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A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Janeites will read anything about Jane Austen – and it’s also a truth universally acknowledged that this opening ‘bit’ is wildly overused. Sorry about that. Anyway, I can’t remember exactly where I heard about A Jane Austen Education (2011) by William Deresiewicz, but I was delighted when my friend Malie got it for my birthday last year. It seemed like the right sort of book for all this *gestures at world* – and I was sucked in straight away by this opening paragraph:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

It’s rare to find a man writing a non-academic book about Austen, and Deresiewicz certainly owns up to some masculine prejudice at the outset. He was a graduate student at an American university, doing a six-year PhD programme. Apparently specialising comes quite late in the day in American PhDs, so the first years were spent covering a lot of literary ground – and that included reading Jane Austen. Deresiewicz was much more concerned with the big men of American fiction, and didn’t want to bother with the quiet manners that he perceived he’d find in Austen. Starting with Emma.

At first, he hates it. He hates Emma’s poor decision making and small world. Still more, he hates the boring Miss Bates and the interminable Mr Woodhouse. But he gradually realised that they were meant to be boring and interminable – and a whole lot more than that too, of course. It is the famous Box Hill scene that finally changed this mind.

And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma’s cruelty, which I was so quick to criticise, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

This passage does also reveal one of the few issues I had with A Jane Austen Education – that Deresiewicz leans a little too heavily on the idea of discovering ‘the’ point that Austen was trying to make, rather than landing on one particular interpretation. His moments of revelation are nuanced and intriguing – like Northanger Abbey helping him realise he should ask better questions, or Mansfield Park making him a better listener – but I wish he had more openly recognised that there is no singular conclusion that can come from any novel. As a PhD in literature, he surely knows this full well.

Through the book, each of Austen’s novels gets a chapter – his reading of the book going alongside his own life, including failed relationships (romantic and otherwise), stalled academic work, and a difficult engagement with his father who wanted a different career path for his son. I love books that interweave the personal and the interpretive. This has become increasingly the way that creative non-fiction is written, and I think it has enriched the genre no end; A Jane Austen Education is perhaps most similar to Nell Stevens’ wonderful Mrs Gaskell and Me, though without a particularly biographical slant to his writing. I would have welcomed even more autobiography, but he is excellent at intertwining literary criticism and self revelation. I’d love to know more suggestions in this genre.

Over the course of the book, Deresiewicz goes from an Austen sceptic to regarding her as his favourite author – and the reader, who probably started far further down that spectrum, can forgive him his early hesitancy. I loved seeing his unusual perspectives on the novel, learning about him, and marvelling again at the way that Austen speaks across the centuries in a way that very few other authors have managed or are likely to manage. And, like all of Austen’s heroines, Deresiewicz’s journey through A Jane Austen Education isn’t in learning more about literature or the people around him – it’s a journey to better understand himself, and start changing where he needs to change.

A round-up of #ReadIndies books

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I’ve been busy reading for Karen and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies month, and here are three of the books that came off my tbr pile for it. They could scarcely be more different!

Image result for brampton wick

The book: Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The publisher: Dean Street Press (their Furrowed Middlebrow series)
The date: originally 1952, reprinted by DSP in 2017

My friend Barbara bought me a whole pile of Furrowed Middlebrow titles, very excitingly, and a few people recommend I pick Bramton Wick off the pile. It’s a classic story of small village life – one of my favourite things – including a group of young people who might fall in love, and a host of wealthy neighbours and neighbours who used to be wealthy. The introduction compares it to Angela Thirkell, which is a fair comparison – perhaps the humour is a bit different, but the characters wouldn’t be out of place in Thirkell’s Barsetshire.

I particularly liked the dog-obsessive women living together, and enjoyed hating the venomous sister among the Misses Cleve. There an awful lot of characters, in fact, and I occasionally wondered if Fair should have narrowed her canvas a little – but I quickly determined the ones whose lives I felt most invested in, and they also turned out to be the ones who got the most focus. Unlikely to be an accident!

Image result for stardust nation

The book: Stardust Nation by Deborah Levy and Andrzej Klimowski
The publisher: SelfMadeHero
The date: 2016

I can’t remember if this was a review copy or if I bought it, but it came in a period where I was trying to expand my knowledge of graphic novels. This one is based on Levy’s earlier short story ‘Stardust Nation’ (2013), and is essentially a story of contagious trauma. Tom is the main character – one day his colleague Nick phones him to say that his (Nick’s) father beat him as a child. But this is Tom’s life, not Nick’s. Memories become shared and stolen and it’s all quite unsettling. I loved Levy’s words, but wasn’t sure about Klimowski’s illustration. A lot looks quite poor draughtsmanship to me, but I suspect it’s deliberate and I don’t fully understand it.

Image result for hello friend we missed you

The book: Hello Friend We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts
The publisher: Parthian
The date: 2020

This novel won ‘Not the Booker Prize’, which is probably why my book group is reading it. It’s a novel on a small Welsh island where ‘Hill’ goes to visit his invalid father, have an affair with his father’s nurse, wonder if Jack Black is ever going to get back to him about his ‘promising’ film script. It’s all built up of minute, often banal, observations – usually on separate lines, and often ending ‘thinks Hill’. There are no speech marks, which seems to be a thing people do.

I quite enjoyed it, and it’s certainly an unusual and confident prose style. What confuses me is how funny the blurb and puff quotes claim Hello Friend We Missed You is, because I didn’t find it remotely funny – i.e. I would have no idea it was meant to be a comic novel if the back cover hadn’t told me. Confusing. Maybe book group will clear it up. Not really my cup of tea, overall, but always interesting to see something so out of the ordinary.

Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

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#ReadIndies naturally made me think of my unread pile of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I’ve yet to buy any of the blue fiction titles, but am amassing the white non-fiction – mostly spurred on by how brilliant This Little Art by Kate Briggs is. I don’t remember why I picked Notes From No Man’s Land – originally published in 2009, and published by Fitzcarraldo in 2017 – but I’m glad I did, because it’s excellent.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first of all: this is a collection of essays about racism by a white woman. At one point she refers to her family as ‘mixed’, but this turns out to be largely about the people her mother and aunt married, not her biological relatives. Well, her mixed-race cousin is her blood relative, of course, and there is an interesting essay on their relationship that I imagine would be very different if the cousin had written it.

Anyway, when I picked up the book I had assumed, from the title, that Eula Biss was herself mixed race – the no-man’s land perhaps being between two communities. That is not the case. Biss lives in various different places throughout the essays in this collection, and sometimes she is in a racial minority and sometimes in a majority, but she is always a white woman looking at an issue that affects other people far more than it affects her. That might mean you wouldn’t want to read Notes From No Man’s Land, and I’d understand that. What I will say is that she doesn’t claim to be anything more than an observer – of current day, of her lifetime, and of history.

The opening essay is a powerful example of the latter. ‘Time and Distance Overcome’ was initially intended to be ‘an essay about telephone poles and telephones’, exploring how people reacted to have poles and wires festoon their neighbourhoods and skies. We take them for granted now, but, as Biss writes:

The idea on which the telephone depended – the idea that every home could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart – seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

The essay starts out looking at this dawn of a new technology. But Biss’s searches for ‘telephone pole’ in newspapers of the early-to-mid 20th century revealed something else: how often they were used for lynchings. With a judder, the essay turns to lynchings instead. Biss doesn’t over-editorialise, but lets the horror of the facts speak for itself. In this essay, she shows something she is very good at throughout Notes From No Man’s Land: resisting the narrative urge to draw everything into a structured conclusion. Whether her essays are mostly facts or mostly subjective, and this collection mixes the two, she doesn’t tie a neat bow.

The first essay is the most objective of the lot. In others, Biss’s own experience is centred – living in so-called dangerous areas of New York, and trying to establish why they have that reputation; moving to Mexico and trying to improve her Spanish; being a teacher in New York during 9/11, and being a university professor at an insignificant university in Iowa. Some of her insights in the latter were among the most interesting things in the book – how clueless most of the students were about racism, but also how university students (en masse) fulfil many of society’s fears about ‘othered’ groups, but somehow without being the target of discrimination and fear.

I loved the way that Biss interwove the personal and the historical in many of these essays – sometimes jarringly, to great effect, and sometimes much more gently. A child custody case flows in and out of Biss’s frustrations working for local media; a Nina Simone song plays during a car journey and melds with thoughts on Irish racial identity; Biss’s experience as a teacher come alongside the idea of education post-slavery. Again, even when these comparisons jolt the reader, or seem poles apart, Biss doesn’t overplay her hand as an essayist. It doesn’t seem an affront to compare ex-slaves’ education with her teaching experience, because she never directly compares them. They are just both there, in the essay, allowing each other room and creating a landscape which the reader can explore.

Chiefly, Biss is a woman driven by curiosity, compassion, and an ability to see how seemingly disparate elements exist within the same universe. Here she is on ‘diverse’:

Walking down Clark Street I pass a poster on an empty storefront inviting entrepreneurs to start businesses in Rogers Park, ‘Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.’ It takes me some time, standing in front of this poster, to understand why the word ‘diverse’ strikes me as so false in this context, so disingenuous. It is not because this neighborhood is not full of man different kinds of people, but because that word implies some easy version of this difficult reality, some version that is no full of sparks and averted eyes and police cars. But still, I’d like to believe in the promise of that word. Not the sunshineness of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.

And perhaps that’s what I liked best about this book. It resists any ‘easy version of this difficult reality’. It recognises complexity, and celebrates the un-simple.

Interview: Will from Renard Press

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This month, Karen and Lizzy are running #ReadIndies – encouraging us all to read books published by independent publishing houses. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got loads waiting on the shelves, and I’ve already dug into a few. But I also wanted to spotlight one of the newer names on the block – Renard Press. And what better way to do that than asking some questions of the guy running it, Will Dady. I’ve interspersed it with some of the lovely books they publish or will publish – check out their site for more info.

1.) Hi Will! Let’s start with your background in publishing?

After graduating, I took on a (distance – ahead of the trend!) marketing position for a small academic publisher, and I managed to get an internship with a tiny indie press whose raison d’être was making beautiful books, and it’s really there that I developed my love of books as an artefact in their own right. That internship turned into a lengthy Editorial/Marketing/Production assistantship, which was an excellent introduction to the independent-publishing scene, of course, where juggling plates and having to be proficient at everything is a way of life.

It’s always been a dream to start up my own press, and in this early role my mentor encouraged me to learn as much as I could, and really encouraged creativity. On the side I did a bit of freelance editing and proofreading, and I did some extra training – a course in bookbinding and a course in InDesign – and I landed a job in a bigger publishing house, largely dealing with editorial and marketing, which grew over the next five years to cover production and design and other bits as well. I continued to do a bit of freelance editorial work, as well as branching out into some web design. Then, in April last year (truly fantastic timing, I’m sure you’ll agree!) I found myself in the position to be able to set up Renard Press.

2.) What was the genesis of Renard Press and how do you fit into the publishing scene?

Setting up an independent publishing house has long been my dream, ever since that early internship, where my mentor insisted that one day soon I would be running The Great Snoring Press (after the village in which I grew up), and at the beginning of 2020 it finally started to look like it might be possible to do so. Although, of course, we had our first lockdown in April, I persevered, and spent the time creating a website, agreeing sales and distribution, bookbinding and setting up social-media profiles. ‘If you can get through this,’ said our sage new print rep, ‘you can get through anything.’

A few manic months later, Renard Press was launched, a catalogue was in print and readers started to get in touch to express their pleasure upon seeing our list. So really Renard’s emergence was very sudden! The ‘independent movement’, if it may be so called, having struggled on the high street for many years, is having a renaissance – there are armies of readers calling for fairness in retail taxes to support independent booksellers, and for inclusivity and diversity in publishing lists, which favours independent publishers, since they are better placed to take risks on literature that falls outside of the mainstream.

So, it’s against this backdrop that Renard shuffled into being, and I have been overwhelmed by the support between presses, championed by some inspirational publishers, reviewers and retailers – not to mention the advent of Bookshop UK, which is potentially great news for the industry. So there’s where we fit in – along with all of the other small presses! No man is an island – we’re part of the rich indie scene now, and we have a duty to publish well and support other independent presses and booksellers, as they support us too.

3.) How do you choose your titles? 

I’m slowly preparing a broad cross-section of genres – essays, fiction, poetry, playscripts – because I think it’s important (and, indeed, enjoyable) to read widely. With the classics, I feel publishing is a bit like ‘curating’ – even more so for a company with a subscriber model, in that most subscribers receive every book – so I like to put together the publishing programme as though I’m planning a year of reading for someone. Of course, there are a few other things to take into account – when I set up the press I committed us to keeping the gender-split of the authors in balance, for instance.

Beyond this, I like to explore authors’ lesser-known works, so if I enjoy a book I go hunting through the author’s backlist, so to speak, to find forgotten or neglected titles I think I could make something of. The literary canon, of course, in 1970, was wildly different to that of today, so I think it’s important to look at why – what was missing? Is there enough of it now? – and make sure that the press’ output focuses on celebrating these positive changes, and perhaps even adding to the canon with voices that have been lost to time.

4.) Stephen Leacock caught my eye first – how did you discover him, and how did you choose Frenzied Fiction?

I first picked up Frenzied Fiction in Any Amount of Books’ basement in the Charing Cross Road – a favourite haunt – and thought it sounded brilliant. It was! From there on I was hooked. A little later I happened across Leacock again – I’m a member of the Whitefriars Club, a literary society, and I spotted his name in the archive, in a write-up of a talk he had given about the nature of a humourist, which made me even fonder of him. Some of his other volumes of short stories are better known, but I really think that Frenzied Fiction, which was published relatively late on, represents a master at the height of his game, and it contains ‘My Recollections as a Spy’, which is my favourite of his stories.

5.) The cover designs of your classic fiction are so strong – really beautiful and striking. How did you decide Renard Press’s ‘look’, and what’s the process of creating them?

Thank you! What really drives the list is a desire to bring ‘niche’ (I hate that word) titles to a wider readership, so there’s an understanding at the heart of things that the books need to look good. Cover design has had lots of vaguely definable ‘eras’ – from the beautiful old leather-bound editions to the stunning Dent editions, the famous Gollancz dustjackets, etc., so sometimes I like the artwork to mind one of one of these eras.

I also think good design draws on good design, as it were, rather than seeking to reinvent the wheel, so a lot of the covers use motifs or typefaces from bygone eras in a more modern setting. Each cover (or series design, in some cases) is unique, but I’ve designed over 400 covers to date, so I tend to be able to crack on pretty quickly now, and I tend to know what does and doesn’t work. Of course, it’s important to get others’ opinions, and I have a faithful panel of supporters willing to give me an honest reaction.

6.) Any hints for the future of Renard Press?

Well, we’ve set ourselves quite the challenge for the year ahead, with a very ambitious programme, so job one is delivering on that. Classics-wise, I look forward to expanding some of the collections – the Virginia Woolf collection, Orwell’s Essays, the Oscar Wildes – and to ‘rediscovering’ some more lesser-known names. I’m actually drawing up the last few titles of the year, so there should be more news soon! We’ve kickstarted the contemporary fiction and playscripts lists with two incredible titles, and I’m about to launch a poetry list, too. But let’s hope for a proper launch party before too long!

7.) What are you reading?

I’ve just inhaled Kae Tempest’s On Connection (Faber), which I’m busy recommending to everyone. It’s in a lovely modern hardback take on ‘the pamphlet’ format, which the production nerd in me just loved, and as a text it’s very powerful, too. I’ve actually taken a quick break from my reading pile in favour of reading some submissions, which I love to go through – and I made an offer on a stunning novel this morning, so watch this space…! Next on the groaning TBR list is the monumental Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, from the excellent folks at Galley Beggar. I must be the last person in the world to read it, so no spoilers, please.

The Indignant Spinsters by Winifred Boggs

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Last year, Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs was one of my favourite reads, and I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’d love it to be a British Library Women Writers title at some point. But it wasn’t the first of her books that I read. The reason I got interested in Boggs in the first place was The Indignant Spinsters (1921). I figured I couldn’t help but love an author who would write a book with a title like that.

I love a slightly ridiculous premise, particularly if it involves convoluted lying and disguise, and that’s what The Indignant Spinsters provides in spades. The first section of the book tries to get the reader comfortable in what’s going on, and I’ll admit I had to re-read bits of it several times. The long and the short of it is that there are three unmarried sisters, the Miss Smiths – Kit, Doll, and the narrator whose name I can’t find. Maybe unnamed? They have lived oppressed lives with an uncle who, when he dies, leaves them with a fair chunk of money but not enough to live on forever.

How easy to be good on a few thousands a year! How difficult on a hundred or so! Oh, the daily grinding sordid things that threaten to make us sordid too! We may manage, a few of us, to afford a heart; we know we cannot afford a soul. We have got to ‘make two ends meet’ instead, perhaps spend fifty years at it – and fail at the last. I also told myself that there were few things I would not do to get a chance at the big things of life.

The Miss Smiths have some tangled connection with the housekeeper of a house where the son moved to Australia and cut ties with the Wanstead family – and had three daughters, all of whom died. As luck would have it, these three daughters are about the same age as the three Miss Smiths. They decide to announce themselves as the missing women, and move into the ancestral home.

The plan is concocted in order to find them eligible husbands, as they no longer wish to be indigent spinsters – or indignant, as is misheard, for such is the origin of the title. They know that wealthy women are far more likely to find men who want to marry them. Their plan is not cruel, as they don’t want to take anything away from the Wansteads. And there is no emotional manipulation at play, since nobody they’re meeting has any fondness for the absent son, or any personal knowledge of his three daughters. Boggs does a good job at keeping us on side, and sympathetic with them.

But – oh, of course – things go wrong. The missing women’s uncle John – also believed dead – turns up, and he is rather dubious about their claims. And that’s just the first of the obstacles that gets in their way, as they deal with their plan crumbling and their moral resolve following suit.

In all of this, there are a few delightful character-types – like straight-talking Aunt Susannah:

”I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I was discussing spinsters. Be good enough not to interrupt and to speak when you’re spoken to, Miss Pert! I say spinsters are maligned. If half of them are ‘couldn’ts’, the other half are certainly ‘wouldn’ts’, and when one sees what some of their fellow women pick up and endure with complacency one hardly wonders or blames them. In the old days they had a regrettable taste in curates; now they prefer motor cars, and again I don’t blame ’em!”

So, it’s a ridiculously silly plot and it’s good fun to read. And it’s not an awful lot more than that, but sometimes that’s all one needs. There isn’t much emotional depth to the characters, and the stakes feel relatively low. Which is why I found it a surprise when I read Sally on the Rocks which is so much more impactful – a genuine feeling of the desperation of unmarried poverty, and characters who are so well drawn. I found a lot to enjoy for a few frivolous afternoons. It was only when I saw what else Boggs was capable of that I realised this wouldn’t be the one of hers that I would be pushing on everyone.

The BookTube Spin

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Look, I’m not on BookTube – where people talk about books on YouTube, for the uninitiated. Nobody needs to see my shoddy camera angles and poor editing technique. But I do enjoy watching a few of the channels, and taking their new and modern ideas to the olde worlde world of book blogging. Our words are written down! Fancy.

And I enjoy no book channel more than Rick’s. He’s come up with The BookTube Spin, which is very similar to the Classics Spin, but open to any sort of book. Essentially, pick and number 20 books – he’ll spin a wheel and a choose a number on 31 January, then we have two months to read the book. I’ll let him explain in greater detail…

It’s a fun way to get someone else to help sort through your tbr pile! I decided to plough my own furrow a little, and pick alphabetically – skipping Q and so ending at U. Where possible, I also chose book titles beginning with the same letter, though that wasn’t always doable from my tbr shelves.

I’ve tried to pick books that I’m not racing towards (though I’m pretty sure I’ll read Butterfly Lampshade soon whether or not it comes up), so as to find something unexpected from my tbr.

1.) After the Funeral – Diana Athill
2.) Butterfly Lampshade – Aimee Bender
3.) Chedsy Place – Richmal Crompton
4.) Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens
5.) Every Eye – Isobel English
6.) Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
7.) Go She Must – David Garnett
8.) Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
9.) Lions and Shadows – Christopher Isherwood
10.) Woman in a Lampshade – Elizabeth Jolley
11.) Suddenly, a Knock at the Door – Etgar Keret
12.) The Limit – Ada Leverson
13.) The Magician – W. Somerset Maugham
14.) News of England – Beverley Nichols
15.) The Opposite House – Helen Oyeyemi
16.) Pax – Sara Pennypacker
17.) Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole – Allan Ropper
18.) The Small Room by May Sarton
19.) Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido
20.) Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Have you read any of these? Fancy making your own Spin? Let me (and Rick) know if you join in!

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell

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I imagine you’ve probably read Shaun Bythell’s very funny accounts of running a secondhand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland – Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller. I love them and I’m hoping they go on and on. While we wait for another diary, though, there is Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshop – published last year, probably with an eye on being a stocking filler. It’s 137 pages and a pocket-sized book, so only takes an hour or so to whip through – but it’s a delightful hour.

As the title suggests, Bythell divides up his usual clientele into seven categories – though each of these has several sub-sections. For example, here is the genus Expert, species Bore:

This type of person often considers him- or herself to be a polymath, and will inveterately share their thoughts with you on any subject you choose to mention, or accidentally mention, once you are aware of their proclivity. It is best to maintain complete silence in their presence, as the slightest thing can trigger a lengthy tirade on the most unexpected of subjects, although often you don’t discover that customers fall into this taxonomic category until it’s far, far too late. They are not averse to listening in on conversations between other customers and interjecting with their (often wildly offensive) opinions, and on many occasions I have had to apologise to innocent bystanders who – having been quietly discussing something – have subsequently been subject to an unsolicited (and possibly racist) rant from a complete stranger who happened to be within earshot.

Bythell is always wonderful at spearing people who have no self-awareness about how difficult they make life for others – though he breaks his curmudgeonly persona every now and then to talk about kinds of people who are very welcome in the shop. He treads the line between wittily grumpy and mean with expertise, never falling on the wrong side of it – but these moments of appreciation are still like the sun bursting through clouds.

Naturally, as a frequenter of bookshops, I read nervously – trying to identify myself. The nearest I came was the posh old lady from the city, with whom I have little in common except for her taste: ‘She would never dream of taking the dog for a walk, and her interests, when she comes into the bookshop and wafts dreamily around, are a light touch of Bloomsbury (particularly Virginia Woolf) with a smattering of the Mitford sisters.’ Ouch!

I will read anything Bythell writes about bookshops and, though this isn’t a proper instalment in the series, it’s enough to keep us going for a while. If it wasn’t in your stocking at Christmas, then treat yourself to a copy to make January a bit more fun.

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.