Two About Aging

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Inspired belatedly by the discussion of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel on the One Bright Book podcast, I replaced my donated copy (see, this does sometimes happen, that I purge a book and then reconsider!) with the nice Penguin Modern Classics edition and reread it after–I don’t even know how many years. I am sure that whenever I last read it, at least 20 years ago, I would felt interest and reluctant sympathy for its protagonist, Hagar Shipley, rightly described by her son Marvin as a “holy Terror,” but my relationship with her would have been based on imagining getting old, not on my own experience of it. This time through, though given average life expectancies these days, at just-turned-59 I don’t really count as “old,” I felt her rage and horror and refusal at the indignities and compromises of old age to my core. Nobody every really knows what lies ahead–except that we all know that it’s coming for us in some form (unless it isn’t, which is no consolation).

There is a lot going on in The Stone Angel, through Hagar’s retrospective account her of childhood, her difficult marriage, her losses, her eventual, still difficult, independence. But this seemed to me where the novel’s fiercest care lies: in Hagar’s fierce, ruthless, but inevitable also both foolish and futile struggle to stay unequivocally herself to the very end. Laurence plays out this losing battle artfully through Hagar’s first-person narration, which gives us the immediacy of her voice and her experiences but also lets slip over and over how Hagar herself is slipping, even as she denies, even to herself, that she is.

“Here I am,” Hagar says at one point,

the same Hagar, in a different establishment once more, and waiting again. I try, a little, to pray, as one’s meant to do at evening, thinking perhaps the knack of it will come to me here. But it works no better than it ever did. I can’t change what’s happened to me in my life, or make what’s not occurred take place. But I can’t say I like it, or accept it, or believe it’s for the best. I don’t and never shall, not even if I’m damned for it. So I merely sit on the bed and look out the window until the dark comes and the trees have gone and the sea itself has been swallowed by the night.

“Even if I”m damned for it”: that’s the spirit of Hagar, and also, that’s the spirit, Hagar! She’s a quintessentially unlikeable character–rude and rough and proud and defiant–and yet there’s something inspiring as well as refreshing in her, and also in Laurence’s, refusal to pander to the notion that an old woman should be a harmless creature, gentle, pliant, no trouble to anyone. It’s not the dying of the light Hagar rages against: it’s life, with its injustices, its griefs, its disappointments. It’s odd that such a negative force should nonetheless be uplifting. Her intransigence is surely not exemplary, but the novel conveys with great power the imperative she fights to live up to: to be herself, Hagar, to the bitter end.

Merilyn Simond’s Walking With Beth could hardly be more different in tone or spirit, even though it too highlights truth to self as essential to aging. Walking With Beth recounts the many conversations Simonds had with her beloved friend Beth, mostly during the pandemic when regular walk-and-talk sessions helped them both cope with the stress and isolation of lockdown. They are 30 years apart: Simonds is in her early 70s when the walks begin and Beth is 101. “Now I am the old lady,” Simonds reflects; “Still, I am not so old that I can’t find a woman older than I am. Beth is my old lady now. My last guide into the future.” What wisdom does Beth have for her, from her position as, not just an elder, but one of the eldest? How can her choices, her way of being so old, help Merilyn imagine herself into an old age that is something other than a fading away?

I liked Walking With Beth but I did not find it a particularly revelatory or inspirational read. Beth is clearly an exceptional woman; like her past, her aged present is rich with creativity and generosity. She has no trouble filling her days, as far as her energy and health allow. “Many people reach retirement,” she tells Merilyn,

never having thought about what has given them pleasure or satisfaction in their life . . . What can take them into the next stage. They don’t realize they have no need of a boss or a job description. Any number of activities are self-initiated. I can’t believe how much has happened between 1988, when I officially retired from teaching art therapy at Concordia, and now–dance, embroidery, my collages–clusters of activity, each one different, yet in a way they are part of one long, continuous journey. Every day, at every age, you wake up, your eyes open, your whole being opens, and off you go!”

Is it because I have in fact been thinking a lot about retirement, and also reading books and listening to podcasts about it, that I found this banal? But Walking With Beth isn’t really a self-help or advice book, so maybe that’s unfair: it’s really a record of a friendship, and considered from that angle it is more satisfying. It is low key, episodic, digressive: sometimes that works (for me), sometimes it feels unfinished (to me). Partly because of Simonds’s own medical problems during this period, it highlights physical decline, often in a dispiriting way. “Younger birds,” Simonds observes,

may be more active and have more vibrant plumage, but birds, at least to the human eye, have been spared the equivalent of the white hair, slack, wrinkled skin, stooped back, clouded vision, and tangled mind that mark advanced age in our species.

“It is the terrors of the mind that frighten me the most,” she adds, but “we cannot avoid the endgame; we can’t even choose which one we’ll be forced to play. All we can do is choose where we cast our eyes,” and she and Beth, and her book, nudge us consistently to look towards the light:

Today, the sky is bright, the Sierra Madre mountains lift the horizon as they have done for thousands of years, the birds in the pepper tree outside my window are singing, and my heart, nudging aside my mind, sings too.

OK, that’s nice, but again, it shades into banality. Nice as the book is, lovely as the friendship it centres on is, deft as some of the writing is, it made little impression on me–much less than, say, Death of an Ordinary Man, which is a lot less nice but somehow a great deal more comforting, or at least more bracing. I actually know someone who walks every week with a friend of hers who is a couple of decades older: they both really look forward to their walks. Maybe as a vicarious experience, it’s bound to be less energizing. Simonds, who has had to clear out the belongings of many of her loved ones after their deaths, comments that photographs are rarely of great interest to those besides the photographers: I had something of the same feeling about this book, that it takes a lot to make a friendship of yours mean much to someone else, and Walking With Beth doesn’t quite deliver.

To be honest, I sometimes have the same feeling about podcasts: it’s a lot less fun listening to someone else’s discussion of a book than it is being in the discussion myself. It can make me feel like Frankenstein’s monster watching a happy family through the window. However! Now that I have finally reread The Stone Angel, I look forward to listening again to the One Bright Book episode. And I’ll be thinking about those walks and those talks. I love walking and talking (or sitting and talking) with my own friends, but it’s such an occasional pleasure, as we all seem to be so busy.

Another Term Over!

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I have certainly not kept up diligently with posting about my teaching this year. I’ve posted just twice about it since January, and once was a re-run! I blame . . . well, pretty much everything, including how much of my energy was spent this term on administrative stuff that was at once important and kind of mind-numbing. But really it’s probably as simple as: a habit, once broken, is hard to repair, however much you miss it, or however guilty you feel about it (however irrationally). I was talking with a good friend recently who commented how helpful she’d found the comment “it’s OK to change your interests.” Has my interest in blogging about my teaching just declined? The proof, I guess, is in the posting.

And yet: I have missed it! I continue to believe, as well, that it is a habit that did me good. I became a better teacher because I took regular opportunities to reflect on what I was doing and how it was going. As I approach the end of my teaching career–I don’t know when that will be, yet, but I know it’s coming eventually!–I know I will be glad to have this record of so much of it, as well.

This felt like a difficult term, though mostly for reasons not directly to do with my own teaching. The string of snow days and cancellations didn’t help: I got pretty tired of gaming out revisions to our reading schedules and deadlines. Disruptions aside, I think my two classes actually went pretty well. I was anxious heading into the Brit Lit survey class, because it did not go well the last time I taught it–and that’s even without taking into account that mid way through it, the pandemic broke out and we were all sent home. The reading list this time was pretty much the same, but it all felt very different, in a good way. How much of that was me, doing things differently (better) and how much of that was the unpredictable chemistry of the group, the room, the moment? I loved working through Great Expectations with them, of course, but the biggest treat for me was The Remains of the Day, which was on the reading list for the course in 2020 but had to be cut when everything blew up. It remains a top 10 novel for me, and its insights and impact feel as urgent to me now as they did a decade ago–more, perhaps. And of course the final scene on the pier still makes me weep.

My other course this term was a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot. I have taught a grad-only version before but this was my first time being able to offer it to Honours students as well. Because many of the undergraduates in the class had read at least one George Eliot novel with me before (along with an array of other Victorian novels), and some of the graduate students had never read her–or much Victorian fiction at all–there really was no meaningful difference in level or preparation, and the discussion was smart and energetic and invested the entire term. Well, OK, it flagged a bit while we were making our way through Felix Holt, which was not a general favourite–but that was also during the worst of our winter weather, so I choose to think it’s not really, or not entirely, Felix’s fault. Silas Marner was a clear favourite, but to my delight and relief, so was Daniel Deronda, which I don’t think anyone in the class was really looking forward to. They were all very happily surprised at how (relatively) fast-paced and provocative and interesting it is. I would have loved to include Middlemarch, but you can only do so much in 12 weeks. (I have put it on the reading list for the Dickens to Hardy class in the fall, as compensation.)

The last time I taught the grad seminar version of the George Eliot class was 2015, and it was interesting to notice some shifts in the interests and questions students brought to our discussions. To some extent this was a function of the critical essays I assigned for the graduate students, which I refreshed to highlight recent developments in the scholarship. But it was still up to them what they specifically brought up in class, and the undergraduates were not doing those readings (or at least were not required to)–and across the board it was clear that disability studies, eco-criticism, and gender were key interests. It’s not that gender wasn’t a central topic of discussion in the past, but the terms of the discussion have evolved: we had as lively discussions about Gwendolen as a possibly “ace” character, for example, as about Maggie’s non-conformity with 19th-century norms of femininity. There didn’t seem to be much energy for talking about empire, even with Daniel Deronda, and my expectation that the novel’s conclusion would provoke controversy about Palestine and Zionism did not really play out.

The spectre haunting everyone’s pedagogy this year was AI. I really tried not to let concerns about it preoccupy me. By and large, I trust my students to want an authentic experience, to be bringing their real selves to the classroom and to the work they do for me. I never had the feeling with any of the work from the students in the George Eliot seminar that it wasn’t truly their own. Could I be wrong about this? Sure. But I got to know them all pretty well, and unless I have learned nothing in 31 years of teaching, there’s not much overlap between “students who want to take an entire seminar about George Eliot” and “students who want to take short-cuts.” I wasn’t always so sure with the online tests in the survey class: some of the answers did have that combination of vagueness and fluency, a kind of unnatural glibness with very little actual substance, that gives off the whiff of AI. Most of the time that meant they also didn’t meet the requirements for full credit, which typically included things like “give a specific example from the reading to support your answer, explaining clearly how it does so.” In those cases I could just give partial credit, noting how the answer fell short without getting tangled up in having to prove AI use. Other times I had to shrug and give credit for a “good enough” answer, even if I doubted its authenticity. Usually I noted that doubt in my feedback, explaining why the answer had made me wonder, in case knowing that was in any way useful to the student.

I’m not at all sanguine about the corrosive effects of AI on teaching and learning, and I don’t kid myself that there is any way to “AI-proof” my assignments. I remind myself, though, that one of my worst teaching experiences ever was the term–not that long ago!–when 1 in 5 of my first-year students was found guilty of an academic integrity offence for literally cutting and pasting material from sites on the internet. AI is worse: more insidious, and at least potentially more widely damaging to the trust I consider essential to my work. I have tried hard over the years to think about plagiarism as a symptom rather than a moral failing and to do what I can to create the conditions in which students neither need nor want to resort to it. The same is surely true of AI, but it’s impossible to ignore how much harder it keeps getting, not just to ward it off (I mean, Copilot is literally integrated in the software they are provided by the university!) but to manage those conditions. Classes are larger, everyone is busier and under more pressure, students’ preparation and expectations and needs vary widely. All I can really do is speak up for and model the value of the process and the work itself. I do feel pretty sure that, whatever complaints they no doubt have about me and my pedagogy, my students can tell I am there for it and for them, that I am genuinely committed and enthusiastic. I hope they appreciate that I continue to prioritize both trust and authenticity on both sides. When I can’t bring that positive energy to the room any more, it will definitely be time for me to retire.

“Germany Had Awoken”: Sally Carson, Crooked Cross

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

Lexa, carried away by the thrill of it all, did not know that Helmy’s triumphant shout at the door–so spontaneous and joyful as it had been–was the signal for the upheaval of the country, for the disappearance of logic, individuality, of freedom itself.

She did not know, nor did Helmy, that the simple words he cried were to announce a spring not only of buds and warm winds but of violence, bloodshed, and foolhardy actions of stupidity which were to make the rest of Europe recoil from the friendship she had felt reviving in her for German.

Germany had awoken. Hitler had spoken. And Hitler was now the rightful spokesman and leader for German.

I’m always a bit skeptical about a book touted for the beauty of its sentences: that’s not what I read novels for, or at any rate, beautiful sentences are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for me to love or admire a novel. It matters a lot to me what the sentences say, what they are for! Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross is a good reminder to me that the opposite is also true: it isn’t enough for a novel to be earnestly, even passionately, in service of something important–especially if it’s something as obvious as “Nazis bad!” which is pretty much the level of subtlety I found on offer in Crooked Cross.

I mean, yes: Nazis are bad! And it’s not that I think we should stop telling stories about this. It’s odd how the badness of Nazis makes it hard to say “this book is bad,” though. I do kind of think it is, however. It’s just so obvious. It’s true that Crooked Cross was initially published when it would not have been so obvious, its stories not so predictable. The novel first appeared in 1934: in her preface to the new Persephone edition, Laura Freeman notes that the most astonishing thing about the novel and its two sequels is “how closely they follow events.” Readers today have read (and seen) a lot of stories about this period of history, and there is something startling about the raw immediacy of Carson’s account of the events of the short period from Christmas 1932 to the summer of 1933, which transform–deform–her small cast of characters. Those who join the Nazis are, she makes clear, being destroyed from within; those who oppose them and those who are their targets and victims are first ostracized, then persecuted, then either sent to the camps or murdered.

It seems wrong to say “OK, so?”–and to be fair to Carson, she does tell her story with enough finesse that even knowing its inevitable outcome, I felt some grim dread about how exactly those inevitabilities would play out. She also does a good job bringing out what Freeman identifies as the unheimlich qualities normal life takes on in an abnormal world. Even as the two eldest sons, Erich and Helmy, become increasingly complicit in Nazi ideology and atrocities and the daughter, Lexa, sees her fiancé Moritz, a Catholic, pay a higher and higher price for his Jewish surname, the Kluger family celebrates holidays, goes to dances, enjoys favourite meals, goes swimming at the local pool, and generally carries on like any ordinary family–at least until they, or Lexa, can’t keep it up any more. Lexa’s devotion to Moritz is initially sweet, innocent, naive–but as circumstances get harder, Lexa’s courage rises to match her outraged principles as well as her love. Their attempt to escape over the mountains into Austria is suspenseful and its outcome is unequivocally tragic, and also rendered with rare restraint by Carson.

If that sounds like the stuff of good fiction, it is! Too bad Crooked Cross is not. It’s leaden, plodding, heavy-handed. Does it just seem this way because we already know? Maybe–but in that case, it is also dated, right? Its interest is perhaps more documentary than literary.

I realize that someone who loves Mary Barton should be careful criticizing writers for being heavy-handed. I believe Gaskell is just a much better (more interesting, more artful, more stylish) writer than Carson. Your mileage may vary. I will quote a few bits of Crooked Cross that I flagged as both particularly lumpish and decently representative. First, here’s a bit that follows on from the excerpt I chose as my epigraph:

Now the Nazi Party with Hitler at its head and the bulk of the nation behind it could march to triumph. The stage was set for a fresh game; the press was silenced; ears were deafened to foreign voices of protest.

Like a gigantic operation the work of rejuvenating Germany began: a blindfold surgeon began to cut at her behind closed doors, chopping away everything he thought unfit, with no thought for her future life, her future vitality, with no idea that the horrible scars on her body would be noticed by her friends–never forgotten, probably.

No matter. There was to be a boycott of Jews beginning on April 1st; there were to be new passport regulations, fresh censorship on newspapers. There were to be murders.

The bursting accumulation of fanatic energy, held in leash so long, was to be let loose. It could no longer be controlled. Patriotism must run its course. All was open and free for it.

I don’t know, maybe that’s not so bad? But I do think it is not good. Why is it so hard to be sure? I have been wondering if I would be less judgmental about Carson’s prose if it were in translation from German: there’s something (to my ear) stilted about the cadence as well as overly insistent in the tone. Here’s another bit that strikes me as, again, not quite getting it right:

As the suspense which swept through the country was heightened into excitement there were more cases of bloodshed in strife between the parties. People like Helmy and his friend, Otto Streicher, performed their tasks with a fresh, hopeful energy. In quite homes like the Klugers [sic] it began to be difficult to ignore the political situation.

Open taunts to Jews and Communists were made, and there were isolated cases of people like Moritz who began to suffer while the days of doubt, hope, indecision, bravado drew January to a close. The country was like a person tossing in a frightened sleep, half conscious yet half unconscious of the nightmare into which, on awakening, it was to be so abruptly plunged.

For me, the worst parts where those where Carson was the most ambitious, moving from her characters’ situations and reactions out towards larger moral or even philosophical insights. Again, I am aware that a Victorianist, and especially a lover of George Eliot’s fiction, could be on shaky ground criticizing a novelist for doing this–but (for me) George Eliot’s philosophical commentary is never thin and reedy, like this:

[Lexa] did not realize that the blessing which appears in times of trouble–that of being only able and forcibly made to live in the present–made the extraordinary behaviour of life possible. She did not know that that is nature’s own anaesthesia; the mind and the heart–holding too much of the past, too pregnant for the future, as external pressure of circumstance increases–gradually reach a point of satiety. Events of the past slip quickly as into a life unknown, become a part almost of a previous existence; the future no longer holds fears and doubts; it is for the moment non-existent. [It goes on like this for two more paragraphs.]

Again, I wonder: how easy is it, to make the case that this is bad writing? Maybe it is more convincing for you! Also, I think it makes a difference pulling these clips out of context. It was not any one moment, any single clunky passage, that made me conclude Crooked Cross was a badly written book. It was the whole reading experience, which left me thinking maybe it was a “lost” book for good reason. A few years back, writing about some re-published novels by Rosalind Brackenbury, I asked

what, besides nostalgia, makes a good but not great novel from a century ago more appealing than an equally middling one from this year? More generally, what qualities make the difference between a lost classic – a work that resists or subverts standard assumptions about literary value – and a period piece whose interest is primarily as an artefact of literary history?

Decently readable though it is, Crooked Cross seems to me an example of the latter, an artefact, perhaps worth recovering for the interest of seeing what could be said about the badness of Nazis and the horrors they wrought as early as 1934, but not standing out as a novel of real literary value, in spite of those currently hailing it as a recovered masterpiece. We have better books to read about its topic: novels like Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, or extraordinary works of non-fiction like Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. Sorry, Persephone: once again I think there may be something to the concept of the “Whipple line”–even though it seems somehow rude or even faintly unethical to invoke that for a book on a subject that matters so deeply.

Taking the Plunge: Daphne du Maurier, Mary Anne

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

“I’ve taken the plunge,” she thought, “and there’s no returning. I’m out for what I can get, and I’ll see that I get it. I’ll pay back in kind, I won’t cheat, I won’t be dishonest. No one will claim I haven’t earned my money. Value given for value received. It’s one trade like another, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. We’ve all got to live.”

Mary Anne is the fictionalized story of Daphne du Maurier’s great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke. It is quite the rags to riches to (near) rags again saga. Mary Anne is born into poverty and clambers up the social ladder with the tenacity of Becky Sharp. She is conscious from an early age of the disparity of power between men and women and she uses charm, subterfuge, threats, manipulation, bribery, seduction—basically, every trick she has!—to get what she wants, which is not so much money as security, for herself and her family. She loves luxury, she loves power, but at every turn she learns how fast she can lose her grip on both. Like Becky, she never stops, and also stops at nothing, fighting to keep them. Many powerful men enlist her in their own schemes, but they usually betray the promises they make her; it’s hard to feel any pity for them when they find themselves, in turn, exposed or betrayed for Mary Anne’s own purposes.

The pinnacle of Becky’s career is her presentation to the Prince Regent. Mary Anne goes one better, becoming the mistress of his brother Frederick, Duke of York. The chief engine of the plot from this point on is her participation in a scheme to profit through his influence over military appointments and promotions. This eventually becomes a huge public scandal, with hearings in the House of Commons; Frederick eventually is driven to resign his position as Commander in Chief. By this time he has severed his connection with Mary Anne, who gets her revenge by being the chief witness against him; she goes on to publish pamphlets and memoirs, which I assume were key primary sources for du Maurier’s novel (I would like to know how many of the letters and speeches in them come directly from contemporary materials).

Mary Anne has little of the lush atmospheric writing of Jamaica Inn or Frenchman’s Creek, or the delicious suspense of My Cousin Rachel or Rebecca. It has its own energy, though: like its protagonist, it just keeps moving forward, restlessly, relentlessly, on to the next thing, and the next, and the next. Mary Anne’s father lets the family down; she picks up the work. Mary Anne’s husband turns out to be a weak drunken fool; she figures out how to support the family. When there seem to be no better options, she “takes the plunge” and becomes a courtesan; when the opportunity arises, she wins the Duke’s favour and works tirelessly to keep it, even though the allowance he gives her is not enough to meet his expectations and (again like Becky) she looks to be winning the game even as she is getting deeper and deeper into debt. When her royal “protector” cuts her off, she just keeps going. She is not particularly likeable and she’s certainly not admirable, but I couldn’t help rooting for her. All those men, for one thing: they just use her and lie to her and break their promises and go home to their wives and then sit in judgment on her.

Mary Anne isn’t just plot points, though: there are passages that definitely have that du Maurier flare. Here’s her description of the back streets of London where Mary Anne grows up, for example:

The streets were mentor and playground, teacher and companion. Rascals picked pockets on the streets, beggars were given alms, goods were bought, rubbish was sold, men laughed, men cursed, women whined, women smiled, children died under wheels. Some men and women wore fine clothes, some wore rags. The first ate well, and the others starved. The way to avoid rags and starvation was to watch, to wait, to pick up the coin dropped on the pavement before anyone else, to run swiftly, to conceal quickly, to smile at the right moment, to hide at the next, to keep what you had, to look after your own. The thing to remember was not to grow up like her mother, who was weak, who had no resistance, who was lost in this world of London that was alien to her, and whose only consolation was to talk of the past, when she had known better days.

Right there we can see the lessons Mary Anne remembered for the rest of her life and her determination to do whatever she can not to be weak, which means having money: “Not money to pinch,” as she later reflects, “but money to spend.”

And here she is at the end of her own “better days,” bathed in the pathos of someone who has played and lost, but still too game to be pathetic:

I remember . . . Then she’d stop herself. The young are bored with reminiscences. Who minded whether dandies in Vauxhall had stood on tip-toe once to watch her pass? What did it matter if a gaping crowd had climbed her carriage-wheels in Palace Yard? Or that she’d queened it in the House of Commons, the only woman in that world of men? . . . But sometimes, in the night, and no one with her, a strange nostalgic yearning came for the past; and baffled by the silence, oddly lonely, a church clock in Boulogne chiming the hour, she thought, “There’s no one left who gives a damn. The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.”

That’s splendid stuff.

“The Rest is Chaff”: Jo Harkin, ‘The Pretender’

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Has his kindness gone? Maybe. Each of his selves took something from him as it fell away. He left his confidence on the farm with John Collan. His innocence drowned on the floor of the house in Oxford, as Lambert Simons covered his eyes. His happiness is still locked in Edward, Earl of Warwick’s bedchamber in Dublin. When Simnel quits here, his goodness and his faith will be left in one of Henry’s strongboxes.

What has he got now? His hatred, and his love. That’s all he needs. The rest is chaff. Like Joan said, he’s better off without it. He should have brushed it off sooner.

I’ve never read a Ricardian novel quite like The Pretender. That’s saying a lot, considering I’ve read quite a number of them: there was a time when any Richard III-related fiction was irresistible to me. (I wrote about this preoccupation of mine long ago in Open Letters Monthly and had just so much fun revisiting and rethinking some of my favourites.)

The Pretender isn’t exactly ‘Ricardian’: it’s more accurate to call it ‘Ricardian-adjacent.’ It includes the York and Lancaster family trees I used to be able to reproduce handily on my own without looking them up, but its protagonist is at most a peripheral character in the story of Richard himself. Harkin has chosen Lambert Simnel as her focus, one of the young fellows put forward after Richard’s death claiming to be a lost Yorkist heir: Perkin Warbeck, for instance, purported to be Richard, Duke of York, younger son of Edward IV and one of the two famously vanished ‘Princes in the Tower.’ Lambert Simnel claimed to be Edward, son of George, Duke of Clarence (the ‘drowned in a vat of malmsey’ one)–nephew to Edward IV and Richard III. Both were figureheads for rebellions against Henry VII; Perkin Warbeck was executed, but Lambert Simnel was pardoned and put into service in Henry’s household. Wikipedia helpfully notes “almost no information about his later life is known.”

I’m not sure if it is a spoiler to say that Harkin leaves the question of whether Simnel was or was not actually Clarence’s son unresolved. She opens when the boy who would end up a claimant to the English throne is living an unremarkable life as John Collan, the son of an inexplicably prosperous farmer whose wealth turns out to be due to the service he is doing for the mysterious nobles who show up one day to turn John into ‘Lambert Simons.’ This temporary alias is to shield him from notice or scrutiny while the tutor they have appointed, Richard Simons, polishes him up, a process the boy enjoys only because it broadens the scope of books he can read.

Each section of the book follows him through a new phase as he is groomed and trained and readied for the ultimately unsuccessful rebellion in his name, and then becomes (in Harkin’s version of his life story) not just a servant but a spy for Henry, sussing out treasonous activity, including among those who at least claim to still be working for his own ultimate victory. Why, you might wonder, would a Yorkist serve Henry’s interests in this way? Since much of the fun of The Pretender lies in the convolutions of the plot, including lies, deceptions, betrayals, and revelations, all I’ll say is that like Arya in Game of Thrones, by the time this is John / Edward / Lambert / Simnel’s life, he has a long list of people on whom he would like to take his revenge.

When I say I have not read a book quite like this one before, it’s the style I mean more than the story. Harkin might not appreciate this characterization but one way I found myself thinking about her style, or at least her style here, is ‘Wolf Hall Lite.’ It is in present tense and also in close third person, much like Mantel’s brilliant series. It also adopts an archaic style, especially in the dialogue, though never to the point that Mantel herself warned writers away from–or at any rate it did not put me off, or seem overly mannered. Here’s a small sample from near the beginning that shows how she uses medieval (or pseudo-medieval) words or idioms:

The future, though bright, is also a little frightening. It’s an inquieting thing to pass out of the bounds of the farm, out of sight of the waving Emma and his father. The men beside him terrify him. Even his horse is intimidating, as beautiful as it is. Its hooves are oiled; its mane traps the light in tiny pieces. The only reason it hasn’t bucked John’s grubby body off its elegant back is because it’s too gentil.

One word she uses a lot is “maugre,” meaning something like “ill will” or “quarrel,” as in “he had no maugre with Philip” (looking it up, I see dictionaries trace it to “Old French” and define it as “bad pleasure”). I was able to enjoy this strategy for evoking a long-ago idiom because there is also a lot of crisp, effective, highly evocative writing and the novel as a whole moves briskly along. It’s a violent time and death is often both sudden and arbitrary (as Simnel learns, grimly, early on). Here’s another small sample, from when the army raised in his name is marching towards battle:

The atmosphere is different with no women around. The boozing is harder and wilder. The japes are crueler. Edward sometimes sees common women leaving tents at dawn. Sometimes the women are weeping. When the men aren’t singing ballads and playing dice games, they’re arguing, or fighting. He passes an affray: shouting, pushing, then–unexpectedly–one man sticking his halberd into the other man’s throat. The body is carried away. Then the men go back to the dice, and Edward to let out his shocked tears in his tent.

There’s a metallic tang in the air; he can feel it. Like swords being sharpened.

Like coming war.

That note about his “shocked tears” reminds us that he is still only a boy (he’s fourteen at this point), and also that he was not raised to be a soldier, that he is–initially at least–loving, imaginative, vulnerable. Until late in the novel, none of what is happening to him is by his own choice, or under his control, even when he thinks it is (something else he keeps grimly learning). The family he thought was his turns out (or so he’s told) not to be; his new caretakers are ruthless; his partisans are manipulative and self-interested; those he fears and those he loves prove equally untrustworthy. So there’s an underlying poignancy to this adventure tale. History tells us he fails, labels him a “pretender,” lets him vanish into obscurity, but Harkin makes us root for him, not least because he is himself self-conscious about his likely narrative fate:

[L]ater, when Simnel’s with Beatrice, he returns to his maugre against history.

‘We might know the truth,’ he says. ‘But in a few hundred years, Richard will be a hunchback and I’ll be a scoundrel. Those people won’t know anything else.’

‘Write your own history, then,’ she says.

‘I’d be writing my own head onto the block.’

It is sad but not surprising that he becomes hard, cynical, even murderous himself: so many people “have lied to him, goaded him, gulled him, terrified him, confused him,” and also taken away “anyone ever loved or might have loved–and left him alone, more alone than anyone, because they even parted him from his own self.”

It sounds great, right? So why did I call it “Wolf Hall Lite”? I don’t mean that The Pretender is a cheap imitation or a knock-off, just that Mantel’s books have a darkness to them that The Pretender does not, while Harkin’s has more humour than Mantel’s. The Pretender is perhaps more easily entertaining, but it’s also less engrossing. Nothing in The Pretender thrilled me the way parts of Bring Up the Bodies did. That said, like Wolf Hall when I first read it, The Pretender surprised me, in a good way. It is nothing like the pedestrian or formulaic historical fiction that can give the genre a bad name. It felt adventurous to me as writing, and it tells a lively and complex story. Would it be too complex for someone who had never heard of the Duke of Clarence or the Duke of Buckingham or Stanley or Lovell or Elizabeth Woodville before? Impossible for me to know!

Sarah Perry, Death of an Ordinary Man

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

But now I understand there are no ordinary lives–that every death is the end of a single event in time’s history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular. So here I am, counting out the particulars of my father-in-law’s life, and trying to preserve them in ink–it’s precious that he drank weak Yorkshire tea in footed mugs printed with blue flowers, and artificially sweetened with tables he called ‘depth charges’ as he jettisoned them in, laughing at his own joke. It’s precious that he disliked dogs, but could calm a feral cat; precious that he kept sugar-free mints in his pocket, and would thumb them free from the tube and into his mouth without looking; precious that each summer he grew rather tough green beans and froze them to be eaten at Christmas, and had a weakness for ice cream, but could never tolerate broccoli . . . all of this remarkable only because it can never be repeated or retrieved.

Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man is simple in its premise, unsparing in its execution, and almost unbearably poignant in its tenderness. In it, Perry recounts–in meticulous detail–her much-loved father-in-law David’s death from oesophageal cancer. From diagnosis to death, it took a scant nine days; in that short space, she and her husband Robert and especially, of course, David himself went together through one of the most commonplace human experiences. That in general we know so little about it–that we avoid thinking about it, until forced to, and so are rarely ready for it–is one of the reasons Perry wrote this book. “It isn’t wisdom I have,” she says near the end, “it’s only experience; and experience of only one death.” Nonetheless,

I am still standing by the gate, and I keep it open, because there are things I want to tell you. I want to tell you that even a good and easeful death may have its indignities and pains, but to know this–to have seen it–is to fear death less, not more.

Above all she wants to share the realization she came to, as she traveled with David along his road to death and then was left behind, that “dying is a part of living, and like living it has its events, both difficult and marvellous.” She doesn’t expect her account to make living less fearful, but to “bring the act of dying into the scope of living,” just one more part of what we all, one way or another, go through, of our events and struggles.

She is conscious even as David is dying that she is attending him not just with love and patience and grief but with the eye of a writer, “with the assessing acquisitive eye of a magpie.” It is to her credit, or a credit to her intelligence and craft, that the result feels authentic and immediate, not artificial or mannered. That she quotes poetry and philosophers seemed unsurprising precisely because she is a writer, and thus also a reader and a thinker, about meaning and about life. Her Gothic novel Melmoth is, I thought, a genuine novel of ideas; her novel Enlightenment, which she has just finished when David begins to die, is about science and philosophy and our place in the universe. All of us who live our lives in part through others’ words find that those words come to us in our own most intense moments (as I found, and still find, that thinking of Owen brings lines of poetry, long familiar, now hauntingly so, echoing in my mind).

Most of the book, though, is not literary, or philosophical, in any conspicuous way. (The absence of that kind of conspicuous literariness is itself exceptionally careful, artful: I don’t mean that the book is at all haphazard.) It is, mostly, very literal: Perry seems to have realized that there is enough power in the simple facts of David’s death–his physical decline, unthinkably rapid; his shifts in mood; his brief returns to energy and lucidity; his graceful submission (Perry’s word)–that just to describe them will also be enough.

That said, the other task of the book is to tell us about David’s life. Some of this is done neatly, efficiently, in the first short section of the book–aptly called “Life.” But Part Two, “Death,” fills in more details, partly through the simple device of Perry noting what she sees when she looks around David’s home–photos, slippers, dishes, his favourite magazine (the Antiques Gazette), his stamp collection, all the paraphernalia of an ordinary life. Something Death of an Ordinary Man captures with great vividness is the sudden diminution of these things when the person whose life they seemed to constitute steps away from them. How quickly they become just clutter, even as they also serve as tangible reminders and connections. David’s illness progresses so quickly that he has no way of knowing, in the moment, that he is putting his slippers on for the last time, drinking his last tea, sleeping for the last time in his own bed.

There’s a lot of medical detail in the book, not the specialist kind the doctors and nurses know, but the kind family members learn perforce when they become caregivers: artificial saliva, commodes, “WendyLett sheets,” which are “fitted with handles and woven in a particular way which allowed us to move David without hurting his body, or ours.” All of this is gripping reading in a way I wouldn’t have expected. There aren’t villains or heroes in the story, but a visiting doctor fills Perry with anger at what she perceives as unfeeling briskness, while the night nurse who comes so they can sleep brings them, and David, calm ease; an oncologist friend offers honesty that comes as a different kind of relief.

I realize that little about this may sound uplifting, and I can imagine people who have gone through the illness and death of a loved one might not at all want to read Perry’s account, though I can also imagine that for some there might be (as there has been for me with some things I have read about depression and suicide) some–what? not consolation, but companionship, in any recognition it offers, and that strange pleasure in finding that someone has found words to express what we perhaps have struggled to ourselves. The TLS review praises the book for being “unsentimental”: I am a fan of sentiment, and I am not sure that Death of an Ordinary Man isn’t a bit sentimental. There is immense pathos in it, at any rate, and raw grief. There is some comedy, too, and anger, and frank admissions of failures of empathy and possible errors of judgment.

Above all, and perhaps this is the most important and surprising thing about Death of an Ordinary Man, even though it is focused on how David died, it gives a really rich sense of him as a man who lived. Death is universal, but there will never be another life exactly like his, or another man exactly like him. That, as Perry observes, is anything but ordinary.

A Bit Sheepish About Woolf

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I have not stopped reading through Woolf’s diaries. I finished Volume 3 some time ago and have begin Volume 4. I have not stopped finding memorable or thought-provoking or delightful moments in them: Volume 3 is festooned with post-it flags, and Volume 4 is on a similar track.

And yet.

I have not been posting about it as much because the truth is, in between the post-it flags are often long stretches I’m not very interested in.

There, I admitted it! But I do feel sheepish about it, which is perhaps foolish. Why, after all, would I have expected to be fascinated by every page of someone’s actual diary? Nobody’s life, not even the life of a genius, is 100% fascinating; even Woolf, a genius, cannot make (and to be fair is not even trying to make) every moment fascinating.

She does a lot of socializing. People come over, she goes to their place, they hang out, they chat, they dine out, they gossip. I can’t always be bothered to read all the notes telling me who everybody is. Sometimes I even have to remind myself who “Roger” is. A lot of her reporting on this stuff is just not very interesting to me. I start to skim during accounts of conversations that seem like even in real time they were a bit tedious for her. She frets quite a bit about servants; by and large these are not her best moments.

She keeps at the diary as writing practice, as a routine, as a record, sometimes as a chore. It was never meant to be her masterpiece, or her legacy.

The best parts of Volume 3, for me, were her comments on the composition of The Waves. At the beginning of Volume 4, she is just finishing it: “Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised,” she writes on February 7 1931, “the end of The Waves”:

I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the lasdt ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice . . . Anyhow it is done . . . How physical the sense of triumph & relief is! Whether good or bad, its done; & as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated–how hastily, how fragmentarily I know; but I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse.

It is vicariously thrilling to share in that sense of “triumph & relief,” and humbling to imagine the mind and the craft and the courage it took to realize that vision in words and in such daring form. In November, when the novel has been published, the exhilaration continues:

Oh yes, between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning–if The Waves is my first work in my own style!

If only it were all like that!

It can’t be, of course, and if it were it would be exhausting, unsustainable for her as well as for us. It’s true that there’s always the option of reading only her ‘Writer’s Diary,’ as “curated” by Leonard. But that would mean no chance of discovering the other delights and oddities and poignancies of the day to day records, which are not (and of course they are not) all dull. I loved reading about her “astonishing hat”! And many of my post-it flags bring me back to moments of personal reflection, some of them vivid and moving in the moment and more so, painfully so, knowing what we know, what she did not yet know, about the story of her life:

The thing is now [she writes in May 1930] to live with energy & mastery, desperately. To despatch each day high handedly. To make much shorter work of the day than one used. To feel each like a wave slapping up against one. So not to dawdle & dwindle, contemplating this & that. To do what ever comes along with decision; going to the Hawthornden prize giving rapidly & lightheartedly; to buy a coat; to Long Barn; to Angelica’s School; thrusting through the mornings work (Hazlitt now) then adventuring. And when one has cleared a way, then to go directly to a shop & buy a desk, a book case. No more regrets & indecisions. That is the right way to deal with life now that I am 48: & to make it more & more important and vivid as one grows old.

That seems like the right way to deal with life now that I am 58 as well.

So I will press on, allowing her to be boring sometimes and trying not to feel that my boredom is a sign of my own inadequacy! In Volume 4 she has begun work on what becomes first The Pargiters, then Three Guineas and The Years. One of my first post-its: “I’m quivering & itching to write my–whats it to be called?–‘Men are like that?'”

Three by Elizabeth Strout

Rohan Maitzen16 Comments
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As I’m going to be reviewing Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit some of her earlier fiction, so I went to the library and signed out a stack. I remembered not having altogether liked My Name is Lucy Barton when I read it before, but you never know: it might have just been the wrong time. I honestly could not remember if I’d read Oh William! or Lucy by the Sea–and in fact I am still not sure. They did both seem familiar in spots, but I have no record of reading them here on the blog. That is not as definitive, as there have been gaps in both my posting and my memory over the past few years! Maybe I started and abandoned them, or read them in such a desultory spirit that they didn’t stick.

I still didn’t love My Name is Lucy Barton. There are things about it I liked the first time and still liked, but the flatly intrusive narrative voice irritated me, and this continued to be my reaction through both Oh William! and Lucy By the Sea. Our response to this series relies heavily on our reactions to Lucy herself, I expect, and for me her character remained too elusive, too remote, despite being the one doing all the talking. After three novels, I feel I know a lot of details about her life and about her verbal (narrative) tics, but I still have little sense of her as a person. At one point her ex-husband William describes her as “joyful” and I was surprised: I had no such impression of her. How can a first-person narrator be so vaporous? It is surely deliberate (Olive Kitteredge, by comparison, is a conspicuously forceful presence), but to what end?

Lucy By the Sea made both the best and the worst impression on me this time. I appreciated (though I didn’t really enjoy) its evocation of the surreal qualities of lockdown, its reminders of the distancing protocols and other precautions we adopted and adapted and (mostly) eventually have abandoned. (Many stores here still have markers on their floors asking people to keep 6 feet apart; they are worn and faded and, of course, completely ignored now.) I remember very well the overwhelming proximity of two people always together in the same house, the development of new routines to vary the monotonous days, the wariness of having or being visitors, the anxieties of getting groceries–it all feels so close and so far away at the same time. But Lucy’s narrative interruptions–not quite metafictional, never at all revelatory–kept pulling me away. Then the novel’s conclusion–that “we are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all”–felt forced to me. Let us get there on our own, was my reaction. I think we would have, just as I think I would have liked all three novels a lot more if Strout had made Lucy less self-conscious.

I have Tell Me Everything out as well now and I’m not really that motivated to read it, although it does bring Lucy together with Olive, which might give it more energy than the others. Strout’s new book is a stand-alone novel, so my ambivalence about the Lucy books doesn’t (necessarily) foretell my reaction to it!

Two By Alison Espach

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I had been in what felt like a reading slump until Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent perked me up. Then a friend lent me Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, and it too was a book that drew me back to it each chance I got, instead of malingering on my side table while I watched yet more TV.

I don’t know exactly what it was exactly about The Wedding People that worked so well for me. My friend cautioned me that the plot turns on someone who begins the novel planning her own death: her situation and also the whole tone of the novel set that so far apart from my own experiences that while it was certainly dark, it wasn’t off-putting or personally upsetting. In fact one thing I appreciated throughout The Wedding People was that Espach manages to sustain the novel’s comedy without losing trivializing her protagonist’s feelings, her sense of having had enough, of being ready. The way she is drawn back into life through accidentally crashing an elaborate ‘destination wedding’ was equal parts farcical and poignant. Somehow, she just can’t seem to extricate herself, and as she gets more and more involved with the wedding people she finds herself less and less tired of living.

I read The Wedding People pretty briskly and was enjoying the momentum so much that I didn’t pause to put in any post-its flagging key scenes or quotable moments–plus its appeal (for me, anyway) lay more in the accumulation of incidents and the gradual elaboration of its characters and their entanglements. So I won’t lay out more details here! But more evidence of how much I enjoyed it is that when I was done, I promptly went looking for Espach’s other novels, and her earlier Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance turned out to be on the shelf at the Central Library.

This one turned out to be harder and sadder–imagine, harder and sadder than one that opens with a suicide attempt! It centers on Sally, whose older sister Kathy is killed in an accident while her boyfriend Billy is driving with the two sisters in the car. Sally’s family is of course devastated; her mother especially is utterly grief stricken and broken. Meanwhile Billy has to live with his guilt and Sally with her trauma; the two of them have a bond born of their terrible experience, and the novel follows the ways their lives overlap over the years following Kathy’s death.

Sally, who narrates, has a sharp eye and a wry voice: though unlike The Wedding People this novel is never comic, it is certainly funny at times. I think I am getting too old to feel terribly invested in ‘coming of age’ novels unless they are Jane Eyre (or, I guess, Great Expectations, which I am currently rereading for class and loving as always). I liked Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and was often moved by it, but I actually found Espach’s acknowledgments, which suggest that she lost a brother, the most touching part: “Thank you to my parents,” she says, “for always encouraging me to write about the hard things and for never shying away from the reality of our grief.”

January Reading

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

January was an OK reading month overall—not great, but with some highlights.

I started with two of the books I picked up at Bookmark’s Boxing Day sale: Vincent van Gogh’s For Life and For Art, which is one of those sweet little Penguin Archive editions. It fell a bit flat for me. I chose it because I was curious to get some insights into van Gogh’s creative process, and there are certainly some interesting passages. One example:

The work is going fairly well. I’m struggling with a canvas I started a few days before my illness—a reaper. The study is all yellow, extremely thickly painted, but the subject was beautiful and simple. For I see in this reaper—a vague figure toiling for all he’s worth in the midst of the heat to finish his task—I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sower which I tried to do before. But there is no sadness in this death, this one takes place in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.

In other places he talks quite a bit about how he uses paint, something to which (to be honest) I have paid a lot more attention since I started doing jigsaw puzzles, which often require minute scrutiny to colour and texture. Much of the book, though, which is all letters (mostly to his brother Theo) are about pretty mundane stuff, like art supplies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But van Gogh’s paintings are so strange and extraordinary that I expected the same here.

Then I read Kathy Page’s In This Faulty Machine, which is a memoir about her diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease. Again it fell a bit flat, which feels like a terrible thing to say about a book that is so personal and also recounts such a profoundly difficult experience. In this case too there are passages that made me pause with appreciation, such as this one about find words for what she is going through:

In times of great loss, meaning flows back into apt but outworn expressions and they seem true again. So it’s possible, even likely, that as my difficulties become more acute, I will find that plain ordinary words; roughly fitting, well-used phrases; and even squirm-inducing metaphors are good enough—perhaps at times better—than nuanced and original phrasings that draw attention to themselves. After all, sweating, terrified, I’m unlikely to waste my time gazing at the approaching forest fire while I struggle for alternatives to ‘wall of flames’ or choose an original way to convey the ghastly, devouring sound it makes. Since I want to communicate, somehow, anyhow, whatever it takes, I may perhaps be glad of whatever first comes to mind.

Perhaps. Maybe. Meanwhile, I have good reasons for being very passionate about words, and I am not on any kind of journey.

A lot of this book is about Parkinson’s – the symptoms, the treatments, the challenges. Near the end Page says that she wants “my account of these five years to be of use to others,” and I think that intention may be why there’s a fair amount in it that is quite literal, not a how-to guide or instruction manual but, in spirit, a bit of an ‘introduction to.’ Page is a good writer: I was interested in the book in the first place because I really admired her novel Dear Evelyn, which I reviewed for Quill & Quire when it came out. And This Faulty Machine is fine, especially when she meditates on illness and its effects on self and identity and creativity. I’ve just read some memoirs recently that really lit me up—I’m thinking of both Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolfand Claire Cameron’s How to Survive a Bear Attack—and I just did not feel the same about this one.

I bought one more book at that sale, Maria Reva’s Endling, which I had been excited about reading ever since hearing her interviewed about it on Bookends. I am sorry to say that at this point this one is a DNF for me, though I hope I will try it again some day. The metafictional turn it took (which I knew was coming, so I did go into this with my eyes open) quenched my already faltering engagement. YMMV.

I followed up on a recommendation on Bluesky and read Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House. This one was high on the “readability” scale and also felt unhappily topical, as all books about resisting fascism do at this point. I didn’t feel compelled to read it at all closely, though, and in fact at times I skimmed along because I was more driven by curiosity about what would happen than I was taking pleasure in its language. It has already gone back to the library, so I can’t quote from it.

A friend leant me Antonia White’s Frost in May, which I have had on my mental TBR for probably decades, given its status as the first-ever Virago Classic. I quite enjoyed this one (although again it has been returned, so I can’t quote from it—such are the hazards of not blogging each book properly as I finish reading it!). My friend commented, and I agree, that it is perhaps a bit too detailed about the religious aspects, but Nanda is a very appealing protagonist to follow along with during her ‘coming of age,’ and I liked White’s prose a lot.

Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker would have been a DNF if I hadn’t been reading it for my book club, and as it was I petulantly turned every page after about the first 150, rather than diligently reading it all. As with Endling I have mostly myself to blame for getting into this one: we read Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know last, and decided we’d like something with some similar themes (e.g. environmentalism, climate change, investigation) but with a more plotty plot, a bit more excitement. Venomous Lumpsucker was one of the books I put on a menu of options and it sure sounded like it would be all kinds of madcap fun. Nope. For me, anyway, Beauman just spent waaaaay too much time filling in all the details required by his concept. It dragged soooooo much. I’ll be quite curious to know how my book club friends got on with it.

I finished Volume 3 of Woolf’s diaries: this is a case in which I have too many passages flagged to do this reading experience justice in this quick recap. She’s working on The Waves for much of the last part of this volume and it is really fascinating watching her think it through. One thing that really comes through in the diaries is that she was never content to sit in one place as a novelist: she was always asking what else she could do, or how better she could create fiction that reflected the ideas and experiences she wanted to convey. I have started Volume 4 and fully intend to do better at posting about it regularly (she says boldly).

Finally, I had heard good things about Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent so I grabbed it up when I happened upon it on the ‘rapid reads’ shelf at the library. It is also very readable, and also smart and subtle and touching. Its epistolary approach made me think of Jane Gardam’s Queen of the Tambourine, although it has been so long since I read that one that I don’t know how much beyond their form they have in common. I pulled the Gardam off myself and added it to my actual TBR pile: I enjoyed it a lot when I read it back in (checks blog archive) 2011. 2011! That’s a long time ago.

And now it’s February, a new month, a short month, a (probably) pretty busy month. One reason I haven’t been posting is that I’ve been so tired after the work stuff is done: it has been a dreary time at work administratively, with budget cuts and internecine wrangling and lots of doom and gloom ‘what if’ conversations, fiscal as well as curricular. Honestly I’m surprised I even read this much (which isn’t that much, by some standards) in January. I’m enjoying my actual classes, though, and I hope the students are too—although if the current forecast holds we may have our third Monday in a row cancelled for snow. Did I mention I’ve been tired?! Still, we are working through the final part of The Mill on the Floss in the George Eliot seminar and that, of course, is genuinely great reading, and Friday’s class in the Brit Lit survey was on “Goblin Market”—what larks! (We start Great Expectations soon, too!)

This post is a re-done version of my previous January 2026 update to correct a number of odd things that happened when I tried to use the latest incarnation of the ‘classic’ editor. Time to learn how to use blocks, I guess–which is what I did here.