to His Gardener 1727-1744, edited by James Colville and published by the Scottish History Society in 1904. A recommendation from Naomi Mitchison! John Cockburn, owner of the estate of Ormistoun in East Lothian, was a fanatical agricultural reformer; he spent much of his time living near London, and so wrote these letters to his gardener Charles Bell with instructions about the management of the gardens, farmland and plantations of the estate. The letters are full of fascinating historical and horticultural detail—Cockburn is remarkably forward-looking in his views of agriculture and economics, setting out some very modern ideas about economies of scale, creating markets for new products and such things, and the minutiae of managing fruit trees, vegetable seeds, the care of planted saplings, pigeons, etc. etc. are all interesting. I also enjoyed the letters for the sense they convey of the writer's personality—the tone is a mixture of earnest zeal for improvement and good work and obstinate impatience at how much less earnestly zealous everyone other than Cockburn is. (His frustration at how if only Bell would read his letters properly, the things that need doing would get done and he wouldn't have to keep repeating himself, was very amusing, and also very modern—I think a lot of people feel the same way about work emails...).