Recovering with Austen: post-texts, detective & other archetypes, & literary feminist books

Dear readers and friends,

I’ve been slowly recovering since I last wrote and will soon tell that autobiographical story on my Sylvia II blog. Here I want to return to our more usual postings: life as I see it through my reading and writing about Austen and all that concerns her, women’s art across the Ages, admittedly a Eurocentric, and Anglophilic point of view, and through my long 18th centuries studies. The slant here is how I am recuperating through several interconnected pathways at once, some of which I am in the midst of and not sure what I shall eventually want to do more of and where and how. Through Austen, women’s art and extensions from my first interest, among these, the 18th century, I, another women writer and reader, am coming back to myself and rebuilding my life (once again).

I will be teaching this summer: online I’ll finish that women’s detective course I had begun, I’m working on two reviews, one about how Austen’s unfinished books (which arguably include Persuasion), manuscripts, and some of the intelligent post-texts (book or video form) sometimes use these to enable us to learn more about Austen.

First up, Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, which title refers both to Cassandra and Jane. This is the story of Cassandra returning to Kintbury in 1840 — PBS/WETA will be presenting an adaptation featuring Keeley Hawes. I like the book. I feel the tone is appropriate, which is always central to my response to these things. The last one I tried which I also liked is The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (reviewed here under the Observer) imprint: Hadlow’s deeply sympathizing with the plain intellectual Mary, rightly (I think) critical of Elizabeth’s failure in understanding. Hadlowe transformed elements of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney’s stories in a plot-design which in part follows the outline of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. it takes elements of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney’s character in a plot-design that revamps P&P.

This Miss Austen, I hope, will be a new story using elements of the traditional biography. I agree with the reviewer Miss Austen is actuated by a spirit of deep kindness towards its principal characters; it also reveals hoe few opportunities for even any fun, much less an individually fulfilling existence, women of Austen’s class and income level had. Hornby has imbibed the lessons of Charlotte and Anne Bronte’s novels. Soon after the opening, Cassandra is finally reading Jane’s letters. The great joy I too felt comes from how frustrating it is to realize two-thirds of Jane’s letters have gone and from a point of view that seeks to hide Austen’s authentic ideas and feelings from us with a view to destroying them. We are made to see how perceptive Jane was — already there are hints hoe much she is attached to Martha Lloyd. I want eventually to compare this book to the coming film and an overview of Jane and Cassandra’s letters.

Hornby sees Cassandra compassionately as a tragic figure … You will love this recreation of Jane’s voice.

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I’ve stayed with my studies – and enjoyment of women writing and how they appear in both detective-mystery-thriller (today called crime novels) and the political-nationalistic (most of the time – though anti- and post-colonialist points of view are dramatized increasing, as begun in the later Prime Suspect and Foyle’s War seasons). Instead of extensive (trying to cover lots of authors) I’ve been proceeding intensively, that is going deeply into one or two authors, because, honestly it’s easier to do.

I am trying to read as much Dorothy Sayers and books about her as I can. I admit sometimes I love the studies of her fictional work, more than the work itself – and her non-fiction essays, which have such an authentic living voice. Unnatural Death is a case in point. She shows us the plight and anger of unmarried women, lesbian as well as heterosexual: Miss Climpson and her Cattery (an agency for women to give and receive support for one another), supported by Lord Peter. We see their peculiar predicaments (Valerie Pitts, “Dorothy Sayers: The Predicaments of Women,” Literature and History, 13:2 (1988), 172-80). Now I’ve begun the entertaining epistolary novel, The Documents in the Case where she alludes to Walter Scott’s epistolary Redgauntlet with its ant-macho male characters.

The trouble is the book is written early in the 1930s, at the height of the puzzle-clue narratives which can be (to me) so tedious we lose sight of what makes the book important. Here I recommend Catherine Kenney’s wonderful The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers. Here is a succinct synopsis

I’m combining this with reading Cornish texts (I’m taking via zoom an OLLI course, from York University in Northern England) with its inspiring readings from Marsden’s Rising Ground (what kinds of landscapes attract to them mythologies?) to Virginia Wool’s To the Lighthouse, to Graham’s Poldark world, DuMaurier’s Cornwall (with A. L. Rowse and a Blakean visionary John Betjeman thrown in). The result: I’ve begun P. D. James’s The Lighthouse, and returning to Josephine Tey’s Shifting Sands, set in the Highlands, edge and liminal places of the mind heart and in reality.

So that’s where I am. Medicine for my still somewhat muddled soul. Haunted stuff. How I long to be haunted by my Clarycat and even Jim, painful as such ghostly recreations might be (I do not reread his letters or listen to his voice, though I keep pictures of him all around the house). They did not survive their encounters with death; it seems, with help from my loving daughter, Laura, I may have Here is a poem by Charles Causeley, a relatively unknown (outside Cornwall) poet

Who?

Who is that child I see wandering, wandering
down by the side of the quivering stream?
Why does he seem not to hear, though I call to him?
Where does he come from, and what is his name?

Why do I see him at sunrise and sunset
taking, in old-fashioned clothes, the same track?
Why, when he walks, does he cast not a shadow
though the sun rises and falls at his back?

Why does the dust lie so thick on the hedgerow
by the great field where a horse pulls the plough?
Why do I see only meadows, where houses
stand in a line by the riverside now?

Why does he move like a wraith by the water,
soft as the thistledown on the breeze blown?
When I draw near him so that I may hear him,
why does he say that his name is my own?

My territory includes the dream landscapes of historical and modernist Bloomsbury fictions (like Hilary Mantel’s, E.M. Forster’s, mentioned in my postscript in my return to Ellen and Jim blog), realism, long-inhabited hard-worked worlds and haunting music

Elinor Tomlinson as Demelza in Poldark

A Cornish church filmed in the 2015 series

Ellen

Hemorrhagic stroke

Dear friends and reader,

Here’s why I’ve not posted for weeks: I wrote this to a literary women, Anne Boyd Rioux, in answer to something she wrote to me on her substack newsletter: I had sent one of nmy foremother poet postings: Muriel Rukeyser

Foremother Poet: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Very unfortunately since I last wrote on this substack newsletter, I had a stroke (Jan 30th, 20240) and now find myself painfully trying to recover. Among the abilities I seem to have lost is typing. I have many ” side” problems like this (insomnia, constipation); centrally I cannot walk w/o a walker and am in danger of falling. I’m physically weak. Where I was for many years (until Jan 29), a rapid touch typist I cannot get my left hand to type anything but slowly and inaccurately. I have been trying to get access to therapy for typing, and as yet have failed. I discover Kaiser might not have such a service. I am again waiting to see — now next week. They provided therapy at the rehab (I was in one for a few weeks) and now at home; but hardly enough. I discover I don’t have medicare but medicare advantage paid to Kaiser– and nothing else. I find nothing on the Net; if this new offer by Kaiser is another sham, I shall try AARP, but feel I will again confront no living services.

To a friend at Olli at MasonI can read and this isolation is bad for me so I am going to try a mini-course (4 weeks in June at OLLI at AU), using all I had created at that last OLLI at Mason. Going to try to do a Trollope talk using handwritten notes. I walk a little better but still need a walker and in danger of falling. Yes a dearth of literature at OLLI at Mason so I signed up for women’s rights and the Sayers at Politics and Prose (though they are pricey)

I’m told of complicated software I probably cannot operate without an at teacher. It is a kind of death for me.

I can read. I can write with my right hand.

Ellen

Winter Mini-term: Syllabus for Women’s Detective Fiction: OLLI at Mason

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Tuesday mornings, 11:50 am -1:15 pm,
Jan 23 – Feb 13
4 sessions On-line (location of building housing the office: 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va, Tallwood)
Dr Ellen Moody

Pushkin Press, 2022 reprint

Women in and Writing Detective Fiction (a continuation of The Heroine’s Journey)

We will explore the genre of detective stories of the mystery-thriller type from the angle of the woman writer, detective, victim & murderer: our three books will be two classics of the 1930s, and one from 40s years later which in many outward conventions continues the popular and acclaimed type: Josephine Tey’s (Elizabeth MacKintosh) The Daughter of Time (a deconstruction of the history of the stories of mysteries concerning a 15th century British king, Richard III); Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night (set in a real early women’s college, which Sayers attended, it is also feminist academic and publishing satire & a lover story); and P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (more centrally what readers expected post WW2 from a mystery-thriller, but it takes unexpected directions because the detective is a woman). We’ll also see (outside class) and discuss (in class) J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (as rewritten by Helen Edmunsen and directed by Aisling Walsh) and Robert Altman and Jerome Fellowes’s brilliantly parodic Gosford Park. This is a feminist literary history course, an outgrowth in one direction of the course I taught this past winter: The [archetypal] Heroine’s Journey

Required Texts:

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time. This exists in many editions (as do the two books below). I have a 1988 copy of the Simon and Schuster Touchstone books, 978-0-684-80386-9; and another by Pushkin Press (a very pretty one), ISBN 978-1782278429

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, HarperCollins Bourbon book, ISBN 978-0-06-219653-8

P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Scribner’s, mostly recently reprinted 2019. ISBN 978-0-7432-1955-6

Required Movies:

An Inspector Calls. Scripted Helen Edmunsen, directed Aisling Walsh, a re-do of J.B Priestley’s original play (1945), adapted into a film in 1954 (featuring Alistair Sims as “Poole” in lieu of Goole). Available at Amazon Prime, Brit-Box, Vudu, and YouTube. Also as a DVD for sale, with an interesting feature by Priestley’s son.

Gosford Park. Directed Robert Altman, scripted Julian Fellowes. Streams on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vudu, and can be bought as a DVD with interesting features (e.g., voice-over commentary as you watch the film).

Supplementary:

There are audio readings of all three books; and you can buy the plays/scripts for the movies:

Priestley, J. B. An Inspector Calls and Other Plays. NY: Penguin, 2000 reprint of 1947 book. The script does not differ as much as one might think; what is dramatized differs.

Fellowes, Julian and Robert Altman. Gosford Park: The Shooting Script. NY: Newmarket Press, 2002.

Sophie Rundle as Eva Smith/Daisy Renton/Mrs Birling/Alice Grey confronts the “boss,” Ken Stoff as Arthur Birling, about to fire her for leading a strike (An Inspector Calls, 2015)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

Jan 23: 1st week: Introduction on detective versus spy fiction, Scottish literature, Richard III. Then we discuss Josephine Tey and The Daughter of Time.

Jan 30: 2nd week: Women’s detective fiction, Agatha Christie and the 1930s. Then Dorothy Sayers and the first half of Gaudy Night. The 2015 An Inspector Calls.

Feb 6: 3rd week: Carry on with An Inspector Calls and move to the second half of Gaudy Night. The importance of the recurring detective and his or her story.

Feb 13: 4th week: The evolution of the women’s detective novel (some contemporary women writers) and P. D. James’ career. How does An Unsuitable Woman for the Job differ from our expectations. If time permits, I’ll discuss James’s sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Death Comes to Pemberley (her last published novel)

Gosford Park, the Manor house as first seen when cars drive up (Gosford Park, 2001)

Recommended outside reading or watching (if you want to go further):

Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik. Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Univ of Illinois, 2012.
Coomes, David. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life. Illinois: Lion book, 1992.
Craig, Patricia and Mary Cadogan. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. NY: St Martin’s 1981. Begins with mid-19th century figures.
Gidez, Richard. P.D. James: the new queen of crime. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Necessarily does not include 2/3s of her (later) career in writing.
Hicks, Michael. Richard III: The Self-Made King. Yale Univ, 2019
James, P.D. Talking about Detective Fiction. NY: Knopf, 2009
Hannay, Margaret P. As her whimsey took her: Critical Essays on the Fiction of Dorothy Sayers. Kent State, 1979.
Henderson, Jennifer Morag. A Life of Josephine Tey. 1988; reprint Sandstone Press, Scotland, 2015.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd edition. Univ of Illinois, 1995. The best single book on women’s detective fiction, with the proviso she deals only with professional police officer-detectives.
Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy Sayers: A biography: her life and soul. NY: St Martin’s, 1993.
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. Faber and Faber, 1972. The best of all the surveys.
Walton, Samantha. “The Scottish landscape in the crime novels of Josephine Tey,” Crimelights: Scottish Crime Fiction, Then and Now. Triet, 2014.
Worsley, Lucy. The Art of the English Murder. NY and London: Pegasus, 2014
Young, Laurel A. P.D. James: A companion to the mystery fiction. McFarland, 2017

There was a Margaret Sutton who herself wrote the Judy Bolton series (1932-67)

A neglected Jane Austen text! — Catherine, or The Bower

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland reading a gothic romance (2007 Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies) — the closest image to Austen’s conception of Catherine Percival (named Kitty Peterson by Jane Austen, the more dignified romance name is given her in the ms by JEAL) …

Dear friends and readers,

What more appropriate to start the new year with than a neglected Jane Austen text? But can this really be? a text by Austen not close read exhaustively, elaborated upon recklessly, post-texted, edited with devotional minuteness? yes. One of the four admittedly unfinished novels: Catherine, or the Bower, probably because it has been dated with the juvenilia, published with them, and not paid sufficient attention to? Why until recently has no one has why Austen didn’t continue with this one? I suggest it’s the early date — the other three come from her mid-career or Bath (The Watsons, begun 1801), post Bath (Lady Susan, 1806-09), and just before death (Sanditon, 1817). It’s seen as juvenile.

I think it was left off for at least one of the same reasons as The Watsons was abandoned after such thorough work and Lady Susan hastily finished: not socially acceptable to her family because the themes too frank about the family, too radical about women’s position. I have been reading a book whose title and author I am not at liberty to disclose which has the idea that faithful sequels meant to fulfill the original, done very well, can shed light on where the text was going. This is not an original or new idea. It was this thought that led Chris Brindle to produce his play of Sanditon: he read Anna Lefroy’s continuation in Mary Gaither Marshall’s edition; long ago Catherine Hubbard finished The Watsons as The Youngest Sister out of the offered endings Austen told Cassandra (as reported by James Edward Austen-Leigh).

I’ve also noted in other studies of sequels and post-texts and extrapolations from the finished novels, that movement of types or characters from one to another of her novels shows us (as Q.D. Leavis showed so long ago in Scrutiny) how Austen repeats her patterns and types. So by looking at the other probably finished books and their continuations, we can understand better what lies there but as yet not fully developed in Catherine, or the Bower.

But first, there is something beyond the poverty of the George Austen family in the father’s youngest years and after the father died and a sexually transgressive mother standing in the way of discussion: the refusal of the Austen family and its conservative pro-family stalwarts, among which Deirdre LeFaye was an adamantine presence: the reality that Eliza Hancock was the biological daughter of Warren Hastings by Philadelphia Austen who just like the eldest Miss Cecilia Wynne (become Mrs Lascelles) at the opening of Catherine, or the Bower, was shipped out to India and married to a man much older than she, not congenial, and found solace and a modus vivendi through her relationship with Hastings. They were also not eager to have it known that like the younger Miss Mary Wynne, George and Philadelphia’s youngest sister, Leonora, farmed out “as a companion” to a Mrs Hinton, had (like the second son of George and Cassandra) apparently been dismissed to the lower status hardship of a servant’s life and simply never mentioned again. Austen is clearly making up for this because she provides a specific fate for the younger Miss Wynne too: taken by the Dowager Lady Halifax as a companion to her Daughters,” and had accompanied her family into Scotland” (Doody & Murray, Catherine and Other Writings, Oxford, 1993, pp 187-189). (For full details of these two young women, see Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen’s Family Through Five Generations, 33-34, 42-43)

These two fates — not atypical for women of this era — are emphatically at the opening of Catherine, or the Bower. It is the Wynne sisters’ companionship in which Catherine takes delight. It is against the Wynne sisters Catherine compares Camilla Stanley, for, unlike Catherine Morland, but very like Charlotte Heywood (from Sanditon), Catherine sees through Camilla’s lies sufficiently not to like and to distrust her. This earlier Catherine was not to be a naif in a Gothic parody, but a real girl suffering from a repressive aunt’s sexual paranoia. She also recognizes the flaws in the overbearing too self-confident hero, Edward Stanley (as her aunt fails to appreciate). We are fooled because it seems that the Wynnes are dropped in the text we have. We are also fooled because the portrait of the male Stanley is not a caricature in the manner of John Thorpe or obviously subtly manipulative in the way of Willoughby or Henry Crawford. If you read with attention, you find at the end there is hope for Catherine to escape her aunt in the country and come to London. We are told Catherine has received a letter from “Mrs Lascelles, announcing the speedy return of herself and husband to England” (p 229). We are also told that the Stanleys are intimate with the Halifaxes; clearly Catherine, though dubious and hesitant about Camilla, and while recognizing that Edward Stanley leaves a lot to be desire morally is not going to give either of these connections up.

Rose Williams as Miss Heywood early on makes friends with with black Miss Lamb (Crystal Clarke) — she is never silly just unexperienced as yet (Sanditon, Season 1)

The novel has only begun. The continuations and sequels to the other unfinished novels can also serve to remind us that more characters would have turned up in Austen’s book. So as with Sanditon as Austen left it, we had only Sidney Parker slightly delineated and none of his hinted-at associates, but have been taught by 3 seasons of a semi-Davies product, that many other characters were in potentia, so in this Catherine, or the Bower, I speculate that either Edward could have had an internal reform such as we see in Darcy and Wentworth, or another worthier suitor come upon the scene. I also suggest that as with the other Austen novels, Catherine, our heroine, would have had to learn to distinguish between different circles of friends to which she can belong. So the Stanleys and Aunt Percival’s relations in London say would have been but two circles; the Wynne sisters would have brought the Lascelles from India, and the Halifaxes from Scotland. One of the more prominent qualities of Edward himself most prominent quality is self-satisfaction, something we see in other heroes, which is got over, but also different ones not exactly villainous but not personality characteristics which bode well for later like (rather like Frank Churchill): Edward Stanley shows a superficial willingness to play on the emotions of others, a kick out of alarming people (p 219)

Within the scenes we have other interesting themes: Charlotte Smith’s novels are admired and perhaps genuinely understood by Catherine; we have not yet seen her discuss them with anyone with a real knowledge of them. There is the question of Catherine’s inheritance (if any) from her aunt, the possibility of Catherine being left propertyless should her aunt die without making adequate provision for her. Catherine herself, rather like Marianne Dashwood (and Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Jane Bennet) likes to have quiet moments in retreat and the question of the nature of social life, the place of imagination (as in a bower — I remember a play by Jane Bowles about what can emerge from summer and a bower, In the Summer House) are adumbrated. There is much here that remains unwritten about because the fragment is not taken seriously.

Which takes me to my last new comment for the new year: I think the juvenilia have been over-rated in the last thirty-five years. There are inspired moments of high brilliance, irresistible comedy, parodic insight, aesthetic deconstruction of the elements of fiction, but many of these fragments are scraps — and I have come across pages of solemn hagiographical talk and speculative elaboration not admitted as such. Cassandra’s drawings once and for all let’s admit are dreadful. This desire to distance Austen from sentimentality and the conservative politics of the Victorian realistic novel also get in the way of acknowledging the first achievement of Austen in Catherine, or the Bower. As Juliet McMaster has said, Catherine is the first of the texts to have psychological depth that is persuasive enough to allow us to enter into it in a reader-like reverie.

Let us hope someone will see their way to a film adaptation of this one — it will have to be someone willing to overcome the immediate objections of the family and conservative fans eager to protect the “respectability” (which Austen makes fun of in Catherine, or the Bower) of the Hancocks, Hastings, and anyone else whose prestige they fear is in danger from anyone anywhere. Let us recall Marianne Dashwood’s response to Elinor’s fear lest they offend Mrs Jennings, as criteria for their conduct and/or thought: “we are all offending every moment of our lives” (S&S, Chapter 13).

A favorite still for me: Sophie Thompson as Miss Bates looking up, enjoying a pleasant moment, just before she is humiliated by Emma at the Box hill picnic (1996 Emma, scripted Douglas McGrath)

We find thus early in her life, early in her writing career (for she carried on writing for the rest of her life and had yet to begin one of her six great novels), a serious criticism of the way her society treats women, looks at relationships among people, an adumbrated examination of what a well and worthily live life could be. I also like that thus early we see that she is prepared to use autobiographical material centrally. What a radical serious and potentially fine novel it could have been.

Ellen

For Christmas Eve — Dickens’s story made feminocentric

Posy Simmons, an illustration for Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs Scrooge

Gentle readers,

Do not be put off by the word “feminocentric:” after all this year have you not had to endure far worse and alienating nomenclature, absurd round-about phrases (as in “people with breasts”); the other day I was told the word “heroine” is sexist, and I fear the term “actress” is fast disappearing.

So here I am to buck this trend with a little help from Carol Ann Duffy and my favorite book illustrator, Posy Simmons. The first, Duffy, does in Mrs Scrooge what she does in The World’s Wife (who knows not “Eurydice”?); and, who does not revel in Simmons’s drawings for Cranford Chronicles (or Tamara Drew, Hardy transposed)?

Just a few stanzas and pictures:

Scrooge doornail-dead, his widow, Mrs Scrooge, lived by herself
in London Town. It was that time of year, the clocks long back,
when shops were window-dressed with unsold tinsel, trinkets, toys,
trivial pursuits, with sequinned dresses and designer suits,
with chocolates, glacé fruits and marzipan, with Barbie,
Action Man, with bubblebath and aftershave and showergel;
the words Noel and Season’s Greetings brightly mute
in neon lights. The city bells had only just chimed three,
but it was dusk already. It had not been light all day.
Mrs Scrooge sat googling at her desk,
Catchit the cat
curled at her feet; snowflakes tumbling to the ground
below the window, where a robin perched,
pecking at seeds. Most turkeys,
bred for their meat, are kept in windowless barns,
with some containing over 20,000 birds. Turkeys
are removed from their crates and hung from shackles
by their legs in moving lines. A small fire crackled
in the grate. Their heads are dragged under
a water bath – electrically charged – before their necks
are cut. Mrs Scrooge pressed Print.
to visit Marley’s Supermarket (Biggest Bargain Birds!) at four

Outside, snowier yet, and cold! Piercing, searching, biting cold.
The cold gnawed noses just as dogs gnaw bones. It iced
the mobile phones pressed tight to ears.
The coldest Christmas Eve
in years saw Mrs Scrooge at Marley’s, handing leaflets out.
The shoppers staggered past, weighed down with bags
or pushing trolleys crammed with breasts, legs, crowns, eggs,
sausages, giant stalks of brussels sprouts, carrots,
spuds, bouquets of broccoli, mangetout, courgettes, petit
pois, foie gras; with salmon, stilton, pork pies, mince pies,
christmas pudding, custard,
port, gin, sherry, whisky,
fizz and plonk,
all done on credit cards.
Most shook their head at Mrs Scrooge,
irked by her cry “Find out how turkeys really die!'”
or shoved her leaflet in the pockets of their coats, unread,
or laughed and called back “Spoilsport! Ho! Ho! Ho!”
Three hours went by like this.
The snow
began to ease
as she walked home.

She hated waste, consumerism, Mrs Scrooge, foraged
in the London parks for chestnuts, mushrooms, blackberries,
ate leftovers, recycled, mended, passed on, purchased secondhand,
turned the heating down and put on layers, walked everywhere,
drank tap-water, used public libraries, possessed a wind-up radio,
switched off lights, lit candles (darkness is cheap and Mrs Scrooge
liked it) and would not spend one penny on a plastic bag.
She passed off-licences with 6 for 5, bookshops with 3 for 2,
food stores with Buy 1 get 1 free
Above her head,
the Christmas lights
danced like a river toward a sea of dark.
The National Power Grid moaned, endangered, like a whale.

Both women follow the original poem, three ghosts, with its environmental, anti-capitalist theme (this is in Dickens after all), but I cannot say it is as joyous in its conclusion as Dickens, probably because the ghost of Christmas Present is nowhere as savage (no girl or boy representing Want and Ignorance), and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, very brief, not personal, almost benign (compromising). For that, they perhaps needed an independent publisher (Dickens published himself) or to reverse Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life” and have the strength to encounter the sexist stereotypes of Mary Hatch as a fearful virgin librarian or Violet as a prostitute in hospital. Instead they wove in their memories of this classic this way:

She heard Bob say, “She really had a wonderful life!”
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
pulled back its hood.
She looked into its smiling, loving, grey-green eyes
and understood.

Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell!
Bell, dong, ding, hammer, clang, clash!
It was St Paul’s again,
gargling its morning bells,
the room her own;
and dribbling Catchit
staring down at her from her chest!
Quickly, Mrs Scrooge showered and dressed.
She flung open the window and leaned out –
a clear, bright, jovial, cold and glorious day!
The doorbell rang.
Down she hurried,
opened wide the door,
and in they poured …

The illustrations in this case are far superior to the book, have more courage. Alas, I have only blurred images from the old Guardian file.

On the street, giving out pamphlets

Scenes in stores (not in the book)

The fantastical journey — don’t miss that comfortable cat …

For what appears to be the whole text of the poem (but I am not sure) go to The Guardian Review for December 20, 2008. Here is the book, now apparently out of print and without the Simmons illustrations.

If you are alone today or with one relative like me, for the most part you cannot look to outside contemporary help (for links to previous Christmas blogs centered on Austen see comments) to bolster or barricade yourself against all the assertions of group jollity. But here in Duffy’s book is a salutary story, in Simmons’s illustrations, strange fantasy, and comforting compassionate beauty, where Simmons uses pictorial allusions to modern artful representations of Christmas and tries to capture the real hectic experience too.

Tonight I’m thinking how lucky we are to as yet not have bombs landing on us (a genocide in Gaza happening in front of us) or our homes and incomes removed or find ourselves in a prison without charge (threatened openly by hateful fascist Trump and the do-nothing GOP) — things have grown much more dire since 2015 when Duffy composed her poem and Simmons made the acute illustrations. For myself for the first time in many years of blogging, I will send a personal photo to wish all my friends and acquaintances here who’ve been reading this blog for I don’t know how many years (or months or weeks) a good holiday season — winter solstice — and good year to come.

This is me and Ian by this year’s Christmas tree, photo taken by Daughter No 2, Izzy. From the 3 of us to all of you. Good wishes, keep hope alive, and resist.

I know I am not looking up or out but consider how hard it is to hold onto a strong-minded cat …

Ellen

For Jane Austen’s birthday … The two pictures of Austen by Cassandra — all we have for sure

Jane facing Cassandra by Cassandra (circa 1810)

Jane looking out at the landscape

Dear All,

For Jane Austen’s birthday I usually try for something special (see these various blogs), something which relates directly to her birthday or something about her personally, e.g., poems she wrote, poems in her honor, her attitudes towards historical women. Today I am proud and happy to have a guest blogger joining in with me: Nancy Mayer, long-time moderator of Janeites now @groups.io, who maintains a website from her research on things about the Regency.

Her topic for today is the vexed one of Jane Austen’s portraits:

December 16th is the anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. One on-going debate about Austen is, Is there an authentic portrait of Jane other than the ones that Cassandra drew? One of those is a back view, and the other doesn’t satisfy because Jane looks either angry or impatient [both just above]. A sort of modified view is on the 10-pound note. There are, however, three other portraits that people claim are portraits of the author Jane Austen.

People are finding portraits in different places and claiming they have to be of Jane Austen of Steventon, I don’t agree. I think Cassandra’s drawings of her sister are the only authentic ones.

One is of a young girl about 15. The question that first comes to mind is why would the family have an expensive portrait made of a young girl when the family didn’t have that money to spare? At least the portrait should have been of the sisters. No one knew she would become famous two hundred years later. The style isn’t the style that would have been in fashion in 1790. Fashion experts have argued both sides of this, I am with those who say it is unlikely that a young miss of 15 having a portrait made in 1790 would have worn this style dress.

Known as the Rice portrait

Then there is a very fashionable sketch the Regent’s librarian made in the margin of a book. This lady is dressed in a very stylish dress. Jane Austen met him in 1814. None of the clothes that we know she wore have the slightest resemblance to the sketch. The reasons that people want to say it is Austen is that it is a beautiful sketch and she met the man.

Said to be a portrait of Austen made by James Stanier Clarke, with whom she was acquainted [for my part I doubt it is her because she did not dress this way]

The third portrait is of a woman sitting at a table looking out of a window in Westminster. She is older than the previous portraits — much older than the one by Clarke, I think. Why this is thought to be of Austen, I don’t know. Again, why anyone would have paid to have her portrait painted– something she never mentions, btw-I don’t know. My objections are that why would she be painted in Westminster instead of Chawton? She appears to be richly dressed. Though Jane paid attention to clothes and fashion, she dressed within her means. Also, I do not see any resemblance between this portrait and that of her by Cassandra. [This is Paula Byrne’s theory]

See my blogs where I argue against the identification and describe a talk where the presenter asked the audience to decide ….

This question of authentic portraits has been a cause of much dissension I know. For many people [nowadays], the picture of Jane Austen that will be the one they remember will be the one on the 10-pound note in England.

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Nancy omits a sixth image — the one that James Edward Austen-Leigh used for his memoir of his aunt. He hired someone to doctor the sketch of Austen that Cassandra drew so as to make her face rounder, smoother, not troubled (no dark lines under her eyes, no sour look — perhaps from headaches she suffered), basically expressionless and to make her arms hang more loosely from her side. The akimbo arrangement where she is creating a barrier between herself and the world gave as aspect to her character he did not want associated with her.

Jane Austen, by James Andrews [circa 1870]

The above is not ludicrous; it’s the colorized engraving that began to circulate that is embarrassingly bad and false:

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In a recent issues of the New York Review of Books, we can see at work the same impulses that led to the doctoring of Cassandra’s sketch and the attribution of the three unauthenticated images. Kathryn Hughes uses the occasion of the publication of Hilary Davidson’s book on Austen’s wardrobe to herself create an image of Austen she prefers to imagine.

A small image of this pelisse

In brief, I see a few telling contradictory elements in Hughes’s musings; the explicit idea seems to be that Austen just loved to immerse herself in fashion, and keep up to date on the very latest whatever, but alongside that we see how poor she and Cassandra were as they attempted to make the same garment do for years, the same piece of cloth essentially turned and resewn, recolored, with new fasteners put in too. She quotes one of Austen’s occasional asides on how she wishes she could buy dresses off a rack, plus Austen’s discomfort with body-exposing undergarments. Hughes’s to me distasteful conclusion that when Austen made her small amounts of money (not little bits to her I know but nothing near what she might need regularly to live independently in any sense) that the first thing she did was “head for the shops” comes from this explicit “official” — conformist and conventional discourse. Hughes has made Austen someone who would have rushed out to see the Barbie movie. Perhaps, then, a different self wrote the fiction books.

I also demur at the description of Austen at tall and thin. I’ve read descriptions of her by the relatives who lived at Godmersham Park which suggest she was just “above the middle size” (so 5 feet 5 say) and Cassandra’s portrait show a chubby woman, someone who did not go in for regular exercise beyond walking.

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Finally, Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen in a coming adaptation of a fictionalized biography by Jill Hornby (Miss Austen)

The book begins many years after Jane’s death: so Hawes looks like a Victorianized 18th century woman

Given her world-wide reputation, it’s to be expected Austen (and Cassandra too) have become a marquee characters (in one film Anna Maxwell Martin plays Cassandra) in books, and beyond the many biographies is the subjection of fictionalized ones too. I’ve written about the bio/pic, Becoming Jane (where Anna Hathaway played Jane Austen) — I cannot tonight find my blog or essays on my website (if that’s where it is). I’ve ordered Hornby’s novel (if that is what it is) and will read it as a sequel (or post-text). From what I’ve read about it thus far (and felt looking at some other images of Hawes now circulating) I fear (the right word since I care) that the book is from the conventional (philistine is the older word) POV anti-Jane — the world thinks to be social and conform is important and I see from others if anyone criticizes Cassandra as she emerges from Jane’s letters (very conventional) they are “up in arms.” I am aware the makers of a film can reverse or alter or sufficiently qualify a book, and the acting crew is made up of some fine actors, and women are centrally involved in writing, directing and so on. I am willing to hope for a portrait which stays true to and is sympathetic Austen’s unconventional unsocial character.

But women can be bought too, pressured to produce stories and characters that are mass-audience pleasers. Witness the recent or 2022 Persuasion — the undertext for Dakota Johnson, the actress playing Anne Elliot is a semi-porn figure.

Ellen

John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A story of rape, gender, & class in late 18th century New York City

The reader will notice that a dazzling number of prizes are listed …

Dear Readers and Friends,

This in the spirit of say the TLS’s recent issue where supposedly famous people who are themselves often writers are asked what was your favorite, or did you think was the best or most important book(s) you read this year? For once I have a single candidate, and for once the number of prizes given are not in inverse proportion to a book’s merits — though I admit I am a year late. The Sewing Girl’s Tale was published in 2022.

But it’s as fresh and excellent and relevant a book as it was the day it was published, and as the story that’s recounted of a long series of connected events 230 years ago. Sweet offers a fully researched and documented account of the rape of a lower-middle class young unmarried female seamstress Lanah Sawyer by a well-connected upper class or aristocratic male — he led a life of privilege with access to opportunities for power and wealth — that occurred Wednesday-Thursday, September 4-5, 1793, in the late mid-night to dawn hours in a locked room in the brothel of Madame Carey in lower New York. What makes it doable is that her stepfather, John Callahan, a successful ship pilot (no easy job — he boarded other men’s vessels, assumed command, and guided the ships safely into or out of port), went to court to accuse Bedlow of rape; the case actually was tried at length, and much of what was said written down by an ambitious young lawyer, William Wyche. The jury’s decision resulted in angry class-induced riots and extended newspaper debates. The members of all the involved families, other individuals testifying, variously involved by proximity, family, friend, professional relationship left papers; that stage of capitalist colonialist society is already wash with property and other kinds of documents.

John Wood Sweet has studied all these to show in a rivetingly supple prose how from the outset Lanah Sawyer was at a severe disadvantage because the stance set up demanded she prove she had resisted vigorously, sustained conspicuous physical injuries, reported the crime quickly, and her “side” could not be shown to be going to court to destroy the reputation (life, career) of the male accused, especially if he was a man of property or standing. It never mattered that Bedlow lied to Lanah to lure her to walk out with him, intended to seduce and/or rape her, or any of the unfair tactics he used. All the savaging of her character that his side could do is listened to; the lies, for example, that the brothel madam concocted against Lanah are given credence after she is shown to be a liar. We see how much on top of gender-distrust of women nuanced levels of class, connections, mattered every step of the way. How important intelligent lawyers with teams of people providing evidence. Sweet remarks “the fact that Lanah Sawyer managed” to win over enough people is a “testament to her courage, to her emotional endurance, and to her ability to inspire trust and sympathy” (122). And none of it would have happened had her stepfather not been himself a man of strong determined character who would “not be circumvented.”

The case did not stop there Callahan went on to sue Bedlow in civil court (where point of view of the legal precedents were not so much about women’s sexuality as the loss of income) for seduction of his stepdaughter, damaging both her and her family’s reputation, loss of time and labor (equals money); and this time Callahan and Sawyer won an enormous sum for the time, $4,500, the payment for which landed Bedlow in debtor’s prison. So after all there were many people in the court who found Bedlow’s masculine predation unacceptable. Bedlow countersued over Callahan’s assault (now alleged) of him; more fascinatingly, one of the lawyers involved on Bedlow’s side of the case, Alexander Hamilton (himself), may have been involved (and was accused by Callahan’s lawyers) in the production of a forged letter allegedly written by Lanah retracting all she had said as lies. This takes us into one of the more sordid love affairs of Hamilton, which itself involved clearly forced “love-sick epistles” written by Hamilton’s possible mistress.

Wood’s narrative study has been widely reviewed for such a book (e.g, New York Times, Kirkus, Amazon Publishers Weekly), the Gotham Center for New York City history, with interviews on C-Span, YouTube.

Sawyer’s is not the only non-fictional case of this type to have attracted a couple of centuries of attention: another is that of Elizabeth Canning who claimed to have been brutally abducted, and kept in a locked room for a full month, beaten, threatened and starved. I found the books on her and studies a lot less satisfying as there is seems the young woman has not been fully vindicated despite Henry Fielding’s heroic attempts to rescue her (whose pamphlet I’ve read) from calumny after a Lord Mayor and judge at the trial decided they could try her for perjury and won a verdict of guilty, whereupon she was transported. I’m as relieved as Sweet to be able to say both young women eventually married and seem to have lived a calm respectable life eventually, but sorry to have to say Canning’s case was taken up by Josephine Tey in her fictionalized version of it as The Franchise Affair where class more than gender prejudice led Tey to re-smear the girl and resurrect the seemingly deathless idea that women are prone to make false accusations to cover up their transgressive sexual activity.

Moore’s book is a study in the ambiguities of all the testimonies and how what people paid attention to tells us more about them at that moment, who they are, how they relate, and the class impositions of variously prejudiced attitudes towards far more than sex itself at the time

That Sweet firmly believes Lanah’s story and sees the trial’s first outcome as the result of misogynistic and class prejudice enables his book to have the clarity it does. I think it also part of the book’s singular virtues that he does see what happened in terms of today’s psychology as it comes down to us from the eighteenth century — as for example, found in Richardson’s Clarissa, which I wrote my dissertation on and have written two recent papers, one directly on rape in the 18th century and today, and the other the film adaptation by David Nokes.

A scene from the movie where the brothel prostitutes help the rapist hold Clarissa down

Among the pleasures of this text are revealing descriptions of the places in New York City where all the different scenes take place; it is written like a mystery-thriller so we never learn what is going to happen next until it happens. So at one point we are told evidence shows that Lanah Sawyer hanged herself, and we have to read into the next chapter, several paragraphs on to discover that she survived. Sweet’s research went well past immediate documents; he discovered this act of Lanah’s by a couple of lines written by the novelist, Susannah Rowson (Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, 1797), who happened to be in New York at the time of the Bedlow trial, and was the cousin of the editor the Vermont Gazette where this detail was published as “the event that provoked the riots — news of the inconsolable young lady’s suicide attempt” (219-220).

The kind of dress Lanah would have been wearing: printed cotton held together with straight pins and drawstrings — from Sweet’s book

Here, though, we do come upon the one drawback of the book: all the words we have left by Lanah herself are the testimony she gave that was written down, testimony necessarily shaped the questions put to her. We are left without any look into the real tone of her mind, the subjective thoughts she must have had; we are left to guess why she does what she does by what is left of her outward actions. We have a great deal — like who she went to directly after she escaped the locked room, and the sequence of events that transpired among her relatives and associates, but nothing of a subjective inwardness. The book is not a novel, and my guess is that Sweet decided not to fictionalize at any point on the grounds it would weaken the effect of his book, and I think he made the right decision.

At any rate, no woman reader or anyone interested in the issues the case swirls round upon, should miss this book. An appendix tells of where Sweet did his research and what he found of particular interest; the notes include full sources and are of great interest in themselves.

Ellen

Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman (Una Donna) and Alba de Cespedes’ Forbidden Notebook (Quaderno Proibito),

Older Italian edition, first published 1950, translation appeared 1979)

Recent English language edition, photographed with type of book heroine writes in, translator Ann Goldstein, Italian text first published 1952, translated 2023)

Dear Friends and readers,

These are not only two of the finest books by women I’ve read this year; they are both part of an Italian tradition of feminism whose latest extraordinary flowering is found in Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter (La Figlia Oscura, pub 2006, translated 2008, Ann Goldstein) and Neapolitan Quartet (L’Amica Geniale, 2012-2015). A few of Natalia Ginzburg’s novellas are written in this tradition: they are subjective narratives with a woman at the center who is enduring an ordeal-filled life where she is struggling to find and build her most fulfilling identity.

Although written 20 years later than de Cespedes’s novel, Aleramo’s A Woman feels like it should be discussed first, because it is the first book to bring out into the discussably open the intimate realities, feminist aspirations, and real life experiences of a woman and make them the center of the book. Nothing like this in language, nothing with this kind of content, had ever been printed before. It might be summed up with the equivalent title in English feminized: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Like Joyce’s book, it is mostly autobiographical (hence the absence of names), and the trajectory is of this of specific-culture drenched obstacles, which in this case are the demands a woman do, and get in the way of her fulfilling her genius for writing. As a woman and in Italy, these obstacles are distinctly different from Joyce’s. Almost no one in the text is named.

As a middle class girl, she is not sent to school beyond the most elementary education; when she is 15, her parents think it is time for her to marry and among her suitors, is one who is more violent and nervy than most of the others; he rapes her, and she thinks (and her parents agree) this means she must marry him. The novel occurs over a 10 year period where she endures being shut up in a bedroom during the day because he is too jealous to let her go anywhere, sex when she doesn’t want it, beatings. She has one son who gives her what joy and meaning she knows. Gradually over a course of time, she and her husband move from Milan to a rural area further south, where her father provides him with a fine-paying job as a factory head (the workers receive derisory wages), and in this town she manages to build a frustrating socializing life. She meets no equal in intelligence or cultural aspiration. She falls in love, is found out, is ostracized horribly, enclosed again. This time she teaches herself to write and reads incessantly, begins to publish (the family has connections) and when her husband loses his job, they move to Rome. She finds friends but is again stymied by this husband who she feels she is bound to all her life, but whom her life enables her to break away from — with help from her family. During the novel she sees her mother end up in an asylum because of treatment parallel to what she’s endured; sisters’ leading thwarted lives, friends too; the men in the novel are often equally twisted. Finally at the end (very like Nora in Ibsen’s play, The Doll’s House, which is alluded to in the novel), she breaks away at great emotional cost, having to leave her beloved son behind. By law she loses a legacy she had inherited, and all that she had owned. But as the last page is reached, she is free, if with a hard road ahead of her.

1913 photograph of Aleramo

My edition (University of California Press, 1983, ISBN 0-520-04949-7, same translator as the older edition) has a superb introduction by Richard Drake where he tells of Aleramo’s life (1876-1960) whose opening phase is told in this autofiction memoir. Aleramo is a pseudonym; her legal name was Rina Pierangeli Faccio. The later phase reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg: Aleramo was politically active, but on behalf of women (suffrage), feminist causes, and the homeless; she was involved with the fascists, the communists and fashionable art movements. She wrote as much journalism as she did fiction. She was for at time the editor of a Milanese feminist journal, L’Italia Femminile. I felt her book really took place in Milan, though Turin as well as Rome were cited. She also differs from Ginzburg because she had a number of lovers, wrote a diary about one affair. Alas, she never wrote another book as daring or relentlessly original as this one. Ginzburg slowly developed into a feminist; Aleramo was there in the first place but her later books and her writing had to backtrack or move into side issues to be published. Her readership and world did not want her to go further than she had. But it was enough and influenced women writers in Italy afterwards. It was one of the books published and pushed during the 1970s phase of feminism in the US and UK, and calls out for attention as an utterly “authentic, controlled and sustained” passionate polemic. I found it mesmerizing, unputdownable.

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I admit that all too often I find book club discussions disappointing; more often they can be frustrating because the level of talk is banal, conventional-conservative, the people unwilling to risk saying what they felt (if they felt something) truly, especially if it relates to private truths about their lives. What made de Cespedes’ so remarkable to me was it prompted several women in on OLLI at Mason book club (in Reston, online via zoom) to spill their “guts” out — their real frustrations, disappointments, troubles as women either married, with children, trying to start a career, at their jobs. A book that can do that must have something in it prompting authentic burning responses. Yet it is a far less daring book than Aleramo’s.

Published in NYC by Astra House, with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, it has received a lot of attention from reviewers and summaries of the story can be found readily (see the New York Times Book Review; the Washington Post’s BookWorld; Kirkus). I will tell it little differently:

There are four stories told in this notebook that Valeria Cossati buys and keeps hidden away: that of her husband, who like her during the course of the entries seems to have a liaison with someone else, in his case a publisher-TV person who is considering his script for a screenplay, a deal that ultimately seems to fall through.  There is her daughter, who becomes involved with a married man and much to her horror is planning to go off to live with him (of course without marrying him as he is already married). She has a son, who is having a very hard time starting a career, one where it seems he must travel abroad (to both parents’ dismay); he becomes involved with an inferior (in gifts, intellect and perhaps class) girl and gets her pregnant. When the book closes this girl is pregnant and Valeria, our heroine, the center of this multi-plot book about to quit her job and stay home and take care of her grandchild! The opposite of what happens in Una Donna happens her: the book begins with Valeria working and getting a real salary for herself and family, being promoted, daring to explore her psyche, her desires, her real thoughts about all those around her and herself. She is continually wrenched emotionally by her relationships with her children (far more than her husband). She remembers intense tussles with her mother whom she still visits. I think we are to understand that she too has an affair, hers with her boss whom she works for on Sundays (the two of them alone together in the office); the pair of people consider going off together for a holiday but never do this, and by the end of the book Valeria is closing herself off from opportunities for herself to grow, see the world, use this talent for writing she is deeply awakened by.

Mondadori photograph

Perhaps because the heroine is thwarted, because she is deeply conflicted over the new contemporary values and the older traditional ones this book club group responded so frankly — and for themselves, or us (since I was there) usefully. Cespedes herself was no homebody. She also was a journalist, and politically active, more dangerously than Aleramo: Cespedes was jailed for anti-fascist activities during WW2, imprisoned for a time, two of her novels banned; she wrote a screenplay for a best-selling movie. She was married to man in the foreign service (as wikipedia puts it), and stayed with him until his death. In her later years she lived in Paris. Like Una Donna, I found the Forbidden Notebook, if not mesmerizing, unputdownable, and so did several women in my book club. Other of her novels are said to pick up the same themes and treat them in the same conflicted ways.

Like Aleramo, Cespedes has not received the kind of attention and lacks the name recognition of women writers in French, English or German of her calibre and interest. Both of them suffer from the real anti-feminism and suppression of women’s causes and norms as central to the arts until very recently. It should be noted that Ferrante uses a pseudonym (as did Lucia Lopresi as Anna Banti in her marvelous part historical fiction, part autobiography, Artemisa, about the great Renaissance painter who went to court because she was raped).See my blog on Banti and her brilliant book.

The style of both books is plain, lucid, subtle and flexible. I’d say that de Cespedes uses more metaphoric language, more allusion to literary works but that Aleramo’s deep structures are themselves the product of reading much women’s poetry — there was a lot once upon a time in Italy, and letters and journalistic writing going back to the Renaissance.

Fellow readers, you can do no better in fiction or semi-fictional narrative, especially if you are a woman or want to experience a great woman’s book, than read these. I use this qualification for my next book will be on a third extraordinary book you must not miss, the non-fiction narrative by John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale, a story of rape, class, gender and riot in later 18th century New York City.

Ellen

Halloween/Samhain & a talk on Bookstore fiction: includes ghosts, historical fiction, mysteries

Opening episode of Outlander: Frank in the rain sees a ghostly highlander looking up at Claire through a window, he enters the room which feels haunted … (Outlander s1:E1, Sassenach)

Fantasies of the Bookstore: combine community & retail space, with meaningful location; you know you are in one when you walk in. Where it is on the planet, what’s across the street matters. The staff, which kinds of books, the atmosphere, language behavior of everyone … (see below, 2nd half of blog)

Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan and Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in a Bath bookshop, Northanger Abbey, 2007, scripted A Davies)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to write a blog for ever so long — on a foremother poet, Anne Stevenson (1933-2020), whose poetry tribute to Jane Austen I’ve put here more than once (“Re-reading Jane,” scroll down), but it is taking me time to read through her collected poems, essays on her, and essays by her (on Elizabeth Bishop, the biography of Sylvia Plath). Tonight I am only ready to share one poem by her, which relates to my eventual topic for this blog: bookstore fiction

Paper,

the beauty of it,
the simple, strokeable, in-the-handness of it,
the way it has of flattering ink,
giving it to understand that
nothing matters
until it is printed or written down
to be cherished on paper.

The way old paper levels time,
is the archive’s treasure,
is evidence talking to your fingers
when passion, two hundred years dead,
filters through the ink-net that,
pen in and, a lover once spread for his mistress,
ignorantly scooping the archivist
into his catch.

The connoisseur of wine
keeps company with the connoisseur of paper,
as the typesetter, rag-testing, rice-testing,
escapes from the glaze of the computer
to explore with a fingertip
an elegant topography
reserved exclusively for types he likes
and faces that delight him.

All the same,
the virtual truths of the TV
and the on-going game of what happens
sluice through the global drain
in a torrent of paper.
Throw it away or save it,
every day as it dies
instantly becomes news on paper.

Why, say the silicon people,
keep house in a paper graveyard?
The future is digital, clean indestructible,
the great web’s face book and bird’s nest.
No fingerprint can be lost,
no fact of identity missed.
All’s for the best
in the best of all paperless worlds.

The afterlife? To live on, on line,
without a mind of one’s own?
I can’t love these fidgety digits!
I want to go home,
I want to keep warm in my burrow
of piled up paper —
fool’s passion, dried grief, live hands of dead friends,
story I’ll keep turning the pages of,
until it ends.

You cannot have a bookstore without paper.

I had been thinking — as appropriate to Halloween — to write on the connection of ghosts to historical fiction, how the deep roots of historical fiction is the ghost, a desire to bring to life revenants who once lived and the world they inhabited, so author and her readers can take refuge there too. The best historical fiction writers, and in my view, these include Winston Graham, Diana Gabaldon (who Anne Stevenson wrote a short column in praise of), Hilary Mantel and Penelope Fitzgerald, are aware of this, discuss it, exploit it.

Only the second writes nothing but historical fiction, but all discuss ghosts in, and sometimes while they as author-narrator, are in their historical novels. Thus it is at Halloween, Samhain in Outlander that Claire is spirited away to the mid-18th century in Inverness, Scotland by means of an ancient or neolithic circle of stones. In the third episode of the first season, Claire listens to a bard sing in Gaelic, the core of the journey story she has just begun as one repeatedly met with:

[audience muttering] [singing in Gaelic] Now this one is about a man out late on a fairy hill on the eve of Samhain who hears the sound of a woman singing sad and plaintive from the very rocks of the hill.
[eerie music] [Gaelic singing continues] “I am a woman of Balnain.
“The folk have stolen me over again, ‘ “the stones seemed to say.
“I stood upon the hill, and wind did rise, and the sound of thunder rolled across the land.
” [singing in Gaelic] “I placed my hands upon the tallest stone “and traveled to a far, distant land “where I lived for a time among strangers who became lovers and friends.
” [singing in Gaelic] “But one day, I saw the moon came out “and the wind rose once more.
“so I touched the stones “and traveled back to my own land “and took up again with the man I had left behind.
” [applause] She came back through the stones? Aye, she did.
They always do.
It was a folktale, madness to take as fact, and yet half of what Gwyllyn had described had actually happened to me.
Why not the other half, the part where the woman returned home? What had Geillis said? As I told you, there’s many things in this world we can’t explain. (Outlander S1:E3, The Way Out)

Elinor Tomlinson and Aiden Turner as dream figures, Demelza and Ross Poldark (2016 Poldark season)

I know more than a couple of times Winston Graham has thoughtful discussions of how difficult it is to know the past, how much of what we think we know about it is more than half-imagination, and dreaming imagination at that. See my paper called “After the Jump.” Historical Fiction and Films seem to exist at a kind of cross-roads of remembered and researched revenants and today’s analogous worlds — sometimes inhabited by sleuths and book writers and lovers (as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession). See my blog quoting a wonderful evocation of this by Caryl Phillips (on Crossing the River).

How I love especially to go back to the 18th century and Scotland: I reveled in Naomi Mitchison’s Bull Calves and the movie, Chasing the Deer (about Culloden). I told of this in my blog on a paper (linked in) and conference and (would you believe?) actual real trip to Culloden.

Yesterday afternoon I was much stirred by books on Mantel’s fiction by Lucy Arnold: Haunted Decades and a collection of essays gathered by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter where spectral realism is the terrain re-imagined. Thomas Cromwell becomes more crowded in by ghosts as we move through his life, and that of Mantel’s stealth heroine, Anne Boleyn, whom Henry Fielding wrote a ghostly history of in his A Journey from this World to the Next. Haunted all her life, says a Slate column.

Mark Rylance and Natasha Little as Thomas Cromwell fearful as he walks up the stairs to where Elizabeth Cromwell now dead has become a ghost (Wolf Hall, the serial)

My previous blog is about my friend Tyler Tichelaar’s fiction and non-fiction, which moves between historical and gothic supernatural stories.

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Early important writer of these books in series forms

But today I was stirred by a talk I heard (on zoom) with a Book History group, the WAPG (Washington Area Print Group) I’ve long attended (though the last three years online): by Dr Eben J. Muse, who has recently written a study of the bookstore novel, Fantasies of the Bookstore. His book is partly a bibliographical tool for finding these books, for which he provides two sites on the Net: a full bibliographies of bookstore novels: https://bit.ly/bookstore_novel
And a bookselling Research Network: http://booksellingresearchnet.uk

And now I finally have a topic for blog fitting for the autumn season — and Halloween.

His talk was about the other part of his book: in “In her Own Right: Women Booksellers in the Bookstore Novel” he described what he said was a intertwined set of tropes found across bookstore novels, especially when they are owned or managed by women, which motives seemed to me are all found in one of my favorite of all books, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop: I’ve taught the book and film more than once, and written about it here too.

What is a bookstore today? why, it’s a cultural interaction space, combining a community with retail space, whose location, kinds of books, atmosphere, staff and customers’ behavior matters. They are usually indie stores, with the subgenre beginning in 1917, becoming more widespread in the 1980s, and reaching a high peak of numbers first between 1985-1995, and since then multiplying especially 2016-17. They are often series, combine mysteries with ghosts (Fitzgerald’s book has a spiteful poltergeist). What happens is the heroine invents an identity for herself by becoming a bookstore owner and manager, who knows how to make a profit from books, how to sell them, make them appealing. She often herself does not care for them herself as reading matter (Fitzgerald’s Florence Green does). The bookstore becomes her way of integrating with the community at a distance, and is often an act of defiance (which in the case of Florence, she tragically loses), but can also be her sanctuary. When there is a murder, it may be that the bookstore becomes a place where someone abusive is killed. There is a deep intimate tie between the place, the space, and the heroine’s role in the story. They are frequently literary fictions, often romances too. We should ask why is the central figure repeatedly a woman?

It’s in the last 30 years that women authors have begun to dominate this subgenre — though it would seem the bookseller character has usually been a woman

Afterwards the talk ranged far and close. We talked of how Victorian got Their Books (the title of someone’s paper published in a book on Victorian bookselling, buying, reading. Bookstores on Cape Cod recently where one kept a map of other bookstores. Someone mentioned The Ghost of Mrs McClure by Cleo Coyle, pseudonyn of Alice Kimberley. Peter Shillingsburg’s formidable sounding Textuality and Knowledge was mentioned: if you don’t know the original form the book took when printed (unabridged, uncensored) you are not grounding yourself in reality. So much for what passes for a book with so many people now. The way we read now.  Shorter, easily more entertaining try this book chapter: Schillingsburg, Peter. “The Faces of Victorian Literature.” The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998. pp. 141-156.

Well, Muse just made me want to rush over to Amazon and buy some of these — in practice I have read a few — the apparently early Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (the grimness or “grumpyiness” as Dr Muse characterized its aging bookseller is another trope of such books), but mostly non-fictions, which seem not to count as they do not have this mythos at their center, though they may well tell a tale of publishing, what books are, the bookish life which has many elements found in the fantasy book. For example, Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir. They may tell a cultural anthropology tale.

While this bookshop name was cited as the title of a book by Deborah Myler (Stephanie Butler our heroine) — this does look like a real bookshop in Lyme Regis

And this its inside

In practice I also used to be a constant visitor of bookstores. Hours in second hand bookstores were the delight of my life here in Alexandria, in DC, in New York City, and in many places in England. I remember those blocks on Fourth Avenue, in lower New York, ancient, filled to the brim with books, some of which were rotting. The Argosy is a rare one still to be found in business (59th Street on the East Side). Blocks in Edinburgh harbored stunningly expensive ancient tomes (Renaissance) normally found in research libraries. How few are left in London; our recent visit took us to one small store, beautifully culled books, but it was the same one we visited the last time we were in London, 4 years ago. Can London be reduced down to one or two (Foyle’s) bookstores when it comes to independent ones? I enjoy the chains but the ambiance and feel and purpose of the store is quite different: they are more for casual visitors, tourists; they do not function as a home away from your library home.

My happiest hours have been spent in bookstores (as when I find a book I didn’t know existed but when I saw it, knew I would enjoy it so mightily) — and yes libraries. My favorite place in Washington DC is the Folger Shakespeare Library (or was, as I’ve no idea what it’s like in the new renovated building). It was my idea for Izzy, my daughter, to become a librarian. And she loved when she was an intern in Fairfax and worked in the children’s area of the library.

Someone at the WAPG asked if there is a subgenre of books about a heroine in a library: he said the problem is the library is usually an institution, and right away it cannot be the expression of just one person’s character or outlook, but of course (thought I) it can have a “body” in it (as do an early Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers book). There seems a link between the amateur woman sleuth and the woman bookseller.

This is one Prof Muse recommended — I didn’t catch the heroine’s name

So these bookstore fictions may be included in all my favorite kinds of books, first of all heroine’s fictions, second gothics and ghost stories beyond the traumatic uncanny kinds, from M. R. James to Edith Wharton about which I’ve written much here in these blogs too. And most recently women’s detective fiction. This week I’m rereading P. D. James’s even profound A Time to Be In Earnest.

Our WAGP used to meet at the Library of Congress itself, the concrete building at 3:30 and by 5 walk over to a nearby Asian restaurant and eat together. We are hoping to do that for the first time in three years this coming spring.

Ellen

Three gothics by Tyler Tichelaar

“Haunted Marquette deftly weaves history, urban legends, and unexplained phenomena into a kaleidoscope of ghostly hauntings … Founded as a harbor town to ship iron ore from the nearby mines, Marquette became known as the Queen City of the North for its thriving industries, beautiful buildings, and being the largest city in Upper Michigan. But is Marquette also the Queen of Lake Superior’s Haunted Cities?” — Sonny Longtine

Dear friends and readers,

My good friend, Tyler Tichelaar’s remarkable book tracing the history and contextual circumstances (often historical) of ghost and other paranormal experiences in Marquette, Michigan, is now an audiobook, read in its unabridged form by Brandy Thomas.  I write this blog to tell other lovers of the gothic about the audiobook and Tyler’s other gothic books.

Faithful readers of my blogs may remember how much I like the gothic and how many blogs I’ve written over the years on gothic books & films; one of these a number of years ago was about his first book, a superb literary study, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. As his title suggests, the book is a survey, history, analysis of the Christianizing gothic, mostly male-centered books, politically conservative; The Gothic Wanderer often centers on lesser-known (nowadays) Gothic classics (Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni), interpreting the more famous ones (Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities) in unusual ways.

This summer I read what I’d call a continuation of this book, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897. In this book, Tyler demonstrates the close alliance and influence that exists between long narrative, once famous (and sometimes still read) fantastical and visionary urban books in French and English. Authors covered include the still famous, Byron, Scott, Hugo, Dumas (many of his books are covered), Stoker (the book ends on his work leading up to and Dracula); the lesser known, William Ainsworth, Eugene Sue, Paul Feval, Bulwer-Lytton; to the all but forgotten but important for a book, e.g., George Croly. We move from books about secret societies (racist diatribes in some of this), to radical re-castings of the French revolution, ending in the era vampires.  Seamless literary history.

The book is chock-a-block with very useful retellings of the stories like Eugene Sue’s Wandering Jew and Mysteries of Paris, extended literary analyses like Paul Feval’s Les Mysteres de London, accounts of the lives of writers as well as eloquent defenses of their books (George M. W. Reynolds), letters of editors, source studies. Categories include Marie Antoinette books. I was startled by some of the connections of melodramatic plays of the era; even Gilbert and Sullivan finds a place here (Ruddigore). We reach truly popular material rarely treated so seriously. There are extensive bibliographies for the reader to explore when he or she finishes the text.

Tyler quotes extensively from his chosen texts and conveys the quality and experience of them. There are women authors (Radcliffe) with some unusual qualities pointed out: in possibly Elizabeth Caroline Grey’s The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress), we discover “the homoeroticism of the female vampire preying upon members of her own sex” (p 346), hitherto only seen in Coleridge’s Christabel, and not again until Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). As a reader of Scott, I appreciated his earnest analysis of Anne of Geierstein. I never read anything about this later book of Scott’s before and here it emerges as important and interesting.

Yet the book does not read like an encyclopedia. Tyler loves many of these books, is enthusiastic about nearly all of them, and occasionally writes in a personal voice and vein, “As I grow older, I personally feel more and more like the Wandering Jew, watching the world I knew as a child disappear and all those I love dying off, leaving me alone to wander through life and wondering why so many ill events must be part of my and all of humanity’s fate” (p 192).

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Tyler’s most recent novel (see review by Mack Hassler)

Still it makes sense to me that the first of his books to be reproduced in audio form is not one of his many novels nor the academic books on the gothic, but his Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City. I read this one during the pandemic. It is well-written, absorbing and entertaining reading and looking — at the many pictures.

On one level, Haunted Marquette is a probing (and intellectual) history of the region from a popular standpoint, taking legends that arose when terrible crises or catastrophes, public and private occurred, forms of consoling redemptive explanation, of oddly uplifting survival, and parsing them — showing how they arose, developed, now linger. On another, it’s an art book: it’s just chock-a-block with black-and-white (and grey) photos of people, places, landscapes, animals too, which could almost be artful illustrations, giving the book a feel ancient history — ordinary people across the era, dressed up in strange outfits, and buildings galore, places people made a living, many of them with unconventional histories retold. Here and there faint depictions of glimpsed ghosts. You learn in detail the constructions of cathedrals over time, the post office too. It’s an ethnography, a study of a culture from a fanciful perspective. Chapters are named after these structures, with addresses given and their headers to the chapters questions: “Does the captain who saved many lives still watch over the lake a century after his death?” “Who is the little girl staring out of the lighthouse window?” “Broom and mop in hand, the deceased man continues his work … ” Lots of evocative nouns and verbs, like Cottages, Storms, Lighthouses. Harbors and Lanterns. I’ve no doubt many of these places are haunted by the same local tourists over and over again.

I enjoyed the book as a travel account — you don’t have to believe in the ghosts; it’s the penumbra surrounding them that intrigues.

Click here and you’ll get a publisher’s synopsis, learn about Tyler (a seventh generation resident of Marquette), and hear some of Haunted Marquette read aloud.

Ellen