That was the question that Sheree from Keeping Up With The Penguins asked me, and a whole bunch of other bloggers – you can find all our answers in a really interesting and entertaining (though I says it as shouldn’t) blog post.
With the caveat that, yes, of course, there are no ‘shoulds’ in reading – which book would you answer that question with? (For yourself – but you can also tell me what to read if you want to!)
Happy Saturday to everyone! I’ve been a bit under the weather this week but I’ve also been really excited by the news that single-adult households can form bubbles with another household, in England. My brother and I have formed a long-distance bubble, which means we can visit and go inside each other’s houses and have a hug! Something I hope I never take for granted again – since it’s now three months since I touched another human. What do humans even feel like??
Anyway, a book, a link, a blog post… in fact, two blog posts.
1.) The blog posts – here’s a great list of black authors published in the Virago Modern Classics series, courtesy of Juliana at The Blank Garden – and here’s a reminder from Helen at A Gallimaufry that Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is coming up again soon. Week beginning 29 June, in fact.
2.) The book – I love the graphic novelist Brecht Evens, and I’m really excited that The City of Belgium is coming out soon. More info – and you can even read it now, if you can read the original Flemish.
3.) The link – how are bookshop owners feeling about reopening? Find out at the Guardian.
It’s not a particularly difficult quiz, but can you spot what connects the books in this picture?
Yes, I suspect you noticed it immediately – the titles are all questions!
At my working-from-home desk, I can see Who Was Sophie? in my eyeline, and it’s a really interesting book that I wrote about a couple of years ago. It’s got me thinking about other titles that are questions, and a quick look around my house brought these titles up (in case you can’t see the bottom left one, it’s What Next? by Denis Mackail, and the top-right cover is deliberately printed upside down).
I had a handful of others that either didn’t have the title on the cover or are in compendiums, but I was quite surprised that my c.3000 books didn’t have more question mark titles. There are some famous ones I don’t have – N or M? by Agatha Christie, Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope – but can you think of others? Do you have others on your shelves?
I think it’s a fun way to write a title, and often extremely intriguing. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is one of Christie’s most beguiling titles, even if it isn’t one of my favourites of her books. Publishing industry, authors – why not more of these?
I read a review of Crossriggs (1908) by Jane and Mary Findlater back in my early days of blogging, and I now have no idea where – but I bought it in 2008, and it’s only taken me twelve years to take it off my Virago Modern Classics shelves and finally read it. And I loved it! (I have no idea how two authors go about writing a book together, so I’m going to quietly ignore that element of it. If anybody has any insight, do share.)
The novel is about the small Scottish village Crossriggs, which only has a handful of families, most of whom have known each other forever and can date back their family in the area through several generations.
We made at Crossriggs a right little society within a very small circle. True, the village was only an hour by train from a capital city; but our excursions there, and our returns, only made our independence the more marked. Crossriggs was no suburb – owed none of its life or interest to another place. Edinburgh was our shopping centre; some of us had business, and all of us had relatives there; our surgeons and our boot-makers lived there; but socially, Crossriggs hugged itself in a proud isolation from ‘town’. We didn’t want it; of course ‘town’ would never have believed that, but it is true all the same, and although the Scottish capital is at all seasons swept by sufficiently bracing airs, one of our customs was to draw a deep breath on alighting from the train at our own station, and remark with satisfaction, “How good the air tastes after being in town!”
Our heroine is Alexandra Hope, commonly Alex, who is a clever, witty, impetuous young woman living with a kind, unworldly father (‘Old Hopeful’) who is terrible at keeping money and excellent at having new interests and schemes. He is a fruitarian, and is usually to be found trying to get unsuspecting locals to try various vegetable pastes that he eats instead of proper meals. I loved him – think the kindness of Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding and the absent-mindedness of Mr Pim from A.A. Milne’s Mr Pim Passes By, rather than the self-centred eccentricity of Mr Woodhouse in Emma. He has a childlike wonder and delight in the world, and an equally childlike inability to manage responsibility and duty.
Alex tolerates him but has to do something to help the family finances – particularly when her widowed sister returns from living abroad, bringing five children with her. She refuses the help of Mr Maitland – a local man of some renown, who has moderate fame and riches, and a wife that nobody is particularly fond of. Some of my favourite scenes in the novel are when he is dealing bluffly with Alex, trying to educate or reason with her, while clearly very fond of her and a little in awe of her. There is something of the Emma/Knightley relationship.
Instead of his money, she starts reading for a local Admiral, whose sight is not up to reading for himself. And he has a smooth, handsome grandson in tow.
Crossriggs felt a lot like an Austen heroine in a Gaskell novel to me – all update a little for the Edwardian period. (In the writing, that is; it is set in the late-Victorian period). Alex is in the same mould as Elizabeth Bennett – very lovable and quite flawed. And not at all like the cover pic on the Virago Modern Classic, which I think is a rare poor choice from them. The story of romance is not simple, as there are a range of male candidates and none of them are quite suitable. But, like Austen’s novels, this is much more a book about the heroine’s development and dawning self-understanding than it is about romance.
I shan’t spoil the ending, but the plot develops in a way I didn’t at all expect – and very satisfyingly. I think I originally bought the novel because it was described as a comedy – well, it’s more a comedy of manners. Smiles rather than laughs, and not without sensationally tragic moments that are of their time, but a wonder set of characters and an enchantingly engaging setting. Perhaps Alex’s similarity to Austen heroines isn’t entirely accidental, but the novel succeeds in being entirely its own thing, however much it owes to a history of sister novelists.
Others who got Stuck into it:
“I could just say – find a copy, read it!” – HeavenAli
“It’s a good story, but I thought that Alex was a bit dense most of the time” – A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore
“I did love it. I can’t say that it’s a great book, but it is a lovely period piece.” – Beyond Eden Rock
For the third of the British Library Women Writers series, I thought I’d republish a post I wrote for the #1947Club back in 2016, which is when I first read Chatterton Square. It’s also the first of the British Library titles that I chose myself – and the afterword that was most interesting to me to write, as I had to do some new research into 1930s divorce law. I hope also interesting to read about! Anyway, here’s what I wrote back in 2016…
I was really pleased when I heard that Chatterton Square by E.H. Young was a 1947 novel, as I’ve had it on my shelves to read since 2007. Since 21st December 2007, to be precise, which makes it a couple of months after I read Tara’s review of it at Books and Cooks. Tara sadly left the blogosphere many years ago, but this book and she have always been associated in my mind – and it is only now, looking back at her review, that I discover that she wasn’t quite as enamoured with Chatterton Square as my memory had suggested…
This was the first E.H. Young novel I bought, but it’s now actually the fourth one that I’ve read – Miss Mole, William, and The Misses Mallett being on my have-now-read list, with William finding its way to the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About list. How does Chatterton Square fare on my list?
It was E.H. Young’s final novel, and there is a great deal of maturity here. I would never have mistaken it for a young writer’s first effort – because the characters and their experiences are described so subtly, so gradually and with such sophistication. As usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Who are these characters?
The novel concerns two families living next to each other on Chatterton Square in Upper Radstowe – Young’s fictionalised version of Clifton in Bristol. The families are the Blacketts and the Frasers, and the time is shortly before the Second World War – though obviously the characters cannot know that it is coming. They cannot know, but some are pretty sure – and some are adamant that it will not; I think this sort of dramatic irony might be something we see a lot of in the 1947 Club.
Mr and Mrs Blackett have an unhappy marriage, but only Mrs Blackett knows it. Mr Blackett is an astonishingly real creation: a monster who is never openly cruel or even vindictive. He domineers and ruins the lives of those in his family simply by expecting his needs to be more important than theirs, and respectability to be more important than freedom. He rules with a rod of iron – but one which manifests itself in hurt disbelief if anybody should ever disobey him, and genuine wonderment that anybody could wish to. Their three daughters – Flora, Rhoda, and Mary – deal with this in different ways. Flora is a copy of her father, though has grown increasingly sick of him; Rhoda is a copy of her mother (as they begin to realise as the novel progresses), and Mary – well, she’s not really anything, and could probably have been left out altogether.
Mrs Blackett has tolerated her misery by pretending to be happy, and mocking her husband to herself. This charade is what keeps her sane, and also what brings her amusement. If there is cruelty in her methods, it is because it is a question of survival. The way Young draws this marriage is truly astonishing – in the minutely observed ways each behaves, and the vividly real dynamic that emerges. It seeps into the reader’s mind and won’t go away.
She is also unafraid to show parents who don’t idolise their children. Mr Blackett is frustrated and confused by Rhoda, but Bertha Blackett actively dislikes her daughter Flora – while still loving her. But it is touching to see Rhode and Bertha come together as Chatterton Square progresses (and it begins when Rhoda sees her mother give her father a look which contained ‘a concentration of emotions which she could not analyse and which half frightened her. There was a cold anger in it, but she thought there was a kind of pleasure in it too’.)
This family transfixed me, and is the triumph of the novel in my opinion, but we should turn our attention to the other family. Rosamund Fraser heads up the family of five children – her husband is believed by some to be dead, but actually she is separated from him. The family is happier, freer spirits, gravely looked down on by Mr Blackett – but appealing to almost all the other Blacketts (sometimes specifically – Flora fancies herself in love with one of the sons – but more as a unit to be envied.)
Living with them is Miss Spanner – a spinster and friend of Rosamund, who suffers still from the memories and affects of an unhappy childhood. She and Rosamund have a close friendship that yet retains many barriers – not least a one-way emotional dependence. Miss Spanner, in turn, starts to become friendly with Rhoda, who sneaks over illicitly to borrow books.
Young has created such a complex and believable web of relationships between these two houses, and it is an engrossing novel. There is less levity than some of her others (no character leaps off the page like the lovable Miss Mole), and it perhaps requires more commitment from a reader than some. It is not one for speed-reading – but there is an awful lot to appreciate, and slow, attentive reading is rewarded.
And as I said, the threat of war looms. Mr Blackett is sure that it won’t happen, and considers predictions of war to be irresponsible and unpatriotic; Rosamund and Miss Spanner are sure it is around the corner. Miss Spanner has this wonderful moment of musing how war could be:
War was horrible, but there were worse things. Indeed, in conditions of her own choosing, Miss Spanner would not have shrunk from it. The age for combatants, if she had the making of the conventions of war, would start at about forty-five and there would be no limit at the other end. All but the halt and the blind would be in it and she saw this army of her creation, with grey hairs and wrinkles under the helmets, floundering through the mud, swimming rivers, trying to run, gasping for breath, falling out exhausted or deciding it was time for a truce and a nice cup of tea.
In our previous chosen year, war was around the corner but could only be guessed at. Some of the books we read paid no attention to the looming at all; some of the authors probably agreed with Mr Blackett that it would never happen. What I’m intrigued to discover this time around (and this is partly why 1947 was chosen) is – will any of the books ignore the war? Could they? And how differently will they all write about?
When I went to Toronto in October 2017, there was only one site that I really, really wanted to go to. Well, two including Niagara Falls – but the place I was most excited to visit was a little town called Orillia. Mention that to anybody in Toronto and they will be baffled – and, having spent a day there, I can see why they might be. It’s a small, perfectly pleasant town, but not the sort of place tourists from England would usually make a beeline for – unless, of course, they love Stephen Leacock. Or are the twin brother of someone who loves Stephen Leacock.
So we spent a day there, and I got to visit his house. Not many people were doing the same, but I found it very moving. I’ve loved Leacock since I started loving books aimed at grown ups, more or less, and it was a dream come true to be in the house where he wrote.
I’ve read a fair amount of Leacock, and had even more unread, but I had not come across My Discovery of England (1922). As soon as I knew it existed, I had to get my hands on it. In the early twentieth century, there were lots of books written by British authors about North America – often on the back of a few weeks travelling between hotels. They repeatedly answered the same sorts of questions about American culture, American women, America’s future – you might remember it being teased in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America.
Well, Leacock decides to beat the writers at their own game – and writes the reverse, coming to England to ‘jot down his impressions’, always bearing in mind comparisons with the places he knows and loves in ‘America’ (he often refers to Canada and America interchangeably as ‘America’ in the book, mentioning in a footnote that he uses it as shorthand for North America).
By an arrangement with the Geographical Society of America, acting in conjunction with the Royal Geographic Society of England (to both of whom I communicated my proposal), I went at my own expense.
The resulting book is (a) very funny and (b) frequently shows how little has changed in the UK in the intervening century. For instance, here he is not long after his arrival, taking a train journey:
The journey from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small county; it contains only fifty thousand square miles, where the United States, as every one knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow-passenger on the train, together with a provisional estimate of the American corn crop for 1922; but he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with jotting down an impression of incivility and paid no further attention to my fellow-traveller other than to read the labels of his luggage and to peruse the headings of his newspaper by peeping over his shoulder.
It was my first experience of travelling with a fellow-passenger in a compartment of an English train, and I admit now that I was as yet ignorant of the proper method of conduct. Later on I became fully conversant with the rules of travel as understood in England. I should have known, of course, that I must on no account speak to the man.
A lot of the humour in the book comes from comparing the way English writers were treated in provincial towns in North America with the way he is treated in England’s major cities – he notes sadly, for instance, that he is not met by the mayor for a tour of the local soap factory. It’s all dry and I enjoyed it a lot.
Curiously, the one time he does seem not to be dry is when writing about co-education – and, despite being a professor at McGill University and teaching both men and women, he launches into quite an odd and unconvincing line of argument against women receiving degrees. Try, if you can, to put that to one side – and then there is much to enjoy in his cursory exploration of Oxford University (from the vantage of the Mitre pub which, one hopes for his sake, was nicer in 1922 than it is today). The university certainly doesn’t seem to have changed much…
In the second half of the book, he focused more on the disadvantages of being a visiting speaker – again, very amusing, but I preferred the first half of the book. But overall it was exactly the sort of mildly silly, gently biting book that I have come to expect and love from Leacock. Something fun for lockdown, certainly.
I recently tweeted a photo of my British library Crime Classics collection, most of which I haven’t read, and asked the good people of Twitter which I should read next.
As I should have perhaps anticipated, I got many, many suggestions – practically as many as there are books there. But I went away and explored a few of the options, and chose Death in Captivity (1952) by Michael Gilbert, which I think I got as a review copy. I was intrigued by it’s WW2 setting and the ‘locked room mystery’ element to it.
The novel is set in a POW camp in Italy towards the end of the war – the soldiers have heard rumours that the end of the war might be coming, but nothing concrete. But they do know that a retreating German army might have no compunction in a few last-minute killings of British soldiers in an interment camp. Now is the time to make good their escape – and they have been busy tunnelling away from the various huts they’re living in.
I’ll be honest – the characters more or less blended into factions for me, in this one. I was too caught up with the setting and the mystery (to which I’ll come in a moment) – so this review is going to be lamentably short on characters’ names and personalities. I was also feeling pretty anxious when I read it, so was speeding through for the plot. But Gilbert definitely makes us feel like we’re in the middle of this camp – with all the humour, rivalries, fear, and ambition that are the everyday norms of the extraordinary situation in which these man have found themselves.
While there are a few tunnels, most are really only decoys for the main tunnel. But one morning, the soldiers find that there is a dead body in it, under a pile of rubble. It brings about a long list of questions: murder or accident? How did he get in? Do the Italian guards know about the tunnel – and how can they begin to investigate his death without exposing their chance of escape?
Like so many detective novels, the denouement doesn’t live up to the prowess of Agatha Christie. If, like me, you started with her, every subsequent detective novelist will disappoint with their plots – I’ve yet to find any exceptions. And, no, the denouement here is not particularly satisfactory – but what was brilliant was the way in which Gilbert brought that world to life. For the vividness there, and sections of real tension, I’d very readily recommend Death in Captivity.
I’ve left it far too long since I wrote about The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair – I’ve been meaning to write quick posts to let people know about the British Library Women Writers series that I am lucky enough to be series consultant for.
When they asked me, back in the dim and distant past, they’d already picked some of the titles to republish – and My Husband Simon was one of them. It was also the only one of the three they’d chosen that I’d already read. And luckily I liked it – and I liked it all the more when I re-read it to write my afterword (which is about class and reading matter in the novel).
The main character is Nevis, and she is a writer with an early success under her belt. Like Panter-Downes herself, she’d published a book as a teenager and had a follow-up that wasn’t as successful. How far it’s a self-portrait is hard to say – I don’t know if any such man as Simon existed, but Nevis is won over by him pretty quickly. He is proud of the fact that he doesn’t read and hasn’t heard of her. He also, she suspects, wouldn’t have heard of Virginia Woolf. Despite coming from different classes, with very different sets of likes and priorities, they get married. The original US title gives us a clue why: Nothing In Common But Sex.
Into this increasingly fragile marriage comes Nevis’s publisher – and a sort of love triangle forms. But the novel is much more than that. It’s about a meeting of classes that has nothing of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover fantasy to it. I’ve noticed a lot of the reviews have also drawn out the way that women’s work was (and always is) disparaged – that’s definitely in the mix too. It’s a really fascinating look at an incompatible marriage – told in a pacey, page-turning way. It doesn’t have the fine prose of One Fine Day, written substantially later, but it is still good writing with moments of real brilliance. This is the bit I excerpted when I reviewed it here years ago:
We climbed on top of the tram and away it snorted. A queer constraint was on us. We hardly said a word, but in some way all my perceptions were tremendously acute so that I took in everything that was going on in the streets. A shopping crowd surged over the pavements. In the windows were gaping carcases of meat, books, piles of vegetable marrows, terrible straw hats marked 6/11d. I though vaguely: “Who buys all the terrible things in the world? Artificial flowers and nasty little brooches of Sealyhams in bad paste, and clothes-brushes, shaped like Micky the Mouse and scarves worked in raffia?” A lovely, anaemic-looking girl stood on the kerb, anxiously tapping an envelope against her front teeth. Should she? Shouldn’t she? And suddenly, having made her decision, all the interest went out of her face and she was just one of the cow-like millions who were trying to look like Greta Garbo.
Wonderful, no?
It has been noted online that Mollie Panter-Downes didn’t rate the novel as highly as her later works, and didn’t want it republished during her lifetime. Interestingly, I’ve seen this noted by someone who has no qualms about biographies that reveal things their subject wouldn’t want revealed! It’s an interesting set of questions, but not one I’ll go into here – as with the George Orwell novel I reviewed recently, she definitely needn’t have worried. It is not her greatest work, but it is greater than many authors’ entire outputs.
I’ve recently remembered Sara Groves exists, and have been going through her discography. Some lovely stuff there – and this, ‘When the Saints’, is particularly moving and invigorating.
You remember the Overhaul? Where I look back at a previous ‘haul’ post on my blog and see how many of the books I’ve read. And it’s always a super embarrasingly low amount. Welp, here we are with another instalment!
The Overhaul #5
The original haul post is here, where you can find why I bought the books.
Date of haul: February 2011
Location: Edinburgh (lots of bookshops)
Number of books bought: 19
Right, let’s see how well I did with those 19!
Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell – Their CorrespondenceTotal bought: 19
Total still unread: 11
Total no longer owned: 2
