StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend! I will be celebrating two of my lovely godchildren this weekend – the 1st birthday of one and the Christening of another. (Wish me luck getting a cake on the train and the tube!) Very exciting and lovely, and I hope your weekends are also looking special. Here, as ever, is a book, blog post, and link to keep you going through it.

1.) The link – you may remember Tanya’s excellent blog 20th-Century Vox. She writes elsewhere now, but it’s still a brilliant trove of reviews. Her writing is now often about indexing, which is her job and a topic I find fascinating. I recently read her article on the politics of indexing, which is something I’d never considered before and which really grabbed me.

2.) The book – I’ve mentioned it in a couple of places, but I just want to spread the word to anybody who has an Audible subscription: you can get their Virginia Woolf Collection free in the Audible Plus catalogue, and Kristin Scott Thomas reading Mrs Dalloway is the best audiobook experience I’ve ever had. (The other readings, of To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and The Waves are also good, but there is something particularly magical about the combination of KST and Mrs D.)

3.) The blog post – I was intrigued by A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland when I saw it in a bookshop recentliy, and enjoyed Susan’s review of it. I’m also interested in how this sort of colour-blocking abstract cover is all the rage at the moment.

The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White – #ReadingWales25

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I have Karen to thank for highlighting the fact that Ethel Lina White was Welsh – Karen contributed a review of Fear Stalks The Village to Reading Wales Month, which is run by a different blogging Karen! Well, that was all the incentive I needed to sneak into final days of Reading Wales with a read of Some Must Watch (1933) – though I’ve called this review The Spiral Staircase, because the novel has just been reprinted under that title by Pushkin Press, presumably because of the famous film adaptation under that name. Indeed, I almost snapped up a copy of the reprint before I realised I already had it under its original title. I’ll refer to it as Some Must Watch from now on, but if you want to get your own copy then hunt for the staircase.

(Sidenote: my copy of Some Must Watch is falling apart, and that’s probably the reason it was priced at £1 by Addyman Annexe in Hay-on-Wye, when any 1930s copy is otherwise prohibitively expensive.)

The only Ethel Lina White novel I’ve read before is The Wheel Spins, which is most notable for having been adapted into Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. In Some Must Watch, White truncates the time period and the space – it is almost all in a country manor over the course of one long evening – and, in doing so, ups the tension.

Helen Capel is recently arrived at the Warren household as a ‘lady help’ – born into a class that entitles her to have meals with the family, and penniless enough to need the work. Bedridden Lady Warren is the formidable matriarch of the family – below her is her widowed son, known as the Professor, an austere and absent-minded man. His sister, Mrs Warren, is the one really running the household, and Helen’s boss. The Professor’s son is ‘a clever, ugly youth […] violently and aggressively in love with his wife, Simone’. She, meanwhile, is more interested in flirting with the resident student, Stephen Rice, a wolfish man whose chief positive trait is affection for his rescue dog.

The household at the Summit (the curious name for the house) is completed by Mr and Mrs Oates, who do almost every conceivable servant task except open the door for visitors, and the newly arrived Nurse Barker – who is an unfriendly, masculine woman given to grudges. The house is near the Welsh/English border, much like Hay-on-Wye.

I’ve rattled through the cast quite quickly, and I did have to flick to the beginning every now and then to remind me how they related to one another – but they are well-drawn, and a particular handful become important in the second half of the novel.

As the novel opens, Helen has been at the Summit for a while and is walking back home after dark – it’s her afternoon off, but she is outside after dark and this isn’t wise. A serial killer has been haunting the region, and his target is young women. His first killings were in town (somebody blithely says that nobody much minds it, if it stays in town) but he’s been getting closer and closer to them. And the Summit is in the middle of nowhere, with just a handful of nearby cottages. Helen’s walk through the woods is an excellent, chilling start to Some Must Watch – we know that nothing is likely to happen to her this early in the book, but the atmosphere still grabs us. And then she sees a man stepping out from behind a tree. She runs home in terror – but was she right to be terrified?

Helen is equally scared of threats within the house, particularly old Lady Warren, whom she suspects is not as helpless as she portrays herself…

“But you’re to sleep with me. You see, my dear, you’re not safe.”

As she smiled, Helen was suddenly reminded of the grin of a crocodile.

“I couldn’t pass a night alone with her,” she thought, even while she was conscious that her fear was only of her own creation. It was obviously absurd to be afraid of a poor bedridden old woman, with a diseased heart.

“I’m afraid I can do nothing without Miss Warren’s instructions,” she said.

“My step-daughter’s a fool. She doesn’t know what’s going on in this house. Trees always trying to get in…”

The next day, though, the fear ratchets up a notch. Another young woman is murdered, very close to home, and the household are sure the serial killer will strike again. It seems to be agreed that Helen is the most likely target. Some characters take a malicious joy in this warning, while others make it more companionably. Nurse Barker is in the former camp:

“Haven’t you noticed that the murderer always chooses girls who earn their own living? It looks as if he had a special grudge against them for taking work from men. Very likely he’s a shell-shock case, who came back from the War, to find a woman in his place. The country’s crawling with women, like maggots, eating up all the jobs. And the men are starved out.” 

The bulk of the novel takes place over the next evening and night, waiting to find out if the murderer will strike again. There is a wild storm outside. Initially, all members of the house agree they will close and bar the shutters and sit tight through the night – but gradually, one by one, they leave for a series of reasonable and unreasonable motives. Helen’s hope gets more and more fraught as the night goes on, the potential defenders disappear (or get deep drunk), and her imagination gets more and more out of hand. Her only other hope is Dr Parry, the local doctor who took an instant (and mutual) shine to her. But will he be able to get in, when the Professor has made everybody promise that not a soul will be let over the threshold during the night?

Ethel Lina White is on brilliant form. It is such a tense novel, with creeping dread created entirely from shadows and distant knocks and the sorts of things that do prey upon a fearful heart on a dark and stormy night. Indeed, it’s a genre most often found (in the 1930s, at least) in penny magazines and cheap paperbacks. Ethel Lina White takes the maiden-in-peril thriller and elevates it through her excellent writing. There are sections that are amusingly ironic, and her creation of character is more nuanced than you might expect. But it’s really, at its heart, a very well written tale of fear. White’s talents and her restraint (almost always – there is one ‘Oh, actually I was strangling myself‘ moment that made me roll my eyes) mean that Some Must Watch remains an effective, chilling tale when so many other examples of the genre feel like melodramatic period pieces.

I’m keen to watch The Spiral Staircase film, which inexplicably made Helen unable to speak. I don’t know where else it wanders from the plot, but it’s all been uploaded to YouTube so I will no doubt find out before too long!

Unnecessary Rankings! Virginia Woolf

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Did you know (and why on earth should you) that yesterday was the second anniversary of my Unnecessary Rankings? How did we ever survive for so long without it, I’m sure you’re asking.

Well, today I’m going for a Big Dog – or a Big Wolf, perhaps. Yes, it’s time to rank the author I consider the best writer of the 20th century – here we go with Virginia Woolf. I haven’t included all her essay and short story collections separately, because they are published in some many iterations, and I’ve actually not read Night and Day yet, largely because I can’t face the idea of coming to an end of all the available Woolf novels.

16. Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)

Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad book, and probably never a bad sentence, but IMO her least satisfactory work is this biography of her friend Roger Fry. She drops her usual style and is made curiously bland by some self-imposed constraints. As I wrote in my review: ‘A good biography – but not quite what one expects from Woolf, and disconcerting to see her talent hide in the shadows of her own book.’

15. Collected Essays

It is hard to group these because, taken on its own, something like ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ – Woolf’s very funny, fairly unfair take-down of writers like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy – would soar up the list. But I’m less interested in her writings on notable authors of the past, and it doesn’t feel like she’s having quite as much fun with them. (What people don’t tell you about Woolf is how funny she is, and this comes out most in her best essays.)

14. Flush (1933)

A faux biography from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog! Sure, why not! The idea feels like a prank gone wrong, but it is worked out surprisingly well. I’m less interested in Flush than her other characters, but it is perhaps her most accessible novel.

13. Collected Short Stories

Woolf didn’t write masses of short stories, and some of the ones in her collected stories are more like experimental flourishes – ‘The Mark on the Wall’ being perhaps the most famous. She is certainly better at novel-length, but her eye for details is on display in her shortest fiction.

12. Collected Letters

There are few authors whose output has been so rigorously turned over, and any time Woolf put pen to paper, it ended up getting published. Her letters go to show that she never threw out a casual sentence. They are honest, thoughtful, often quite bitchy. I love them.

11. Three Guineas (1938)

I’ve included a couple of book-length essays as separate entries in this list. Three Guineas is wide-ranging and interesting, though I always find it hard to remember precisely what the main thrust of it is. What has largely stuck with me is the interesting way Woolf writes about photography.

10. The Voyage Out (1915)

Woolf’s first novel is surprisingly ordinary, in style. Rachel Vinrace is travelling by boat to South America, and the novel explores the range of fellow-passengers (including a couple who will take centre stage in a later novel!) as well as revealing Rachel’s life back in London. It’s a very readable, good book, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it was by Woolf.

9. The Years (1937)

I’m always surprised that The Years was Woolf’s bestselling title during her life, or up among them at least. Towards the end of her novel-writing career, Woolf returned to a more ‘traditional’ style – and this is a sort of family saga that, again, is excellent but not ‘Woolfian’ in the way you might expect.

8. Collected Diaries

You have to assume Woolf had an eye on publication here – her diaries are so beautifully, thoughtfully written. I love A Writer’s Diary, the single-volume focusing on books/writing/publishing that Leonard Woolf edited after Virginia Woolf’s death (though I know it is controversial in some circles). The unedited, six-volume edition is the real must there, and the best source for insights into Woolf’s mind.

7. Between The Acts (1941)

The top seven are hard to separate, because I’d say they are all works of genius. Woolf’s final, slim novel is characteristically insightful in its depiction of people putting on a pageant at a country house.

6. Orlando (1928)

Orlando lives for several hundred years and, overnight, becomes a woman. Sure! Why not! Woolf was joining in the 1920s vogue for fantastic novels (see: my doctoral thesis) and also teasing, and honouring, Vita Sackville-West. It’s a tour de force though I have to confess I loved it most the first time I read it.

5. The Waves (1931)

Woolf’s most experimental novel is written mostly in ‘dialogue’, but the speech marks are really the inner thoughts of a group of friends, from childhood upwards. When I first read it as a teenager, I was astonished that anything could be so beautiful – while also not really knowing exactly what was going on. That hasn’t changed.

4. A Room of One’s Own (1929)

A foundational text of 20th-century feminism, A Room of One’s Own has that famous central ask – that a woman should have a room of her own to work in, and £500 a year – but it is so much more than that. It exposes the sexism inherent in literary history, academic institutions and more – and it’s also bitingly funny.

3. To The Lighthouse (1927)

The Ramsay family take centre stage, and are the closest thing that Woolf did to a portrait of her parents. The plot is incidental – WILL they get to the lighthouse? – and what makes this novel so special is her extraordinary, searing understanding of the ways people interact with and hurt one another. Lily the artist is her deepest fictional exploration of the creative process. And having said the plot is incidental, the novel has a twist moment that made me gasp out loud on the bus.

2. Jacob’s Room (1922)

Whenever someone asks me where to start with Virginia Woolf, I point them towards Jacob’s Room. It was her third novel and the turning point for finding her own distinctive style. Jacob is largely absent from this novel-length portrait of him – and, while not as experimental as the ‘big four’ novels, it’s a great introduction to how she plays with traditional novelistic forms and styles.

1. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

My first Woolf novel remains my favourite. I juggle around the top three at different times, but listening to Mrs Dalloway recently, read perfectly by Kristin Scott Thomas, has re-established it as my absolute fave Woolf. In the parallel stories of Mrs Dalloway hosting a party (and, yes, buying the flowers herself) and Septimus Warren Smith experiencing PTSD, Woolf never puts a foot wrong. I still felt a thrill of delight about the way she merges their stories, playing with perspective in ways that still feel fresh a hundred year later. It’s a joy. It’s a lark, it’s a plunge.

 

How would you rank our Ginny?

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Is it spring? Is it still winter? We’re being kept on our toes here. By the time you read this, I’ll be doing a treasure hunt around Oxford (no real idea what it entails) and it’s meant to RAIN, so we’ll see. Hope you have good weekend plans, and here’s a book, blog post, and link to get you through it either way.

1.) The blog post – one of my favourite bloggers has reviewed my favourite book! Even better, she likes it. I still get thrilled whenever I see someone review Miss Hargreaves, and I’m particularly pleased that it’s at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

2.) The link – I haven’t watched it yet, but I discovered that there is an adaptation of Miss Hargreaves available to watch on YouTube! Sadly not Margaret Rutherford’s – we can but dream of that being unearthed – but Mary Wickes’, from 1952. Only 45 minutes, so will be intrigued to see what they’ve managed to include.

3.) The book – it’s not out until end of May, but I was excited to get a review copy of the latest Gertrude Trevelyan novel that will be reprinted by Boiler House Press – her final novel, Trance By Appointment. And what an excellent cover choice. It also reminds me that I’ve yet to read As It Was In The Beginning, so plenty to enjoy.

P.S. you can also have a reminder that the 1952 Club is coming up in one month’s time! 21-27 April – looking forward to it.

 

Project 24: Book #5

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It is very surprising to me how many of my Project 24 books so far have been IN PRINT. It’s quite unusual for me at the best of times, but particularly when I’m narrowing my gaze to limited buying. Truth be told, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico wasn’t on my radar at all – but I need to read it for the next episode of ‘Tea or Books?’

Perfection (Paperback)

I’ve read lots of Fitzcarraldo’s non-fiction, but this will be my first delve into their fiction. And look how zeitgeisty, it’s just been nominated for the International Booker, or something like that.

Not where I thought Project 24 would take me – but pleased that I’m still very much on track with my rations.

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis – #ReadingWales25

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I don’t think I’ve managed to join in Reading Wales before – an annual project led by Karen at Booker Talk. To be honest, that’s largely because I have no idea which authors on my shelves are Welsh. I imagine there are quite a few hiding among the vintage books, and perhaps I should do some digging into the more Welsh-sounding surnames (though, as someone with the surname Thomas and no Welsh blood, I know it’s not always a given).

But I knew about one Welsh book: Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis. It’s a classic of Welsh literature, hovering somewhere in the hinterland between novel, memoir, and children’s book. I suppose it falls down most certainly on ‘novel’, but it feels very like a memoir of childhood – four siblings living in Pengarth, called Delia, Lucy, Maurice and Miriam – as well as the vicarage children nearby. The oldest is 11 years old and the youngest ‘Miriam – who ran to width rather than height – barely managed to reach the key-hole at three and a half years’. (We are introduced to them by that most familial of things – heights etched into a doorpost.)

As far as I can tell, Pengarth isn’t a real village, but it represents any similar community in the Welsh borders. The novel was published in 1934 but is set in a hazy past. As Charles Morgan hints in his brief prefatory letter, Dew on the Grass is aimed at those who have ‘said “My childhood is gone!” and mourned for his giants’. Childhood is bathed in a glow of nostalgic innocence. The children here may have minor feuds and grievances, but you know that they will not outlast the sunlight. They experience nothing that will scar them psychologically – significant, as Morgan writes, in an era with ‘legends, now intellectually in vogue, which represent children as Freudian Yahoos incontinently abandoned on the doorstep of the London School of Economics’.

I’ve been calling this a novel, but it’s really a series of vignettes. Here’s a taste from the beginning of one of them…

The Rectory children had come to tea and now all of them had run out into the garden and were deciding what game they should play next. Released at length from the spell of Louisa’s eye and the cool, leaf shaped nursery, they danced out on the lawn, shouting, hopping with excitement, ready for something adventurous, scarcely able to contain their glee.

“Rounders!” someone shouted. But were there enough of them for rounders? Yes, if they got Dick the stableboy to join in; then Delia remembered that Dick was cleaning out the hen-house under Jarman’s eye, so it was no use counting on him.

“Hide and seek!” called out David. “I vote for hide and seek.”

“No, no, not hide and seek,” Lucy thought to herself. “Oh God,” she prayed rapidly – half shutting her eyes because you should always pray with your eyes closed, but only half because the others might notice and laugh at her – “let it not be hide and seek. Please, dear God, let it not be hide and seek.”

But it was. Perhaps God didn’t mind what game they played, although it mattered so much to Lucy; or perhaps He was punishing her for being rude to Louise that morning.

That’s about as high as the stakes get in Dew on the Grass. So, what did I think? Well, it’s undeniably charming. It crosses the line into twee, really. And sometimes I am happy for a dose of twee.

In an episode of Tea or Books?, Rachel and I talked about books that do or do not have ‘bite’, and I’ve found it a useful categoriser in my head ever since. This book has the least bite of any novel I’ve ever read – which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a choice and something that can delight in certain moods and irritate in others. The children act like children, so it’s not a case of unlikely Victorian moralising from their mouths – but they also live a fundamentally happy, peaceful, contented life in a narrative totally absent of irony.

I can see why Morgan found it delightful, and I can particularly see why it was precious to buyers of my 1944 reprint. In the midst of war, this was exactly the sort of world that people believed they were fighting for. It’s a very selective vision of any era – but, why not. It wouldn’t suit every mood, but sometimes it’s lovely to read something in which happiness is so evident on every page.

#136: Does Reading Make Us Better People? and And Then There Were None vs The Invisible Host

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Agatha Christie, Gwen Bristow, Bruce Manning and reading morality – welcome to episode 136 of Tea or Books?!

In the first half of this episode, we discuss whether or not we take moral instruction from the books we read – does reading make us better people? In the second half, we compare two very similarly plotted books – And Then There Are None by Agatha Christie and The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning. Many thanks to Susan for suggesting this (and sorry for forgetting your name when we recorded!)

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you, even if I’m quite bad at replying quickly. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us. And you can support the podcast at Patreon.

FYI Hargreaves gets very noisy in this episode!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Stasiland by Anna Funder
Mrs Dalloway: A Biography of the Novel by Mark Hussey
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior
Book Girl by Sarah Clarkson
Emma by Jane Austen
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
How To Know A Person by David Brooks
Ghosted by Nancy French
Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Walkable City by Jeff Speck
Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Pamela Smith
Brink of Being by Julia Bueno
Shaun Bythell
A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie
A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Spring seems to have sprung. I went out without a coat! It’s all happening. And, since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d mention the blog post I posted last year – ranking the British Library Women Writers titles. A few books have come out since then, and I’d put the forthcoming The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning high up the list – probably #4. Available to preorder wherever you preorder!

1.) The book – Nicola Wilson sent me a proof of her book, which I’ve very excited about. It’s called Recommended! and is about the Book Society. I wrote about them during my doctorate – one of the book-of-the-month clubs that proliferated in the 1920s and ’30s, and I can’t wait to find out more about it. Readers of the Provincial Lady series will have come across several mentions of it already.

2.) The blog post – do go and wish Rebecca a happy 10th blog birthday! It feels like she’s been part of the blogosphere for even longer, and we’re lucky to have her wide-ranging, thoughtful posts.

3.) The link – well, it’s a video, but I wanted to highlight again the excellent Never Too Small series on YouTube. It looks at small homes (usually flats) around the world, and how clever architectural decisions have maximised their use. My only criticism is that usually they seem to be lived in by people who don’t own any possessions, but this recent home is clearly loved and lived in.

Project 24: Book Four

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I’m on track with Project 24 – buying just 24 books in 2025 – with my restrained rate of two-per-month. It was while reading Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson that I decided I should probably make sure I had all her novels – and Goodbye, Stranger is thus added to my shelves. It hasn’t been reprinted by Mike Walmer yet, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Now, maybe I should actually read one or two of the books I’ve bought so far this year.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy March! Here in the UK we seem to be alternating bright sunshine and torrential rain. As I write this, it’s one of the sunny days – cold, sunny weather is my favourite, and hopefully it’ll continue as I jaunt round London this weekend. The world might continue to get worse and worse every day (don’t you miss the days when villains were at least a little nuanced? Not ‘I’m going to deprive the world’s most vulnerable and then lie about fraud’ levels evil?) but here’s a book, a link, and a blog post to make things feel momentarily less bleak.

1.) The book – I’m halfway through a proof copy of Mark Hussey’s Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel and absolutely loving it. Hussey goes from the genesis of the novel through its writing to its publication, reception and aftermath. Definitely one for people who already know and love Mrs Dalloway, but I am happily in that camp. Looks like it’s out in May, so get your pre-orders in now.

2.) The link – not a usual one for me, and not about books, but this long read in the Financial Times by Madison Marriage is absorbing, excellent, and devastating. It’s about the inquest into her brother’s death, and the 48 hours that led to it while he desperately tried to get an urgent repeat prescription – and the ways the NHS, pharmacies and others failed him.

3.) The blog post – March is Reading Wales month – get some suggestions over at Booker Talk.