ACOB2018

A Century of Books: some catch-up mini-reviews

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I’m actually doing rather better in A Century of Books than my tally has been looking, to date – and that’s because there are quite a few titles that I haven’t reviewed. And, for one reason or another, I don’t want to write full reviews of all of these – so, instead, I’ll do a quick round-up of some of the other books I’ve been reading… in date order. (And more reviews to come shortly!)

1925: The Human Machine by Arnold Bennett

This was an audiobook, and I think it might have been serialised much earlier, but Wikipedia says 1925 so I’m going to believe it. It’s a rather odd self help book, in which Bennett spends much of the time saying over and over that people don’t train their brain enough, or control their emotions enough, but doesn’t come up with much concrete advice other than ‘concentrate your mind for half an hour every day’. To be honest, I was listening more out of interest in social and literary history than to receive any self help advice, and for that it was an entertaining angle on Arnold Bennett. (Whenever I write about him, the Arnold Bennett Society pop up – so hello guys!)

1959: The Young Ones by Diana Tutton

I would do a full review of this, but I had to read it in the Bodleian (since secondhand copies are rarer than hen’s teeth) and I don’t feel like I can write a review without the book in front of me. It’s about a brother and sister and their adopted sister, and the various emotional tangles they get into – including the brother and adopted sister falling in love. But that is the least of the tangles… It’s written with the confident wit and ever-so-slight surrealism of Tutton – not as wonderful as Guard Your Daughters (and indeed what is?) but I think very deserving of being back in print nonetheless.

2013: Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

I’ve read one previous memoir about the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, Simon Stephenson’s brilliant Let Not The Waves of the Sea – and Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir tells of being in the midst of it, losing her husband, parents, and two children. What makes the book so powerful is that she doesn’t attempt to retrospectively explain the grieving process, but just tells us what she did – even when it’s as odd as terrorising the family who moved into her house. Stark and astonishing book.

2017: Scribbles in the Margins by Daniel Gray

I love a book about books, and one that’s inspired by J.B. Priestley’s Delight is likely to be, indeed, a delight. This is a fun look through the different things that readers love doing, and different reading habits, but it is very light on actual books. That means its potential audience is much wider – and I imagine it was rather a stocking filler last year – but it’s not got a huge amount to get your teeth into. A very enjoyably diverting read, of course – but expect it to be what it is!

The disturbing popularity of The Sheik

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My latest audiobook from Librivox was The Sheik (1919) by E.M. Hull, and it was a fascinating experience – and not only because I discovered that some people say ‘sheek’ rather than ‘shake’. (The recording was done by a group of people, taking different chapters, and an especial hat nod must go to M.J. Franck who is a brilliant reader.)

If you’ve done any reading about popular fiction in the early decades of the 20th century, you’ll have read about The Sheik. It was an enormous bestseller (selling over a million copies even before the silent film with Rudolph Valentino was released – which, incidentally, you can watch on YouTube). It kicked off a whole new lease of life for desert noir, or whatever they were calling it. And I’m pretty sure that almost nobody reads it nowadays.

I listened to it entirely out of my interest in literary history – not for the novel itself. You’ll understand why the more I explain, if you don’t already know about the novel. And this blog post will have spoilers, because I’m not expecting anybody to read The Sheik. Indeed, I urge you not to read it.

The novel tells of Diana Mayo, an independently-minded young woman who doesn’t want to kowtow to society’s restrictions. She’s not interested in romance or marriage, but instead wants to go exploring on her own – to the concern of her decadent brother. Indeed, she is rather an admirable and refreshing character. Against her brother’s advice, she sets out into the desert with some locals to guide her… and is ambushed. Some of the men are shot. And she is kidnapped by ‘the sheik’. There is rather a lot about how strong he is, and about how his strong arm pushes her strongly against his strong chest. He’s strong, in case that was too subtle.

The sheik is Ahmed Ben Hassan. And he has not intention of letting her go now that he has her. Indeed, between the second and third chapters he rapes her. He continues to rape her every day for several weeks – this is 1919; we don’t see those scenes, but we do get lots of scenes of him looking cruelly at her, laughing cruelly, smiling cruelly etc. Hull goes in for iterated statements.

And throughout all of this, Hull is crazy racist. Lots of sweeping statements are made about “the Arabs” and their supposed disregard for mercy. A lot of her horror seems to come as much from having had sex with “an Arab” as from being raped – though the word ‘rape’ is never used. It’s all pretty unpleasant.

It gets worse.

One day, out riding, she manages to escape. Long story short, she doesn’t get super far until Ahmed Ben Hassan catches up with her and makes her come back to his camp. And… she realises that she is in love with him. I knew this was coming, but I still shouted at the car radio when it happened. I think this brief excerpt sums up everything I hated about the plot of the novel:

Her heart was given for all time to the fierce desert man who was so different from all other men whom she had met, a lawless savage who had taken her to satisfy a passing fancy and who had treated her with merciless cruelty. He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality and superb animal strength. And he was an Arab!

I had thought it might be more like Pamela, where the power of her virtue forces him to repent – but, no, she is the one who changes to be his object. And – skipping forward a few chapters – phew, it turns out he’s actually European after all, so all’s well that ends well.

Hull writes surprisingly well and engagingly, and I’d enjoy reading her in an entirely different sphere – it doesn’t make much of a difference what a writing style is like when it’s about this. My main surprise – as with when Fifty Shades of Grey became so popular – is that so many people had this… taste? fetish? fantasy? Apparently in 1919 this passed for acceptable reading – unless all the millions of copies were read in secret, of course. It’s telling that, in the film, the sheik only thinks about raping her, but doesn’t actually do it.

I’ve no idea what E.M. Hull’s other novels are like (though I don’t hold out hopes for The Son of the Sheik), and I don’t think I’ll explore any further. This dip back a century has confirmed my worst fears from reading about the novel – and painted rather a disturbing picture of what was de rigueur in 1919.

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

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It’s turning out to be all Whipple all the time on Stuck in a Book right now. Well, long before I started Random Commentary, I was already reading the monster that is The Priory (1939). It’s enormous. My copy is 528 pages – I basically never read books that are over 500 pages, and that’s why I’ve had my copy for nearly 14 years (gasp, how did time pass that quickly?)

I bought it just before I started university, while on a trip to the Bookbarn to buy books for my course. This was, ahem, not for my course – but I couldn’t resist. And it was only when I got home that I discovered that my copy was… signed by Dorothy Whipple!

Obviously my copy is much older than the Persephone edition – which I do also have, as I can’t bring myself to get rid of either copy. And it starts like this…

It was almost dark. Cars, weaving like shuttles on the high road between two towns fifteen miles apart, had their lights on. Every few moments, the gates of Saunby Priory were illuminated. Every few moments, to left or to right, the winter dusk was pierced by needle points of light which, rushing swiftly into brilliance, summoned the old gateway like an apparition from the night and, passing, dispelled it.

The gates were from time to time illuminated, but the Priory, set more than a mile behind them, was still dark. To the stranger it would have appeared deserted. It stood in dark bulk, with a cold glitter of water beside it, a cold glitter of glass window when clouds moved in the sky. The West Front of the Priory, built in the thirteenth century for the service of God and the poor, towered above the house that had been raised alongside from its ruins, from its very stones. And because no light showed from any window here, the stranger, visiting Saunby at this hour, would have concluded that the house was empty.

But he would have been wrong. There were many people within.

So – what’s The Priory about? The house in question is called Saunby Priory, and is the vast home belonging to the Marwood family. There is grumpy widower Major Marwood, who lives only for the cricket season – which he throws large sums of money at, while the rest of the year he is a fierce penny pincher. There are his daughters Christine and Penelope, still in the nursery though now newly grown up. And there is a handful of servants who occasionally war with each other and occasionally sleep with each other (in a tactful 1930s way, of course).

Curiously, the Priory never felt very big to me. After that introduction, the scenes inside the house are rather claustrophobic – people worrying about space, getting in each other’s way, or being moved to make room for others. I wonder how deliberate that was.

There are a series of stages, where the entrance of a new character into the scene changes things – the first being the shy, anxious woman who will become Major Marwood’s new wife: Anthea. She is old enough that she believed she would always be a spinster, and is keen to accept his fairly ungracious proposal – which he makes by phone, because he doesn’t want the bother of going around to her in case she says no. There are also men who enter stage left to woo the girls; there is a passage of time in London. It is all very involved, and spaced evenly throughout the hundreds of pages – like an ongoing soap opera of events, neatly paced and always meeting the anticipated dose of emotion. There is also humour, particularly at the beginning, though the tone of the novel grows a little more melodramatic as the pages go by.

The Priory doesn’t have the psychological nuance of some of Whipple’s other novels. (That’s my view anyway – see review links at the bottom for different opinions!) Because her tapestry of events is so protracted, and must be filled, each one gets its moments of alarm and pathos, and everybody reacts in heightened dialogue before neatly moving onto the next moment. For instance, Anthea moves from being a timid new bride to ruthlessly running the household for the protection of her new babies, but settles into the new role so comfortably that it doesn’t feel as though a psychological shift has taken place so much as a new set of characteristics has been introduced. The same is true for the daughters as they experience marriage, parenthood, and adult woes.

Which is not to say that what is here isn’t a joy to read. It is – I moved through the novel very happily, enjoying every page for the entertaining soap opera that it was. I suppose my only point is that Whipple can do better, in terms of insight and depth – but not every novel needs to be insightful and deep. Some can just be engagingly written and immersively enjoyable – indeed, that is no mean feat. Yes, it could have been 200pp shorter without losing very much – I’d have advised staying in the Priory and not wandering off around the country – but I can’t disagree with the tribute that E.M. Delafield gave the novel in The Provincial Lady in Wartime:

What, I enquire in order to gain time, does Mrs. Peacock like in the way of books?

In times such as these, she replies very apologetically indeed, she thinks a novel is practically the only thing. Not a detective novel, not a novel about politics, nor about the unemployed, nothing to do with sex, and above all not a novel about life under Nazi régime in Germany.

Inspiration immediately descends upon me and I tell her without hesitation to read a delightful novel called The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, which answers all requirements, and has a happy ending into the bargain.

Mrs. Peacock says it seems too good to be true, and she can hardly believe that any modern novel is as nice as all that, but I assure her that it is and that it is many years since I have enjoyed anything so much.

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The best thing about this book is the characters. Whipple develops them so skillfully, and I loved how she did it by showing the reader through their words, thoughts, and actions, not just telling us.” – Books and Chocolate

“It is a beautiful novel, worthy of the highest praise and Whipple is an author, whose writing I look forward to reading more of, in the near future.” – Bag Full of Books

“Not a lot “happens” in this novel; most of the action centers around emotion. It’s all about subtlety here.” – A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

There is also an enjoyable write-up in the Persephone Forum.

 

Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple

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I’m continuing my informal project of reading the long-awaited books on my shelves – and since I know how lucky I am to have a copy of Random Commentary (1966) by Dorothy Whipple, I thought I should actually read it.

I remember vividly finding it in a bookshop in Falmouth. I’d had a hunt for it online, and knew how rare it was – and there it was, sitting with The Other Day (also by Whipple) on a shelf, and not very expensive. Dad couldn’t quite understand why I was so excited, or why I lunged for them – just in case somebody should appear from nowhere and grab them before I could get my hands on them.

That was in 2006. And now I’ve finally read Random Commentary, was it worth the wait?

Well, yes and no (as so often).

Those familiar with Whipple’s lifespan will know that she died in 1966, and this book was published from the journals she left behind her – which span from 1925 until the late 1940s. Whoever edited them has pulled out mostly entries related to her writing, which is wonderful, but has put them together without any date markers or sense of the passage of time – so we might go in a couple of paragraphs from the genesis of a book to its publication. It’s not usually quite that swift, but the moment of finishing writing is often immediately followed by the book appearing in print – which makes the whole thing rather dizzying at times. This dizzying quality also comes when Whipple has clearly edited her journals at a later date – though we don’t learn quite the extent this has happened. Here’s an example of all of this…

I posted the book to Cape’s at five o’clock. I hope they will like it. I hardly think they can. What possessed me to write about a girl in a shop? I know nothing about it. But I was fascinated by the life of Miss S., who has done so wonderfully well with and for herself.

I went to the theatre: “Five o’clock Girl”. Hermione Badeley is a genius. I wish I could ask her to tea. I wish one could do that sort of thing. What fun if you could get to know everyone you wanted to!

My book back from Cape. They refuse it. They say it wouldn’t be a commercial success. (This book afterwards sold thousands of copies and is now in its tenth edition. Still selling after thirty years. SO refused authors should take courage and go on notwithstanding. I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Everything worth while is accomplished notwithstanding“.)

I long to do better and am humbled in my own estimation.

But it’s certainly a pleasure to read, structure aside. It was extremely interesting to get an insight into her writing process – and into her thoughts of herself as a writer. She frets that she may be no good; that each new book must be a failure. And yet she is also strongly protective of her characters and her writing, in anguish when her dialogue is badly re-written for a film version, or when publicity material misunderstands the point of They Knew Mr Knight.

Lovers of Whipples novels want to find out all the information they (we) can, and it’s a shame that the entries close before she starts writing my favourite of her books – Someone at a Distance. Quite a lot of the space is occupied with the writing of her autobiography, The Other Day – largely because she doesn’t at all think she can write an autobiography, and ends is some sort of tussle with the publisher, who assures her that she can. I’ve not read it yet, but it’s interesting that (despite all the fiction publishing they’ve done), Persephone haven’t brought her non-fiction into print. It’s much more scarce, so one must assume that they’ve decided it’s not meritworthy enough.

As for Random Commentary – it’s a wonderful resource for the Whipple completist, and brings the novelist as nothing else could. She is frank in these notebooks, and I felt a lot of empathy for her very human feelings about her writing and the publishing process. But it has to be admitted that these notebooks are not great works in and of themselves – they are what they are, which is random jottings of an author trying to encourage herself to write, or distract herself from worrying how a manuscript will be received.

I suppose we’ve been spoiled by Virginia Woolf’s diaries – particularly the edited version A Writer’s Diary – and spoiled by how great an author can be in their diaries. Hers are sublime, a great gift to literature. Whipple’s are not that. They are entertaining, though, and they add a valuable perspective on her much-loved novels. Is this book worth the price you’d have to pay online to get it? Probably not. But keep your eyes peeled when you’re wandering around Falmouth, and you might be in luck.

The Case of May Sinclair

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This is quite a bold title for somebody who is far from a May Sinclair expert, but it’s meant to mirror an article Q D Leavis wrote, ‘The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers‘, though I do recognise that her article isn’t exactly canonical. In Leavis’ article, she wrote about how Sayers fell between two stools – considered highbrow by middlebrow readers, and middlebrow by highbrow readers. I think Sinclair is something of the opposite. I’ll explain what I mean by that shortly.

You might have seen that Edinburgh University is going to release a new critical edition of all of May Sinclair’s works. For those outside academia, that essentially means expensive matching editions with introductions and thorough footnotes from a volume editor, and they’ll only expect university libraries to buy copies. I recognise a few of the editors’ names – one of them I’d count as a friend, from the conferences we’ve both been to – and I have no doubt that it will be done very well. But why May Sinclair? Why has she been singled out for this golden key to the gates of academe?

Every good student of 20th-century English literature will know Sinclair’s name, though a large percentage will only know what fact about her: she coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’. It was done in a review of Dorothy Richardson’s high-modernist novel sequence Pilgrimage; I don’t know how the term caught on so broadly, though I’m sure somebody has written that thesis. My slightly cynical side thinks that fact alone might have been enough to warrant the feting she is now receiving – not that it is her only claim to being remembered, but because she already got a foot through the door.

In terms of her novels, her most famous is probably Life and Death of Harriett Frean, which was one of a small handful of her books republished as a Virago Modern Classic. It’s a very good, melancholy short novel about a wasted life. You may also have heard of Mary Olivier, which Ali recently blogged about, and I’ve previously written about The Three Sisters and Uncanny Stories. But she was extremely prolific – scrolling through her Wikipedia page brings up all sorts of novels I’ve never seen while hunting in secondhand bookshops – though quite a few of them are available as free audiobooks from Librivox. I’ve just listened to Mr Waddington of Wyck (1921), which is what inspired this post.

Mr Waddington of Wyck is about an egocentric and maddening man who is writing a tedious book on the area, and who gets caught up in an awkward affair – observed by his new secretary, who also happens to be rather enamoured with his previous secretary. It’s all very entertainingly done (and the narrator, once I’ve got used to his voice, was pretty good – even if he doesn’t know how to pronounce Cirencester). But what it didn’t seem to be, to me, was modernist.

That’s the thing – those of us who delight in middlebrow writers have happily included her in that number. She writes about middle-class domestic lives, sometimes quietly and sadly, and sometimes comically. Her short story ‘Where Their Fire is Not Quenched’ is an especially brilliant supernatural twist on sexual guilt, done with amazing spatial metaphor (and equally excellent illustration in the original publication). But she doesn’t dismantle prose and put it back together again; she doesn’t use stream of consciousness – or at least not more so than many authors confidently characterised as middlebrow (for purportedly modernist techniques are commonly found across all echelons). Again, I give the caveat that there is plenty by her that I haven’t read – but I doubt the four books I have read are wildly uncharacteristic.

I’m certainly not upset that she is getting this attention – I think she’s a very good writer, and I’m pleased for any added attention she does get. But I don’t think she is in a different literary category from E.M. Delafield, Rose Macaulay, Margery Sharp, or any number of authors who haven’t had this treatment. Indeed, I feel slightly uncomfortable about the idea of transferring an author from literary outsider-dom to literary respectability, rather than elasticating the idea of canonicity. I don’t think that’s what these critical editions are trying to do, but it is sometimes what the label ‘modernist’ does – puts a mantle of respectability on what was previously just read by people who liked reading.

This debate has waged since the 1910s, and I find it a fascinating one – and rather less catty than it was when Desmond McCarthy and J.B. Priestley were going up against each other. But I remain fascinated by which authors fall in the middle – the ones who are clearly neither Virginia Woolf nor Ethel M. Dell; who don’t fall easily into either side of the highbrow vs middlebrow dichotomy. And May Sinclair seems to be all things to all people. The scholars can now claim her for our own, and pure-and-simple readers can still have her. And, after all, most of us fall – to some extent or other – on both sides of that divide anyway.

The Birds by Frank Baker

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My reading sort-of-resolution – to read more of the books that have been on my shelves for years and years – continues apace with Frank Baker’s 1936 novel The Birds. It was his second novel, and his third was my much-adored Miss Hargreaves – would this finally be the novel that lived up to Miss H, after many swings and misses from Baker’s oeuvre?

Well, no, but it was interesting to read nonetheless. And it’s perhaps most interesting to read in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. Which was, we are told, based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story ‘The Birds’; she claimed never to have heard of Baker’s novel, and Baker never went through with his threat to sue Hitchcock. (My edition was published in 1964, the year after the film came out, with a woman who looks suspiciously like Tippi Hedren on the cover – and the passive aggressive publishers note ‘Written long before Daphne du Maurier’s short story…’) It’s quite possible she never read it – it only sold a few hundred copies when first published. My edition is apparently ‘revised’, though I don’t know to what extent.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never read du Maurier’s story or seen the film, but I suspect at least some of the premise is similar – birds are attacking and nobody knows why.

About as large as starlings, but different in every other respect, they were neither pink nor purple as the messenger had surmised, but an ambiguous shade of dark jade green. This colour, catching the bright sunlight, sometimes shone blue, sometimes purple. It was an almost fluid colour. Each one had a little ruff of pretty feathers round his neck which stuck out like a hat above his head. The brightest part of their colouring was in the breast, from the throat downwards, where the feathers were smooth and of a glossy sheen which seemed to reflect all colours. Their little beaks were curved, not unlike a parrot; they had sharp, very lively eyes which gave them an inquisitive, impertinent expression.

There are some vivid scenes of the birds attacking – but they do not swoop and attack in crowds from the sky. Rather, they seem to target individuals – swindlers, unkind people – and disappear once their victims have been attacked or killed. But nothing will kill the birds themselves – not fire or bullets or anything.

This central thread of action is drawn well and engagingly, and the reader wants to know the secret behind the birds activities – and there is a secret of sorts, albeit one rather clouded in a bizarre philosophical spiritualism that Baker half-explains eventually, in a cloud of vague writing. But there is a conceit of the novel that palls very quickly – it is all told by the narrator to his granddaughter Anna, after some sort of world-changing event. All the mores and customs of the old world – that is, the 1930s world the reader would recognise – have been wiped completely. And, for some reason, none of them have been brought up until now. It means that Anna apparently doesn’t know anything about politics, religion, machinery, jobs… anything at all, really. And the narrator discourses about them at length – sometimes just explaining what they are; sometimes letting Baker indulge in some cynical satire. It was all rather self-indulgent and distracting.

I love Miss Hargreaves. You know that by now. But every other novel I’ve read by Baker ends up being so stodgy. And I’ve now tried four others – but I’ll keep persisting, on the off-chance that one of them will come close to the novel I love so much.

But the link to Hitchcock’s film, however unintentional, has given this book something of a lease of life – it was republished in 2013 and, if the #frankbaker tag on Instagram is anything to go on, has proven rather popular recently as Os Pássaros. Perhaps it’s a better book in… Portuguese? (According to Google Translate, at least!) Any Portuguese speakers out there, maybe give it a go.

The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

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This beautiful Slightly Foxed edition has been on my shelf for a few years, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (originally published in 2001, and a SF Edition in 2013). I do remember that I accidentally gave the SF team the wrong address for my review copy, very embarrassingly, and bought my own after my rather unpleasant ex-landlords never forwarded anything to the address I gave them. OH WELL. I finally picked it up, and wolfed it down in a few days.

If the name Ysenda Maxtone Graham rings a bell, it might be because her oral history of girls’ boarding schools – Terms and Conditions – was a bit of a hit a couple of years ago, and deservedly. What you might not know is that she is Jan Struther’s granddaughter, though she was born some years after Struther died. The family connection is the perfect rationale behind this insightful, slightly gossipy, and largely unscholarly examination of Jan Struther’s life and career.

When I say unscholarly, I mean there are none of the apparatus of your Hermione-Lee-style biography: no footnotes, no index, no appendices. No anecdote is referenced and, in much the same delightful way as Terms and Conditions, it feels more like a friend telling you everything they know on a topic, vague anecdotes and all, than a biographer carefully weighing the evidence. I mean it all as a compliment.

I suspect most of you know who Mrs Miniver is, even if you haven’t read the book or watched the film (and I recommend heartily that you do both). She was the British everywoman (well, upper-middle-class everywoman) whose tales of everyday events – going to the dentist; hosting a tea party – became a bestseller when collected from the newspaper into a handy edition. And she then became Greer Garson, noble British housewife facing war – and one very over-the-top angry Nazi in her kitchen – in the film that apparently helped persuade the American people to join WW2. Even though the initial book was published before war was declared.

And Jan Struther (real name Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham), of course, was the woman who created her.

Joyce went out of Printing House Square and walked along Upper Thames Street, thinking of all the ‘M’-words she could. Every one she thought of was either too long or too short, or a real name, or didn’t sound like a name at all. Then she noticed a man carrying a bundle of skins out of one of the furriers’ warehouses, and this set her thinking about the heraldic names for fur which her father had taught her. Vair and counter-vair, potent and counter-potent, ermine and erminois… and what was the other one? It was on the tip of her tongue for several minutes. Then she remembered it. She went straight back to Printing House Square.

“What about calling her ‘Mrs Miniver’?”

That’s a pretty good example of the sort way Maxtone Graham approaches the biography – the account doesn’t have any sort of referencing, and we are taken into Struther’s mind almost as though we were reading a novel. It does occasionally mean I wanted to take her anecdotes with a pinch of salt, but it made them nonetheless interesting to read.

Unlike most Slightly Foxed Editions, The Real Mrs Miniver isn’t a memoir – and it doesn’t focus on only part of the subject’s life. We see Struther from cradle to grave, though Maxtone Graham wisely focuses on the story surrounding Mrs Miniver and her various incarnations. The title is something of a misnomer because, despite being inextricably linked in the public consciousness, Struther was really very different from Miniver – not least in her marriage. Where the Minivers were the perfect couple, Struther’s marriage started off joyfully and became strained. The other focus of this biography is the dwindling marriage, and the love affair Struther started next with a younger refugee escaping the Nazis.

I found anything connected with Mrs Miniver fascinating – from the origins of the columns to the whirlwind surrounding the film (and the welcome way in which Greer Garson took on the mantle of ‘the real Mrs Miniver’). Struther lived in America for several years during the war, and reading about her publicity tours and radio appearances was so interesting. And, truth be told, Struther didn’t achieve much else, career-wise. We don’t hear much about her hymn-writing (‘Lord of all Hopefulness’ is still very familiar to many of us, I’m sure) but do see how she struggled to follow up on a success that was due to serendipity perhaps as much as purpose or even talent.

Maxtone Graham writes sensitively and rather movingly about Struther’s romantic strife, writing block, and a period of mental breakdown. The whole book is crafted brilliantly because Maxtone Graham is such a good storyteller – not adhering to the usual forms of biographies, but creating her own unique and inspired version. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and it’s made me want to dash back to Mrs Miniver – both book and film.

Tea or Books? #51: Author Parents vs Author Children, and The Boat by L.P. Hartley vs Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

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Literary families, and the reveal on our recommendations for each other – we’re back after a seasonal break. We’ve missed you!


 
In the first half of our 51st episode, we look at families where more than one generation has written, and try to determine whether we tend to prefer the parents or children – thank you Paul and Kirsty for your suggestion. And in the second half we find out whether or not our recommendations worked. We each picked a book we thought the other one would love – how well do we know each other’s tastes? I chose The Boat by L.P. Hartley for Rachel, and she chose Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner for me.

In the next episode we’ll be doing Penelope vs Penelope. All suggestions welcome (if you’ve sent one, it will doubtless happen eventually, once I dig it out from somewhere), and you can see our iTunes page here. If you can work out how to do reviews, via iTunes, they are always much appreciated!

The (enormous number of!) books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Mr Men series by Roger Hargreaves
Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls
Bluestockings by Jane Robinson
No Surrender by Constance Maud
The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther
Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
The Priory by Dorothy Whipple
Money by Martin Amis
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks
E.M. Delafield
The Unlucky Family by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (not The Unhappy Family!)
Provincial Daughter by R.M. Dashwood
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Trilby by George du Maurier
Only the Sister by Angela du Maurier
Virginia Woolf
Leslie Stephen
Anthony Trollope
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope
American Notes by Charles Dickens
A.A. Milne
Christopher Milne
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft
Angela Thirkell
Colin Macinnes
Denis Mackail
E.F. Benson
Stella Benson
Sitwells
Corduroy by Adrian Bell
Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell
Bloomsbury by Quentin Bell
Angelica Garnett
Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett
Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson
Frieda Plath
Ted Hughes
Sylvia Plath
A.S. Byatt
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Forster
Ivy Compton-Burnett by Cecily Grieg
Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor
Meyer
Bloomsbury’s Outsider by Sarah Knights
H.G. Wells and His Family by M.M. Meyer
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Alan Bennett
Two People by A.A. Milne
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley
The Betrayal by L.P. Hartley
According to Mark by Penelope Lively
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Mortimer

First and Last by V.L. Whitechurch

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Guys, I don’t know if you realise, but I’m hilarious. And that’s why I decided the last book of 2017 and first book of 2018 would be… First and Last (1929) by V.L. Whitechurch. Well, at least I amuse myself.

This is my second novel by Whitechurch – the first was the very amusing Canon in Residence – and I picked it up in a bookshop in Stratford-on-Avon a few years ago, when I was (happily enough) hunting for more books by him. He is one of the few vicar-authors, indeed canon-authors, and the title of his novel is a reference to the Bible: ‘so the last will be first and the first will be last’. Jesus actually says it twice in the Bible and, in scriptural context, I think it’s mostly about how the poor are not excluded from Heaven, and nor are those who find faith late in life.

The novel isn’t really about either of those things.

It is about what happens when somebody from a poor background – young Tom the fisherman – comes into vast fortune, through a combination of luck and ability. He saves a rich man who gets caught in sailing difficulties and, in turn, is offered an education far beyond the means of his family and his class (particularly given that this section is set in 1881). The other character we follow is Alan, the stepson of the vicar, who has to leave the vicarage when his stepfather dies – most of the inheritance goes elsewhere, and his future looks much poorer than he realised.

Such is the set up of the characters and their fates (and an ill-advised dose of dialect from local fisherman alongside). The novel skips forward forty years, where Tom is Sir Thomas, a rich businessman (and war profiteer) whose fortune is partly ill-gotten; Alan is a clergyman with a very small income, widowed and not very happy with his life. Tom has a son; Alan has a daughter. You can probably guess what happens when they re-emerge in each other’s lives… but it all happens charmingly and interestingly. Whitechurch is a great storyteller.

I didn’t mark down any passages to quote, so here’s a bit I’ve picked more or less at random, to give a sense of his prose:

The Reverend Alan Crawford, Vicar of Lingmarsh, was tired – tired in body and in mind. He had been paying a round of parochial visits in his widely scattered country parish, trudging along lanes thick with mud, taking ‘short cuts’ over fields to outlying cottages, all the afternoon.

Altogether he had paid seven calls, and each visit, with, perhaps the exception of one, had added to his sense of weariness – a weariness that had come over him before ever he fared forth on his parochial round.

I really enjoyed reading First and Last, and I think any fan of middlebrow novels from the interwar period will love the characters, pace, and comfort of the novel. What prevents it being a brilliant novel, to my mind, is partly the lack of humour (did I imagine it in Canon in Residence, which I recall being tantamount to farce?) and partly the ways in which the characters lean to stereotype. The good people are a little too good; the wicked a little too wicked. First and Last isn’t at all moralistic (in the negative sense), but it does follow firmly trodden moral paths – and, as a parable is unlikely to show thorough nuance in its participants, so First and Last does paint a little in black and white.

But, given these limitations, I think it’s a delightful and absorbing book – not great literature, but certainly a great read. And a great way to kick off 2018 and A Century of Books.

A Century of Books

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2018 is going to be the year of A Century of Books – henceforth to be known as ACOB. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, only on Twitter, but hopefully it’s not too late for people to join in if they’d like to.

What is ACOB, you ask? Back in 2012, I thought it would be fun to try to read and review a book for every year of the 20th century – not in order – and various people joined in, with different targets. Some wanted one book for each decade; some wanted to do it over 2, 3, or 4 years. Essentially, you can make up your own rules. I think Claire from The Captive Reader was the only other person aiming to do 1900-1999 in one year, and… we both did! Here’s what Claire read, and here’s what I read. My post also has some stats and tips; Claire also has some helpful hints on how to get the most from ACOB.

I’m thrilled to say that Claire is doing it again this year! My century is shifting a bit – I’m going to do 1919-2018 – and I’ll keep track of the reviews on this page. If you’d like to, please do join in in whatever form you choose – I certainly found it one of the most rewarding and enjoyable (and, in the final month or so, frustrating!) reading projects I’ve ever undertaken. The best thing about it is that it is the anti-project, as you can more or less read at whim – at least for the first two-thirds of the year…

Let me know if you’re joining in, and… here we go!

1919 – The Sheik by E.M. Hull
1920 – In the Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim
1921 – Mr Waddington of Wyck by May Sinclair
1922 – The Lark by E. Nesbit
1923 – Sphinx by David Lindsay
1924 – Bill the Conqueror by P.G. Wodehouse
1925 – The Human Machine by Arnold Bennett
1926 – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
1927 – Leadon Hill by Richmal Crompton
1928 – As Far As Jane’s Grandmother’s by Edith Olivier
1929 – First and Last by V.L. Whitechurch
1930 – Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
1931 – Buttercups and Daisies by Compton Mackenzie
1932 – Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
1933 – A Thatched Roof by Beverley Nichols
1934 – Concert Pitch by Theodora Benson
1935 – Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie
1936 – The Birds by Frank Baker
1937 – Hunt the Slipper by Violet Trefusis
1938 – Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull
1939 – The Priory by Dorothy Whipple
1940 – The Cat’s Cradle Book by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1941 – Soap Behind the Ears by Cornelia Otis Skinner
1942 – House-Bound by Winifred Peck
1943 – We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood by Emily Kimbrough
1944 – Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange
1945 – The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen
1946 – Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood
1947 – Tell It to a Stranger by Elizabeth Berridge
1948 – The Plague and I by Betty Macdonald
1949 – By Auction by Denis Mackail
1950 – Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Macdonald
1951 – Lise Lillywhite by Margery Sharp
1952 – The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot
1953 – Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
1954 – The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp
1955 – Onions in the Stew by Betty Macdonald
1956 – The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
1957 – Tea with Walter de la Mare by Russell Brain
1958 – The Sweet and Twenties by Beverley Nichols
1959 – The Young Ones by Diana Tutton
1960 – The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
1961 – Albert the Dragon by Rosemary Weir
1962 – Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
1963 – Two By Two by David Garnett
1964 – Further Adventures of Albert the Dragon by Rosemary Weir
1965 – The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
1966 – Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple
1967 – Stonecliff by Robert Nathan
1968 – Several Perceptions by Angela Carter
1969 – The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
1970 – A Tale of Two Families by Dodie Smith
1971 – A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis
1972 – The Devastating Boys by Elizabeth Taylor
1973 – The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn
1974 – Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow by Paul Gallico
1975 – Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
1976 – Just Between Ourselves by Alan Ayckbourn
1977 – Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff
1978 – Albert’s World Tour by Rosemary Weir
1979 – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
1980 – Desirable Residence by Lettice Cooper
1981 – Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon
1982 – The High Path by Ted Walker
1983 – Another Time, Another Place by Jessie Kesson
1984 – According to Mark by Penelope Lively
1985 – Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis
1986 – The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace
1987 – Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
1988 – Man of the Moment by Alan Ayckbourn
1989 – The Education of Harriet Hatfield by May Sarton
1990 – Touching the Rock by John M. Hull
1991 – Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy
1992 – The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon
1993 – Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
1994 – When Heaven Is Silent by Ron Dunn
1995 – An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
1996 – Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl
1997 – Naked by David Sedaris
1998 – Family Man by Calvin Trillin
1999 – An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
2000 – Letters From the Editor by Harold Ross
2001 – The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
2002 – The Pelee Project by Jane Christmas
2003 – Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras
2004 – A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel
2005 – The Curtain by Milan Kundera
2006 – Mr Thundermug by Cornelius Medvei
2007 – Two Lives by Janet Malcolm
2008 – Who Was Sophie? by Celia Robertson
2009 – Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
2010 – Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
2011 – The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
2012 – The Other Mitford: Pamela’s Story by Diana Alexander
2013 – Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
2014 – The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent
2015 – Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
2016 – Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
2017 – Scribbles in the Margins by Daniel Gray
2018 – Bookworm by Lucy Mangan