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British Library Women Writers #7: O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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Right, I’m up to date with British Library titles now! This is the one I’m most excited to have brought back into print – I only read it for the first time last year, but O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith is a novel I know I’ll cherish forever. And the interesting thing is, looking at reviews elsewhere online and in the comments and emails I’ve had about it – a lot of people love this book for their whole lives. I’ve seen so many people say they read it many decades ago, and have come back to it time and again.

It’s a coming of age story for a young girl called Ruan, whose love of the moors is what sustains her through pain and grief and uncertainty. I’ve compared it to I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters, but quite a few people have compared it to Jane Eyre more recently. It is certainly quite sombre and poignant, though there are comic moments, and it’s one of the most enveloping novels I’ve ever read. I shan’t repeat my whole review, since I wrote it less than a year ago – head over here to read the whole thing about why I love it so much.

Oh, and I got to talk to two of Smith’s grandsons while putting together the author bio and afterword. That was such a privilege. It was quite hard to find something to say in the afterword except that I loved it, but in the end I wrote about clothing. But mostly about how much I love it.

Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

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I bought a couple of books by Winifred Boggs, as she sounded like the sort of author I’d like, from the scant information I could find online – and the gamble has paid off. Sally on the Rocks, from 1915, is a really wonderful book with a heroine I won’t forget in a hurry.

Winifred Boggs starts us with the sort of village community that has been the basis for many of the great works of literature. Little Crampton is an insular world, assured of its own superiority, and not necessarily very welcoming to outsiders. But how few outsiders would be interested in it, because any village would be equally convinced that it is the first and best village in its region. Little Crampton is ruled over by Miss Maggie Hopkins – an unofficial position, but her gossiping, her rigid adherence to morality when it can shame others, and her determination to root out the truth in any situation mean that she is feared and also a vital source of information.

As the novel opens, she writes to Sally, hinting that the curate, Mr Bingley, is looking for a wife. ”He’s so safe, and of course there’s the house and ‘perks’, as well as the fifteen hundred,” she writes, none too subtly. It is enough to bring Sally back to the village where she grew up, adopted by the vicar Mr Lovelady, who is still in residence but hears little from his ward. She is in France, wary of the probable coming invasion – for the war is underway – and she has is licking the wounds of an unsuccessful love affair. She comes back to Little Crampton.

As she says, ”You’re not out for romance at thirty-one; it’s a business.” She is truly fond of Mr Lovelady, but she does not want to end up dependent on him – rather, she sets her cap at Mr Bingley and is willing to do whatever it takes to become his wife. All is fair in love and war, perhaps – but there is neither love nor war here. It is a woman who has been broken by the world seeking to play the world’s rules against themselves. She is like a much more likeable Becky Sharp. She doesn’t seek power or position – just stability.

Sally on the Rocks is wonderfully feminist at many junctures. I shan’t spoil all the plot, but Sally’s lover from France comes back. When Sally is asked, by her ex-inamorato, if she can forgive him, she replies:

”There is no question of that, only you are a little illogical, aren’t you? You are to be permitted to forget, but never I. Yet you have paid no price. Your wife forgave you and married you just the same, as women, wise or foolish, do the whole world over. You look at the matter one way and I the other – the man’s and the woman’s way. You ran no real risk of losing your wife by confessing. I lose everything in this world; some think everything in the next. No, such things are not on the same footing, after all.”

Most wonderful is Boggs’ take on a love triangle. Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter, is also keen to persuade Mr Bingley to marry her. We have seen, hundreds of times, the two women pitted against each other for the ‘prize’ of the man. Here, the women candidly agree that Mr Bingley is a repellent prospect but the financially savvy one, acknowledge that they will both fight hard to win his hand, but that they will play fair. There is a sense of comrades-in-arms between them that I haven’t seen in a novel before.

I should say, Sally on the Rocks is very funny, as well as having a lot to say about the status of women at the time. Sometimes simultaneously. My favourite, extended scene was when Sally takes Mr Bingley off on a walk in the woods, deliberately letting them get lost – her plan being that, lost alone with her in the woods, under a full moon, he will feel duty-bound AND romantically inclined to propose.

But much of the humour, as well as the enjoyment in the book, comes from Sally. She is determined, witty, bloody but unbowed. She is even rather ruthless, but there is plenty of humanity in her too – and, of course, there is another man who catches her eye. He is not at all the savvy choice. I shall leave it to your imagination to decide which path she ultimately takes…

It’s a joy to find a book so utterly forgotten and to love it. Or perhaps I am wrong, and there are many latent Boggs fans? I’ve now read another, with a better title and worse content, which was silly fun. And Sally on the Rocks is sold as being By the author of The Sale of Lady Daventry, which is an intriguing title. I couldn’t find cheap copies of many of her books, but I do have another on the way – I’m hoping to discover more and more joy from the unfortunately-named Winifred Boggs.

British Library Women Writers #6: Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

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When I was first asked to suggest titles for the British Library Women Writers series, one of the first titles that came to my mind was Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex. Some authors are loved because they are great prose stylists. Others because they have something profound to say about contemporary society. And then there are people like Mary Essex who just know how to write a rattlingly enjoyable story. I say Mary Essex – her real name was Ursula Bloom, and Mary Essex was one of a handful of pseudonyms she used for her hundreds of books. Truly, an extraordinarily prolific woman.

I’ve read a few of the books she wrote as Mary Essex, and this was the first – back in 2003, I think. I bought it because of that wonderfully beguiling title, which I’m hopeful will also attract book shoppers when bookshops are open again.

The novel is about David and Germayne, who decide to open a tea garden in a village just after World War 2. David has some experience in teashops – albeit the business side rather than any hands-on experience – and Germayne is willing to come along, though obviously a little less enthusiastic. They met when she was married to someone else, and Essex is very witty about their coming together – how Germayne wanted somebody spontaneous and more exciting than her first husband. It’s that spontaneity that leads to this ill-fated plan.

The village are not very pleased to have these outsiders coming in, and they have to try and placate various other people – from the doyenne of the village to the pub owners who claim the tea garden is stealing their business. Many things in village life have not changed since 1950, when this book was published, and I certainly recognise a lot of the sparring. Things only get more animated when Mimi is hired as a cook. She is a refugee from Vienna, and not above using her feminine wiles to get attention. As the narrator drily notes, her English gets more broken the more she wishes to charm her interlocutor.

Essex handles the whole thing wonderfully – it’s just a joyful romp, with quite an unexpected ending that I shan’t spoil here. It was quite difficult to find any contemporary issue to write about in the afterword, so I chose to write a bit about rationing. But this isn’t in any way an ‘issue novel’ – rather, it is a dollop of fun in a year that needs all the fun it can get.

The Faces of Justice by Sybille Bedford

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You probably know about Sybille Bedford, and maybe have even read some of her novels. She had a welcome resurgence of interest in the blogosphere when Daunt republished a few of her books a while ago, and I think she is a really interesting novelist. Lots of good stuff on small moments in child/parent relationships, as well as the drama of a larger scale journey. I enjoyed A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error enough to buy up more books by her – and four years ago I came across The Faces of Justice (1961) in one of my favourite bookshops, The Malvern Bookshop.

She starts off with a description of a trial of someone accused of stealing 32 cheeses. We are thrown, in media res, into the court case – a mixture of legal speak and very human reactions; a clash of the amusingly mundane and, for the defendant at least, the extraordinary.

This case, or one like it – it was a very ordinary case – came on some four or five years ago. Mutatis mutandis, it could come on this year and it could come on, God willing and if this particular judge has not retired, next year and the year thereafter. I walked in on it by chance when I was first trying to learn the ways of our law courts. I have sat since through many cases of all kinds, but that one was the first criminal trial and the paragraphs above, with a few enlargements, are what I wrote of what I saw at the time. Now, I propose to go through the case – in memory as well as words in black on white – with a fine toothcomb [sic!]. For I have decided to start on a journey to the law courts of some other countries, and I was a kind of yard-stick. Before going off to see how they are doing it elsewhere, I want to put down, if I can, commit to mind and paper, the look, the sound, the ways of some daily English trials.

And that is exactly what she does. Bedford is limited by the languages she understands – which are quite a few – and she goes to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France to see how their courts compare with England’s. But first, she will spend about eighty pages looking at England’s courts.

Of course, these comparisons are no longer particularly useful as a comparison of legal systems. England’s justice system of sixty years ago might as well be a foreign country. All manner of laws have changed – we still had the death penalty, for instance – and I expect an awful lot of other elements have also altered. But it is absolutely fascinating nonetheless.

Bedford doesn’t take any particularly structured approach to examining the justice system. There are occasional incidental descriptions of why certain things are happening, but it is mostly a series of snapshots of court cases. Some are trivial, some are rather more devastating. All the driving offences are rattled through in moments. Similarly, the prostitution cases are rocketed through as a matter of course. The wonder of this section is Bedford’s eye for humanity and her ability to condense those observations into a few words. I learned a little about the legal system, but a lot about how people felt appearing in court. And that just by Bedford’s transcriptions – if transcriptions they are – of the usually brief appearances each defendant makes.

Off she goes to Germany. And this is probably where her stated exercise of comparison rather breaks down. If she intended to compare, presumably she’d have sat in on similar cases, and pointed out similarities and differences. What she actually does, in Germany, is document one case at length, involving the shooting of a man believed to have repeatedly flashed girls and young women in a public park. It was a warning shot gone awry, apparently.

I should be clear – I absolutely didn’t care that the purported point of The Faces of Justice changed. Bedford is just as good at taking us through a more complicated and more serious case as she was with the trivial. She never intrudes her opinion, yet the framing she gives to everything is still pretty editorial. We never lose the sense that Bedford is our guide to these worlds, and I’m grateful for it.

The sections on Austria, Switzerland, and France aren’t quite as memorable as that on Germany, but Bedford could give me a tour of my own home and I’d find it surprising and original. I shan’t go through what happens in each place, but her ability to find humanity in any arena doesn’t falter.

The Faces of Justice will tell you nothing useful about today’s justice systems, and only fairly circumstantially will you learn anything about the ’60s, but it’s no less engaging, curious and oddly delightful a book for that. In anybody else’s hands, it might have fallen apart. But, with Bedford’s pen, she pulls together all the disparate and disorganised strands into one successful whole.

Pin A Rose on Me by Josephine Blumenfeld

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I was intrigued when I first read Scott’s review of Pin a Rose on Me (1958) by Josephine Blumenfeld, mostly by this line of his: “a bit like one of E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady diaries as penned by Morticia Addams, or perhaps it’s like one of Shirley Jackson’s wonderful humorous memoirs of domestic life, if Jackson had let loose all the more morbid gothic impulses of her fiction instead of keeping them fairly muted.”

Well, how could I resist?

I think it ended up being a cross between the Provincial Lady and Barbara Comyns, for me – the sardonic domestic memoir combined with a matter-of-fact observation of bizarre things. Very little is given any sense of being unusual, rather we rocket through her experiences without much pause for breath.

Mrs Appleby is the first-person narrator, who has a handful of adult children and doesn’t much care for them or their progeny. As the novel (let’s call it that, though I’m not sure it quite qualifies) opens, she is more focused on her dog Fanny and her coquettishness for dogs of the opposite sex. The line ‘Tarts don’t have Fannys’ on the first page might rather make this one impossible to reprint in England…

There isn’t a plot, really, it’s just Mrs Appleby’s life – which seems crammed with movement. At one point she rather suddenly goes off to America by sea (if I understood it properly), while elsewhere she embarks on a volunteering career in a hospital. Very little is forewarned, and the eccentricity of the structure matches the eccentricity of the character.

Essentially, it is an exercise in tone. Here are a couple of examples of it…

After dinner the others play bridge and say, ‘The rest are mine’, while I do my occupational therapy, a rather revolting piece of tapestry I am doing for my nephew and his wife who don’t want it but who daren’t say ‘no’. It has gone wrong somewhere, it rises to a tight peak in the middle and is lopsided.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” people say sadly. “But isn’t there something a wee bit wrong? Haven’t you pulled the wool too tight? You’ll have to have it stretched, won’t you?”

I shan’t have it stretched, I shall throw it into the sea the day we leave. But now while the others are writing their log books and we are drifting about between the islands, it is infinitely soothing to push coloured wools in and out of any old holes I feel inclined, and it keeps my mind off the rough seas.

And another…

Sad friend sends white hand-knitted shawl for my birthday.

“It will go well with your dark hair, my dear,” she writes. “It was originally meant for Derek’s wife, but things didn’t turn out to plan as you know, so I feel that you should have it for your birthday.” She goes on to say she has arthritis in all her fingers and is finding it more and more difficult to get through her tea cosy orders. “The doctor says I should winter abroad. What wild ideas they have.”

The shawl is beautiful, wide, long, soft and miraculously woven in the shapes of giant cobwebs and open roses. In a shop it would cost a lot. Sad friend wouldn’t get a lot from a shop, but she will get nothing from me as it is my birthday present and I can’t pay for my birthday present.”

Sometimes the tone worked really well – sometimes the deliberate inconsequential nature of Mrs Appleby’s descriptions of life were, well, too inconsequential. Overall, it is exuberant and odd, and it doesn’t quite cohere into a full novel, but perhaps Blumenfeld is trying something completely different. It certainly felt pretty dizzying to read, and there were plenty of moments that made me laugh – as well as times I had no clue what was going on or where we were. Mrs Appleby’s determined forthrightness, and total absence of anything resembling etiquette or regard for others, made her an enjoyably eccentric protagonist to spend time with. She would be a nightmare in real life, but some of the best protagonists would be.

I think I’ll re-read one day and see if I can work out what’s going on a bit better. But it’s great fun and very unusual – not quite consistent enough to warrant becoming a classic, but a tour de force that may have influences of Delafield, or even Comyns, but ends up being its own strange little thing.

G is for Gallico

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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.

If it’s a numbers game, then Gallico is an easy choice for G in this ongoing series – but I also think he’s a really interesting and varied author. Above is my colourful pile of Gallicos!

How many books do I have by Paul Gallico?

There are 18 books in the picture above, but there are a couple that are 2-in-1, so I’m going to call it 20. He was very prolific and there are an awful lot of his books I haven’t got, including some pretty famous ones – The Poseidon Adventure, for example. I don’t remember buying any Gallicos online, so I think these are all books I’ve stumbled across in bookshops – with the exception of a handful of reprints I got as review copies.

How many of these have I read?

Exactly half. I’ve read the four Mrs Harris books, Jennie, Love of Seven Dolls, Coronation, The Hand of Mary Constable, The Foolish Immortals, and The Small Miracle. I started The House That Wouldn’t Go Away once but wasn’t quite in the mood for it.

How did I start reading Paul Gallico?

I’m pretty sure it was with Flowers for Mrs Harris, also known as Mrs Harris Goes to Paris or even Mrs ‘arris Goes to Paris. It’s a whimsical story about a charwoman who saves for many years to go and buy an expensive designer dress in Paris. But there are dark undertones to the whimsy.

It was republished as part of the wonderful and sadly short-lived Bloomsbury Group reprints from Bloomsbury, in which Miss Hargreaves was famously included.

General impressions…

Gallico is a fascinating author to me, not least because all his novels seem to be twists on fairy tales – not traditional reinventions of them, but borrowing from them. Some lean very much to the whimsical, like Jennie, about a boy who turns into a cat. Others are so much darker, like the brilliant novella Love of Seven Dolls, where a young woman falls in love with a group of puppets but suffers abuse at the hands of the puppet master.

Mrs Harris is a wonderful character, deserving of her three sequels. That is perhaps Gallico at his most charming, with enough wry humour to save it being too fey. One has to be in the right mood for the sweetness of The Small Miracle, but it is so short that I found it perfectly hit the spot. The one of his I was most excited to read, based on the premise, was The Foolish Immortals – about a couple of people convincing a lady that they have found a cure to mortality. But it didn’t really live up to the premise, and became a bit meandering.

He is an ingenious and very varied author. I think Love of Seven Dolls is his masterpiece, but just make sure you’re in the right mood for the particular brand of Gallico you’re picking up at any particular time.

O, Genteel Lady! by Esther Forbes

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O Genteel Lady! (Cassandra Editions): Amazon.co.uk: Forbes, Esther: 9780897332347: BooksI think Esther Forbes is a name to conjure with in America, but I hadn’t heard of her when I bought O, Genteel Lady!(1926) seven years ago. I picked it up because I’m keen to read anything by women from the ’20s, and because I was beguiled by the opening paragraphs:

‘I have nothing,’ she thought, ‘but myself. No parents that count; no longer a fiancé; no home. I’m not even young any more, actually twenty-four. Ladies in novels are never out of their teens. Well, at least I’ve got myself.’

She straightened her long, slim body, straightened her bonnet, and looked about the railroad coach and the miserable cold companions of her journey.

‘Myself… and a mink pelisse,’ she added, and was sorry for the women in frayed shawls and shabby bonnets gathered close about the pot-bellied stove standing midway in the coach.

Lance Bardeen – what a name! – has left a jilted lover behind in Amherst, Mass., and is moving to Boston. It isn’t long before the reader discovers that this novel might be written in the ’20s, but it set several decades earlier. In all the talk of bonnets didn’t clue us in, then Lance’s ability to hide her bare feet under her wide-hooped skirt shows us that this is a mid-to-late Victorian woman.

All the more impressive that she has struck out on her own, refusing to marry a man who is taking her for granted. Lance is spirited, intelligent, and determined to make a better life for herself. At times, she says wonderfully feminist things – like this, to a man who says ‘I will never again believe in your sex as I did’:

‘I hope you never will. I hope you’ll see we are not made of cambric and sawdust, with porcelain heads, but of flesh and blood.’

All well and good. I could have loved this novel if Lance had stayed true to her intentions as she set out for adventure. I really enjoyed seeing her start working at a magazine, writing little stories for them while also trying to write rather better stories for rather better magazines. It’s certainly not pacy or filled with plot, but it’s good fun – and the narrative of a small-town woman discovering the big city is pretty timeless. But…

Forbes gives us one of those heroes whom you wish never to hear of again. The sort of selfish brute who apparently turned the heads of woman in the mid-Victorian period – c.f. Heathcliff, though Anthony Jones certainly isn’t in his league of cruelty. He is struck by Lance and, let’s call a spade a spade, assaults her with a kiss. She reacts angrily, somewhere between the ‘think of my virtue’ of the typical novelistic miss and the ‘how dare you disrespect my agency’ of the character we saw at the outset. And yet… she quickly falls in love with him.

Partly to distract herself, partly (I imagine) because Forbes ran out of ideas for Boston, Lance goes off on a tour of England. While she’s there, why not meet with various famous literary figures of the day? Forbes gets rather carried away, giving scenes with George Eliot, Tennyson, and a near miss with the Brownings. I’m sure it was fun to write, and it’s pretty fun to read, but it rather dispenses with the structure of the novel.

So, O, Genteel Lady! sadly doesn’t live up to the promise of the first chapter and the delightful Lance we see in those pages – in my opinion, at least. It’s all a little hotchpotch – a novelist who hasn’t quite worked out yet how to use her evident skills.

A trio of mini-reviews

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My pile of books to write about has been rather piling up again. So much reading this year! So I’m probably going to do a few mini posts where I jumble a few different books together…

Love, Interrupted by Simon Thomas

First things first, it is very surreal to read a book by someone with exactly your name. Particularly when I would glance at the coffee table and see my name there. Very odd. But it’s certainly not the first time I’d heard of Simon Thomas. I doubt he has much name recognition outside the UK, but he was once a presenter on Blue Peter, a long-running children’s TV programme. He went on to sports presenting, but came to wider attention a couple of years ago when, tragically, his wife died of blood cancer aged 39. And only a few days after she was diagnosed.

In Love, Interrupted, Thomas writes about those terrible few days, as well as meeting Gemma and how they became a couple. He looks at his illness with depression and anxiety that happened before Gemma died.But most of the book is about the days, weeks, and months of grief that follow – as he tries to be honest and open to his eight-year-old son, while also facing the greatest pain of his life. As a man of faith, he also documents his wrestling with God – and his growing dependency on alcohol. It is such a wise, thoughtful and passionate book about grief – and about how people either did or did not help with their reactions. I read it because I know very little about grief, and want to be a better friend to friends who are experiencing or have experienced it – and I think Love, Interrupted will help me do that. Obviously ever journey with grief is different, but Thomas is so open and honest in his book that I will take a lot of it with me.

A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations

Published four years after his death, this is a collection of essays from people who worked with, corresponded with, or simply admired William Maxwell. I have loved and admired his fictional writing, and particularly enjoyed reading his letters with Sylvia Townsend Warner and Eudora Welty. And there is no doubt that he was a beloved and widely appreciated figure in American writing.

There are some names I recognise among the contributors – Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Shirley Hazzard – and an awful lot that I didn’t. I particularly enjoyed Tartt’s funny, humble, personable account of being something of an occasional amanuensis for Maxwell. The contributors sometimes write entirely about their personal experiences of Maxwell, some write what are effectively literary essays, and most are in between. But clearly topics were not apportioned, and there is an awful lot of reputation here – down to the plots of novels being explained over and over. It’s possible that all these pieces were published separately, and this is a compilation. That would make sense, and explain why the editing is pretty much absent.

Overall, the affection and respect everyone seems to have had for Maxwell is rather touching. But it leans heavily on ‘respect’. Because he was in his mid-90s when he died, most of Maxwell’s contemporaries had predeceased him. So we get only the perspective of the next generation[s], looking to his reputation and his output, doffing their cap and treating him like a reverend old man. It couldn’t be any other way, but I did miss any affection from a contemporary – someone who wouldn’t put him on quite such a pedestal. If Sylvia Townsend Warner could have added a chapter, she would have ribbed him, admired him, accepted his admiration, and loved him. Perfect.

I For One by J.B. Priestley

First off, this book is perhaps my Platonic ideal of the musty smell of a book. Some people love new book smell, which I dislike. Some people hate musty book smell, but it is my kryptonite.

Anyway, this is a collection of occasional essays. Many of us have enjoyed his Delight – this is more in the line of grumbles, but they’re also pretty delightful to read about. Though the book was published in 1924, there are plenty of topics that ring true almost a hundred years later – on being annoyed by optimists and by strangers, on different understandings of free speech, on everyone’s secret conviction that they’re pretty good at singing. I enjoyed his look back at a moralistic science book for children, from his youth, and his analysis of the characters of Charles and Emma in there. And ‘The New Hypocrisy’ was great fun – about how everyone has to pretend to be amoral or immoral in the ’20s, regardless of what they actually do:

The young men who loudly extol an ethical system that would make a tiger look thoughtful, are now compelled to deceive their acquaintances just as the old type of hypocrite deceived his’ and often when they are generally supposed to be breaking the ten Commandments, they are in reality paying secret visits of consolation to invalid aunts in East Dulwich.

It’s the sort of totally inconsequential collection that probably wouldn’t get published now, or would appear as online columns perhaps, but it’s a fun window into how amiable grumbling has never really changed.

What Was Virginia Woolf Afraid Of?

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Engelskspråklig litteratur og kultur - V.Woolf: How Should One Read a Book - NDLAIt’s no secret that I adore Virginia Woolf, so I was pleased when I was given the opportunity to watch What Was Virginia Woolf Afraid Of?, which was shown on Sky Arts last year and is now available on DVD. It’s a documentary about her life and work, speaking to many Woolf experts.

The first one who pops up is Hermione Lee, who was my thesis supervisor during my Masters. I only tangentially wrote about Woolf then, but I certainly enjoyed going to her Woolf lectures as an undergraduate. Alongside her are experts like Lyndall Gordon and a lot of people I hadn’t heard of, but are doubtless brilliant. I particularly enjoyed the small amounts of archival interview footage with Angelica Garnett, Woolf’s niece, and Nigel Nicolson [who also seemed weirdly excited to talk about his parents’ love lives and affairs – he being the son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson].

The documentary starts by talking in broad brushstrokes about her influence on writing, her power as a writer, the main themes of her life and work. From here, there is a fairly chronological look at her life – looking particularly at moments of trauma. These include the early deaths of her brother and mother, and the sexual assault she suffered at the hands of her step brothers. Woolf’s mental health is inextricably intertwined with her reputation and any interpretation of her work, and it is discussed sensitively here – the trauma is not allowed to loom too large, but is given a reasonable space. But I would have liked a bit more on how funny Woolf was, in her novels, letters, and particularly her essays.

The choice of readings from Woolf’s books are wonderfully well chosen – all perfectly illustrating different aspects of her character and career. Many are the expected moments from anybody who loves her writing, and her most famous novels certainly take the limelight, but there are some more unexpected and thoughtful choices too. All read beautifully, and accompanied by a new score by Adrian Munsey.

If you already know about Woolf, it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything you didn’t already know here. There are certainly no new revelations or unusual interpretations. But, much like Alexandra Harris’s brilliant biography of her, it manages to encapsulate almost everything significant in a short space. If you only know her writing, or don’t know much about Woolf at all, it’s a great place to start – and should set you off keen to find out more about the many angles of this multi-faceted genius.

Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

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The body-swap comedy is one of those tropes that is often talked about as if there were millions of them about, but in truth I can only think of a handful. In the world of literature, I’m down to Vice Verse by F Anstey, Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, Turnabout by Thorne Smith, and, if you read it somewhat elastically, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Do let me know if there are others I’m missing. But I can now add to that number Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes.

If you’ve heard of it, it’ll be because of Brad’s review at the excellent Neglected Books blog, where he wrote about it in June. Brad is up there with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for his extraordinary knowledge of books nobody else on the internet has mentioned. And he certainly knows how to wipe the internet clean of the books he mentions – as soon as the reviews are out, the secondhand market is drained. The first copy of Strange Journey I ordered got me a ‘sorry, this book has gone’ reply – the second, thankfully, came to my house. And with such a fab cover!

Given my love of the period (it was published in 1935) and my interest in fantastic novels, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. When I say ‘fantastic’, I mean elements of fantasy happening in the real world. It had such a vogue in the ’20s and ’30s and so often commented on issues of the day. And in Strange Journey, the issue appears to be class.

Polly is a housewife in a middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle-class) household. Her family certainly aren’t poor, but they don’t have money to spare for luxuries. Even the basics can be a little bit of a struggle, and Polly feels rather run ragged. In 1935, it was still a novelty for some households to deal with only an occasional help, rather than a more regular maid or two. She is looking at from her front gate when she spots a woman in a Rolls Royce, clearly well-to-do.

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

I’ve quoted the same bit Brad did, but it is the key moment. Polly’s longing to exchange lives with this woman doesn’t happen instantly, but the seed is sown. A few days later, remembering that idle daydream, Polly suddenly feels dizzy – and discovers she is no longer in her own home.

Her dream seems to have come true. She is in a beautiful and enormous country house, with a team of servants and with no labour required of her. One of the first things she notices is her immaculate hands, which clearly have never had to be plunged into a bucket of soapy water.

Novels which use a fantastic device have to deal with the surprise of the protagonist. It’s the main difference between a fantastic novel and magic realism – this bizarre turn of events, and the character’s reactions, must be taken into account. Cairnes handles Polly’s disorientation very well. Her attempts to work out who the people around her are, and how they relate to her. Her frequent faux pas, as she tries to take on the tone of Lady Elizabeth (for such she is). And perhaps chiefly, trying to behave in a convincing manner to her new husband, Gerald (Major Forrester), without betraying her real husband, Tom. As it is, any affection from her seems to baffle Gerald.

Polly doesn’t stay there. Before too long, she is whisked back to her normal life – and it becomes clear that Lady Elizabeth has been there in her guise, telling Scottish folklore stories to Polly’s two children.

One of the less convincing elements of the book, albeit essential for the plot, is that Polly decides not to confide in her husband, or anyone. As the months go by, she keeps finding herself having dizzy spells that land her in Lady Elizabeth’s world. Cairnes has good fun with the humorous side of things, as Polly reveals Lady Elizabeth to be a secret bridge player, or as she gets confused with titles of nobles. At the heart of it is a lovable and empathetic character, making the most of the strange world she has found herself in, throwing in some matchmaking on the side. As the reader, I longed for Polly and Lady Elizabeth to meet… and, thankfully, they eventually do.

I loved Strange Journey. The novel sustains the initial idea wonderfully, and Cairnes is obviously an adept, if fairly light, writer. She appears to have only written one other novel, The Disappearing Duchess, and this costs $300 online…

Brad’s detective work add another fun twist to the tale. Maud Cairnes was a pseudonym – for Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!!), known as Lady Kathleen. Head over to his piece for a bit about her extraordinary milieu; it’s safe to safe she was more familiar with Lady Elizabeth’s world than with Polly’s, so it is to her credit that she makes both equally believable.

Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…