Harriet Devine's Blog

The Last September

It was interesting to hear in the comments on my Sunday Salon post that people had mixed feelings about Elizabeth Bowen. Having finished the book, I believe I can kind of see why that might be. She is quite a challenging writer to read in some ways. Her prose style is pretty dense in places -- mostly wonderfully so, I think, and I revelled in some of the descriptive passages:

A shrubbery path was solid with darkness, she pressed down on it. Laurels breathed coldly and close: on her bare arms the tips of leaves were timid and dank, like the tongues of dead animals. Her fear of the shrubberies tugged at its chain, fear behind reason, fear before her birth...

But there were some points where I actually had to stop and read sentences several times before I saw what she was saying. Also, she is dealing with complex emotions and inter-relationships. So this is not the sort of easy read that just washes over you. It really repays reading with attention, though -- I found it immensely interesting and rewarding.

This novel is not autobiographical exactly, but it certainly owes a lot to EB's own youth in Ireland, and the great house in which it takes place is based on the one she grew up in, Bowen's Court. It came out in 1928, and was only her second published novel, though she had brought out two collections of short stories. But it is set in 1920, a crucial time politically, and one which partly gives the novel its title. Primarily it is the story of Lois, who is just twenty. An orphan, she lives with her aunt and uncle, the wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, at their estate Danielstown, somewhere in the south of Ireland.  This is the time of the 'Troubles', and the area, like the rest of Ireland, is full of British soldiers, billeted there to deal with the Irish rebels. The Naylors are typical of the Anglo-Irish in their ambivalent attitude to this situation. They rather despise, and certainly don't understand, the English, and have a good deal of sympathy for their poor Catholic neighbours -- but those same neighbours are increasingly antagonistic because from their point of view the Anglo-Irish are identified with the English.

For the young girls -- Lois and her friends -- the presence of the soldiers is obviously a huge bonus. Lois herself has a soldier admirer, Gerald, who has fallen in love with her. But she is rather confused about her own feelings. As the novel begins, she is struggling with the revival of a teenage crush on a family friend, Hugo Montmorency, who has just arrived for a visit with his delicate semi-invalid wife Francie. Hugo proves very uninterested in Lois, however, and soon falls heavily for another visitor, the stylish, cosmopolitan Marda, who Lois also comes to adore and to wish in some ways to emulate. So Gerald's adoration is sometimes rather upsetting -- when he kisses her at a party, she is very unsure how she feels:

So that was being kissed: just an impact, with inside blankness. She was lonely, and saw there was no future.

All this is so well done! It reminded me a bit of Ian McEwan, a very different kind of writer in many ways, but one who, like Bowen, seems to be able to home in, in the most extraordinarily perceptive way, on the fine shades of relationship between two people -- the endless capacity for misunderstanding, the almost impossibility of really knowing what the other person thinks, feels, or means to say. If you take all this, and you add wonderfully funny social commentary and sharp, often painful political events bubbling dangerously under the surface, you have such a rich and entertaining mixture. I have heard Bowen described as an important writer and I now understand why. Here, to finish with, is a bit of a scene at a party:

The evening 'went' with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out of everybody's control. Everyone looked and spoke and danced close up with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air. Sandwiches were ambrosia, brightening the eyes; rims of plates went electric where fingers touched. Mrs Rolfe laughed all the time, you would have said with despair. She climbed past couples very close up at the darkest part of the passage, she entered the kitchenette with a shriek and swept some cards from the table. The spare men danced with each other. She ran in and out of her bedroom, shaking a plate of chocolates at the couples sitting out on the chest o'drawers and on the washstand covered with Turkish cushions. If the hut had risen and soared up into the air, so that someone stepping out at the door had to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised.

Julia Briggs

I thought I'd say a word or two about how I came to know Julia Briggs, who I mentioned in my post on The House of Arden a few days ago as the biographer of E. Nesbit.
I was a mature postgraduate student at Oxford in the 1980s, and at that time mature students were very thin on the ground indeed. In fact I didn't know any others! I think and hope things have changed since then. Anyway, at the time when I was there, Oxford University was slowly dragging itself into the 20th century in one important way -- "Women's Writing" was to be introduced as a new course. The grand movers behind this were Professor Marilyn Butler and Julia Briggs. I was not actually working on any women writers -- I had done a lot of work on Wordsworth and was just starting a PhD on an obscure 18th century poet called Mark Akenside. So I was quite surprised when Marilyn Butler accosted me one day outside Blackwell's bookshop and asked if I'd like to give any lectures on the new course. I muttered something about not knowing anything much about women writers, and she said, "Yes, but you're a feminist, aren't you?". I wasn't really sure if I was or not, but it was obviously a chance not to be missed, and so it was that I gave my first ever public lecture, to a large chunk of the students of the English Faculty. I lectured on Jane Austen, by the way, and used  Mansfield Park to prove my point that JA was a feminist (hmmm, I hear you say -- but I assure you it worked). After that I found myself a member of a small group of female students and lecturers who were prepared to lecture on women writers. You may or may not be surprised to hear that it was a small group because many -- indeed most -- of the female dons at that time thought it was a very silly idea and did not want to have anything to do with it. So we used to divvy up the lectures between us, and as well as JA, I lectured on Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Atwood and possibly someone else I've forgotten. Marilyn Butler seemed often too busy to come to our meetings, so Julia was mainly in charge of running it all. Everything you may have heard or read about her was true. She was not only extraordinarily beautiful, but also kind, warm and open, qualities you may not necessarily associate with Oxford dons, or did not at that time. I had done my first degree at what was then North London Polytechnic, and this was felt by the more traditional elements to count against me in some way. But Julia always made me feel welcome, and gave me a good deal of confidence at a time when that was somewhat lacking.
Julia left Oxford in the 1990s to become Professor at De Monfort University. The last of her many books was a biography of Virginia Woolf -- sadly, she died from a brain tumour last August, aged only 63.

Sunday Salon

I've just joined the Sunday Salon, I think! So if this works, hello all. I've noticed on some of my favorite blogs that there are posts headed Sunday Salon but have never understood why. Then I read about it on dovegreyreader this week and I was off -- the dgr is my mentor, really, though she may not realise it -- she was the one who urged me to start blogging and I did so, rather nervously, almost a year ago. Thanks so much, Lynne -- the queen of the book bloggers.
I have been in a 'what on earth should I be reading now' phase for a while and have taken refuge, very happily, in children's literature and undemanding crime fiction. But I have a book on the go right now which I am really loving. It is The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen. I'm only about two thirds through it at the moment and will be blogging about it fully when I have finished, but so far it has hugely exceeded my expectations. This is the first Elizabeth Bowen I have read, though I have one of hers here, The World of Love, which I have tried to start several times and given up very quickly as I couldn't warm to it. But I shall certainly return to it when I've finished this one as I am now a convert. Beautiful writing, sharp intelligence, wonderfully sensitive characterisation -- what more could you want?
Anyone who knows my blog will probably have noticed that I seem to have a preference for novels that have been around for a while. I've been reading a great many Viragos of late -- Elizabeth Taylor, Rosamund Lehmann, Rebecca West and others -- and at the moment this period (early to mid twentieth century) seems to be my favourite. But all that could change.

The House of Arden

You could be forgiven for thinking I have entered my second childhood. I am beginning to think so myself. In the past few weeks I've read two Noel Streatfeilds, a Ngiao Marsh first read aged 13, and now I've just finished this, which I read when I was about eight or nine. I have re-read it since, to various children, and my excuse for buying it now was that I was going to give it to my grandson George. I hope he is going to love it as much as I did and still do. My mother had loved E Nesbit when she was a child, and we happily read The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Five Children and It, The Story of the Amulet, and others too though those were the ones we liked the best. But this one always had the most special place in my heart. It is about time travel, though I wouldn't have used or even known that phrase when I was a child.

Edred Arden is ten, and his sister Elfrida two years older, when something astonishing happens -- two things, in fact. They have been living with their aunt, who runs a boarding house at the seaside -- their mother died when they were small, and their father and Uncle Jim have disappeared on a gold prospecting expedition in South America, and have been pronounced dead. Amazingly, the news comes that a distant relative has died, and that Edred has inherited his title and his property -- he is now Lord Arden, and the owner of the picturesque, though ruined, Arden Castle. Luckily the ruin has a house attached, and the two children are soon living there and being cared for by the motherly housekeeper Mrs Honeysett while their aunt sells the boarding house.  The children soon discover that there is supposed to be a great treasure hidden somewhere in or around the castle, and as there is little money available they wish more than anything that they could find it. They would like to restore the castle, and also to help the poor people in the neighbourhood by mending their roofs and enabling them to feed their children.

The second astonishing thing that happens is that the children discover magic. They meet a small creature, a white mole -- the Mouldiwarp -- who gives them a wonderful gift. They learn that in a secret room in the attic -- only accessible at certain times -- there are trunks full of clothes from past periods in history. If they put on any of these clothes, they find themselves at once back in that time. So, with this great ability, they visit Napoleonic times, the eighteenth century, the England of James I, and finally the time of Henry VIII. On each visit, they have extraordinary and sometimes frightening adventures, but they also gather a little more information that may help them to find the hiding place of the treasure. Whether they find it or not I shall not tell you, as, even though you are grown up, you really should read this story. Perhaps you can already imagine how intensely exciting all this was to a small child with a fascination for history. I longed and longed so much to find those trunks and to put on those clothes!

E Nesbit was a fascinating and beautiful woman, with great socialist ideals. There is an excellent biography, A Woman of Passion, by the beautiful and brilliant Professor Julia Briggs, who sadly died last year. I was lucky enough to know her, and loved her book on Nesbit, with whom, I think, she must have felt some affinity.

Scales of Justice

Any Ngaio Marsh fans out there? I was introduced to her when I was about thirteen, by my mother, who was a great lover of what she called detective stories and we now supposedly call crime fiction. Her two favorite authors were Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, and I have been reading and re-reading them at intervals ever since. I don't remember ever having read this one, though, which I grabbed recently when it was being thrown out at the end of the school fair (you'd be horrified to see how many books are unsold and end up going to charity shops unless I take pity on them and cart them home).
Scales of Justice (the title is a pun of sorts, since fishes figure quite importantly in the plot) is set in the quiet country village of Swevenings. Nothing particularly momentous has happened here in the village's many centuries of history. But soon after the novel begins, Colonel Carterette, a retired army man and a keen fisherman, is found murdered on the banks of the river. Lying beside him is the giant trout, known as 'the Old 'Un', which he has been trying to catch for years. It soon becomes clear that one of a rather small group of people must be responsible. Could it be Carterette's fishing rival, the eccentric widower and cat-lover Octavius Phynn?  Or Commander Syce, who vents his frustrations by practising archery in his back garden? Or possibly it is one of the Lacklanders, the landed gentry who inhabit the mansion on top of the hill -- perhaps the matriarch, 17-stone Lady Lacklander, who indulges in watercolour painting, or her son Sir George, who seems to be dallying with Carterette's wife Kitty while supposedly coaching her in golf? Everyone seems to have a motive of sorts, and Roderick Alleyn, Marsh's cultured, charming detective, must weave his way through the increasingly complex clues to discover the murderer's real identity. Wonderfully traditional stuff, then, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have seen some, not all, of the TV adaptations of Marsh's novels (the cover shown here is a still from one of them) and have been a bit disappointed. Patrick Malahide is a fine actor but he is so unlike my mental image of Alleyn that I couldn't warm to him. I'd rather read the books.

Woman Writing

Actually a 'lady' writing, according to the title. Another one by the wonderful Vermeer, who has to be one of my all-time favorite painters. This one was painted in about 1655.

Love Letters from my Death-Bed

The nice people at Two Ravens Press sent me this -- it's great to hear about new independent publishers and these people seem to have done well -- interesting books, nicely presented, if the two I got are anything to go by.
This is Cynthia Rogerson's second novel -- her first, Upstairs in the Tent, was published in 2001. She is a Californian writer living in Scotland, but this book is about a Scottish woman living in California. It's a lively, quirky, entertaining read, and begins with an 'Apology' which is not an apology:
I make no apology for the fact that this is a story about death. All stories are about death. Oh yes, they are.
So yes, this is indeed partly what it is about -- but it is also of course about life and about love and I don't think it matters if I tell you it has a happy ending. The story is set in a hospice in Marin County -- an incredibly unsuccessful one. Huge amounts of money have been poured into it, and it is bursting at the seams with up-to-date equipment and personnel, but there are no patients -- or at least only two. The manager, Joe Johnson, is desperate -- so desperate that he takes on the rather dodgy seeming Manuel Mendoza on the strength of Manuel's completely untrue assertion that he is a doctor and can drum up some custom. He does produce one elderly lady but she only lasts a few days before expiring, leaving things as desperate as before. So Manuel does something daringly outrageous -- he tells his friend Morag MacTavish that she has cancer -- three incurable kinds -- and that as she has little time left, she may as well check into the hospice. So she does, feeling a curious mixture of fear and elation -- having acquired a gold credit card, she is treating herself to all kinds of luxuries she has never  been able to afford.  Of course Manuel is on love with Morag but she, though she has been married  (bigamously) several times, does not think she is attracted to him.  This all sounds pretty bizarre when you put it  like this, but I can assure you it manages to be both funny and touching. It's full of well-observed characters who get themselves into all manner of appalling and ridiculous situations, and death pops up all over the place. A black comedy, then, but one with a heart, and one that will make you think. Definitely a writer to watch.

White Boots

When I was about ten, I developed a passion for ice skating. Growing up in London, the obvious place to go was the Queens Ice Rink in Bayswater (which I am amazed to find still exists, though it now has a bowling alley attached). Once a week my mother and I used to go there for a happy couple of hours. We'd hire our brown boots -- unattractive but sturdy -- and plunge onto the ice. At first it was a matter of clinging desperately to the sides and frequent falls, and as I was neither athletic nor physically brave this stage went on rather a long time. But eventually I got to the point where I could get out onto the ice and whizz around fairly successfully. How I did enjoy it! Slowly I learned how to go backwards, and to do rather feeble figures of eight. And I persuaded my parents to buy me a pair of white boots, those outward and visible signs of a certain degree of attainment in the ice-skating world, or so they seemed to me. I longed to be able to dance, or do tricky figures, and watched green with envy while those people who were being groomed for stardom did their wonderfully accomplished bits. But by the time I had grown out of the boots, I had somehow grown out of the skating, though I've been pleased to find that I can still just about do it on rare occasions.
So you can imagine how much I must have loved this book. And when you realise that it is about a ten-year-old girl called Harriet (like me) who lives by the river in London (like me) and gets to love skating.... Well, I needn't go on. Here's how it begins:

Even when the last of the medicine bottles were cleared away and she was supposed to have 'had' convalescence, Harriet did not get well. She was a thin child with big brown eyes and a lot of reddish hair that did not exactly curl but had a wiriness that made it stand back from her face rather like Alice's hair in Alice in Wonderland. Since her illness Harriet had looked all eyes, hair, and legs, and no face at all, so much so that her brothers Alec, Toby, and Edward said she had turned into a daddy-long-legs.

What a great start -- so many of the elements of the story already in place. Harriet's illness -- never specified -- has left her with legs that feel like cotton wool, and her kindly doctor has the idea that ice-skating will help them to get stronger again. At the rink she meets Lalla, who is her age but already a star skater, or at least being groomed for stardom by her frighteningly controlling Aunt Claudia, who wants her to follow in her dead father's footsteps. Rich and confident, Lalla is everything Harriet is not, but the two girls makes friends and soon Harriet is allowed to share Lalla's delightful governess, to wear some of Lalla's cast-offs or even have some jerseys knitted by Lalla's Nana, and, best of all, to have skating lessons from Lalla's teacher, the great Max Lindblom. Both girls grow and change immeasurably as a result -- Lalla, who has never had a friend of her own age, benefits hugely from her contact with real down-to-earth family life, while Harriet becomes more and more absorbed by skating. The path is quite a bumpy one for both of them, but.... Well, you'll have to read this for yourself if you want to know all that happens, obviously.

I managed to get hold of this on ebay, after my very enjoyable revisiting of Ballet Shoes at Christmas. I gulped it down in one go yesterday afternoon and loved every minute. But how much of that was nostalgia? Yes, Noel Streatfeild is an extraordinarily good writer, lively, engaging, well rooted in the realities of the world. But would ten-year-olds today appreciate it as much as I did? Perhaps someone else knows the answer to this -- I don't.

Top Ten Novelists Poll

The wonderful normblog is running a poll -- you get to vote for your ten favorite English-language novelists.  What larks, Pip!   Do have a go. I'm actually finding it hard to come up with my final final list,, though I can tell you that Jane Austen is at number one and will not be moving from that spot.

The Shakespeare Secret

I do love a good crime novel. I have read, or attempted to read, several in the past few months and liked them not at all -- this is the first I have finished and enjoyed for a while. One thing I must say before we start, though, is that on the cover it is compared to The Da Vinci Code. Let me tell you that it is much better than that execrably badly written book. But I can see what they mean. Like The Da Vinci Code, the plot hurtles dizzyingly from one event to the next, leaving you gasping for a little respite. Essentially, this is what it is about. The main protagonist, and narrator, is Kate Stanley, a young American academic who has abandoned  a university career for the theatre, and is directing a production of Hamlet at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. But before the production opens, someone sets fire to the theatre and Kate's mentor, the Harvard professor Roz Howard, is found dead, soon after she has given Kate a mysterious gift of a Victorian brooch. This is only the first of a series of murders, all of which are carried out in ways that mimic deaths  in Shakespeare's plays: Roz has been murdered with poison in her ear, like Hamlet's father; another woman is found floating in water like Ophelia; a man is stabbed through a tapestry like Polonius, and so on. Kate, aided by the distinguished Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Lee, starts to follow a series of clues which soon indicate that Roz has been on the trail of a lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, the last copies of which disappeared in the eighteenth century. But all this has to be done on the run, since Kate has come under suspicion for the murder. Soon Kate, Sir Henry, and a young man called Ben who has stepped in to help, are whizzing around the world, taking in Boston, Washington DC, Arizona, New Mexico, Spain, as well as various locations in England including Wilton House and Ormskirk in Lancashire (where I happen to live) among other places. The search for the murderer, and for Cardenio, becomes inextricably tied up with the long-standing debate about the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays -- there have always been supporters of the 'anti-Stratfordian' theory that WS was just an uneducated actor and that the true author was -- well, the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or any one of several other claimants. Although, in my opinion, all very silly, these claims have raised extraordinarily intense emotions in their supporters, to the extent of driving one 19th-century woman, Delia Bacon, over the edge into insanity (a circumstance which has a bearing on the plot here). There's more, lots more, but I can't really go on. Not only are the twists and turns of the plot absolutely relentless, but so much of it demands very close attention to the various theories of authorship, the interrelationships between the numerous sixteenth century personae involved, attitudes to Catholicism at the period, to mention but a few. I know a lot about Shakespeare and so a good deal of this was, if not exactly well-known to me, at least vaguely familiar ground, and even so I found myself a little confused at times. It is certainly brilliantly done -- the author, Jennifer Lee Carrell, is herself a Harvard PhD and a Shakespeare professor -- and is obviously deliberately challenging. Not for the faint-hearted, then, but if you feel up to it, give it a go.