Harriet Devine's Blog

Ballet Shoes

Hands up if you read this and loved it when you were little. Amazingly, you could have done if you were born in the 1920s, as it was first published in 1936 -- then again in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s etc etc etc. A true classic, and one that I absolutely loved as a child -- being at the time wildly ambitious to be a famous actress, it fed my fantasies to bursting point. This is the story of three little girls, adopted as babies by the eccentric fossil collector known as Great Uncle Matthew (or Gum), who disappears soon afterwards leaving them in the care of his ward Sylvia and their plump and comfortable Nana. Money gets shorter and shorter -- the girls have to leave school, but are thankfully able to get a good education, as they are taught at home by the two "lady doctors", a literature one and a mathematical one, who lodge in the house. Another lodger teaches at a school of dance and drama, and through her, the girls get places at the school. The beautiful Pauline eventually becomes a famous actress, the astonishingly talented Posy joins a celebrated ballet school in Europe, and the middle sister, the tomboyish Petrova, looks forward to a career as a pilot or a chauffeur and to living with Gum, who has returned home in the nick of time. Something for everyone, really. I can't claim to have given this book much thought in recent years, but it all came flooding back when I saw it was going to be on the BBC on Boxing Day. I enjoyed it a lot -- it was wonderfully cast, with Victoria Wood as Nana, Emilia Fox as Sylvia, and most memorably Gemma Jones and Harriet Walter (with short hair and a monocle) as the two lady doctors. It seemed pretty true to the original but I had to find out if it was, so I managed to get hold of it and have just finished reading it. And in fact, with one notable exception, it was. The exception was the introduction of romance. In the book, Petrova manages to indulge her passion for cars because a lodger called Mr Simpson owns a garage, where he lets her work on her days off. Mr Simpson is a slightly shadowy character, and has a wife -- even shadowier and lacking a first name -- called Mrs Simpson. For the BBC, though, Mr S became a quiet but rather glamorous chap, a widower whose wife and son had died in an epidemic. And, finally, he proves to have been in love with Sylvia all the time, despite appearances to the contrary -- so the adaptation ended with a wedding, of the sort so beloved by classical adaptors, all flowers and dancing and laughter. Should we mind this? I didn't, actually -- in fact I couldn't remember if it had been in the book, though without it the book ends on perhaps a slightly darker note -- poor Sylvia -- I wonder how she would have got on in Hollywood, where she went to live with Pauline, who was clearly going to be a BIG STAR.

All Passion Spent

I read this a couple of weeks ago, for the book group on the Cornflower blog. I must say I enjoyed it a good deal more than I thought I would. I had tried to read Vita's The Edwardians a year or two ago and had not got very far as I did not warm to it  at all. I thought at first I'd have the same problem with this one, which seemed initially rather whimsical and superficial -- but I was drawn in to it and in the end impressed by the quiet thoughtfulness of it all. How many books can you think of that have a woman of nearly 90 as the central character? I can't think of any others. That in itself is a great point in its favour, I think. The story begins when Lady Slane finds herself recently widowed. She has spent her entire adult life as an "appendage" to her successful diplomat husband, and her six ageing adult children expect that she will now settle down as a sort of female King Lear, spending a few months at a time with each of them in turn. But Lady Slane has other plans. She remembers her youth when, aged about seventeen, she had nurtured a secret desire to run away and be an artist, but had somehow found herself following the conventional path and had married instead. Now, finally free, she wants to make her own decisions. Thus it is that she finds herself a delightful house in Hampstead, into which she moves with her French Maid Genoux (the two of them have lived together all their lives), and where she is attended, and befriended, by her landlord Mr Bucktrout, and her handyman Mr Gosheron. She lives an enjoyable, peaceful existence, hardly even seeing her own offspring, whose interference she can well do without. But then, into her life comes Mr FitzGeorge, a somewhat eccentric millionaire collector, who proves to have fallen in love with her over 50 years earlier and who has never ceased to think of her and to wish to see her again. Amazingly, she discovers that "the man-to-woman mainspring still coiled like a cobra between them", and they spend many happy hours together before events take various, not altogether unexpected, turns. There is a great deal of sweetness here, without being at all sentimental. I was really impressed by Vita's perceptive account of extreme old age, its pleasures and its annoyances. Subtle and thought-provoking -- I'm very glad to have been nudged into reading it -- thanks, Cornflower!

Death and the Maidens

Honestly, you couldn't make it up! Well, you could of course, and many soap opera writers do these days, but the lives of the young people described in this fine biography are pretty extraordinary, and just go to show that the sort of thing we see on the Jeremy Kyle Show/Jerry Springer/any other tabloid tv show you can think of, is nothing new. Adulterous sex, menages a trois, illegitimacy, incest, and, most tragically, suicide, all figure largely, and no-one escapes unscathed. And who was to blame for all this? Why, Percy Bysshe Shelley, no less.

Central to the story is the remarkable household headed by the philosopher and novelist William Godwin. Having lost his adored wife, the great feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, he has married for the second time, to the plump, annoying, and congenitally untruthful Mary Jane Clairmont. By 1803, their household consists of no less than five children, only one of whom (their baby son William junior) has more than one parent in common. Mary Jane has two children, Charles and Claire, by two previous liaisons, and Godwin is bringing up Wollstonecraft's first daughter Fanny, the result of her relationship with the attractive, feckless American Gilbert Imlay, as well as his and Wollstonecraft's own daughter Mary, whose birth precipitated the death from puerperal fever of her mother. With me so far? Although in the 1790s Godwin was regarded as a great man, he has slid increasingly into debt, his books no longer making enough to support the family. Even so, their upbringing, though somewhat unusual, has been in many ways exemplary. Serious training the arts (drawing for Fanny, singing for Claire), debating the issues of the day, and above all reading, reading and more reading.

When the three girls are in their mid-teens, Shelley breezes into their lives. He is, initially, accompanied by his beautiful young wife Harriet, but is already looking around for extramarital excitements. This is, after all, the poet who was to write, a few years later:

I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and longest journey go.

He seems initially to have courted Fanny, but soon turns his attention to Mary, and, having apparently made love to her on her mother's grave in St Pancras churchyard, elopes with her soon after her sixteenth birthday. Her step-sister Claire goes along too, and remains with them, on and off, for many years, during which she almost certainly gives birth to a least one of Shelley's children and also has an affair with Byron, who adopts their baby Allegra and then, tiring of her, places her in an Italian convent where she dies aged just four years old.  Fanny, though probably in love with Shelley, is left behind to cope with her irritable stepmother and her cold, though much-loved, adopted father. Harriet Shelley is also abandoned -- though Shelley does invite her to participate in their free-love commune -- along with their two small children. Both girls struggle along for a while -- but at last Fanny takes herself off to a hotel in Wales where she takes an overdose of laudanum and is found dead in the morning, a suicide note by her side. Shelley almost certainly travels to Wales to identify her, and tears her name off the bottom of the note. Soon afterwards Harriet, heavily pregnant, is found drowned in the Serpentine lake in London.

If you know anything about this period, and these people, you may think this is all old news. Indeed, much of it is already well established fact. But Janet Todd has a new and extremely valuable angle here -- she focuses attention, for the first time, on Fanny Imlay Godwin. For me -- and here I speak as someone who has worked for years on Wollstonecraft and her circle (I even wrote an article about all this, with the rather delightful title '"A Meritorious Wife"; or, Mrs Godwin and the Donkey') -- this new emphasis is fascinating. Fanny has always seemed a shadowy figure, fading into the background while her two sisters hogged the limelight. Here at last we have her own words, her activities, her motivations, and all of it adds a new and very satisfying piece to this complicated jigsaw of inter-relationships. There is still a lot we don't know and probably never will know, especially with regard to what exactly went on between Claire and Shelley, but the picture is now a good deal more complete with the addition of a portrait of this quiet, sweet-natured, artistic, and much put-upon girl.

The Uncommon Reader

My son-in-law got this for Christmas yesterday and I seized hold of it straight away -- I'd been longing to get my hands on it. So while everyone else was watching Finding Nemo (well, we did have a five year old and a twelve year old) I just read it. It's only 124 pages, but what a great book. I suppose that everyone knows what it's about: the Queen developing a passion for reading, and finally a desire to write. What a delightful conceit is that? Anyone who loves reading will sympathise so much with HM as she moves from uncertainty to pleasure to obsession, and soon becomes unable to leave the house without a book -- she gets very good at waving with one hand while keeping the book just out of sight below the window of the coach. She neglects her appearance -- sometimes even wearing the same outfit several times in a row -- and even loses interest in racing, never mind the boring business of listening to advisors and complainers. She is delighted to find, after some time has passed, that her ability to appreciate books has definitely increased -- Ivy Compton Burnett is her yardstick as on a second reading she finds subtleties and jokes she had missed entirely the first time around. And she grows to love Jane Austen, and even Henry James, both of whom she initially had little time for. Her note-taking too becomes increasingly sophisticated so that eventually she comes to believe she may have something useful and interesting to say. The final outcome, though I suppose in a sense predictable, made me laugh, as I had done many times throughout. So that was a very nice way of spending Christmas afternoon.

A Very Happy Christmas!

Hope yours will be as jolly as this one!

Elizabeth and her German Garden

Strangely, although I have known about it for so many years, I had never read this book until this week. I was so much looking forward to it but I'm sorry to say I was a little disappointed. In case you have not read it, this was published in the 1890s and is the (autobiographical) story of a young woman, married to a German aristocrat and with three young daughters, who undertakes to remake a neglected garden deep in the wilds of the German countryside. She has never gardened before and indeed is not permitted to garden, in the modern sense, at all -- she has to instruct a series of gardeners, most of them at least as ignorant as herself. There is a wonderful moment in which she escapes and spends a glorious few minutes actually tilling the soil, but she has to do this in secret as it is simply not the done thing at all. I  can see why everybody loves it so much and indeed I loved all the passages about the garden -- the freshness and enthusiasm is great, and she is so delighfully witty and honest about her many mistakes and disappointments. So what didn't I like? I was terribly irritated by her husband (The Man of Wrath, as she calls him). Of course she is irritated with him too, or I suppose so, though she doesn't say so in so many words -- he is allowed to make endless speeches about how weak and feeble and unintelligent women are, which, I guess, she expects will condemn him to her readers without her having to do so. But I had to skip these bits because I hated him so much. Also, I didn't much like what went on when she had a couple of women friends to stay -- at least, one was an old friend and the other a young, serious-minded English girl who had been foisted on her. Basically, Elizabeth and her friend take against this girl and tease her and criticise her unmercifully. I found this quite upsetting -- OK, she is a bit dull and perhaps not all that bright, but they don't even try to like her or understand her, and I felt terribly sorry for her, being ganged up on all the time by these two older more sophisticated women. So, though I loved to hear of Elizabeth dancing for joy in her garden and adoring all the lovely new plants, I found other aspects of her life less appealing. Still, I'm clearly in a minority (possibly of one).

The Thirteenth Tale

I rarely buy books in supermarkets -- not so much for ethical reasons, though I know there's a been a lot of debate about the way they sell them for less than half the recommended retail price, but because they hardly ever seem to have any that I want to read. But I was mooching around my local Asda a few days ago looking for light bulbs and happened to pass the book section, where this one caught my eye. I had never heard of it, but I liked the look of the cover and the description sounded intriguing: twins, mysteries, books, a touch of the gothic. I've been reading a lot of classic stuff lately and felt like bit of contemporary relaxation so I thought I'd give it a go. And I have to say it really grabbed me, so that I finished it in record time. It is the story of Margaret Lea, a rather isolated, bookish girl whose life is spent working with her father in their antiquarian bookshop. Her reading has been vast and unusual, and she has dabbled in writing biography, but she is astonished when she is contacted one day by the hugely popular (but very populist) novelist Vida Winter, who invites her to write her own life story. Winter, now old and ill,  is notoriously secretive about her past, but she invites Margaret to stay in her remote country house and promises to reveal things she has never revealed before. Margaret is quickly drawn in to the story, though Vida still seems to be concealing much. But she feels especially connected to the older woman because, like Vida, she was born a twin -- a fact she only discovered by chance, as her parents -- warm, kindly father, neurotic, cold mother -- have never mentioned it. She was in fact a conjoined twin, and her sister died when they were separated soon after birth, a fact which, for Margaret, explains the deep sadness she is never free from. As Vida reveals her story, piece by piece, Margaret gets increasingly intrigued and starts to try to uncover facts that she knows are being kept from her. Many strange and disturbing facts are revealed along the way, and I certainly did not guess the whole denouement until almost the end.

This is a tremendously atmospheric novel -- Diane Setterfield's first, which is impressive -- and full of deliberate allusions to 19th century fiction -- Jane Eyre in particular, but also Wuthering Heights, Rebecca (though that's not 19th century), Lady Audley's Secret, The Fall of the House of Usher and others. It is (also deliberately) impossible to tell when the novel is set. It could be in the present day, and in fact I thought it was, but it could conceivably be earlier, sometime in the 20th century.

If you want to be gripped and delightfully thrilled and chilled, this is a good way to go!

Woman Reading (8)

Isn't this one lovely?  It's called A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Looking over her Shoulder.  It is by Joseph Wright of Derby,  painted c. 1767-70.  Joseph Wright  was celebrated for his use of light and you can see why.

The Photograph

When I started reading Penelope Lively a few months ago, several people recommended this novel. By the time I got hold of it, though, I'd moved onto some other interest, so this has been on the shelf for ages waiting for its moment to arise. In fact it was when I mentioned PL as one of the writers I'd discovered this year that I remembered this unread book and picked it up. It is indeed a fascinating read. The photograph concerned is one that Glyn, an academic in his sixties, finds one day in a cupboard. It is inside a sealed envelope labelled 'Don't open -- destroy'. Of course he has to open it, and inside he finds a photograph, obviously taken some years earlier, of his wife Kath holding hands with another man. Kath -- for reasons that are not immediately revealed -- is no longer around to answer the questions this raises, and Glyn becomes obsessed with the need to find out the truth. The more he searches, the more he realises how little he really knew of this beautiful, apparently carefree woman with whom he shared so many years of his life. But it is not only Glyn who is changed by this discovery: everyone who knew, or thought they knew, Kath is forced to reassess not only their relationship with her but also themselves and the ways in which they relate to the world in general. This is a subtle and thought-provoking novel, which not only tells an intriguing story but, perhaps more importantly, analyses the complex workings of the human mind. It's a book about history and about memory, as Lively's books perhaps almost always are. As she has said, what interests her is "'the ways in which the physical world is composed of memory, the ways in which it’s an encumbrance and the ways in which it is an asset … I can hardly decide which it is. But it is something that I’m constantly aware of and constantly seeking new ways of exploring fictionally". 

My Best of 2007

Traditionally I think people do this at the very end of the year, but I started thinking about it and can't stop now. It's been interesting to look back over my less than a year of blogging to remind myself what I have liked the most. One thing I realised on my backwards trawl was that I do not read all that many newly published books, and when I do, I often don't like them all that much -- I have actually read quite a few more in this category than I have blogged about, because I don't want to rubbish new authors. So for me it has been more than anything a year of discovery, even though my discoveries are undoubtedly old news for many people.

Fiction (new)

I really wanted this to be a book published in 2007 and when I picked it I thought it had been, but it turns out to have appeared first in 2006. Notwithstanding, the winner here has to be:

Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves

A very close second is Jessica Grigson's  The Angel Makers.  which I also enjoyed a lot.
Crime Fiction

Andrew Taylor, The Roth Trilogy: The Office of the Dead , The Four Last Things, The Judgement of Strangers

I happened on this by pure chance, having picked up one volume in a charity shop on my way to France in May. I could certainly have put Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine in this category, but we all know how great she is -- Taylor was a real and wonderful discovery for me. Tremendous stuff.

Fiction (Classic) 

Recently I have been reading lots of Viragos, a couple of which were re-reads and so, technically (by the rules I have just created) can't really win, though they were both superb. They were:

Rosamund Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets

Elizabeth Taylor, Angel

But for a 'new' classic novel, the clear winner here has to be:

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

In Translation

I got rather fed up, earlier this year, of reading books in translation which, IMHO, were not very well translated. This was not the case, though, with this wonderful book:

Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

It has to tie, though, with Zola's Nana.

And I'd like to give an honourable mention to another charity shop find and an admirable book:

Elke Schmitter, Mrs Sartoris

Biography

I haven't read many of these this year, but had to give the prize anyway, to:

Selina Hastings, Rosamund Lehmann

Non-fiction

I suppose this one is autobiography of a sort, but a truly unusual, fascinating and beautifully written little book:

David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity

DISCOVERY OF THE YEAR

Has to be Ian McEwan. Why did I resist reading him for so long? But I also discovered Penelope Lively, and Peter Carey. Where have I been all these years, you may well ask.