Harriet Devine's Blog

Reading Meme

I saw this yesterday on Savidge Reads and today on Stuck in a Book -- so following the lead of the two great blogging Simons, here is my own -- I've edited down a bit from their longer versions.

How many books read in 2009?

About 90, which is rather less than last year -- put it down to moving house. I've also started quite a few others and given up before finishing them -- I've done far more of this than usual this year for some reason.

How many fiction and non fiction?

Only eight non-fiction, almost all of them biographies or autobiographies

Male/Female author ratio?

Thirty-one by men, so obviously I do tend to prefer women authors, though interestingly enough my two favourites (below) are both by men.

Favourite book of 2009?

This is hard --  I think it might be a split between An Equal Music by Vikram Seth  and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

Least favourite?

Probably Stevie Davies Impassioned Clay, which I would not have finished if I hadn't been reading it for a book group.

Any that you simply couldn’t finish and why?

As I said earlier I've done this a lot, for various reasons -- mostly because they just didn't grab me enough.  But the top of the list would have to be Engleby by Sebastian Faulks. I'm afraid I couldn't stand it.

How many books from the library?

About twelve, and most of those in the last few months. I've been using the library a lot more since I moved to Oxford.

Any translated books?

Yes. Colette, Ripening Seed, Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga and The Fifth Woman, Stefan Zweig, The Girl in the Post Office (which I haven't written about yet), Alan Fournier, The Great Estate .

Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?

Interestingly enough it turns out to be Jill Paton Walsh -- I've read all four of her Imogen Quy novels, Lapsing, and Goldengrove Unleaving.

Any re-reads?

Quite a few. Several Margery Allinghams, a couple of Michael Innes, one or two by Barbara Pym, and probably others.

 Which book wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?

That would be the two William Fiennes books I was lucky enough to win from dovegreyreader -- The Snow Geese and The Music Room. I loved them both.

Which books are you annoyed you didn’t read?

I'd like to have read Hilary Mantell's Wolf Hall and AS Byatt's The Children's Book. No doubt they will both will turn up in a charity shop before long

Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read?

Yes! The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford -- it took me about twenty years to get around to it. So very glad I did.

A New Use for Old Books

Something to do with those books you can't bear to part with! Found on arts journal blog who will I hope not mind me putting it on here.

Norm's Literary Quiz

Do you read the wonderful normblog? If not, I suggest you start this year -- it's a great mixture of so many things and always intelligent and thought provoking. Norm has put together the most amazing and challenging literary quiz for which there are prizes -- book tokens, of course, as only right. If you are wondering how to fill this rather strange time between Christmas and New Year, have a go!

Norm, by the way, is the very distinguished Professor Norman Geras, and he is married to the celebrated novelist Adele Geras. Their daughter is the brilliant poet and crime writer Sophie Hannah. A pretty smart family, all in all.

Christmas pictures (4)

Here, for Christmas Day, is The Sacred Family by Pompeo Batoni. The detail is so lovely I wanted to show you that as well. I doubt if anyone is reading blogs on Christmas Day but in case you are -- I hope you have a wonderful day.

Christmas pictures (3)

 An etching by the great Rembrandt for today. This is such a contrast to yesterday's painting -- yesterday's was a close up, this is gives you the big picture. Which one gives you the greatest sense of the spiritual wonder of the experience? I don't think you can judge. We saw the Magi yesterday, their faces so still and silent, as if their feelings were so overwhelmingly strong there was no room for normal emotion. This one by contrast gives you the tiny figures of the shepherds in the vastness of the landscape but by their body postures you see how completely astonishing and wonderful is the extraordinary vision of the angel, and the divine light radiating from above. No colour here, but do we need it? Perhaps without colour the fantastic detail of the etching is clearer. 

Christmas pictures (2)

This is The Adoration of the Magi by Gentile da Fabriano. It was painted in 1423 and you could see it if you went to the Ufizzi Gallery in Florence. Most pictures of the Magi -- the three wise men, or the three kings -- show Mary and the baby but this one concentrates you just on the faces of two of the wise men.

Here is T S Eliot's poem on the subject:

Journey Of The Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed,refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Christmas pictures (1)

Here is the beautiful painting of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico, the great 15th century painter of whom William Michael Rossetti wrote:

"All of his many paintings were of divine subjects, and it seems that he never altered or retouched them, perhaps from a religious conviction that, because his paintings were divinely inspired, they should retain their original form. He was wont to say that he who illustrates the acts of Christ should be with Christ. It is averred that he never handled a brush without fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a Crucifixion". 

The painting is in the Museo San Marco in Florence, where I was lucky enough to see it some years ago. It is magical.

A Little Princess

"Be careful what you wish for" is a bit of a hackneyed saying these days -- the implication being that you might just get it and it might not turn out the way you had hoped. Well, when I got home with all those lovely books last week, I thought how nice it would be to be ever so slightly unwell so that I could lie in bed all day and just read. And lo and behold yesterday I got my wish -- and what's more, though I did feel a little peculiar first thing (dizzy, queasy, feverish), by mid-morning I was absolutely up to reading though not to getting up and doing anything else. So I lay there all day in my deliciously cosy bed, finished The Making of a Marchioness and blogged about it, and then, longing for more Frances Hodgson Burnett, found my copy of this. I read it from cover to cover in just a few hours and goodness how I did enjoy it. If you have not read it, this is the story of Sara Crewe, who, as the story begins, has just arrived in London from India with her much loved father. Sara's mother died when she was born, so she and her father are very close, but now she is eight she must leave India and go to Mrs Minchin's school in London. Mrs M, impressed by her father's wealth, gives her the best room in the house -- she has her own maid -- and her clothes and possessions are the envy of everyone. Luckily Sara, though extremely bright and imaginative, is also very kind and good and does not become spoiled by it all. But suddenly, when she is eleven, news comes that her father has died, having lost all his money investing in diamond mines. Mrs M, realising that, much as she would like to,  she can't just turn Sara out into the street because it would harm the school's reputation, takes away all her possessions and makes her into the school drudge. From now on she must live in a garret, freezing cold and always hungry, and work all day long for the hard-hearted cook. Of course in the end her fortunes are reversed again, and everyone (apart from Mrs Minchin) lives happily ever after.

It was fascinating to read this immediately after The Making of a Marchioness. When I wrote about that novel yesterday I remarked on how good a person Emily was, and how hard this was to do successfully in literature. Well, of course, Sara too is good, and it is often a struggle for her, even more than it was for  Emily. Sara is tested to the very limit, but manages to keep going through her tremendous powers of imagination, constantly telling herself that she is a princess, despite being treated as not much better than a beggar. So I think FHB was interested in goodness, and also in the power of positive thought -- remember how Colin in The Secret Garden actually recovers his health and strength through positive affirmations? But I also thought there must be some autobiographical elements here, as I know FHB and her family were catapulted into poverty after the death of her father when she was much the same age as Sara Crewe. One of the ways Sara keeps going is by telling stories, and surely little Frances must have done the same. I know there's a recent biography and must get hold of it soon.

Oh and by the way, I'm absolutely fine today.

The Making of a Marchioness

There can't be many people who don't know about Frances Hodgson Burnett's wonderful novel for children, The Secret Garden. It was my favourite book when I was a child and I would still be happy to put it on any list of the best novels I have ever read -- I have re-read it periodically over the years and love it as much today as ever. I once tried her famous Little Lord Fauntleroy, but was not so taken with it, and I have a copy of A Little Princess which I haven't read since I was very little. But I had not realised until recently that she also wrote novels for adults. This one, now beautifully re-published by Persephone, is probably her most famous. It started life as a rather short novel, published in three parts in the Cornhill magazine, and only later acquired its second half. Though Part Two continues the story of Part One, the two halves are rather different in approach -- what starts as romance ends as melodrama, really. But the consistency of the whole is really held together by the central character, Emily Fox-Seton. A well-born, well-bred, well-educated woman in her early thirties, she has descended into what was politely known as genteel poverty. With an income of £20 a year (according to Measuring Worth that's somewhere between £2000 and £8000 in today's money) she can only afford to live in very simple lodgings, and survives by doing little errands for her wealthier friends. Despite her cheerfulness, and her ability to make do -- there are wonderful details of her clothes, and how she plans to make last year's skirt look more like this year's fashion -- the shadow of the workhouse, or indeed of starving to death, is never far away. But this part of the story has a happy ending, and it's hardly a spoiler, given the title, to tell you that she meets a Marquis at a country house and, at the end of Part One, she marries him. In Part Two, her adored husband has to travel to India and she is alone, pregnant, and beset by terrible difficulties, though she does come through in the end.

What makes this novel so remarkable, though, is not really the plot, readable though it is. FHB has really achieved something extraordinary here by making her central character absolutely, unquestionably GOOD without ever making her boring. This is something that is well-known to be almost impossible to achieve. Think of Paradise Lost, in which Satan is a far more interesting character than God -- or if by chance you are not familiar with Milton (!), think of Fanny Price, a much less popular heroine than Lizzy Bennett or even Emma. Emily Fox-Seton is a big girl, with a fine figure but large feet. She has  "nice round fresh cheeks and nice big honest eyes, plenty of mouse brown hair and a short straight nose". What makes her so lovable to those in her own world is her openness, her friendliness, her willingness to help others, her complete lack of any sense of her own worthiness to be loved or even valued, but without any regret or bitterness accompanying that last quality. She is not imaginative, and not even all that bright, in actual fact, but she is adorably sweet natured, trusting and kind-hearted. And it is all these qualities that cause Lord Walderhurst, a hugely wealthy but rather dull middle-aged widower, to decide she is the wife he wants. In the hands of another novelist all this could go badly wrong -- wealth might corrupt Emily, Lord W might turn out to be a bad 'un -- but in fact she remains as simple, sweet, kind and trusting as ever, and deeply devoted to her undemonstrative husband.

There are some wonderful minor characters here -- the elderly Lady Maria Bayne, once a rather dashing and scandalous girl, who introduces Emily to Lord W and cares for her deeply beneath her sharp and ironic facade -- the beautiful debutante Lady Agatha, one of the contenders for Lord W's hand, whose fate, should she fail to get a husband, will be to return to the remote Irish castle where debts are mounting and no one ever visits, so that the next of her six sisters can have her chance in London for a year while she sadly and quietly "goes off" -- wicked Captain Osborn, who will inherit the title if Lord W dies without an heir, and his sad, ill-treated Anglo Indian wife Hester -- Hester's Indian ayah, the evil Ameerah (forget political correctness here) -- and Emily's devoted maid Jane Cupp, daughter of her erstwhile landlady. Very much of its day in its depiction of the English class system, the novel is nevertheless almost ruthlessly honest about what lies behind the facade of English upper class society. Wonderful stuff.

Girl Reading

This painting is called 'Literary Pursuits of a Young Lady', by Alexei Alexeivich Harlamoff, a Russian Academic Painter (1842-1922) Apparently much admired by Queen Victoria, he was, according to Wikipedia, "best know [sic] for his informal portraits of sitters whom he painted for their beauty and innocence".  You've probably seen some of his pretty paintings, many of which have been used as posters. You can see a few of them reproduced here.