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The Land by Vita Sackville-West [or a bit of it]

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File:Victoria-mary-sackville-west-vita.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I am trying to be the sort of person who likes poetry, and picking some of the poems off my bookshelves. If I’m honest, it hasn’t been an enormous success yet – though I did enjoy some of the Yeats I read, and felt pretty unenthusiastic about quite a lot of it.

One of the poems I’ve been keen to try is The Land by Sackville-West – a book-length poem from 1926. It is perhaps best remembered now, at least to the non-poetry read fraternity, for Virginia Woolf’s teasing of it in Orlando. In that novel, published a couple of years later and inspired by Vita Sackville-West, Orlando spends years writing a long poem called The Oak Tree that is later lampooned by a noted Elizabethan critic.

So that is quite a starting point for trying The Land! And I can see why it might be lampooned. It’s essentially a rustic and atavistic take on nature, filled with farmers doing ancient things with scythes etc. etc. I’m going to be honest, most of it didn’t really work for me. That ‘poetic shepherd’ genre always feels a bit improbable and fey to me. BUT I am glad I read it for this small section alone, which I really liked.

Long story short – I don’t think I’m the right audience for The Land, but I love two particular pages. So, if you’re like me – here, I’m saving you some time and just sharing this bit, on comparing poets and artisans.

The poet like the artisan
Works lonely with his tools; picks up each one,
Blunt mallet knowing, and the quick thin blade,
And plane that travels when the hewing’s done;
Rejects, and chooses; scores a fresh faint line;
Sharpens, intent upon his chiselling;
Bends lower to examine his design,
If it be truly made,
And brings perfection to so slight a thing.
But in the shadows of his working-place,
Dust-moted, dim,
Among the chips and lumber of his trade,
Lifts never his bowed head, a breathing-space
To look upon the world beyond the sill,
The world framed small, in distance, for to him
The world and all its weight are in his will.
Yet in the ecstasy of his rapt mood
There’s no retreat his spirit cannot fill,
No distant leagues, no present, and no past,
No essence that his need may not distil,
All pressed into his service, but he knows
Only the immediate care, if that be good;
The little focus that his words enclose;
As the poor joiner, working at his wood,
Knew not the tree from which the planks were taken,
Knew not the glade from which the trunk was brought,
Knew not the soil in which the roots were fast,
Nor by what centuries of gales the boughs were shaken,
But holds them all beneath his hands at last.

For All We Know by G.B. Stern

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What a curious novel, which has left rather an impression on me, even though I find it a little complex to untangle. I bought For All We Know [1955] in 2011, based on having enjoyed her books on Jane Austen that she co-wrote with Sheila Kaye-Smith. She’s also one of those names you see a lot if you’re interested in women writers in the early/mid twentieth century – and years ago I did read her novel Ten Days of Christmas. But somehow it still felt like I was a Stern fiction newbie. Do Christmas novels feel substantially different? Like you haven’t really heard a singer if you’ve only listened to their Christmas album?

Anyway, I decided to see what was going on with For All We Know – the sort of title that isn’t really giving anything away. What I think of as an Alan Ayckbourn-esque title – trips off the tongue and doesn’t really mean anything.

I was daunted by a family tree in the opening pages. For me, a family tree in a book is a tacit way of admitting that they haven’t done a good job delineating characters. But onwards – the first section, of five, is a family group discussing Gillian’s recent biography of the whole dynasty. She has been working on it for years, and it has been a total critical and commercial flop. Gillian is a biographer of some note, and the family is well known in theatrical circles, so why has it not been a success? Well, because Gillian has ignored the noted Bettina, and devoted significant sections to Bettina’s son Rendal, who is of no public note.

This family gathering and sotto voce discussions over, we jump back a few decades – to an infant Gillian, encountering Bettina’s side of the family for the first time. Bettina is Gillian’s grandfather’s sister’s daughter, whatever that translates into in terms of cousins and removes. That side of the family has a whole range of siblings and cousins and whatnot, and you quickly work out why the family tree is needed. All you need to know is that Gillian’s grandfather is the head of the side of the family that isn’t famous, and Bettina’s mother is the head of the side that is.

It was Timothy, her cousin, who had casually referred to Gillian’s grandfather and her Uncle Conrad as the ‘failure branch’ of the family tree. Dear, dear Timothy! Happily able to say even worse than that, not to tease nor to be cruel but because he could not for the life of him see why she need mind, as it was true. Timothy had a thick blank spot, and though only twelve years old when he came forth with this chubby definition of Gillian’s immediate family as compared with his own, indisputably the ‘celebrity branch’, he would be just as capable of saying it to-day when he was sixteen, because the thick blank spot had not grown more delicately assailable and nor had he; just one of those get-away-with-murder-boys, every year handsomer, and brilliant at everything he undertook.

Gillian is a few years younger, and in awe of this daunting family – though also enamoured by them, and desperate for them to show her attention and affection. The strength of For All We Know is the Stern’s understanding of the power of embarrassing or upsetting moments. She is so good at children and the way they feel so strongly in the moment. There are a couple of incidents where young Gillian feels she is being laughed at by the family – and, even more powerfully, one moment of triumph that is later forgotten by the people she thought she’d impressed. In a biography, these moments wouldn’t even warrant a footnote – but in Gillian’s young mind, they are seismic. She decides that she will one day write the biography of the family, and begins to fill notebooks with observations and eavesdroppings.

The novel has a further three parts, jumping forward in time, seeing how Gillian’s life becomes more embroiled with the family. Timothy fulfils his early promise and becomes a big-name actor in Hollywood; Rendal has fulfilled the prediction that he will have a much less illustrious career. Gillian has grown in confidence, though still clearly in awe of what Bettina thinks, and capable of strong emotional reactions.

One of the interesting things about For All We Know is that, jumping in stages through this family’s history, Stern doesn’t land in the most significant places. We hear about marriages that have happened between sections, and of moments of success and fame. The chapters of narrative seem almost random, in terms of a timeline, but perhaps they are the places of biggest emotional impact – not the places that Gillian’s biography would highlight. Stern is more interested in the ways that relationships within the family change. And particularly between Gillian and Bettina. There is no big surprise twist or gotcha moment – I did wonder if Bettina would turn out to be Gillian’s mother or something, but there’s nothing like that. But there are times when their relationship shifts dramatically – largely because what they want and expect from it is so different.

Getting to the end of For All We Know, I was left with a really strong impression of the emotional weight of the narrative – and, yes, slightly disconcerted by the curious structure and the events that aren’t covered. I can see why Stern chose to pick the moments she did – and yet I feel a bit like Gillian in the early chapters. That I’ve been watching a family from the outside, not quite privy to their most significant memories. I like a novel to leave me thinking, and I’m not quite sure yet whether I’ll remember this novel as a brilliant success or as something a little off-kilter. Or perhaps both?

Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden

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I absolutely loved Molly Fox’s Birthday a year or so ago, and so over Christmas I thought I’d treat myself to one of the other Deirdre Madden novels that I’d since been stockpiling. I went on Twitter for advice, but nobody seemed to have read the ones I had – so I picked the shortest one: Nothing is Black from 1994.

Claire lives in a remote coastal area of County Donegal. I have to admit that, until now, I hadn’t realised that Ireland had a north coast – but turns out that Northern Ireland is really only the north-east of the island. You probably all knew that. She lives in a stark and sparsely populated area, living an almost perversely minimalist lifestyle – only the barest, most functional furniture; few local friends; few efforts to stay connected with her past. She’s an artist, and practices each morning by making a quick watercolour sketch of the ever-changing landscape outside the window of her ugly, practical house.

Rather reluctantly, she lets her cousin Nuala come to stay. She lives in Dublin, but it might as well be a thousand miles away. This is the idea of Nuala’s husband. Neither of them are particularly enthusiastic about the idea – which Nuala combats with talking, and Claire with silence.

They drove out along the coast road. Claire would have admitted that the place where she had chosen to live was bleak, but she thought that it had its own magnificence too. It certainly didn’t have the lushness and prettiness people often expected to find in the countryside. To appreciate this area properly required a certain way of seeing things. Because of the wind coming in off the Atlantic, it was never static. Claire liked that about it, and she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone.

This isn’t an ‘Enchanted April’ type of novel, where unlikely companions become firm friends. But Madden expertly takes us through the paths and wounds that have led to these two women’s unhappy circumstances. Nuala has started shoplifting. Claire has deliberately isolated herself. But these are only the outer signs of much deeper matters – and, even in a very short novel, Madden finds space to gently develop them.

Do you ever get that ‘difficult second novel’ feeling with an author you love, even if isn’t actually their second novel? This was Madden’s fourth, and actually written fourteen years before Molly Fox’s Birthday – but I suppose I was no longer surprised that she was such a wonderfully perceptive writer. Which is to say, Nothing is Black is beautifully, poetically, sensitively written – but at this point I’d have been surprised if it weren’t.

Throughout, Claire’s painterly mindset influences the narrative. Just as the playwright in Molly Fox’s Birthday was always thinking of words and staging, even if this only came through to the surface of the narrative in the subtlest ways, so colour and form threads through everything in Nothing is Black. It’s done so cleverly and naturally – it matches the world and characters that Madden has created, and their preoccupations and concerns. Unusually for me, I think this could have been longer. I suppose, because she has created fully realised people and is showing us their existence, rather than a particular set of plot points they go through, there is no end to the interesting things she can tell us about them.

2020: Some Reading Stats

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Hopefully you’ve already seen my Top Books of 2020 – and now its time to do one of those fun reading stats posts, that delight other bloggers and blog readers and probably totally baffle normal people. Along the way, I’ll be comparing with my stats from 2019.

Number of books read
I read 147 books in 2020 – up from 133 last year, though down from 153 in 2018. The telling thing there, though, is that in 2018 and 2019 I did ’25 Books in 25 Days’ projects, which bolstered the total. 2020 was still a bumper reading year for me – thanks to the pandemic.

(My own mystery illness meant I couldn’t read for a bit, but thankfully my eyes have largely been ok since the summer. Other symptoms ongoing, and hoping for a diagnosis in 2021. Thanks for your thoughts and prayers.)

Male/female writers
92 of my 147 books were by women, with 53 by men and 2 by women and men. That’s 62.5% of my books by women – it’s usually about 55%. The difference is probably explained by all the reading I’ve been doing to find new titles for the British Library Women Writers series.

Fiction/Non-fiction
I read 97 fiction books (69 by women, 28 by men) and 50 non-fiction (23 by women, 25 by men, 2 by both). All of those stats are pretty similar to 2019’s. It’s funny how these things work out.

Books in translation
2019 was my all-time high for reading books in translation, at 11 – 2020 took a hit, at only five. They’re from Greek/Hebrew (guess that book!), German, and three from French.

Most-read author
Three authors tied for first, with me reading four books by them – E.M. Delafield, Beverley Nichols, and Marilynne Robinson. All big favourites of mine – though only two Robinsons and one Delafield were first-time reads.

Re-reads
Speaking of, I re-read 15 books in 2020, which is much more than usual. A few were pandemic-propelled comfort reads (Austen), some were Marilynne Robinsons because of Jack coming out, but almost all were connected with British Library Women Writers series.

New-to-me authors
I usually read about half new-to-me authors, but this year only 63 of the books I read fall into this category – 43%. Not my lowest ever, but apparently I needed some reliables this year.

Number of audiobooks
I thought all those government-mandated walks would have amped up my audiobook total, but I only read eight books that way. Some of them were very chunky though.

Shortest book title
A few four-letter titles: Home and Jack by Marilynne Robinson, Emma by Jane Austen, and Them by Jon Ronson.

Strangest author name
It’s not a strange name in itself, but reading Love, Interrupted by Simon Thomas was quite a surreal experience – glancing down to see my own name repeatedly.

Most disappointing book
I think Mr Kronion by Susan Alice Kerby. I’d loved Miss Carter and the Ifrit so much, but this one wasn’t in the same league at all.

Worst book I read
This wasn’t really a disappointment, because I was expecting it to be rubbish and it was: Self-Leadership and the One-Minute Manager by Ian Blanchard, that I read for work. Management books are not at all my cup of tea anyway, and they never will be if they’re all as appallingly written as this one.

Word that came up a lot unexpectedly
Three of the novels I read this year had the word ‘Citadel’ in the title – The Citadel by A.J. Cronin, Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, and Citadel of Ice by my mum, Anne Thomas (you can order it here!)

Persephones
Last year I said I wanted to read more Persephones from my shelf, after reading three in 2019. Last year I read… one. Patience by John Coates, which was very good.

Names in book titles
After I read 72 books with names in the title for Project Names in 2019, I thought it would be interesting to see how many I managed when I wasn’t trying – well, it clearly made a difference, as I only read 20 in 2020.

Animals in book titles
Only three in 2019, which is lower than usual. In 2020, there were The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, All the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim, The Birds of the Air by Alice Thomas Ellie, Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons, A Summer Bird Cage by Margaret Drabble. Apparently I was mostly drawn to birds last year.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A stepping stone tested chastity, two women swapped bodies, a husband and wife swapped bodies, three women stole identities, a serial killer tried to win a title, someone pretended to write a biography of Byron, a husband disappeared, two cities inhabited the same space, patients woke from comas, a man hunted the devil in Cornwall, someone gave birth in the Blitz, a body was found in a sealed tunnel, chairs were made of human skin, a shark crashed through a roof, and a borrowed overcoat led to abduction.

Rosemary’s review of Project Places

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In 2019, Rosemary joined me in #ProjectNames – one of the most rewarding reading projects I’ve done. Last year, she decided to keep going with #ProjectPlaces. I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing her experiences – and she has kindly written the guest post, below. You can find Rosemary’s blog at Scones and Chaise Longues.

Most of us haven’t been further than the Co-Op this year (not that I’m complaining, as I’m privileged to have beautiful countryside on my doorstep – and the ladies in my little local Co-Op are lovely..)   By some happy chance, however, I decided in January to set myself a reading theme, and having so much enjoyed Simon’s #projectnames in 2019, I hit upon #projectplaces.

Reading only books already resident on my sagging shelves, I would choose titles that either were, or included, the name of a place – though as you’ll see, I interpreted that requirement rather liberally to say the least. So throughout these strange stay-at-home seasons I’ve been to France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, North America and even once round the world.  The majority of my travels were, though, in the UK, from Cornwall to Cumberland and the Hog’s Back to the Highlands and Islands. It’s been great.

I didn’t set out to choose mainly English locations, but when I think about it, it’s hardly surprising that my preference for certain types of novels kept me firmly in the villages of everyday and the country estates of days past. I went with Angela Thirkell to Pomfret Towers and (Christmas at) High Rising, to (The School at) Thrush Green with Miss Read and to Turnham Malpas with Rebecca Shaw (Trouble in the Village, Whispers in the Village, The Village Newcomers.) Turnham Malpas is a bit like Midsomer without the murders; there’s always some intrigue going on, whereas I’ve lived in my fair share of villages and, much as I love them, intrigue is not their USP – or maybe I just don’t notice.)

Beginning, though, in my beloved Scotland and one of my very best reads of 2020: O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker;

‘Janet lies murdered beneath the castle stairs, oddly attired in her mother’s black lace wedding dress, lamented only by her pet jackdaw…’

I’d never even heard of Barker before, and without the project in mind this strange and compelling story of Janet, a misfit child growing up in Auchnasaugh, the remote Aberdeenshire home of her eccentric, dysfunctional family – a place where eagles fly and hogweed flourishes – would probably have languished, ignored, for evermore. Now I recommend this haunting novel far and wide. (My full review is here) and I was delighted to find that it is being reprinted by Orion in October 2021

Still in Scotland, the project encouraged me to take up Compton Mackenzie’s Monarch of the Glen, which may have been the inspirations for the TV series, but is quite unlike it. (And no it’s not, as my husband, ventured to suggest, ’the book of the film’…) Persevere with Mackenzie’s slightly convoluted style and you will be rewarded with a light and entertaining story, one that is very much anchored to a time, and especially to a place.

I often find short stories frustrating – ‘What happened next?’ is my plaintive cry – but Thomas Clark’s Selkirk FC vs The World proved the exception. Selkirk is a Borders football club struggling in the middle of serious rugby country, and in 2015 – for reasons impossible to fathom – it appointed Clark its first ever writer-in-residence. The result was this outstanding collection of stories and poems.  Clark captures the cynicism, resilience and grimly morose nature of the area perfectly; some pieces are funny, some sad, and there is even an outstanding science fiction story, The Keys of Paradise – definitely something I’d never have looked at without the project to take me there.

The US provided me with comedy (Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon Summer, 1956), black history (Margo Jefferson’s eye-opening Negroland), sagas (Joan Medlicott’s Covington books, and even Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove series – yes, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not proud…) and academic intrigue in the form of my much loved Amanda Cross’s The Theban Mysteries. Set not in Greece but New York City, this is another outing for Kate Fansler, professor of English, lover of Austen, ardent feminist and (usefully) rich as Croesus.  In the 1970s Virago published many women crime writers, and I have to say some of them did not deserve this honour – but Cross (pen name of Carolyn Heilbrun, first ever female professor of English at Cornell) was one who did, and I still re-read her books with great joy.

Back in Europe I went to Florence with the late Diana Athill, and to Lake Garda with Rumer Godden’s Battle of the Villa Fiorita. The Black Forest Summer by Mabel Esther Allan may be a 1950s children’s book, but it changed my ideas about Germany, a country of which I have seen only Berlin. Now I want to visit Freiburg, the setting of this perhaps unlikely but most enjoyable story of an orphaned London family being rescued by their father’s affluent brother.

Irish writers seem to have a particular talent for the short story, and so it was that I read William Trevor’s brilliant, memorable collection The News from Ireland. And although Maeve Binchy may not be in Trevor’s league, she remains one of the great tellers of tales, with a perfect ear for her native speech; I enjoyed Dublin 4 immensely.

The British Library Crime Classics were, of course, a great source of place-name titles. I can’t say I enjoyed them all, and I do wonder if the ‘Golden Age of Crime’ is really my thing, but I still travelled to the South Downs with John Bude (The Sussex Downs Murder) and with Freeman Wills Crofts to Surrey (The Hog’s Back Mystery.)  Better reads for me came in the shape of the ever-excellent Mary Stewart’s Rose Cottage, Jennifer Ryan’s The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s and Miss Read’s School at Thrush Green.

And finally, off I went with Phileas Fogg in his attempt to go Around the World in 80 Days. I’d always thought of Jules Verne as a ‘difficult’ writer – goodness knows why, as this tale of adventure positively flies along. Great and unexpected fun.

Three books stand out: the aforementioned O Caledonia, Marghanita Laski’s wonderful, quiet, beautifully observed The Village (review here) and (predictable to all who know me) Kenneth Grahame’s story of humble Mole, clever, kind Rat, sage and sensible Badger, jolly Otter and impetuous Toad, living their rural lives through the changing seasons on the riverbank and in the Wild Wood. In a year in which comfort has been needed more than ever before, The Wind in the Willows gave it in abundance:

‘As he hurried along, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would be at home again among the things he knew and liked, the Mole saw clearly that he was an animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough , in their way, to last for a lifetime.’

I’m addicted to reading projects now; they are such a great way to focus my wavering attention. I’ve already thought of one for 2021, and this week I spent a glorious hour sorting out the books to fit it. So thank you again Simon, for setting me on this happy path.

Top 12 Books of 2020

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It’s been a terrible year, but it’s been a great reading year. I always wait until December 31st before I let myself compile this list – and going through the year’s reading, picking out the best books for a shortlist, is one of my favourite book-related moments of the year.

Often I already have a vague idea of which books will make the cut, but sometimes things leap out as reminders of wonderful times. This year, I couldn’t keep it just 10 – and there were another half dozen I’d have been happy to see on a Best Of list.

As always, I have firmly ranked – every year I hope for fewer ‘in no particular order’ lists on blogs! – and have excluded re-reads. That meant missing off Tension by E.M. Delafield, which I loved but apparently read in 2005. Each author can only appear once, otherwise Michael Cunningham would have taken up two places.

Each link goes to the original review. Without further ado…

12. Strange Journey (1935) by Maud Cairns

A body-swap comedy from the 1930s, where a lower-middle-class woman and an upper-class woman swap places. Cairns keeps it from getting stale by having them go back and forth a number of times – and, eventually, meet.

11. Told in Winter (1961) by Jon Godden

A beautifully written, dark, and atmospheric novel about a playwright, his male servant, a devoted dog, and the young actress who arrives to change things forever. So psychologically interesting. Rumer Godden is better remembered, but her sister deserves to be known too.

10. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) by George Orwell

A novel about poverty, pride, stubbornness, books, and class – all done with Orwell’s wonderful prose, totally unshowy and yet totally beautiful.

9. The Stone of Chastity (1940) by Margery Sharp

The first of two Furrowed Middlebrow titles that will appear on this list – Sharp’s comic novel is about a professor investigating the legend of a stepping stone on which unchaste women will stumble. A brilliant premise for a completely delightful novel. Even more to my liking than The Nutmeg Tree, which I also loved this year.

8. The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham 

I wasn’t sure whether to include this or Flesh and Blood, but ultimately went with the more compact novel. Cunningham has such a gift for creating a real group of real people, and sprinkling it with magic. Here, a group of New Yorkers live, love, and lie to each other in the early 20th century.

7. Sally on the Rocks (1915) by Winifred Boggs

A total gamble on an unknown author that paid off – Sally is drawn back to her home village at the prospect of financial security in marrying the curate. The novel is a feminist crie de coeur about the moral standards applied to women, while also being witty and like a 1910s Cranford.

6. Doctor Thorne (1858) by Anthony Trollope

I only wrote a paragraph about this novel, which took me nearly a year to finish: “The plot is about secret inheritances and couples who might not be able to marry because of poverty, but the plot is dragged out and (especially in the second half) very predictable. What makes this wonderful is Trollope’s delightful turn of sentence, and the leisurely and assured way he takes us through each conversation, reflection, and narrative flourish. A protracted joy.”

5. Tea at Four O’Clock (1956) by Janet McNeill

A 1956 Club choice that I’ve owned for more than 15 years, hitherto unread. As it opens, Laura is returning from her sister’s funeral – free for the first time. Until her ne’er-do-well brother turns up, that is. A beautiful novel, in which even the suspect characters end up being (by the reader) understood and thus forgiven.

4. Inferno (2020) by Catherine Cho

An extraordinary memoir of post-partum psychosis. Cho writes brilliantly – about this, but also about domestic violence, fear, and love.

3. A House in the Country (1957) by Ruth Adam

How fictionalised is this memoir? Unclear, but this Furrowed Middlebrow about moving into an enormous mansion with seven friends is charming and funny, even when we learn in the opening sentences that the whole thing goes terribly wrong.

2. Business as Usual (1933) by Jane Oliver and Anne Stafford

The novel we’ve all loved this year, right? If you’re among the few yet to get hold of it – like me, you might be sold simply by its being a novel in letters about running the book department of a thinly-disguised Selfridge’s. It’s every bit as delightful as it sounds.

1. Jack (2020) by Marilynne Robinson

I was toying up between this and Business As Usual, but while Business As Usual is a charming wonder, Jack is an extraordinary masterpiece. The fourth in Robinson’s Gilead series, though can be read as a standalone, Jack is a prequel to Home, seeing Jack falling in love with Della. She is African-American, and their relationship is illegal in their state. Nobody writes like Robinson, every sentence a tiny marvel – and even more marvellous that she doesn’t edit or re-draft. What a gift to writing, and the character portraits in this novel will stay with me forever. Even more incredible, Jack went from being someone I hated in Gilead to someone I love here – while recognisably exactly the same person.

Happy Christmas giveaway!

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You don’t need me to tell you that this has been a weird and sad year, and it’ll be a weird Christmas. I don’t know what the restrictions are where you are, but this will be the first Christmas I haven’t spent with my parents – though thankfully only because of the restrictions. I know there are others who have a much sadder reason.

I will be able to spend it with my brother, though, because bubbles are still a thing – and the main thing is that we all stay as safe as possible. And we can celebrate the birth of Jesus every day of the year!

I know Christmas isn’t just about gifts, but I thought I’d put something on the positives scale for 2020. You probably know that 2020 has seen the launch of the British Library Women Writers series, for which I’m the series consultant. And I’d like to offer a British Library Women Writers title as a Christmas present to three people!

In the comments, just let me know which of these you’d pick if you won (it is one each for 3 people) – and I’ll draw three names out the hat.

O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex
Father by Elizabeth von Arnim
Chatterton Square by EH Young
My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes
The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair

This is open around the world! I’ll be off the blog for a few days – have a very lovely Christmas, despite the circumstances.

A moving memoir of racism, poverty, and abuse

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I recently finished a memoir, read by the author as an audiobook. It was a really striking portrayal of growing up as a mixed-race child in America in the ’70s, with violence, poverty, and uncertainty.

The narrator was the youngest of three, and can barely remember a time when her parents were together. Their relationship was volatile, and they had divorced by the time she could remember – leaving her with some resentment of her older brother and sister, who had got to experience something close to a happy family. In turn, they resented the narrator – not least because of her paler skin. Though they had the same parents, the narrator was lighter skinned than her siblings – and could often ‘pass’ as white, or perhaps thought to be Latino. This meant she dodged some of the racism that her siblings experienced – though certainly got her fair share too.

She recounts one of the first times that she remembers her race being an issue – taking a white schoolfriend to visit her Black dad. The schoolfriend had only known the narrator’s white mother before – and when the door to the apartment building was opened by a Black man, started crying and screaming and refused to go in. The narrator, a young girl at the time, was confused and hurt – not least by seeing the hurt on her father’s face.

Sometimes the pain she faced came from within the family too. There are extraordinary, vividly written scenes where she relates her sister – whose life had somehow derailed so that she was addicted to drugs and was selling her body – trying to pimp her out when she was only fourteen. Luckily someone the narrator knew happened to stumble across the scene, saving her from who knows what. And her brother became increasingly violent, so that the narrator never felt safe at home. Sometimes her mother would have to call the police, and the narrator would have the terror of a Black brother being at the mercy of cops. All she dreamed of was a time of safety and love at Christmas, a day that seemed more than any other to mark the difference between her family and a perfect one. It never came.

Perhaps a third or a half of the autobiography consists of this examination of childhood. It is revealing, painful and so well written. You long for her to get somewhere safe where she can begin to live properly. And her career does start to take off with incredible speed – her hard work and some luck making her more successful than she could imagine. She charts every moment that led there, so it’s hard to remember she is only in her late teens when it all begins to fall into place – albeit against the backdrop of the legacy of that childhood.

But things don’t fall into a happy ever after. She finds herself in a controlling marriage – richer than she ever imagined, but without any freedom. Her husband won’t let her see anyone or decide her own time. There are cameras in every room of the house. She is followed by security wherever she goes. Her husband is never physically abusive, but she is subjected to emotional and control abuse for years.

She does manage to get out, and the second half of the autobiography is much more about her career. After this, you probably do need to have an active interest in her work, otherwise the details are not very captivating – but the first half of the book is an extraordinary insight, whether or not you care about her career. And the problem is that this will probably be largely overlooked by people who’ll see the name of the author and decide the book isn’t for them. Which is why I’ve waited until the final line of this review to tell you that the autobiography is The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey.

The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp

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I was VERY excited when I saw that the Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press will be reprinting many Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons titles in January. Do I have many books by both these authors still unread? Yes, of course. But it’s still great to be able to get easily available copies of books that have eluded many fans for years – most notably Rhododendron Pie by Sharp, something of a golden fleece for book bloggers.

Dean Street Press have kindly sent me that as a review book, but I have started with the other one they sent – one I’ve had my eye on for a while: The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp, from 1940. I had high hopes, because the next novel she wrote is probably my favourite of the seven Sharps I’ve read, Cluny Brown. And the premise is irresistible: there is a little village called Gillenham where there was reputed to be a ‘stone of chastity’ in the stream. It was a stepping stone that any ‘unchaste’ woman would stumble on – sort of like one of those medieval witch trials, though believed to have been around in the time of the current population’s grandparents.

Professor Pounce arrives in the village, with his widowed sister-in-law and his young adult nephew Nicholas, intending to investigate the legend. Oh, and there’s also the beautiful, distant Carmen, whose presence is not quite explained. It’s a delightful set up – because the Professor can’t understand why anybody would find his investigations impertinent or insulting. As his sister-in-law points out, people might be offended at his prurient questions about their grandmother’s purity – but he has only science in mind. Nicholas, meanwhile, has other things in mind – and begins to fall both for Carmen and for a Bloomsbury-type who is staying in the village and writing terrible verse-set-to-music.

Nicholas’s objections to distributing the Professor’s questionnaire are disregarded, and he sets off to an unsympathetic local community. Here’s a sample of Sharp’s delightful prose:

Wobbling down the road next morning, on a borrowed bicycle with the bundle of questionnaires stacked in its carrier, Nicholas Pounce felt himself to be, both literally and figuratively, in a very precarious position. He was practically certain that only the front brake worked, and he was extremely apprehensive as to the effect upon its recipients of his Uncle Isaac’s questionnaire. By a curious chance all the villagers he passed were able-bodied males. Some of them said “Mornin'” to him, and Nicholas said “Good morning” back. He said it ingratiatingly. In each stolid pair of eyes he detected, or thought he did, a complete lack of scientific interest and a fanatic regard for the good name of woman.

As I’ve said before, Sharp is equally good at funny and poignant – and in The Stone of Chastity, she is in full comic mode. It reminded me a lot of R.C. Sherriff’s equally delightful The Wells of St Mary’s – a local village dealing with the unexpected introduction of the miraculous, and responding with the sort of village politics that have changed little in the decades since. Factions are formed, rumours spread and, yes, the stone itself turns up.

Thanks so much, Dean Street Press and Scott from Furrowed Middlebrow, for bringing back this wonderful novel – like so many of Sharp’s books, it deserves to be a modern classic. Incidentally, it seems to have reprinted a number of times – check out the range of cover images it has received over time.