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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.

Flickerbook by Leila Berg

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My second (and final?) contribution to this year’s #ReadIndies is an autobiography that was sent to me by CB Editions – Flickerbook (1997) by Leila Berg. It was a very canny choice of reiew book to send, given my recent interest in memoirs and novels told in fragments – I’ve repeated the titles often, but the Big Three from the past couple of years are Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Flickerbook very much follows in the same mould – being told in fragmented paragraphs, sometimes following on from each other for a bit before taking a new direction, sometimes calling back to an earlier paragraph, and sometimes building up a portrait from a series of stray impressions. The title, Flickerbook, refers to what I have always called a ‘flipbook’ – where you draw gradually changing illustrations on every page of a notebook, so that they form a sort of animation when you flick through them. It’s a great comparison for this sort of approach to a book.

Berg starts the autobiography in 1921, when she was four years old – ‘I am the Bridesmaid. I stand on the table.’ are the first two lines. It is clearly her earliest memory – and the autobiography continues from there until the moment war breaks out in 1939, when Berg is in her early 20s.

Particularly in the early sections of the book, Berg is writing impressionistically – trying to echo the imprecise ways in which a child begins to understand the world. Or, rather, the very precise way that they latch onto small details, building up their place in the world by observing, interrogating, and assuming the things and people they see in front of them. In these early years of Flickerbook, Berg particularly concentrates on what makes her Jewish family distinct from many of the other families in their area of Manchester. She is constantly dividing into us and them, trying to make sense of the world. ‘Christian girls don’t wear knickers. Knickers are Jewish,’ she decides. Or ‘Christians say Granny. Or they say Nan. They don’y say Bobbie. And Christians say Grandad. I have heard Ronnie talking.’ Her only way of comprehending her own experience is by homogenising the ‘other side’. The same is true of her understanding of herself as female – particularly the restrictions placed on her that boys don’t have to observe.

In these early sections, Berg re-assumes a naivety that was long behind her. It leads to passages like this (and that interruption about the wickets gives you a sense of the way the fragmentation works):

Mr and Mrs Cohen came and had tea, and I saw a smudge on the white tablecloth. I thought it was a flea, and I was afraid Mr and Mrs Cohen had seen it, because you mustn’t see them.

I don’t really understand how fleas are smudges and not thick. Can people be smudges?

Wickets are the lines boys chalk on the wall when they play cricket. There is a good wall round the corner in Hilton Street. Bails is the bar they chalk on top.

I think that is what ghosts are. People smudges.

As the years go by, Berg grows less naive and more knowledgable. We see her join the anti-fascists, consider politics, reject various futures and explore others. Boys become more interesting (and more confusing), and she steadily goes from flirtation to infatuation to a sort of cool detachment:

I have had ten offers of marriage in as many weeks. How conventional and idiotic the Communist Party is. I sleep with a boy, and immediately he asks me to marry him. Supposing I said yes. Where would we be?

A thread I particularly enjoyed was the cinema. Berg often goes, and references many films and actors that she has been to see – throwing us into the experience of a teenage girl in the early 20th century with authenticity. Yes, this is a portrait of a time and place and a memoir of being Jewish in an era of rising antisemitism – but it’s also an account of being a young girl who is captivated by the fictional characters and matinee idols dominating the cultural conversation of the day.

The only reason I don’t love Flickerbook as much as I love the other fragmentary memoirs I’ve read does, actually, go to that question of authenticity. Yes, it is all Berg’s experiences. But she was 80 when the book was published. I don’t know if she kept diaries that helped her put it together or relied on her memories, but either way it felt continually like she was putting on the costumes of the past. Of course, anybody writing an autobiography is looking back – but Flickerbook is told in an eternal present. The voice is a child’s for the period of childhood; the voice is teenage, then young adult. So it felt a bit jarring to know, all the time, that the voice was ventriloquy. For instance, an anecdote about an ‘Invisible Mender’ being surprisingly visible would be funny is told in retrospect, but feels a bit awkwardly fey when spoken as though for the first time with the pen of an octogenarian.

This qualm meant Flickerbook kept me at a bit of a disbelieving distance. I found it fascinating, well-written, eye-opening about a period of history in an environment and for a type of person whom the history books have glossed over. I didn’t feel any genuine immediacy. If the same technique had been done in the past tense, without affecting the voices of different eras of her youth, I think Flickerbook would have been both less experimental and more successful. It’s still a very good read, and I’m sure many readers would wholeheartedly disagree with my views on how it could be better, but for me it fell a little short of brilliance.

Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson

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February is drawing to an end, but I’ve managed to get in with a Read Indies post – #ReadIndies being an annual event run by Karen and Lizzy, encouraging us all to read books from independent publishers. In this case, I’ve picked Pipers and a Dancer (1924) by Stella Benson, published by the one-man publishing house Michael Walmer. He has steadily been republishing Benson’s novels, which is just one of many ways in which his excellent taste is helping a new generation of readers discover lost gems.

Stella Benson is probably best known for Living Alone, her novel about a boarding house of witches, and I’ve really enjoyed discovering I Pose, This Is The End, and The Poor Man. I love the eccentric, witty way she writes, often upending expectations and occasionally breaking the fourth wall. Her characters are always odd, and some of that oddness comes in the stark, ironical way they are presented to us. Here, in the first paragraph, we are introduced to Ipsie:

Ipsie suddenly stopped speaking and heard with horror the echo of her own voice saying, “You see, I lost my three brothers in the War.” “How damn pathetic,” she thought, and she reminded herself for the thousandth time that she had determined to be reserved. No man ever told her half as much about himself as she told nearly all men about herself. This was why men were so seldom in love with her. Indeed, she thought, no one who knew her very well ever loved her much. Rodd, with whom she was sitting now on the starlit boat-deck, was not attracted by her. For the first two or three days out of San Francisco he had energetically sought her company, but now he did not seem much interested to learn that she was bereaved and lonely.

Ipsie has a ‘Showman’, which is something of a variation on the ‘I pose’ of her first novel – i.e. a self that she presents to the world, overdramatised for the response she is likely to get. That might be laughter, shock, sympathy or anything really. It is self-conscious but not deceptive. It is a version of Ipsie, even if not the most natural one. And she realised, when talking about moments of grief – she has, truly, lost three much-loved brothers – that the Showman is the one doing the talking.

Her superimposed self may be needed in the future. Ipsie is on a boat to China, where she will meet with her fiance, later to return home. It’s not entirely clear why she makes this arduous journey when he’ll be coming back home almost immediately, but it certainly isn’t for mutually romantic reasons. Even before we meet Jacob, we know that he isn’t going to inspire any warmth in our hearts. Ipsie has hopes that, getting to know each other better, they will have some version of passion between them. Jacob, meanwhile, considers her with ‘indulgent contempt’, hoping ‘she would, when properly trained, make a good little wife’. Marriage is a matter of good sense to him, and nothing more. We, naturally, loathe him.

On the other hand, Rodd is a much more appealing Benson hero. He will be taking on Jacob’s position in China (as a customs official) and becomes bewitched by Ipsie, and keen to change her mind about her forthcoming marriage – and if he happens to be a substitute, so much the better. Like all likeable young heros in this sort of book, he is spontaneous, enthusiastic and passionate. Ipsie is kind and friendly towards him, but her vision of Jacob has yet to splinter. He, in turn, considers her as ‘little Mary’, rather than Ipsie. They will both find their expectations of the other to be thwarted.

The blurb of this edition mentions that it is Benson’s first novel set in China (is there another?), but it could equally well have been set anywhere else. All the principle characters are British or American, and Benson’s sparse, pacey style doesn’t leave any space for dwelling on local colour. There is a major incident that I won’t spoil, which perhaps had to happen in China – but a slight variant of it could have happened in rural America, or somewhere like that.

While a fair amount of this novel has Benson’s characteristic oddness, there is rather less than I expected. Sentences, paragraphs, pages go by without any of her clever wordplay or iconic detachment. People don’t say as enjoyably unnatural things as they often do in her oeuvre. For a lot of the time, this is a heart-on-its-sleeve about a love triangle.

As such, I enjoyed it, but I did miss Benson’s unique style. She can still deliver, of course – I noted down this cultural exchange, as relevant now as then:

Mrs Hinds beamed at Ipsie through pince-nez and bubbled her joy through thin lips, but Ipsie made no reply. Americans see English people always reduced to dumbness on a first introduction; they must think us an oddly inarticulate race. However, I suppose they remember William Shakespeare and Ethel M. Dell and hope for the best.

– and, for any other novelist, this could be a curio. But it is Benson in ‘normal mode’. There isn’t much breaking of the fourth wall, certainly compared to some of her earlier novels, but this was a fun moment:

Sometimes Ipsie would check herself in full pose with a devastating confession. “I was lying when I said that, though I didn’t think so at the moment…” “Make me stop talking – I am only copying the heroine of one of Stella Benson’s novels…”

Ipsie is, indeed, a very Benson heroine – and I enjoy the idea that this is particularly because she has, also, been reading I Pose or This Is The End. Her spirited naivety is great fun, and I enjoyed the novel a lot. I have no idea why it’s called Pipers and a Dancer, on reflection. If it’s my least favourite Benson so far, that’s only because her quality is so high and her style so perfectly and unusually honed. If you already love her, do track it down. If you’ve never read her, maybe this isn’t the place to start.

A whole bunch of non-reviews

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It’s that time again, where I blitz through a whole bunch of books I’ve read or listened to in the past few months. Think of it like that viral guy on Instagram who rates outfits at awards events in one or two words (too niche a ref?)

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
I listened to this short Japanese detective novel for my book group, and it was fun – about a quarter of the total was the ‘reveal’, which did feel a bit imbalanced, but there was a likeable, unusual ‘detective’ character and a culturally specific spin on the locked room mystery. I particularly enjoyed the references to other classic crime novels, including A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, which seems to be perpetually getting reprinted and never quite making it to mainstream awareness.

On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior
A non-fic that somebody here recommended to me, I think? It goes through different virtues and relates them to classic literature – from Persuasion to Huckleberry Finn – as well as a couple of more modern books that I didn’t know about. It’s quite an unfashionable idea, that we can learn to be better people from the books we read – and KSP is writing from a specifically Christian perspective – and I found it fascinating and edifying (which is another unfashionable compliment). She writes very well about literature, and equally well about moral behaviour.

Heap House by Edward Carey
This young adult trilogy is free on Audible at the moment, and my love of Carey made it a no-brainer. It’s a world where everyone connected to an exclusive family have ‘birth objects’ that range from a safety-pin to a huge piece of furniture – and there is one boy who can hear objects endlessly repeating mysterious names. There’s a whole lot more lore that I don’t have time to write, and the chapters alternate between this nervous boy and a charismatic girl – it’s very Carey in its oddness, and perhaps a bit more enveloping in its world creation than some of my favourite books of his.

Weird But Normal by Mia Mercado
I love a book of personal essays, particularly when they link individual experiences to wider cultural phenomena, and do it well. I’ll be honest, this collection was very good and immersive, but I now don’t remember any of the specifics (unlike, say, Emilie Pine’s Notes To Self or Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which are still with me many months/years later).

The Purgatory Poisoning by Rebecca Rogers
Since there are endless murder mysteries written (all branded to look like Richard Osman’s series), I suppose it was inevitable that one of them would be set in purgatory eventually? In Rogers’ novel, the protagonist has been murdered and has to work out from purgatory who did it. There’s a very likeable angel character, and it’s well written for this sort of thing, but the characters are quite annoying and the solution very obvious (and somehow, simultaneously, nonsensical). It won a prize for humour, but it wasn’t to my taste, humourwise.

Into the Dark by Jacqueline Yallop
I got this from the Big Green Bookshop’s clever idea of giving two strangers the same book, based on some criteria you send in. I loved the idea of Yallop’s book, looking at a cultural and scientific history of darkness, prompted by her father’s dementia. And it is fascinating. Into the Dark is so wide-ranging that often I wish she’d spent a bit more time on certain areas, and I would have liked more memoir/more about her father in it – but it is still a very good, interesting, unusual book and I’m glad the Bookshop chose it.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I loved this long novel about the longstanding friendship between a man and woman who are obsessed with video games – turning that obsession into a successful professional life. I’ve never played a video game, but was fascinated by Zevin’s exploration of their creation and development. Above all, this is a novel about friendship, which is an overlooked relationship in the history of literature – which, of course, has always privileged romantic relationships first. The only reason I haven’t written more about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow on here is because it’s so well-known already that I don’t have anything to add to the wider discussion. But it’s brilliant (and a gift from my dear friend Mel, who proves how important friendship is).

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
A young girl suddenly discovers that she can taste the feelings of a baker/cooker in the food they have produced. It’s a brilliant conceit that sort of spirals too far from its origin, and I enjoyed the book but not as much as I would have done if Bender had kept more tautly to the initial idea.

Project 24: Book Three

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We’re halfway through February, and that means I’m due another book under Project 24, right?

I was in London for a couple of days, and remembered about a lovely little bookshop called Walden Books, in Camden. I’ve only been there once before, in 2017, when I was also doing Project 24. Top of my agenda for 2026 is making sure I go there when I’m not restricted in my book-buying, as there seems to be a really good range of affordably priced books.

But I did not come away empty-handed, of course.

Jane Seth-Smith wasn’t a name I recognised, but I love the set up of multiple generations living together – and the copy was signed by Jane Seth-Smith, which is a fun bonus.

And then I discovered that Scott had reviewed this one a couple of years ago! It has tempered my expectations – it seems to be a fun novel, rather than a brilliant one – but perhaps exactly right for a certain mood.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Well, thank GOODNESS January is finally over. I can’t believe it was only a month. I feel like I’ve lived lifetimes in January, and none of them very good. Some of that I will share in due course, and other bits can be swept under the rug (and some is just things like spending a fortune on dentistry, which I suppose is all part of life when it’s impossible to find an NHS dentist). On the brighter side, I’ve read some wonderful books recently, none of which I have yet reviewed.

I hope your year has started better than mine! Though the world is feeling quite a dark, scary place at the moment. I’m largely deciding to go for denial and hiding this time around, as all the anger and sadness didn’t really help me or anybody else last time.

As ever, we can turn for some mild solace to a book, a blog post, and a link:

Three Men in New Suits by JB Priestley

1.) The blog post – I loved Rohan’s take on one of the more recent British Library Women Writers titles, Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts. And not just because she says nice things about my afterword!

2.) The link – this is actually another blog post, but I’m including as the link because it feels so much MORE than a blog post. Victoria/LitLove at Tales From The Reading Room has posted the first of (hopefully) a series of personal essays, and it’s simply extraordinarily good. This one looks back at her teen years, and it makes me very much hope a book comes eventually.

3.) The book – the Imperial War Museum emailed me recently about an upcoming reprint that sounds really interesting – J.B. Priestley’s Three Men in New Suits, about men returning from war. It’ll be out in April. They also have a backlist that I know very little about and which looks very interesting. Any recommendations?

Unnecessary Rankings! Daphne du Maurier

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While trying to think whom to cover for another Unnecessary Rankings! post, I was looking around my bookcases and alighted on Daphne du Maurier. She was prolific, and I’ve read quite a few of her books. But I am slightly wary – because I also haven’t read a fair number of her books. And there’s always the danger someone will reply “You haven’t read Jamaica Inn??” or something similar. Well no, dear reader, I have only read 10 of du Maurier’s books. And yet here we go, I’m going to rank them…

10. The Progress of Julius (1933)
Later reprinted as Julius, this novel about the rags-to-riches of a selfish, cruel man is fairly well-written – but I’ve put it last because I hated reading it. The whole thing just felt so antisemitic and I ended up feeling dirty reading it.

9. The Flight of the Falcon (1965)
There’s a reason you seldom hear anybody talking about this one. I found this story of two brothers getting to re-know each other in a beautiful Italian city interesting for the scenery, but otherwise pretty boring.

8. The Rebecca Notebook (1981)
The title essay of this slim collection is an outline of Rebecca and gives the sort of insight into its writing history that you wouldn’t normally get. It’s fascinating. But the other essays in the collection are more or less padding, and Daphne du Maurier doesn’t have a lot of interest to say about religion, but says it a fair few times.

7. The House on the Strand (1969)
The narrator, Dick Young, takes an experimental drug that transports him to the 14th century – where he follows the man who lived there then, Roger, and Isolda, married to a powerful local knight. Given my distaste for historical fiction, this was very much a mixed reception for me. I loved all the sections set in the present day, and was bored rigid by the 14-century stuff.

6. Short stories (various)
I’ve grouped all of these together, even though I’m sure there are some I haven’t read, as I’ve read a few collections and can’t remember what was where. ‘Don’t Look Now’ is deservedly famous, and I like all her stories that use creeping discomfort to create a gradual terror.

5. Frenchman’s Creek (1941)
This novel caused an infamous disagreement between me and Our Vicar’s Wife (aka my Mum) – when I reviewed it in 2012 and my Mum had a post the following day, defending the pirate! I maintain that the heroine and hero of this novel are horrible people, as she abandons a kind, good man to have an affair with a selfish man for whom ‘toxic masculinity’ could have been invented. But I can’t deny that it’s a very compelling and enjoyable read nonetheless.

4. Gerald: A Portrait (1934)
Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father is an absolute delight. It is incredibly subjective, of course, and many of the passed-down anecdotes about his early life are probably apocryphal – but what makes it wonderful are du Maurier’s beautiful writing and the way we are immersed into Gerald du Maurier’s life as an actor and theatre manager. Daphne du Maurier brings the theatrical world alive, and the whole book is a lovely, fascinating tribute.

3. The Scapegoat (1957)
You do have to swallow quite a lot of disbelief in the premise of this novel – an English man is forcibly swapped with his French doppelganger, and nobody in the strange new family seems to suspect anything – but, after that, it’s worth it. As a novel of mistaken identity it is great fun – as a novel about the legacy of France’s occupation, it is very moving.

2. My Cousin Rachel (1951)
Did she or didn’t she? No novel does ambiguity better than My Cousin Rachel, which has – at its heart – the culpability or otherwise of a young widow, in the eyes of the deceased man’s cousin, Philip. His mind goes back and forth, putting him deeper and deeper into indecision and torment. Du Maurier walks a tightrope with impeccable judgement, and it is the perfect book group book.

1. Rebecca (1938)
If I were feeling all contrarian, I’d put something else at the top – but the reason Rebecca is the best known is because it’s the best. The unnamed Second Mrs de Winter comes to Manderley as the much-younger new bride of Maxim de Winter, who throws her to the wolves in the form of du Maurier’s greatest creation – the haunting, formidable housekeeper Mrs Danvers. The twists and secrets keep you guessing, and it’s the perfect updating of the gothic novel – still as chilling and engaging now as it was all those decades ago.

What do you make of my rankings? And which of her other books should I prioritise?

O is for Oyeyemi

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

How has it been 2.5 years since I last added to this series? Time – and this is a thought I’d just come up with myself – flies. Anyway, as a reminder, I am very, very slowly going through the alphabet in my shelves, picking out an author I like an talking a bit more about my collection of their books. Some take up a lot of space (Leacock, Milne, Nichols having been a prolific run) – others are in rather shorter supply.

How many books do I have by Helen Oyeyemi?

As things currently stand, I have seven books by Oyeyemi – looking at my shelves, they are Peaces, Mr Fox, The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching, Boy, Snow, Bird and Gingerbread. Which just goes to show that I might alphabetise my shelves, but I’m not very good at putting books in publication order.

How many of these have I read?

VERY out of character, but I’ve read them all! I’ve even read a seventh book by Oyeyemi – her short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, but decided not to hold onto that one.

How did I start reading Helen Oyeyemi?

While The Icarus Girl came out in 2005, a couple of years before I started book blogging, I was pretty sure I was sent it as a review copy… maybe I got The Opposite House (2007) and asked for her first novel to be added too? Since then, she has been one of the rare living novelists that I’m a completist for – though have yet to get or buy her latest.

General impressions…

…having said the above, I’m not really sure where I stand on Oyeyemi now. I LOVE Boy, Snow, Bird and it is the book that comes to mind most often when people ask me to recommend a book to read – why that one is top of mind, I don’t know. I think Mr Fox and The Icarus Girl are brilliant. And all the others… I find a bit too confusing. Oyeyemi, for me is always hovering between interestingly experimental and totally baffling. To be honest, I thought I’d given Peaces and Gingerbread away, and I might do that now… I simply had no idea what was going on for most of the time I was reading those. In fact, this will be the first entry in this alphabet series where I end up with fewer books than when I started. Someone cleverer than me will enjoy those two books, and they’re heading now to my charity shop pile. I’ll keep the Oyeyemi books I love or like, and have some chance of re-reading.

Project 24: Books 1 and 2

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Project 24 is in full swing! If you missed it, it’s a year where I only buy 24 books for myself. This must be the fourth time I’ve done Project 24, at least, and it’s always a fun experiment in (a) seeing what priorities I make and (b) going slightly mad. I’ve already started dreaming about buying books. I wish I were joking.

It doesn’t take a mathematician to spot that 24 books in a year is two books a month – though, of course, sometimes a trip to a bookshop can use up a few months’ worth in one fell swoop.

As it is, we are nearing the end of January and I’ve already bought my first two books for the year – here they are:

First up is Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant. It’s been on my wishlist for a long time, ever since Handheld Press republished it – and it might have stayed there for a long time, except the Handheld Press closing down sale made me realise I’d better leap quickly. In a non-Project-24 year, I might have bought far more in the sale. Their catalogue is so wide-ranging that I never knew whether or not I’d like a book they published, but some of their choices were excellent and I have high hopes this will be among them.

And I wasn’t planning on getting The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick, an author who was only on my horizons as a guest on the Unburied Books podcast… but then Jacqui reviewed it. Well, if you can read that review and not order it immediately, then you’re a stronger person than me. I’m very into books in vignettes at the moment, and Daunt Books are always a safe bet for excellently chosen books – wide-ranging too, but impeccably picked. I instantly ordered it to my local Waterstones and here it is!

Normally I prioritise secondhand books during Project 24, because the chances of coming across particular books is obviously less guaranteed than if I can just order it from a bookshop next year – but I’m sure you can see why these two books HAD to end up my shelves.

I’ll keep you posted with my Project 24 choices, and I look forward to getting through some of the many hundreds of unread books on my shelves.

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

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I first came across Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul simply by browsing in Waterstones Piccadilly. It was on one of those display tables, and I was struck by how beautiful it was. Jonathan Cape have done a lovely job. It’s a chunky hardback with thick paper, and a striking photograph on the front from Celia Paul’s studio. Everything about it feels luxurious and artistic and interesting – but I didn’t know anything about Celia Paul or Gwen John, and so I felt I couldn’t indulge.

A few blog posts and instagram posts and whatnot later, it was firmly on my wishlist. My friend Clare bought it for my most recent birthday – and it was the perfect book to read in the period between Christmas and New Year. I absolutely loved it.

If, like me, you’re not familiar with Paul or John – Gwen John was an artist who lived 1876-1939. She grew up in Wales and later studied at the Slade School of Art, becoming one of the foremost female artists of her generation – indeed, many would argue simply one of the foremost artists.

Celia Paul, meanwhile, is an artist who is still painting today. She grew up in a vicarage and, like John, studied at the Slade School of Art and is (according to her author blurb) ‘recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today’. Importantly, she was born twenty years after Gwen John died – and so Letters to Gwen John is not a collection of letters as we might be most familiar with the concept. Rather, Paul is writing to a kindred spirit who will never read the letters or write back. It is an imagined sisterhood between women with a great amount in common.

Besides their profession, there is a significant commonality that Paul writes a lot about in this book: both women were associated with more famous, male artists. Gwen John’s brother, Augustus John, seems to have been very supportive – and she was in a relationship with (and model for) Auguste Rodin, who was 35 years older than her. Paul, meanwhile, had a ten-year relationship and a son with Lucian Freud – starting when she was 18 and he was in his mid-50s. This is not overtly a ‘me too’ story from Paul, but it’s hard to imagine any sexual relationship between an 18-year-old and a 55-year-old that doesn’t have, at the very least, a severe power imbalance.

Paul doesn’t shy away from the non-painting elements of their lives. Or, rather, much Letters to Gwen John explores how these preoccupations and the demands of powerful men can interfere with the main purpose of your life: your art. There is something both refreshing and shocking about the way she is clear that nothing – including her son – is allowed to interefere with her art. The brutality of her determination shouldn’t feel any more shocking because she is a woman – Lucian Freud certainly didn’t let paternity interfere with his work – except that she also fixates on the maternal guilt she feels.

I devoted myself to him at these times. I think he might have preferred it if I had been less intense and more casual, like the other mums he observed when he went round to friends’ houses, who spent a lot of time speaking on the phone or were preoccupied with housework. I didn’t spend much time on either of those things. My mother mostly shopped and cooked for us all. Generally the mothers of his friends didn’t leave home to go to work. Most of them didn’t work. I felt ashamed of my ambition, and I felt ashamed to be a single mum, I was ashamed of being younger than them. I couldn’t explain to most of them what my work involved. When I told one of them that I was a painter, she said, ‘That must be very relaxing.’ I know you were indignant when people reacted to your work with similar incomprehension. I didn’t feel indignant; again, I felt only shame. How could I excuse myself by saying that I often lay curled up on the floor of my studio, just thinking and planning and trying to quiet my soul, until I was focused enough to start work?

I appreciated the total honesty with which Paul writes. It felt genuinely like letters to a friend – letters that expose the soul, that are stumbling towards a philosophy. She exposes her self and her decisions with a mix of determination and uncertainty. Paul is sure that her art has been worth sacrificing everything to – and yet, simultaneously, unable to escape guilt. As she writes of John, in the sections between letters that are more exploratory biography: ‘Despite her apparent timidity, Gwen was always certain of her talent.’

This is the personal side of Letters to Gwen John – but what made me love the book so much was the way John treats her writing as the meeting of minds. There is so much about the artistic process in here – about the choices that can make or break a painting; about the rationale behind decisions and what composition or colouring are intended to convey. She writes often of the fear of ‘killing’ a painting, or of a painting ‘coming to life’. I loved how she combined very practical concerns – the exact paint colours she uses, and the techniques – with something much more nebulous.

I mixed Prussian Blue, Chrome Green, Vandyck Brown, Payne’s Grey and Brilliant Yellow and spread it in a thin layer across my willow tree. It already suggested water. But then I started to feel haunted by the loss of my tree, and I scraped off the grey layer of paint with this scraper that I’d bought from a hardware shop. It left horizontal lines across the image, suggestive of water, and my willow appeared like a ghostly reflection. I thought maybe I’d discovered a mystical new interpretation to a way of painting. I want to do more paintings of reflections in water. I thought I needed to intensify the gleaming highlights of the watery streaks across the tree. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I fear I may have killed it. It took all my courage to take it off the easel and place it, stretcher side out, against the wall. I’ll look at it again after a while.

One of the most special things about the luxury of this book is how many paintings – both by Paul and John – are reproduced. Often they are placed next to each other in a way that feels like a conversation between images. Paul’s self-portrait by John’s, for instance, or two domestic interiors. More paintings are discussed than included, unsurprisingly, so I did turn to Google images often – but it’s wonderful to have so many of the paintings that Paul writes about available to see in between chapters.

I enjoy painting sometimes but am certainly not an artist – yet I loved this glimpse into an imagined community, a sorority of artists who have had to battle forces external and internal – and who remained totally committed to their integrity and purpose as creative artists. Paul writes beautifully (annoyingly well for someone who is only latterly a writer!) and Letters to Gwen John is a special gem of a book.