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Announcing 4 New British Library Women Writers Novels!

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Sometimes you see news about an exciting book coming out, and then you realise you have a year to wait. Well, not today friends – I’m going to tell you about the four new British Library Women Writers novels, and two of them are coming out this month! And the other two are coming out next month! Basically what I’m saying is, put your preorders in now and you won’t have long before you can be knee-deep in these books. [In the UK, that is… they’re next year in other countries, I think, though of course you can ship them elsewhere.]

Obviously I love all the books in this series, and all but the first two have been titles I’ve suggested for reprinting – including these four – but this batch is particularly special to me. There is one book here that I’m particularly excited to see people discovering. ANYWAY on with the announcement…

Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

This is the one I’m most thrilled about, I think – because it had disappeared almost completely before this edition, and deserves to be so much more widely known. You might remember I raved about it last year, and it ended up on my favourite books of 2020.

Sally is a delightful heroine, coming back to her childhood village with the prospect of marrying the local bank manager – but gets in a love triangle with a widow. The thing I love is that the women aren’t pitted against each other – they both agree that the bank manager is awful, but want the security that comes with a ring – and play fair to see who’ll win. It’s such a joyful, funny novel, but also one with a lot to say about the situation of women in the 1910s.

Which Way? by Theodora Benson

I had only been able to read this in the Bodleian Library before – it has hitherto been very hard to find, and is a wonderfully innovative novel – especially for its time, the 1930s. The heroine is invited to three different weekends away – and the novel is split into sections looking at what would have happened if she had taken those three different invitations. It’s cleverly and engagingly done.

A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse

I know this novel has long been on people’s wishlists to be reprinted, and I was so happy when the clever people at the British Library managed to secure the rights. It’s a fictionalised version of the Thompson/Bywaters case – but you don’t need me to persuade you it’s brilliant, as coincidentally Lucy Scholes has just written a wonderful piece about it in the Paris Review.

The Love Child by Edith Olivier

If you’ve been reading StuckinaBook for a while, you’ve probably seen me mention this one – it was one of the first titles I suggested to the British Library, and I’m delighted that it’s now on the list. One of my favourite books, it was also one of the central texts for my DPhil – so you can imagine I had a lot to say in the afterword. In the novel, Agatha is a lonely spinster who accidentally conjures her imaginary childhood best friend Clarissa into life. What starts out a joyful bizarrity becomes something darker as a power struggle develops. It’s a super short novel, so we’ve also included excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography in the book.

So glad to tell you all about these now – which appeals the most??

Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

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I’m slipping into the final hours of Women in Translation Month with Dry Season (2015) by Gabriela Babnik – originally in Slovenian, and translated by Rawley Grau. It won the European Union Prize for Literature, and is the final of the EUPL books I requested when I was asked by them to review some current and previous winners. As usual, more info at the bottom of this post.

I chose this one largely because one of my close friends in Slovenian and I’ve always intended to try some literature from her homeland – though Babnik’s novel is actually set in Burkina Faso, where a 62-year-old Slovenian woman called Ana is being a tourist. Early in the novel, she meets a young man from Burkina Faso called Ismael – though ‘meets’ is perhaps the wrong word, since he first sees her as somebody he might be able to mug.

Their motivations aren’t clear at first. When Ismael rejects his partner in crime’s suggestion that he grabs Ana’s bright yellow bag, it initially looks like he has decided to play the long con. Ana initially seems like a bit of a fool – exposing herself to dangers on the streets of Burkina Faso, without taking any precautions over her possessions or potentially her life. She is there to escape something – perhaps simply to escape her humdrum life, though the more we learn about her background the more we realise that dark secrets linger there.

And dark secrets linger similarly in Ismael’s past – not least what happened to his young brother. The present day scenes of the novel are interspersed with both of them thinking back to the past – we are jolted to the unsavoury activities under a lone bridge, or inadequate parents, or long forgotten antagonisms resurfacing. As Dry Season continues, the reader realises that these two characters have a lot more in common than it first appears.

This is driven home by the fact that all the novel is told in the first person, but we are given no warning when we shift between Ana and Ismael. Often it takes a while for us to realise who is speaking, or which period we are in. Dividing lines blur and fade continually. This section was one of the most disconcerting, because it describes something graphic and we don’t know who the victim is (content warning of sexual assault):

It happened so fast I had no time to think. He lay down next to me, took off my trousers and, with an adult hand, touched my thighs. I froze; everything in me froze. If I had been awake and the man had approached me in broad daylight, I would have said it did not happen. But his hand travelled up to my most intimate part and there was no way that it did not happen.

Dry Season is an intriguing mix of tones. On the one hand, the haziness and rejection of solid boundaries feels almost fairy-talesque, and there are moments of magical realism that seem to link to Burkina Faso folk tales. On the other hand, the whole novel feels quite sordid. Sex permeates the book, and both characters often think the phrase ‘he put it in me’ or ‘I put it in her’ as the sole description of the act, usually sans affection. Dirt – literal dirt – recurs, as the infant Ismael used to eat handfuls of it. Nothing is sanitised here, and when I finally landed on the word ‘sordid’, it did tie together a lot of the novel for me. It was an interesting, rather than a pleasant, read. I should add, I felt pretty uncomfortable about the racism in the novel – often from the perspective of characters, or received by Ismael, but I’m not sure there’s any excuse in 2015 for a white author to be using the n-word in her writing. Perhaps it doesn’t carry the same weight in whatever the Slovenian word is.

Ana and Ismael are intriguing characters, well-drawn with many layers, and Dry Season is an ambitious and complex novel. Not a cosy read by any means, but an accomplished one.

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

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My book group does a Secret Santa every year at our Christmas meal. Everybody wraps a book and puts it in a bag, and you pick one out. They’re not chosen specially for you, but I’ve come away with some great things in the past – notably, it introduced me to David Sedaris. It has also introduced me, now, to Jeanette Winterson – three years ago I got The Gap of Time (2015), which is a retelling of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, The Winter’s Tale. Or a ‘cover version’, in the parlance of this edition – with a handy synopsis of the play at the beginning, for those who aren’t familiar with it.

It starts with a short section where an unnamed narrator witnesses a man being pulled from a car and beaten to death. Yikes! And then he and his son see something at the nearby hospital, where his wife had died.

And that’s when I see it. The light.

The BabyHatch is lit up.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected – the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

Because there is a baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body’s in slow motion. The child’s asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I’ve got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she’s as light as a star.

Then we zoom back a little while to discover how the baby got there, and the plot does indeed closely follow The Winter’s Tale, albeit modernised in various ways. Leontes is Leo, a hedge fun manager who is rich and ruthless and rather too emotional to think about his actions properly. Hermione is MiMi, a French singer who is beautiful and fairly famous – and, as the novel opens, pregnant with the baby we will later see in the BabyHatch. Polixenes is Xeno, a video game designer – who is working on a game called The Gap of Time, in one of the few strands of the novel that I didn’t think was particularly successful.

As with Shakespeare’s play, Leo manages to convince himself that MiMi and Xeno are having an affair – and, indeed, that the baby is Xeno’s. Winterson convincingly makes him as impervious to reason as Shakespeare manages with Leontes – he has the same passions that cannot be calmed, and the same power that can turn those passions into deadly action. Interestingly, in a twist on the original that works very well and almost beguilingly, Xeno is rather lovelorn over one of the couple – but it isn’t MiMi. He is sexually very fluid, but it’s Leo who has his heart.

One thing leads to another, and Leo’s self-destructiveness sees the baby left at a hospital – but adopted by our narrator from that opening section. The second section of the novel sees Perdita retain her name from the play, though some elements of the plot have been changed since Shakespeare’s reliance on flimsy disguise and near-incest don’t translate quite as well to the twenty-first century.

I really loved this novel. Having not read any of her fiction before, I’d rather got the impression that it would be bitter and spiky and earnest. The Gap of Time certainly isn’t – there is a lovely playfulness and elegance to it, where she is having fun with the task of updating Shakespeare but also borrowing his ability to make sentences both amusing and profound.

You never feel the weight of the Bard looking over her shoulder – with the exception of when she echoes some of Shakespeare’s more idiotic comedy; the stuff that was thrown into the originals to delight the people stood in the cheapest spots.

‘[…]he found that Thebes was being terrorISed, TErrorised, terrORised – like having the Mafia come to stay – by this creature called the Sphinx.’

‘Sphinx? Isn’t that underwear?’

‘Spanx is underwear. The Sphinx was a woman – you the type: part monster, part Marilyn Monroe.’

It’s a good impersonation of the bits of Shakespeare’s plays that I tend to glaze over for – and just as glazable-overable here.

I think the first half and the final section, when we are back with Leo et al, were the most successful – I got less out of the middle bit, where we are introduced to a new and bigger cast, none of whom are quite as well defined or as interesting. But overall, her updating is both clever and engaging. The main mark of its achievement is that I would recommend The Gap of Time even to people who’d never read or heard a word of The Winter’s Tale – and it has certainly made me keen to read more by Winterson, if she is on this form elsewhere.

Sun City by Tove Jansson – #WITMonth

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I bought Sun City by Tove Jansson in 2007, at which point there wasn’t that much of Jansson’s work available in English. This was one of two novels that had been translated in the ‘70s, and then she had languished – until Sort Of Books started their noble work of publishing translations by Thomas Teal. Teal was also the translator back in the day, and did Sun City – so I knew I was in good hands with him when I finally took this off the shelf. To be honest, I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of running out of Jansson things to read – but if not for Women in Translation month, then when?

The setting of Sun City sets it apart from Jansson’s other books, and perhaps helps explain why it was picked for translating into English first. Rather than her usual Finnish islands or towns, we are in St Petersburg, Florida – at an old people’s home called the Berkeley Arms. The residents are mostly American, and it’s a world away from where Jansson spent her life. (I’ve read two biographies of Jansson and I still can’t remember if she visited America, but I’m almost certain she wasn’t there for any extended period.)

While Sun City was only Jansson’s second novel, she was already 60 by the time it was published (1974) – not old, but also not looking at this retirement home through the callous eyes of youth. The newest resident is Elizabeth Morris, intelligent and reserved and a little unsure about her new community, and it looks at one point like she might be the protagonist – but this becomes very much an ensemble piece. Much of the ‘action’ takes place in the rocking chairs outside, which are strictly assigned to individual residents, in practice if not in theory (‘To move your rocking chair is an unforgivable insult in St Petersburg […] Only death could move the rocking chairs in St Petersburg’).

Mrs Elizabeth Morris of Great Island, Nebraska, seventy-seven years old, had the second rocking chair from the railing by the big magnolia. Next to the magnolia was Mr Thompson, who pretended to be deaf, and on the other side was Miss Peabody, who was very shy. So Mrs Morris could sit and think in peace. She had come to St Petersburg several weeks earlier, alone, with a sore throat, and once at the Berkeley Arms her voice disappeared completely. On a page from a notebook Mrs Morris had supplied information about her name, her condition, and some antique furniture that was to arrive later. Silence protected her from the reckless need to confide in other people that can be so dangerous at the end of a long, lonely journey.

If you’re familiar with Jansson’s writing, you’ll recognise her tone – certainly in sentences like that last one. I like that the long, lonely journey could either be the one that has brought her from Nebraska to Florida, or could simply describe her life. It feels like familiar Jansson territory in the writing, if not the setting.

Sun City continues in an episodic way. An estranged spouse of one of the residents turns up; a couple of residents die; there is a trip away from the Berkeley Arms. There is also drama among the people working there, particularly one in a relationship with an eccentric young man who believes Jesus will soon return and is waiting to be collected by a fringe Christian organisation.

A lot of Jansson’s writing is episodic. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about whether her most famous work for adults, The Summer Book, is a novel or a series of interlinking short stories. Sun City is definitely a novel, but what makes it feel a bit different from her other work, and perhaps a little less successful, is that the moments that happen are all a little overly dramatic. It feels like, in transferring her canvas to America, Jansson has taken on board the idea that everything in America is bigger: the events are bigger, the reactions are bigger, the potentials for change are bigger. I have to be honest, I missed the gentleness of her Scandinavian backdrop, where lives are no less full but somehow the stakes seem to be lower.

If this were my first novel by Jansson, I’ve no doubt I’d have wanted to read more. Her sentences are still beautiful and insightful, and the partnership with Teal is reliably great – but the good news for people looking to explore Jansson is that the best stuff is already in print, in translation. This is an enjoyable coda, but Jansson is at her finest on her Finnish island.

4 good books and 1 piece of fluff

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It’s one of those times where my pile of ‘to review’ books has got a bit teetering, so I’m going to write a little bit about five books I’ve read recently. And ‘recently’ goes back several months in some of these cases. They’re all books that I enjoyed to some extent, and some that were really brilliant – but, yes, one of them is a completely inconsequential piece of fluff.

One Apple Tasted by Josa Young

This was actually a gift from the author, for which many thanks. It takes places in three timelines – which start in1939, 1958, and 1982. We kick off in the most recent of these, where the excellently named Dora Jerusalem meets Guy Boleyn – a flirty, easy, charming man who bowls her over. Dora may not be flirty, easy, or charming but she is determined and scrupulous – and one of her scruples is about not having sex before marriage. And so Guy proposes to her…

The earlier periods are involving for their own reasons, but also gradually come together to show us the background to these two lives. I thought, at first, we’d be dashing between the three timelines – but they are mostly sequential, with sustained periods getting to know the characters in each section. One Apple Tasted reminded me quite a lot of Eva Rice’s writing, and that is certainly a good thing – I really enjoyed reading this.

The Familiar Faces by David Garnett

Garnett was one of the main authors in my DPhil – or, rather, his first novel Lady Into Fox was one of my main novels. I dipped into bits of his autobiographies at the time, but have never actually read one of them – and I started here, with volume three. He has only just published that first novel as the autobiography opens, and I am far more interested in his life as a writer than in anything that came before.

I loved this book. Garnett is not always a very nice person, as I gleaned from Sarah Knights’ biography of him – and, yes, he is very callous in this book when hinting at his extramarital affairs, even while his wife is seriously ill with the cancer that would later kill her. But he is very good at detailed portraits of people he knew – and, as the title The Familiar Faces suggests, this is more about snapshots of his friends and acquaintances than about his own life. Among them are Dorothy Edwards, T.E. Lawrence and George Moore. He certainly gives the rough with the smooth, and these are never hagiographies. And heaven help anyone who crossed him and gets the bitchier side of his writing. Here he is on Hugh Walpole…

A year or two before Moore’s death I received one of the very few letters that Hugh Walpole ever wrote me. It was to say that ferreting about in the Charing Cross Road he had bought the inscribed copy of The Sailor’s Return which I had presented to George Moore and he was writing to ask if I would mind his keeping it, hinting that it had been unworthy of Moore to sell it. Walpole’s letter oozed malice. Quite obviously it was written to wound my vanity and to estrange me from the friend who had helped me to whom I had dedicated my story. It failed in its effect.

High Rising by Angela Thirkell

A while ago I decided to read through all of Thirkell’s novels in order. I’ve managed to read one in six months, so it’s going about as well as any structured reading project goes with me.

The novel is about Laura Morland, a writer of middling sorts of books, and her neighbourhood – specifically her neighbour George Knox, whose new secretary might be suspect, and his daughter Sibyl, who is looking for an engagement. And there’s her schoolboy son Tony, whom she seems largely to despise but in a way that I can fully recognise is warranted.

I thought this was a lot of fun. Laura is on the borderline between likeable and snobby/arrogant, but it’s a line that gives the novel some realism in the midst of its gossipy village plot. It’s very identifiably Thirkell from the off, and I fully intend to continue the project thought it may take the rest of my life.

Chedsy Place by Richmal Crompton

I blitzed through an enormous number of Richmal Crompton novels almost two decades ago, but still have quite a few on my shelves waiting to be read – sometimes I think I read all the best ones early on, but Chedsy Place was very fun. Chedsy Place is an ancestral mansion that the new inheritor can’t afford to live in – though he is certainly fond of it from his childhood days there. His enterprising wife decides they should temporarily open it up to paying guests – he is reluctant, but they go for it. We don’t see an awful lot of this husband and wife after that…

Crompton loves an enormous cast of characters, and I’m sure I was better at keeping them in my mind when I was a teenager than I can deal with now. Luckily they are listed somewhere, so I could make little notes alongside to remind me. And there are types to whom Crompton often returns – including the dominant/subordinate pair of women who are emotionally too involved with each other, who appear in almost all her novels under different names.

Added to this, there’s a psychic novelist, a lady with dementia, a lady who wears tweed and complains, a blind man who resents his wife, an ineffectual vicar, a couple who love crosswords, twin sisters looking for romance, a common woman with badly dyed hair, a woman who is described as ‘sloe-eyed’ almost every time she appears… and so on and so on. There are 29 main characters, and it is rather dizzying. Some of them are described with a casual unkindness that wouldn’t be published today, but in general I found the novel an engaging and fun maze of not particularly detailed characters having fairly high emotions and very low stakes – for the reader, at least.

Improper Prue by Winifred Boggs

And, finally, for the piece of fluff. Yes, even fluffier than Chedsy Place. Ever since reading the brilliant Sally on the Rocks, I’ve been hunting down other Winifred Boggs novels – and some of her titles are such a delight, like this one. And, indeed, Prue is a delight – she is everything you could want from a witty, flighty heroine. Her dialogue is a joy, never taking anybody particularly seriously and yet with an underlying decency – e.g. her closest friend is an older woman called Jane, largely ignored by the world and revitalised by Prue’s affections.

Then she heads off to a lengthy house party, peopled by any number of eligible and ineligible men. Everything gets a little gothic in its heightened emotions, and proposals abound – there’s even a murder. The whole thing is very silly – entertaining, but absolutely impossible to have any real emotional investment in what’s happening. Curiously, Sally on the Rocks is a very insightful and thoughtful look at women’s lives in the 1910s – while also being great fun – whereas the other novels I’ve read by her (including this one) have been gossamer light and not remotely thoughtful. So, still fun to read – leaving more or less nothing in the mind, and a smile on the face.

The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

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Mary Lawson’s latest novel is on the longlist for the Booker Prize. Seeing her name there finally prompted me to read the novel she was longlisted for in 2006 – and which I bought in 2009: The Other Side of the Bridge.

I first read Lawson with the novel Crow Lake, which I heard about on Margaret’s blog – and I reviewed it back in the first year my blog existed. Somehow it was a long time between drinks, but it’s testimony to keeping books on your shelves even if you haven’t managed to get to them for more than a decade. The Other Side of the Bridge is a wonderful read.

It’s set in rural north Ontario, in a fictional town called Struan. In winter, a few minutes outside is enough to chill the marrow in your bones. A trip to Toronto is possible, but in the two timelines we see here – the mid 1930s, and a generation later in the 50s – the community is pretty self-sufficient. The most important professions are farmer and doctor – and there aren’t a whole lot of other professions.

In the 1930s timeline, Arthur and Jake are farmer’s sons locked in a battle that at least one of them doesn’t understand. Arthur is the older – adept at farming but poor at school, stuck going because of his mother’s ambitions that it will help him have opportunities. The way he is described is often animalistic – slow, broad, heavy. But he is thoughtful and kind, and quietly sensitive – he knows that his father won’t ever do anything courageous, and he knows that his mother loves Jake more than Arthur.

Jake is quick-witted, intelligent – and seemingly cruel. As a child, he loves to get Arthur in trouble with his lies – cajoling him into hitting a boy Jake alleges is bullying him, which turns out not to be true. He fakes danger, calling again and again for Arthur’s help – until Arthur believes Jake is really in danger, and Jake can laugh at him for his gullibility.

It’s this ‘boy who cried wolf’ that leads to the defining moment of their lives together – tied up with the bridge of the title. ‘The other side’ is not simply getting away from Struan – it is the other side of the day where the bridge played its role in a devastating incident. I shan’t spoil.

In the 1950s – alternate chapters dip between the two – the focus is on Ian, the doctor’s son. He is intelligent and pensive. Everybody assumes he will follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor – but as a teenager he gets a weekend job at a farm instead. Arthur is the farmer now, married to Laura and father of three. Two women define Ian’s life: his resentment of the mother who left his family, and his silent adoration of Laura. At night, he goes to watch the house – content just to see Laura walk across the room, and be near the life she is living.

The Other Side of the Bridge is a slow, immersive novel. It reminded me a lot of Barbara Kingsolver, though with perhaps less visual description of the natural world. In Struan, the natural world isn’t considered for its beauty – only its practicalities. But Lawson is just as good as Kingsolver at the depths of human relationships in a small community, and the gradual consequences of actions that might sprawl over decades. Even sudden changes are not cut and dried – Lawson expertly shows how the tendrils of each big moment can creep through the years. Her writing is so subtle and perceptive.

In this community, few people leave and few people come – except in wartime, which comes in the earlier timeline. In the later timeline, Ian is weighing up whether to stay or go. Here’s a long chunk of a section where he’s talking with his girlfriend, Cathy:

“We’re going to miss it, you know,” she said.

“Miss what?”

“All this.” She gestured at the dark wooden booths with their stained red-plastic-cushioned seats, the red Formica tables, the walls festooned with photos of happy fishermen holding up big fish. Paper place mats with more fish swirling about the edges, fishing lines coming out of their mouths. Above the door to the toilets there was a three-foot-long muskie, stuffed and nailed to the wall.

“When we’re older, we’ll look back at this place and realise it was beautiful.”

“Harper’s” Ian said.

“Even Harper’s,” Cathy said earnestly. “We’ll look back and we’ll realise that our childhoods were beautiful, and everything in them was beautiful, right down to…” she looked about her, “right down to the holes in these cushions. We’ll realise that Struan was the most wonderful place in the world to grow up in. We’ll realise that wherever we go, wherever we live for the rest of our lives, it will never be as perfect as here.”

A little worm of irritation rose up in Ian from somewhere about mid-chest. “Maybe we’d better not go,” he said, twisting his mouth in a smile.

[…]

“But we have to go,” Cathy leaned towards him earnestly.

“We don’t have to go. Most of the kids we started school with aren’t going.”

“Yes, but people like us have to go. You know that.”

I love the steady beauty of this novel, and my only criticism is that the pacing gets a little awry towards the end – things more a little too quickly, in both timelines, and it felt a bit like Lawson lost confidence in keeping the narrative going at its gentle pace. It felt like portraits that had been built up of minute brushstrokes being finished off a little impressionistically. Though this wasn’t ideal, it didn’t spoil the reading experience – I still finished wondering at her ability to create such a nuanced world, more truthful than any cosy countryside or any Hardy-esque rural misery. Actually, that is what Lawson does best: truth. The Other Side of the Bridge is such a powerfully constructed world that it feels a little blasphemous to suggest that Struan isn’t really there somewhere, still living the legacy of the actions of men and women half a century or more ago.

Tea or Books? #97: Spontaneous or Planned Reading, and Tension vs Thank Heaven Fasting

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How do we choose our reading, and E.M. Delafield – welcome to episode 97!

 

In the first half of the episode, we debate whether to read spontaneously or plan our reading. In the second half, two E.M. Delafield novels vie against each other: Tension, recently reprinted in the British Library Women Writers series, and Thank Heaven Fasting.

Do get in touch if you have any suggestions for future episodes, or questions for the middle section – teaorbooks@gmail.com. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your podcast app of choice etc, and can support the podcast at Patreon.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Consequences by E.M. Delafield
The Way Things Are by E.M. Delafield
The Solange stories by F Tennyson Jesse
Mrs Alfred Sidgwick
The Hills Sleep On by Joanna Cannan
A Lion, A Mouse, and a Motor-Car by Dorothea Townshend
The Glass Wall by E.M. Delafield
Love Has No Resurrection by E.M. Delafield
The Gap of Time of Jeanette Winterson
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
Barbara Kingsolver
Miss Bunting by Angela Thirkell
Love at All Ages by Angela Thirkell
The Duke’s Daughter by Angela Thirkell
Festival at Farbridge by J.B. Priestley
The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart
P.D. James
The Shelf by Phyllis Rose
Sun City by Tove Jansson
Agatha Christie
Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh
Georges Simenon
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
Where There’s Love, There’s Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mary Webb
Faster! Faster! by E.M. Delafield
The War Workers by E.M. Delafield
The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby
Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell

British Library Women Writers: now available as audiobooks!

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This is some exciting news I didn’t know was coming – six of the British Library Women Writers series are now available as audiobooks!

I’ve got really into audiobooks in the past 18 months. Well, before that – when I had a long commute – I’d started listening to them in the car. But they came into their own for all those long, solitary lockdown walks. And now I might just have to get hold of one of these new releases. Isis Audio are producing them, and I’ve borrowed the above image from them.

At the moment, the six books available are:

  • Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
  • The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair
  • Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
  • Father by Elizabeth von Arnim
  • My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes
  • Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

The narrators are Penelope Freeman, Julia Franklin, Patience Tomlinson, and Jilly Bond. I think it’s probably easiest to find them by searching in your audiobook app of choice. I don’t know if others in the series are coming out as audiobooks (fingers crossed!) – I’d love to hear from you if you give any of these a try.

Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley

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If you look at Jane’s 2010 review of Love in the Sun (1939) by Leo Walmsley, you’ll see a comment from me saying that I’d like to read it. And, indeed, I bought a copy in 2012, still remembering Jane’s enthusiasm and how wonderful the novel sounded. Recently for my book group, I read The Village News by Tom Fort – there’s a chapter that mentions Walmsley a lot, and so 2021 finally became the year when he got his moment in the sun(!) Now read Love in the Sun, I can report that it is just as wonderful as Jane says.

I’ve done a bit of background reading online now, and haven’t quite worked out how autobiographical Love in the Sun is, nor how it relates to Walmsley’s earlier novels – but all of that can be put to one side to enjoy what this is: the story of a couple who’ve fled a financial crisis in Yorkshire, arriving in Cornwall with almost no money.

St Jude is a seaport in South Cornwall. It lies near the mouth of a small river, the Pol, whose estuary, shut in on all sides by high land, affords a safe, deep-water anchorage to ships of considerable size. The town itself, while small, straggles along a mile and a half of waterfront, its main street widening out here and there into wharves and jetties. This street continues through the old town into a residential area of hotels, boarding-houses and modern villas, becomes a parade, and ends near the sea in public pleasure gardens, with a golf course extending along the coastline.

[…]

It was the afternoon of a Christmas day that I, a Yorkshireman and a stranger, arrived on foot in St Jude, and, from one of those quays that break its straggling main street, had my first view of its harbour. That view was not specifically attractive. It did not encourage the hope that I was near the end of my peculiar quest: least of all did it suggest the beginning of a great adventure.

And perhaps it isn’t a great adventure, in the literary sense of the word. The plot of the novel is steady and simple, and all the more immersive for that. The narrator and his partner (they are not married because he still has a wife, but this is an incidental strand of the novel) fend for themselves by setting up home in a cheaply-rented old hut. Rain pours through the roof on the first night, when a storm seems almost to remove any possibility of staying. But gradually, resourcefully they make the hut into a home – they start growing vegetables, they adopt a visiting cat. In their quiet cove, they have idyllic beauty in front of them – and anxiety alongside, since they don’t know how they will survive with almost no income.

The solution is for the narrator to write a book, and it was fascinating to follow this process – aggravating at first, because he seemed so certain of its success. And, indeed, he is ultimately published – but the feelings he goes through after his first emotionless rejection are feelings that I recognise 70 years later! The development of his manuscript is perhaps the closest this novel comes to adventure. Unless you count some cat drama, which (thinking about it) gave me more tension than most tales of humans in peril.

Love in the Sun is lovely because it is authentic and beautifully realised, in all its day-by-day details. Walmsley is also wonderful at depicting this corner of Cornwall, making me ache to visit it. But the novel certainly isn’t a sweet tale of escaping somewhere beautiful. Even if it weren’t for the financial difficulties, the community are pretty lukewarm to the new residents – partly because they are new, but also because they are unmarried and eccentric. The narrator and his wife don’t seem unduly concerned about their reception, and it isn’t a dark thread of the book – rather, this is a story of solitary struggles and progress, not a saccharine story. Having said that, there is an unlikely friendship along the way, which is rather touchingly done.

The narrator, whom I think is unnamed but could be misremembering, is certainly the dominant character – but I think Walmsley’s portrayal of the partner is good too. She does have a name – Dain. Dain shares the same vision, capable work ethic and determination of the narrator, with just enough differences to make them work well together – she has a touch more romance, a little more optimism, a bit more willingness to see the best in people. If it is autobiographical, it is an affectionate portrait that still feels honest and accurate.

This novel is relatively long, but it felt even longer – in a good way. Like when I read L.P. Hartley’s brilliant novel The Boat, it’s the slow and steady pace of the novel that helps make it a beautiful reading experience. One to luxuriate in, even if it took me more than a decade to get to it after reading Jane’s review. And, you know… there are two sequels…

So, I bought some books in Hay-on-Wye

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I spent Saturday in Hay-on-Wye – the bookshop town in Wales, as I’m sure you know. I was meeting up with some friends who moved to Wales near the beginning of the pandemic, and it was wonderful to hang out. It was also wonderful to dive into the bookshops.

A few months shut really meant the shops had had a good sort out – fewer piles of books on the floor etc. And I think I came away with my best ever haul. Seventeen books, many of which I was really excited to find.

I’ll divide into authors I know and authors I’m going to experiment with – starting with the familiar faces, who make up most of the books I got…

The Glass Wall by E.M. Delafield
Love Has No Resurrection by E.M. Delafield
The biggest excitement was seeing some very hard-to-find E.M. Delafield books in the window of Addyman Annexe. They initially went right back in the window, as they’re a bit pricey – but I couldn’t leave them there. Thankfully everything else was very reasonable.

The Solange Stories by F. Tennyson Jesse
I’ve just finished a re-read of A Pin To See the Peepshow, so was really pleased to find some short stories I hadn’t heard about – and they look to be detective stories, which is really fun.

The Freaks of Mayfair by E.F. Benson
I’ve got a lot of unread EFB books on my shelves, but for a couple of quid I added another.

The Stiffsons and other stories by Herbert Jenkins
This week, I did decide to part with my Bindle books – I tried one and the Cockerney dialect was more than I could stomach – but they’ll be replaced with this more promising looking book.

The Hills Sleep On by Joanna Cannan
An author you may well know from her Persephone book Princes in the Land – I looked this up afterwards and it seems I was very lucky to find it. Must actually read it…

Download Echoes by V.L. Whitechurch
I have only read a couple of Whitechurch’s novels, but really like him so was delighted to find another. The Cinema Bookshop truly had amazing stock in this time.

Rude Forefathers by Ursula Bloom
Ursula Bloom – known to readers of the British Library Women Writers series as Mary Essex – wrote quite a few volumes of autobiography, I think. This seems as good a place to start as anywhere.

Son of Amittai by Robert Nathan
It’s rare to find Robert Nathan novels in the UK, so this was a nice surprise. Son of Amittai seems to be based on Jonah from the Bible, which I’m a little on the fence about as a topic, but we’ll see.

Odd Come Shorts by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick
Mr Sheringham and Others by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick
I’ve only read one novel by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick – Cynthia’s Way – but I enjoyed that enough to keep amassing more of her books. Though maybe she isn’t as rare a find as I’d thought, so I don’t need to snatch up every one I see…

Tish by Mary Roberts Rinehart
This was initially in my ‘authors I’ve not read’ section, but when I googled it I realised I have read Rinehart’s mystery novel The Circular Staircase. Tish looks like it’s about an eccentric older woman – my favourite genre – and possibly the second in a series?

A Lion, A Mouse, and A Motor Car by Dorothea Townshend
The first of the authors I haven’t read before – though grabbed this eagerly off the shelf. You might have read Scott’s review of it the other day, in which he made it sound wonderful but also said no copies were available anywhere in the world online. Imagine my delight when I found it in that brilliant Cinema Bookshop.

Cottage Loaf by A.A. Thomson
Not gonna lie, I picked this up because the initials made me think of A.A. Milne. There were quite a few by this author, and I picked one with a title I liked – I don’t even know if Thomson is a man or a woman. Well, I’ve just googled and he is a man who is mostly known for his books about cricket. Fingers crossed it’s a good’un…

The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner
Givner apparently wrote a biography about Katherine Anne Porter – I don’t know it, nor have I read Porter, but my recent reading of Dreaming of Rose by Sarah LeFanu has whetted my appetite to read more behind-the-scenes books about being a biographer.

Fever of Love by Rosamond Harcourt-Smith
I’m always on the look-out for potential BLWW authors – this one has a terrible cover and title, but the description of gradually swapping husbands, and the writing I read, are a bit more promising.

Simon Learns to Live by Mary Mitchell
Well, I couldn’t leave behind that title, could I?