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

Sexual & familial subversion in Elizabeth Gaskell’s & Andrew Davies’ Wives & Daughters

Molly (Justine Waddell) helping the much debilitated Mrs Hamey (Penelope Wilton) up the stairs early in the serial (and book)

Molly and her father, Mr Gibson (Bill Patterson), rebelling against the rigid and jealous Mrs Gibson (her father’s second wife) to grow close and have loving comfortable supper together while she is away, later in the serial (1999 BBC Wives & Daughters, scripted Andrew Davies

Dear friends and readers,

I trust I’m not exaggerating when I say I just finished a delightful, companionable and very instructive time with a class of older adults (around 23-26 people) reading Gaskell’s final novel masterpiece, Wives and Daughters. This long (some 650 pages) mid-century (written 1864-66) seeming pastoral novel took us some 6 weeks; some of us watched the film adaptation during the last 4 weeks. I found for us some very readable good essays on the larger more abstract themes of the book: the decline of the older gentry against the money-based agricultural new science; a world view which is based upon, and a landscape growing out of, early evolutionary theories about people’s relationship to animals, a Darwinian outlook (Roger Hamley, the second son, is modeled on Charles Darwin, Gaskell’s cousin whom she was friendly with, and some of whose work she had read); the new credit economy.

The class discussed at length the character-based ones: the education of a young woman in this society, what should it be like to lead her to a fulfilling and productive life — something far more useful and stimulating and even career-oriented than making hats and spending time on fashions or being sheerly idle; the importance of mothering, mothers, caring for one another truly as the basis of social life, sisterhood and women’s friendship. Of course the class system and importance of money, individual conflicts, gossip and communities — no English novel can be written without these.

Mr Gibson (Bill Paterson) introducing the two new sisters, Molly and Cynthia Kirkpatrick (Keeley Hawes)

To some readers the above may not sound exciting or absorbing — it may today seem commonplace as ideas to assert. I admit I left out what counted most in the class out of Gaskell and especially this novel: her astonishing creation of believable complex elusive personalities changing and developing in interaction with other personalities; the exquisite precision of her style and use of the just the right word to capture moments of being; the beauty of the evocative landscapes. The book is Tolstoyan in its memorable characters (who does not love Molly? detest Mrs Gibson, feel there is much in Mr Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick we can’t get near), various intriguing depths of this and other sorts — from the book’s uses of memory, time passing, slow changes, and its surprisingly wide range of reference and radical ideas mingled in conversations at dinner tables too.

Osborne Hamley (Tom Hollander) manifesting that what is being asked of him, to be proud hierarchical obtuse master is beyond him

Tonight, though, I’d like to call attention to what is often overlooked in this book: it is assumed the book’s depiction of family life and sex is strictly conventional, with what we see of family life basically good for everyone, and a depiction of readily binary normative heterosexual sex for just about everyone with restrictive norms for controlling (keeping “safe”) women. Not so. In fact what this book calls attention to is how women (take Mrs Hamley) and young girls can be driven to illness, an early death, by the “killing” (Molly’s word) demand the individual sacrifice him or herself (more often her) for authority figures who turn out to be quietly predatory and bullying (Mrs Gibson) or noisily an ignorant (hard word I know for the squire who means very well). It is arguable that the Squire’s insistence he control his older son’s marriage choice, and dissatisfaction over who and what Osborne is, killed Osborne. The book is often discussed as one where lying and keeping secrets are shown to be the coward’s way of avoiding reality, but it is also one where these techniques are shown to be self-protective defenses against people close to you who cannot understand you and the large community. Mr Gibson may be too loving a father: his bad marriage choice results from his sexual panic when he finds Molly, age 17, is attracting suitors; he is as controlling as Mrs Gibson and his attitude towards “the sex” (“women”) is condescending, narrow; he marries badly because he does not begin to think of having a wife as an intimate partner. He does not expect women to be equal to men.

At the same time sexuality is fluid and gender roles too. Mr Gibson mothers Molly; Roger and Osborne both have many “feminine” characteristics too: nurturing, tender love. The women are forceful and strong. Lady Cumnor runs her big household; Mrs Hamley ran the business side of Hamey house; for better or worse, Mrs Gibson takes over the housekeeping in the Gibson household. The unmarried women seem to do very well.

Rosemary Pike as the independent-minded young Lady Harriet whose attraction to Molly signals Molly is potentially such another as she

This in a book where the central characters and interests of the story are feminocentric. The small, intimate, daily domestic behaviors and words and art are those that truly count. Lady Harriet, unmarried (and likely to remain so) Cumnor daughter, occasionally a mouth-piece for Gaskell, tells Lord Hollingford (amateur in the best sense of the word geologist, biologist, botanist) his finds may be the important intellectual truth which account for the attitudes and forms our society takes, but hers, about the daily ephemeral yet endlessly repeating living acts, however small and intimate, are where life is lived. Gaskell does write of industrial strikes and strife, abysmal poverty and early death from the unameliorated capitalist manufacturing system the characters live in (Mary Barton, North and South); of 18th century mutiny and pressing (Sylvia’s Lovers), of witch trials (misogyny and crazed religion — “Lois the Witch”), meditations on the 18th century enlightenment and revolution (My Lady Ludlow). But in all these books what makes us so deeply engaged is the same deep textual matter (the text itself, the scenes, and dialogues and meditations) left “richly indeterminate” that is the basis of Wives and Daughters (see Jose Billington’s book on Gaskell’s books as Tolstoyan). It should be no surprise that Gaskell can manipulate these kinds of texts to contain the funniest of scenes amid scenes of death, distress, bankruptcy, loss and change in Cranford too

We turn to Davies’ movie, which develops just the subversive material I’ve been talking about, which relies on the production of stress and sympathize to make us enter into any critiques of novels turned into films.

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Roger (Anthony Howell) and Molly early in the film sharing a vision of real nature in the microscope early in the film

Roget enabling Molly to have educated herself, and now travel with him as a collecting scientist

Davies’ commentary on why he did what he did, the analogues to other films and books he relied upon give us useful insight into Gaskell’s book and how he treated it. What he said about Molly Gibson shows how in his mind Gaskell’s book is such another as Austen’s books (written we should remember half-a century earlier):

It’s a pretty close run between her and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice for the most appealing heroine in English literature. I’m the father of a daughter, and Molly brought out those feelings in me. You feel very protective towards her, even though she can stick up for herself. She’s not the prettiest girl in the story, and you sympathize with her when all these chaps look past her and see Cynthia and immediately stop paying her any attention.

Of Osborne Hamley:

He was the character who gave me the most problem with the script, because when I read the book, I thought: “My God! This is the first gay character in 19th-century literature!” Then I thought: “No, it couldn’t be.” You get the feeling when Osborne comes on that the revelation about him is going to be that he’s gay, because in the book he really is quite effeminate in his manner. He seems to be a caricature of a gay character. He’s always talking about the opera, he’s very good with older ladies, he has a very close relationship with his mother, he can’t stand his father. The secret French wife and the child seemed a bit unlikely to me, and so I tried to make him more Keatsian – not a drooping spirit, but a passionate, poetic character, who just had the bad luck to have a growing and fatal illness.

Analogously, Davies dwells more on the sister pairs of Molly and Cynthia than Gaskell and he makes Cynthia more sympathetic, the feel of this relationship is also homoerotic and deeply sympathetic to women as his portrayal of the Misses Browning (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findley)

Davies is working with a modern flexible sense of what a family and friends group truly consists in:

It’s about second families, isn’t it? In the book, of course, you’ve got second families because of people dying young. Nowadays, it’s because of divorce and remarriage. But the problems are the same, aren’t they?

I would call attention — and Davies does too — to how Mr Gibson and Molly are the central bonded pair of the book. This is one of the subversive areas of the novel. Is Mr Gibson doing the right thing the way he persists in trying to keep Molly a child? He can’t, and his attempts at procuring a dragon-lady chaperon lead to much unhappiness and sickness in Molly. The book’s first climax of the book is Mr Gibson confronting Molly with what he has heard about her “loose” behavior with Mr Preston; the second of this Gibson plot is supposed probably to be Mr Gibson accepting Roger’s explanation for why he has realized it was not Cynthia who would make him happy but Molly.

I noticed again the book’s other story, the Hamley and mostly male one, had been rearranged so as to make the Hamley story as and more important than the Gibson one. Davies often takes the male story of a novel by a woman and makes it central where in the original novel it is subordinate or at least very much secondary — though this is not true of Gaskell’s book. The last part of W&D is more changed from the book than the earlier parts — it is after all unfinished and Davies takes more open liberties than with Middlemarch or other of his adaptations of older classic novels. Not only is Preston made sympathetic, but as Gaskell didn’t get to finish the book, Davies choses his own ending and alters matter coming up to it to fit — Molly becomes free to explore and wander around the world (as a married woman). All book long she was educating herself under Roger’s tutelage and in the film adaptation we see her reading, copying out picture; Roger’s first present is a wasp’s nest (dead).

Molly has received a wasp’s nest from Roger, delivered to the Miss Brownings (that’s Phoebe, Deborah Findlay) while her father has placed her out of their house

Nonetheless, as I’ve suggested, this is very much a woman’s film, showing a woman’s world and it is at the intimate level of reality such things are experienced as destroying life. Mothering is central to everyone’s experience of growing up. Today the home is hard for many women to escape still.

In the book (softened in the film into comedy) Mrs Gibson is made one of the obtuse unchangeable horrors of life: a continual liar, deceitful, obtuse to all but her ugly way of seeing the world (not just utterly materialistic but everyone and thing is measured by rank – it is a misogynistic stereotype), but now the sexuality between Mr and Mrs Gibson (why he lets her get away with what he allows) complicates it as it’s brought out. In one manuscript the book was called The Two Mothers: the other would be Mrs Hamley who is seen comforting Molly several times and Mrs Gibson never. In the modern sense Mrs Gibson is allow to inflict emotional abuse on Molly by continually objecting, over-riding, mocking, complaining, demanding, controlling.

Mrs Hamley and Molly

To turn to a few particulars, Davies develops further his depiction of the father and daughter as intensely loving and interdependent, this really revelatory of Davies’ preoccupations and presentation of him self in his work. IN the film Mr Gibson believes Molly’s story, accepts her refusal to tell it all and immediately guesses the real culprit is Cynthia – – it is so painful in the book where at first he does not believe Molly. In the film Molly is not quite as ill (in the book she seems to come close to dying), and in the film Mr Gibson is using the illness that to try to keep Roger and Molly apart. It is in the film more emphatically than the book Lady Harriet (Rosamund Pike) to the rescue of Molly, Osborne dies, and Molly and Roger (Anthony Howell) marry: we are spared the wedding (though we do have the reception afterwards — see the comments below) and instead have that appropriate expansive walk into an Africa sunset (I doubt it looks like Ethiopia). The growth of new enlightened attitudes in medicine and respect for science (this is part of Mr Gibson’s role), is part of the novel, and the film adds this is the age of women travelers (see some of the film studies in my supplementary reading list). Much of the proto-feminism of Molly’s remarks are in Gaskell, not made up; the dialogues we hear are often in the book.

In this retelling Davies, the film-makers, and actors combine to make Osborne’s death and his father’s grief very like Shakespeare’s Lear. Gambon has Lear in mind as he staggers home with the corpse in his arms; when Gambon as the squire howls; when he realizes Osborne will never eat again.

Cardwell’s Andrew Davies includes a few remarks on this film. She singles out strong female protagonists but does not sufficiently see the weak males which hold center of films: emotional men, needing ties — the Squire, Osborne. Strong men are men who follow a work ethic — Roger and Mr Gibson

Davies also builds up Preston’s (Iain Glenn) relationship with Cynthia, and shows sympathy for Preston in insisting on his point of view: he loved her, thought she loved him, is intensely enamored of her sexually, won’t let go. This is very like Davies 2002 Dr Zhivago (Granada/WBGH, Giacomo Campiotti, Anne Pivcevic, discussed in another blog) where the same interaction of feeling and sentiment informs Davies’ conception of Lara (who like Cynthia at first loves and then turns to hatred) and Komarovksy (Sam Neill was more subtle about showing this, but then he’s the older man). (This emphasis and perspective is a development out of Elizabeth Gaskell, but one could read Gaskell’s text quite another way — as sheerly hostile to Preston as a cold unscrupulous cruel ambitious man.)

Although in black-and-white this still captures the aggressive sexual energy Ian Glenn projects as Mr Preston

The sexuality of a man (Preston’s) gripped by a woman is repeated in Davies’s portrait of Mr Gibson’s (Bill Patterson) marriage to Mrs. Gibson (aka Hyacinth Kirkpatrick, Francesca Annis)

The film genre is richly pastoral, indeed Arcadian environment, with richly colored flowers and much dark greenery. The houses of the wealthy are ornate; there is much scientific equipment to be seen, books, botanizing in the Hamley as well as Gibson household. When we are in Africa, we move to a burnt-orange, yellow and brown palette, but there too intense beauty is caught. All this is fascinating and well-done.

It’s telling that in an interview with Nic Ransome Davies says he’s usually rejected from fully American projects, and himself called “effete.” The demands for intense physical masculinity in American typologies are often avoided by Davies. But Davies is talking of how this very macho culture precludes doing sensitive perceptive film-adaptations of better novels in the US cinemas — and tells one story of his own experience of rejection and its grounds.

I noticed the music echoed music in Brideshead Revisited and nostalgia was worked up, use of blurring, the mise-en-scene rich and ornate greens, and this was done especially in the sequence where Mrs Gibson went to London with Cynthia and we have a few minutes of the renewal of Mr Gibson and Mollys’ relationship. Davies is daring here — he again and again in his series broaches this area of the older man loving the young girl, here really a father and daughter. It reminded me of Sebastian and Charles Ryder sequences with a use of voice-over too as the father and daughter revel together at a picnic in a meadow, and eating before the fireplace alone.

The film also exhibits intertexuality with famous books: Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon is just brilliant) coming out with Osborne in his arms, and the use of “never” shows Lear and Cordelia are meant. Osborne’s death with the fly over him is naturalistic death. Strong secularism in Gaskell’s book becomes a lack of providential patterning. Davies turns to Austen for some of the bitterly ironic but subdued lines of Gibson to his wife. Brideshead Revisited techniques are seen in the build up of Roger and Molly’s romance, but also the use of dance from Austen, and the final “yes” scene is clearly James Joyce’s Ulysses’ Molly. Roger and Molly are modelled partly on Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, but it’s clear Roger is also another Yuri Zhivago or Arthur Clenham (Davies has also made a brilliant Little Dorrit).

Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon) and Molly reading a letter of congratulation for Roger together — reading letters together is all about memory, bringing the past and the absent one close in our imaginations

But finally or for the Gaskell fan, constant reader or watcher, it’s the film’s coterminous terrain with Cranford Chronicles and the Return to Cranford (where letters are central), or Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with her Cranford stories that provides the subterranean basso continuo of the book and film. I am back with how feminocentric Wives and Daughters is. However blurred, this still captures that: another “Amazon’s” world. But this would require another blog (unless I’ve already written on these parallels in all the Gaskell material on this and other of my blogs) on the marvelous Cranford Chronicles and Return to Cranford. Here is one I wrote with a friend long ago, before I started on my journey through Gaskell’s writing.

Molly, Cynthia, Mrs Gibson (Francesca Annis), and the Miss Brownings (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findlay)

Ellen

Prelude: Jane Austen sequels or post-texts

Darcy grown older (Matthew Rhys) facing Elizabeth (Anna Maxwell Martin)’s demands (Death Comes to Pemberley, Towhidi’s film out of PD James’s sequel to P&P)

Dear friends and readers,

I recently finished Janice Hadlow’s excellent sequel/post-text to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, The Other Bennet Sister: Hadlow rewrites, re-sees Pride and Prejudice from a thoroughly conceived and believable Mary Bennet: it’s a deeply empathetic take on Mary Bennet inside the world of Austen’s P&P which brings out Austen’s blindnesses in not acknowledging the whole Bennet family colludes in an emotional abuse of Mary. Hadlow also reconceives the story while using Austen patterns across her oeuvre (as so many of the film adaptations do) and echoing specific scenes and plot-lines in the various novels. Yet it is a wholly satisfying Austen sequel novel (almost as they all are) in its own right.

But before I write an account of the story, characters, revived and new themes in Hadlow’s novel, I thought (because I’ve been asked to do so) I’d produce a list of those Austen sequels I’ve read which I consider to be good books, worth reading as post-texts to Austen’s works and good stories with interesting characters in their own right. For once I am just going to list them with the prefacing comment that I’ve tried many many of this type of book and most I’ve found to be poor to embarrassing. The question for my next two blogs will be what qualities are found across these books as well as what do we mean by a sequel or post-text (a few thoughts on this), and then an analysis of The Other Bennet Sister in terms of these criteria I tease out.

I have listed them in the order of last read:

Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister (P&P)
Cathleen Schine, The Three Weismanns of Westport (S&S)
Joanna Trollope, Sense and Sensibility (S&S)
Jo Baker, Longbourn (P&P)
P. D. James, Death Comes to Pemberley as the basis for the film by Howdidi (P&P)
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club (all 6 famous novels)
Cindy Jones, My Jane Austen Summer (MP)
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, together with The Edge of Reason (P&P, then Persuasion
Whit Stillman, Love and Friendship In which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon is Entirely Vindicated (Lady Susan); Metropolitan (a full screenplay basis of the excellent film)
Diana Birchall, Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma (P&P with MP and NA)

The book needs to be readily recognizable as interwoven from and with Austen’s work, so, although excellent, I exclude Trollope’s Small House at Allington and E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren (both out of S&S)

To see my full library of these sequels, most of which I’ve tried (the list excludes for the most part, the graphic novels, those screenplays I have as part of a Making of or Companion book to a film adaptation), go to Libary Thing under austen sequels. Of these the ones I’d like to try again are Kathleen Flynn, The Jane Austen Project; Gina Fattore, The Spinster Diaries. I’ve a new one I’ve never tried that sounds intriguing: Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions, a Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love and Jane Austen.

There are scattered short story versions of post-texts found in places like the journal Persuasions (a brilliant one by Margaret Drabble both extending and parodying Persuasion), anthologies of sequels, and (listed in Library Thing) screenplays for the appropriation type Austen movie (like Ruby in Paradise) under austen screenplays, but these are different experiences from attempts at a novel which is a sequel or post-text to Austen’s own. I’m not sure Henrie’s Doomed Bourgeois in Love, essays on Whit Stillman’s films, which include good essays on his first two film adaptations, for Last Days of Disco is in part an adaptation of Austen (S&S and Emma), for which there is a good novel, Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Finally, there are the continuations of unfinished novels by Austen listed in Library Thing as austen continuation (when they are a separate book); I’ve at least three of Sanditon, one unfinished by Anna Austen Lefroy; one of Mansfield Park (providing an Alternative Ending). Catherine Hubback’s The Younger Sister is by one of Austen’s nieces, Francis’s daughter,  a minor Victorian novelist; the book is almost a sequel because The Watsons comprises so little of Hubback’s book in comparison with the very long continuation and is itself partly rewritten.

Ellen

Politics & Prose classes on women’s fiction & authors; genre fiction for, by, about women; Lot’s wife re-seen

Hilary Mantel’s superb non-fiction essays, a selection from the London Review of Books

A rare almost Radcliffean female gothic fiction for Oates

Dear friends and readers,

For about 12 weeks now I’ve been taking on-line courses at Politics and Prose and the quality and level of the discussions, the information and insights offered have been as excellent as those I’ve been taking now online from Cambridge, early evening British time, early afternoon East Coast on Saturdays and/or Sundays.  These have occurred across the pandemic and I chose mostly women and mostly Bloomsbury era women (exceptions include a session on E.M. Forster, and a session each on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Christina Rossetti’s poetry).

At Politics and Prose I can’t recommend highly enough Helen Hooper, Elaine Showalter, and at Cambridge University in their programs just about every Literature professor I’ve been privileged to listen to and watch (as these are video zooms). I’ve read books I’ve never read before by Mantel, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates — including Black Water, the astonishing tour-de-force retelling of the drowning and suffocation of Mary Jo Kopecknek at the close of her mad drive with Ted Kennedy down unpaved roads over an unsteady bridge. I’ve now a rounded point of view on Mantel, a way of putting her works together coherently for the first time. Maybe my favorite session from Cambridge in the last few months was on Vita Sackville-West by Alison Hennegan. I discovered Sackville-West’s love of animals.

The question I asked myself about Mantel was how much of her fiction was an escape for and protest against her from her fraught family life, traumatic health problems, and religious ways of thought (especially her interest in seance mediums). Paradoxically it’s not her imaginative fiction-writing self that is most aggressive in building a new identity, but her non-fictional arguments and the first two of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  For Shirley Jackson she takes on the type of the older woman alone, unable to navigate herself in a deeply hostile world (“The Bus”); she cannot escape cruelty it seems. To me Joyce Carol Oates in much of her fiction is herself living vicariously thrills and adventures at whatever price these cost her heroines (death, fearsome rape), with no concern for safety – so often so central to women’s stories. There is something troublingly irresponsible in Oates. It seems to me that American female gothic as practiced by these two women almost avoided the supernatural in order to make concrete to women readers what the life of an American woman is today. By contrast, Mantel is drawn to it in her contemporary British gothic comedic novels.

At the same time I’ve been going further in my popular genre books by, for, about female characters and discovered I can enjoy P.D. James’s Cordelia Grey books (detective fiction), Italian women women’s fiction: I just began Alba de Crespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, as translated by Ann Goldstein:

This last, perhaps not as well known in English-readers’ circles as I hope it might become is about a woman who after WW2 decides to keep a prohibited notebook. The closer word in Italian is prohibited. (Another instance of Goldstein’s inadequacy). The whole set of attitudes Valeria has to get beyond to even purchase and then hide her notebook brings home the inner world of Lila when she keeps a series of notebook and the profound betrayal Elena enacts when she throws them in the river in Florence. Purchase laws are against her, she has no space for it, little time because she hasn’t a maid and she has a job (this money is why she can buy it); she’s afraid to tell her husband who might suggest she give it to her son. I can see that the tragedy might be that she discovers herself … Very modern tale. Jhumpa Lahiri provides an insightful contextual introduction, and Elena Ferrante is quoted urging us to read it

For a couple of weeks I immersed myself in the fiction of Natalia Ginzburg, and the poetry and life of Elsa Morante in the course I’m teaching on Italian memoirs and novels and poetry of the 20th century — more than a couple of weeks because this was a culmination of several months on and off.

With my friend and mate over on Trollope&Peers, Tyler Tichelaar, a historical novelist, I read the whole of Devoney Looser’s very long study of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two early historical fiction (and other genre) writers around the time of, or just before Jane Austen and the Brontes: Sister Novelists: Trailblazing Sisters. The Porter sisters left a huge treasure trove of candid letters from which Looser constructed their hard and fascinating lives as independent women writers. Their courage, stamina, ability to network and live on very little, their romances and enormous amount of fiction produced puts before us a new angle on the world Austen lived in, a lot freer sexually than is usually supposed: the question was did they invent historical fiction or did what they call historical fiction lack a deep consciousness of the past (and real research into it) as shaping force of what was and is, such as we find in Scott.

As I found myself thinking about the archetypal heroine’s journey, so I’ve been looking to see if when women take over popular genres, there is some subset or continuous underlying themes, tropes, norms that cross these genres (each having to conform to readers’ expectations). An image one sees on many of the covers of their detective fiction is the typewriter:

I’ve not come to any conclusion that will allow me to concretize the l’ecriture-femme elements in these books but the topic is on my mind and I’m not alone as I pursue it.

I’m neglecting no one; I’m now watching serial dramas based on Agatha Christie’s famous series of Miss Marple: two nights in a row found me really engaged by one of the original episodes with Joan Hickman (The Body in the Library) and tonight I began a brand-new one: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which includes Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent in a hilarious scene as our amateur female sleuth’s parents.

At night I’ve re-begun Christie’s Autobiography, read by me 40 years ago and still remembered.

So this is some of what has been occupying me over these past weeks — some eighteenth century matter in Looser’s book while I listened to David Rintoul’s exhilarating reading aloud of Scott’s Waverley (very entertaining tones and Scots accent). I will end on a poem by Anna Akhmatova as translated by Annie Finch. The poem was brought to mind by Graham Christian’s writing of postings about poets daily for this month of April on face-book

Lot’s Wife

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” –—Genesis 19:25-26

The righteous man followed where God’s angel guide
shone on through black mountains, imposing and bright —
but pain tore his wife’s breast. It turned her aside
and said, “Look again! There is time for one sight
Of towers, and Sodom’s red halls, and the place
Where you sang in the courtyard or wove on your loom
By windows now empty — where you knew the embrace
Of love with your husband—where birth filled the room —.”

She looked. And the sight was more bitter than pain.
It shut up her eyes so she saw nothing more;
She shimmered to salt; her feet moved in vain,
Deep rooted at last in the place she died for.

Who weeps for her now? Who can care for the fate
Of someone like that—a mere unhappy wife?
My heart will remember. I carry the weight
Of one who looked back, though it cost her her life.

I like this one because the POV is not the implicitly masculine POV or Lot’s male POV. We begin with an impersonal verse; at “it turned her aside” we move into the woman’s perspective (whose name we are still not told. Then we move into the second person, “You” and the last three lines are the torture she’s feeling — just for wanting a sliver of freedom within enslavement unto death.

Just arrived! and this was a hard one to find for a reasonable price ($9.99 at WorldofBooks): The other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Mary at last)

And Isobel completed this beautiful puzzle: that’s Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Nora Zeale Hurston and Virginia Woolf

Ellen

Do you hear their hair? — on the Iranian women’s rebellion

Ghazaleh Hedayat (2008)

Dear friends and readers,

I’m honored today to have as a guest blogger M. Mansur Hashemi’s essay, “‘Do you hear their hair?’: About a piece of conceptual art” as translated by Fatemeh Minaei

Three months ago, a protest movement began in Iran. It was instigated by the tragic death of a young girl (Mahsa-Zhina Amini) while detained by the “morality police” who arrested her for not dressing according to the rules of compulsory hijab. The media echoed the event that moved the nation in the name of “woman, life, freedom”.

The following is a translation of a Persian writing that reflects some debates over hijab. It was written about nine years ago highlighting the problem through an interpretation of a work created by an Iranian female artist. The author has written other detailed articles criticizing the mandatory hijab, in which he has predicted the present situation in Iran. But this short poetic writing on an artwork (created by Ghazaleh Hedayat) extracts the essence of the matter. Naturally, the discussed conceptual art can be interpreted in various ways. The author has put it in the context of two bans in Iran, trying to emphasize the complexities of a social conflict. A conflict manifested now in the violent confrontations between the government and persevering teens and youth who fight for their freedom.­ Fatemeh Minaei, 2022 December.

***

Imagine the broad plane of a wall. From a distance, you might miss it. But if you look closely, you will see nails. Eight nails, to be exact. Getting closer, you will see the eight iron nails connected by four strands of hair. You feel a tension between the stiffness of the nails against the tender strands of hair. It looks as if the strands are chained to the wall. You hear the daunting sound of a hammer that heightens that feeling. But, with all their fragility, the strands of hair are there. They are not destroyed, despite the collusion between the hammer and nails. They are stretched on the hard surface and this tautness on the broad area, this being tied to the iron nails, enhances their presence.

The strings on a musical instrument are stretched on it and tied to its body, just as those hair strands are tied to the wall. Nevertheless, the very tied-up strings make the unrestricted sound of the music. Those four strands of hair are like strings on the wall. We do not even need to hear any sound those imaginary strings would make. We’ll hear them as soon as we take a look. Apparently, the strands of hair are not supposed to be visible. But they are. Just as for a while, under the new Islamic regime in Iran, musical instruments were not supposed to be seen. Showcases got cleared from any musical instrument. Yet the sound kept on coming out from behind the veils the government ordered. Music survived. It survived until one day the musical instruments came back to the windows and now the only place the musical instruments are not seen is on the Islamic regime’s TV. However, musical instruments are not for watching; they are to be heard. And their sound, the music they create, is now filling up even the official broadcastings of the regime. So seems to be the state for the sound of the locks that were supposed to not be heard. Now the sound that sneaks out from under the slipping scarves can no longer be ignored. The sound of the objecting strands of hair that display themselves despite the morality police, despite the violent surroundings. The veil is no longer working.

A piece of conceptual art sometimes represents a situation not easy to express otherwise. “The Sound of My Hair” by Ghazaleh Hedayat (pictured below) can be interpreted as a representation of a situation. A metaphorical visual translation of a conflict.

I grew up in a pious family and spent my childhood mostly in mosques and Islamic schools. So, I understand how much symbolic that ‘sound’ can become. I feel the taboos and their dreadful power. The imposed patriarchal mentality puts unbearable pressure on a religious man. His mind gets overwhelmed by obsessions that are extremely hard to overcome.

People raised outside the religious stratum of Islamic societies would never comprehend the Hijab issue. Just like the issue of music being impermissible (Haram), sounds being sinful, or musical instruments being devices of ‘libidinous pleasure’, makes no sense to them. The hair of Iranian girls and women not raised in religious families is covered by the force of the regime rules. Just as decades ago, a patriarchal government (ruled by Reza Shah) unveiled the hair of religious Iranian women by force because of a shallow understanding of modernity. The value of individual freedom is missed in both cases. And since the logic of force is not convincing, it was and is doomed to fail.

Now the times are changing. Besides women forced to have hijab or those who chose hijab for a while under the influence of the Zeitgeist, nowadays, even many Iranian girls from religious families prefer not to cover their hair. In an ironic turn of events that can be called, in the words of Hegel, “die List der Vernunft” (the cunning of reason), those girls participated in civic life because the Islamic regime prepared the circumstances their families required, and now they do not see the need for veils.

When you wander in the streets of Iranian cities now, it will be strange if you don’t hear the sound of the strands of hair that want to get free. To get their voice heard despite the repressive surroundings. That reminds me of the interpretable work of Ghazaleh Hedayat. She has visualized a situation that I am sure will continue to cause a stir in our society for a long time. The issue is as complicated and intricate as that work of art: The Sound of My Hair.

*******************************************************

Women’s Rights Activist on Protests Sweeping Iran, the Intensifying Gov’t Crackdown & Executions:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/15/iran_protests_sussan_tahmasebi

Sussan Tahmahsebi:

Over nearly 500 people have been killed — 480, I think, is the last figure that the Human Rights Activists Network reported. Sixty-eight of them are children who have been killed. And the majority of those who have been killed — I mean, at least 50% of those who have been killed are from ethnic minority regions, Kurdish areas and Balochi areas. In Balochistan, just in one day, on Black Friday, which was September 30th, 103 people were shot dead. These were peaceful protesters leaving Friday prayers. And most of them were shot in the back, running away from bullets that the police were shooting at them.

Now, as you mentioned, the violence has reached a new level, where protesters are being sentenced to death. They’re being charged with enmity with God or waging war against God, and they’re being sentenced to death in these sham trials that, you know, don’t take very long, where people are not afforded — allowed to have access to their lawyers. And it’s extremely concerning …

On the women’s reproductive rights front: “How quickly anti-abortion activists abandon plans never to be punitive: demand jail time for “pill trafficking:”

https://tinyurl.com/2fzsvd6a

But it is true that the democrats’ solid wins in many states and for many offices, and putting into state constitutions women’s rights to autonomy, care, and choices over their bodies show who in the US are also in the majority

Posted by Ellen

Judy Woodruff “stepping down” from anchoring the PBS newshour

She announced this briefly last night as a last news item:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/judy-woodruff-stepping-aside-from-pbs-newshour-anchor-desk-at-end-of-2022

I shall miss her badly. Tears come to my eyes as I write this. I know I watch the show many even most nights to feel a little of her presence (as presented by herself) in my life. She projects kindness, genuine concern for the vulnerable, seeks stories that can comfort intelligent people, and in general is part of the shaping force of the choices of what to run, where to place it, as well as what is said in the segments. Over the course of the pandemic at the end of many of her hours I felt better.

I’m not going to over-praise. To categorize PBS as left of center is too generous because in many of the central interview and some secondary political segments our “correspondents” consistently avoid asking tough questions to reactionary and also (occasionally) fascist (if when on the show seeming courteous) types, do not truly challenge important lies; their even-handedness is the old mainstream liberal-social but conservative=economic (1950s style) republicanism. Some of the people there are harsher than that, bringing in blaming culture: Amna Navaz and Amiche Alcindor to me would be a fatal choices for anchor. Once I watched Judy sit before Mark Shields and David Brooks spout disguised misogyny. Not a peep out of her. The show omits stories, gives slack to where they should not. I concede many of the “human interest” and cultural segments are probing, humanitarian, egalitarian, and useful. The best of these are done regularly by Fred de Sam Lazaro, Jane Ferguson (what a courageous woman), Malcolm Brabant, Miles O’Brien (Paul Solomon is too far a compromiser). Recently Stephanie Sy has been improving: she actually said to one election denier candidate he was not answering her question! Indeed probably I might stop watching it; it does depend on who is the leading shaping force. William Branagh who would be my choice for anchor but I worry he has a slight nervousness in delivery and of course that won’t do.

Here is her rightly proud resume:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Woodruff

I remember her when she was very young, one of the people on the McNeil-Lehrer hour, telling Washington DC news. There was a brief foray into commercial news broadcasts, about which my father said “she won’t last.” He meant the cut-throat politics and subrisively mean tone of some of the networks would cut her out; she was also no Leslie Stahl, a genuine left-liberal newscaster, daring too — so that made Stahl viable on the ABC of those days. Judy was ever a lady.

Who but her could have done all those end-of-shows obituaries during the height of the pandemic. I know nowadays she has a badly crippled son who cannot get about without a super-engineered walker and also about how unscrupulously and callously such people and their wheelchairs are treated at that most abominable of places, airports, where human rights are thrown away.

I remember her crying when Gwen Ifill died. How relieved Fauci was to talk to her. I shall miss her and her show.

A 1981 photograph of her working for NBC

Ellen

My top Austen films

The journey from Norland to Barton Cottage, found in all S&S films, both heritage and appropriations (this from Davies’s 2009 JA’s S&S)

Gentle readers,

As an appendix to my review of Persuasion 2022, plus 4, I’m answering a query I got in three places: what are my choices for Austen films very much worth the watching. I came up with 3 sets for heritage films, and a small group of appropriations. I don’t say others do not have good qualities and interest, but these to me are outstanding.

My criteria: I think a film should convey the book in spirit: the following films are very well done throughout, add to and enrich our understanding of the books, and are works of art in their own right fully achieved

1st set:

1995 Persuasion, BBC, Michell and Dear (Amanda Root & Ciarhan Hinds)
1996 Sense and Sensibility, Miramax, Thompson & Ang (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet)
1995 Pride and Prejudice, BBC A&E, Andrew Davies & Langton (Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle)
1983 Mansfield Park, BBC, Giles and Taylor (Sylvestre Le Tousel & Nicholas Farrell)
2007 Northanger Abbey, ITV, Andrew Davies & Jones (Felicity Jones & JJFeilds)
1972 Emma, BBC, John Glenister & Constanduros (Doran Goodwin & John Carson)

Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price writing from her nest of comforts to her brother William (note his drawing of his ship), one of my favorite chapters in the book (1983 MP)

2nd set

1979 Pride and Prejudice, BBC, Fay Weldon (Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul)
2008 ITV (BBC and Warner, among others) Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Andrew Davies & John Alexander (Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield)
2009-10 BBC Emma, Jim O’Hanlon, & Sandy Welch (Romola Garai & Johnny Lee Miller)
1999 Miramax Mansfield Park (MP and Juvenilia and JA’s letters), Patricia Rozema (Francis O’Connor & Johnny Lee Miller)

Doran Goodwin as Emma deliberately breaking her shoestring so as to maneuver Harriet and Mr Elton to be alone (1972 Emma)

3rd set
1996 BBC Emma, Davies and Lawrence (Kate Beckinsale & Samantha Morton)
2007 ITV (Clerkenwell in association with WBGH) Persuasion, Snodin & Shergold (Sally Hawkins, Rupert Penry-Jones)

Aubrey Rouget (Carolyne Farina), the Fanny Price character at St Patrick’s Cathedral with her mother, Christmas Eve (Metropolitan is also a Christmas in NYC movie)

Appropriations

2000 Sri Surya Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have found it (S&S), Menon (Tabu, Aishwarya Rai)
1990 Indie Metropolitan (mostly MP, w/Emma), Whit Stillman (Christopher Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, and Carolyn Farina, Allison Rutledge-Parisi, Isabel Gilles)
1993 Republic Ruby in Paradise (NA), Victor Nunez (Ashley Judd, Todd Field)
2008 Granada/ITV/Mammoth/ScreenYorkshire Lost In Austen (P&P), Andrews and Zeff (Jemima Rooper & Elliot Cowan)
2013 BBC Death Comes to Pemberley (P&P), Daniel Percival & Juliette Towhidi (Anna Maxwell Martin, Mathew Rhys)
2007 Mockingbird/John Calley The Jane Austen Book Club (all 6), Robin Swicord (Mario Bello, Kathy Baker, Emily Blunt)
2006 Warner Bros. Lake House (Persuasion), Agresti & Auburn (Sandra Bullock, Keenu Reeves, Christopher Plummer)

Olivia Williams as Jane Austen in reverie, during a walk, facing the river (Miss Austen Regrets)

Biopic

008 BBC/WBGH Miss Austen Regrets (from David Nokes’ biography & JA’s letters) Lovering & Hughes (Olivia Willias, Greta Scacchi, Hugh Bonneville)

See my Austen Filmography for particulars

My Austen Miscellany contains links to many of the blog-reviews I’ve written.

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood wandering: as Elinor is my favorite of all the heroines, so Hattie Morahan is nowadays my favorite embodiment (Davies’s S&S, Part 3)

Ellen

Sanditon, a second season of Austen patterns

Arthur Parker (Turlough Convery) and Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke) — a convincingly warmly congenial couple: they act out of kindness to one another, actually talk to one another, support one another — I am sure I am not alone in wishing this Parker brother’s implicit homosexuality had not gotten in the way

The three friends: Alison Parker (Rosie Graham), Charlotte’s younger romantic sister; Charlotte (Rose Williams), once again our grave heroine; and Georgiana, wary, distrustful, somewhat alienated

Dear friends and readers,

Two and one-half years of pandemic later, Andrew Davies’s creation of an experimental Sanditon (alas he wrote the last episode only) returned. It resembles the first (see Episodes 1-4: by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea; and 5-8: zigzagging into a conclusion in which nothing is concluded) by its use of a too many stories at once, one of which is over-the-top melodrama: centered again in Edward Denham (Jack Fox), Clara Brereton (Lily Sacofsky) as his now discarded pregnant mistress, and Esther (Charlotte Spencer) become Lady Babbington desperate for a child.

An aggressive Esther & vulnerable Clara as enemies at the harsh-mouthed tactless Lady Denham’s (Anne Reid) table

Life is again a matter of pleasures in which all the characters participate: this time it’s a fair or summer festival complete with a contemporary balloon ride dared by Charlotte and the Wickham character of the piece, Colonel Lennox (Tom Weston-Jones), rescued by Arthur (this character is the quiet true hero of this season); another ball, afternoon garden party, complete with archery (in lieu of cricket),

The male rivals: Colborne in front, Lennox to the back

with a sequence of magical dancing between Charlotte caught up, entranced and entrancing, her seemingly Rochester-like employer, Alexander Colborne:

Tom Parker (Kris Marshall) is still irresponsible, getting into debt, now at a loss without Sidney; Mary (Kate Ashfield), his long-suffering prosaic wife turned mother-figure by his side. There is whimsy; many individuals walk or ride along the seashore; too many shirtless men.

Tom Parker confronting Captain Lennox over debt — interestingly, this is a motif from Austen’s draft as continued by Anna Lefroy

But it differs too, most obviously in that several of the central actors & actresses had long since signed other contracts when it seemed there would be no second season. Thus this season the first episode is taken up with grieving for the suddenly dead (in Antigua) Sidney (Theo James), and in the last he (together with Arthur) improbably saves all by proxy when his box arrives, with money (he was always good for that in the previous season) and letters exposing villains: Charles Lockhart [Alexander Vlahos] turns out to be no innocent painter seeking Georgiana’s hand, but the nephew of her white planter-father seeking to replace her as heir. Esther has to appear sans mari (Mark Stanley), so we have to endure a silly gaslight story where Edward steals Babbington’s letters, as he tries to poison Esther so his baby son by Clara can be Lady Denham’s only heir. Diana (Alexandra Roach siphoned off to another series) was no longer catering to and making a hypochondriac out of Arthur, much to the improvement of Arthur.

New men were supplied: a lying soldier, William Carter (Maxim Ays) who Willoughby-like pretends to the poetry-loving Alison he loves and writes poetry when it’s the physically brave and truthful Captain Fraser (Frank Blake) who’s the poet and love-letter writer. Alison is, however, an innocuous boringly innocent Marianne with no serious story about sexual awakening (as has Austen’s heroine).

On the beach during one of the many festive occasions, time out to look at one’s cell phone

I did miss Mr Stringer (Leo Suter) — we hear he is doing well as an architect in London. A mildly comic vicar-type, Rev Hankins (Kevin Elder) and his well-meaning sister-chaperon for Georgiana, Miss Beatrice Hankins, spinster (Sandy McDade) thicken the scenes’ comedy nicely (as in a recipe).

The addition with a sense of weight and original presence is Alexander Colborne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) — his romance with Charlotte had some convincing darker emotions: years before his wife, Lucy, had left him for London, not liking his tendency to a withdrawn awkward state, and been seduced by the Wickham-Lennox who provides obstacles to Charlotte and Colborne’s relationship in the form of lies (he accused Colborne of what he had done). Guilt and anger and depression keeps him isolating himself from Lucy’s daughter by Lennox (Flora Mitchell as Leonora who dresses up as a boy – some hints at a trans person there), and a resentful niece, Augusta Markam (Eloise Webb).

Charlotte has declared now that Sidney is dead, she has thought the better of marriage and will instead support herself and is hired by Colborne by the end of the first episode to care for and teach his daughters. She brings the whole family out of their obsessive cycles of reproach, self-inflicted frustration and loneliness — by her patience, compassion, inventiveness. This is the over-arching story and along with Arthur and Georgiana’s relationship, it’s the most alive and interesting matter in the season. Here is this pair learning about one another at a picnic:

Charlotte and her employer, Alexander Colbourne reach some understanding

What one can say on behalf of this very commercialized semi-Austen product in itself? First the dialogue and language in general is a cross-between 18th century styled sentences and modern demotic talk and is often witty: e.g, “how we are a stranger to our own affections” says Charlotte. Lady Denham’s way of commenting that no one chooses to be a spinster remains in our minds. The actors had to have worked hard to say lines like this in the natural quick way they do. There is a good deal of successful archness and even irony now and again. Andrew Davies’s concluding episode is the most natural seeming at this.

I very much enjoyed the imitations of story motifs and patterns in Austen’s novels: beyond those already mentioned, Rose Williams has managed to recapture the feel of the heritage Austen heroines: self-sacrifice, earnestness, perceptive behavior combines with a strong sense of selfhood. She is a kind of Elinor Dashwood blended with Elizabeth Bennet; Colborne is a Darcy figure as much as Rochester — at first Charlotte believes Lennox’s lies. Mr Lockhart’s painting Miss Lambe echoes the picture-making in Emma. The picnic again put me in mind of Emma. When Fraser gives Alison a wrapped book as a present and tells her how he values her friendship is a repeat of Edward’s gift of wrapped book to Elinor in Davies’s 2009 Sense and Sensibility so disappointing Elinor with a similar avowal and retreat.

On the other side of the wall, the other characters are listening, hoping for the proposal that finally comes

The worst: the experience is jerky, not smooth, the dialogues at time absurdly short, and as I felt with the previous season (more than 2 years ago), scenes seem not rehearsed or edited enough. I also concede that much that goes on would have horrified Austen as romance material; nevertheless, Clara’s baby out of wedlock can be found central to an off-stage and on-stage stories (e.g., Charlotte Smith’s) in the era; Charlotte Spencer shows her real talent for acting when she is transformed into a such a sweetly gratified mother upon adopting Clara’s baby. Turlough Convery, Rose Williams, Ben Lloyd-Hughes and Charlotte Spencer all provide credible varied depths of feeling to their scenes.

I noticed the film-makers used the same music as in the first season – very cheerful and sprightly and the continuity as well as the well-drawn paratext animation (cut-outs in the old Monty Python style) brings back memories lingering from the previous season.

Much good feeling

It was filmed in the same or similar places (Wales, Dyrham Park)

Again the series ended with a cliff-hanger. At the last moment when Charlotte is expecting Colborne to propose at long last, he demurs. We are left to surmise he is afraid he will disappoint her as he did his wife (Lennox needles him as also at fault in the failure of his marriage) but Charlotte is now tired of being batted about (so to speak). She took a lot of punishment from Sidney and now she is being twisted and turned off by Colborne.  The sequence goes this way:  his older daughter, Augusta, scolds him for not opening up to Miss Heywood and demands Colborne thank Charlotte deeply for all she’s done:

A family once again (and it does not matter that they are not biological father and daughters)

Colborne is to ask Charlotte to stay by marrying her.  But when he goes off to propose, Charlotte rejects him.  The series overdid this turn and undermined it thematically by having her two months later announce that she is at long last engaged to Ralph Starling (who we heard about as a long-standing suitor back at Willenden).

The sudden new information (from Sidney’s box) that Georgiana’s mother is alive after all and her determination, now that she has been taken in by the Parker family, to find her mother was another obvious bridge: there is an unaccounted for black woman who works for Colborne; she does not behave like an enslaved person. Two people I know said they expect her to turn out to be (what a coincidence! like a fairytale Shakespeare ending) Georgiana’s mother.

Flo Wilson plays the role of Mrs Wheatley (I could not find any stills of her in costume): her last name alludes to the black American 18th century poet, Phillis Wheatley

I will watch Season 3; I even look forward to it. The film-makers are trying to make a sort of Austen sequel-film, a somewhat heritage type criss-crossed by modern behavior and ideas and appropriations. We must forgive them when they pander too obviously now and again: Alison as the princess bride does not do too much harm. It is a series with its heart and mind in the right moral place: any series that can make Turlough Convery, a heavy-set non-macho male who is a superb actor (I’ve seen him as a scary thug, and in Les Miserables he was the most moving of the revolutionaries) the male we most like, admire, and know we can depend on, is worth supporting.

Arthur — the question is, did he really say it was that he was so attracted to Lockhart that he advised Georgiana not to dump him …

Ellen

Elena Ferrante’s (Anita Raja) Lost Daughter and (with help from Domenico Starnone) The Story of a Lost Child

Il Figlia oscura as translated by Ann Goldstein (a rare pleasing cover for women)

Jessie Buckley as the young Leda Carusa in the film by Maggie Gyllenhaal

Friends and readers,

The writer (or writers) of the novels who uses the pseudonym Elena Ferrante has become a more complicated person (or two persons) and her books better or more widely appreciated since last I wrote about her and them. I’ve come to some conclusions about the people, the books, their translator, and the now at least five film adaptations made. I think it important to know the true author, context, and helps to have films meant to convey a book in trying to understand, and enjoy that book. I laid out the choices of author and stances we are presented with in the author controversy when I reviewed the first novel of The Neapolitan Quartet, My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale). I’ve finished the Neapolitan Quartet, read and re-read a couple of the novellas, and then a couple of good books of criticism: The Ferrante Letters by five women authors, and In Search of Elena Ferrante by Karen Bojar as well as the obfuscating hostile statistical essays on the books as a scam by Domenico Starnone (Anita Raja’s husband, also a novelist).

What decided me the author, the person who wrote all the material in Italian is Anita Raja are her Italian translations of Christa Wolf, the famous brilliant German, whose novels and memoirs I’ve been reading over the past two to three months while reading chunks of Ferrante’s novels in the Italian.  First, Ann Goldstein is (to my mind) a misleading translator of Raja’s books: Goldstein (like many another recent commercial translator) has turned dense, difficult and ever so richly suggestive Italian prose (very long sentences) into the kind of modern simple-to-read lucid English publishers press translators of older and recent more difficult books to use. Literally it is hard to accuse Goldstein of inaccuracy, but as to the experience of these novels you are losing much that makes her one of the important women writers of the 21st century. I was chuffed when late in Bojar’s book she says how alike are the characters and a number of the plot-designs in the Neapolitan Quartet and Wolf’s Quest for Christa T; Raja’s Lila (Raffaelle Cerullo) is in type and meaning a recreation of Christa T. What’s more the Italian in both books is close in style, feel, sentence structure, and that indefinable thing called presence.

I also read Domenico Starnone’s Ties (Lacci) and, as Bojar claims, it reads like the male’s answer to Raja’s Days of Abandonment (see my review). I felt like I was meeting Nino, the cad-villain of the Neapolitan Quartet, whom both Lila and Lenu (Elena Greco) fall in love with, have babies by, who rises in life to high positions in academia, parliament (with a stint in jail that ultimately does him no harm). Here is this man who thinks so well of himself, and treats women so dismissively (whatever he might say of them when their lover). I could not compare style since the translator is Jhumpa Lahiri (who has left her husband and children and made herself over as a writer of Italian, living in Italy): Lahiri make a hard book, nothing like the flexible fluid style of Goldstein but as to outlook it is a contrast to Raja’s: Ties is a witty book, often sarcastic and ironic; it moves quickly and simply one story at a time; rearrangements of time are clarified; the author is guarded. All very unlike Raja. I am not at all convinced by the statistical studies’ walls of numbers; such studies when applied to Shakespeare have concluded 17-18 of his plays are collaborations, or not written by him at all. But I do think this “answer” to one of Raja’s books, and what I’ve read of his other books and life suggests he has had input: mostly his childhood in Naples, his male outlook. Neapolitan Quartet is so much more outward, and more in control, more mainstream, polished, less raw and openly vulnerable.

It’s my view that Ferrante ought to come out and protect her name and her work – the way George Eliot was forced to when a male claimed he had read it. Perhaps some of the denigration, the condescension, and sheer resentment would be controlled. She is in the unfortunate position of Anne Radcliffe, the later 18th century gothic writer who is today still ridiculed because she could not bear to acknowledge, much less answer her critics.

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Gaia Girace as Lila Carracci (nee Cerullo) in film by Staverio Costanza (among others, Elena Ferrante too)

To the last of The Neapolitan Quartet (Storia della bambina perduta) and Lost Daughter. The closeness in title is true to the content of the very long fourth book and the novella. All four of the novels (very mainstream with two central heroines who correspond to one another thematically) are one continued story (like Winston Graham’s Poldark books) and by the time we get to this fourth, there is so much to resolve, so many ongoing stories (see My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name [Storia della nuove cognome] and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Away [Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta], that I can’t begin to cover them here (see supersummary and the New York Times review ).  What I’d like to dwell on is the central event (though it comes about 2/3s of the way into the book) that determines the final outcome of Lila’s life: her daughter is kidnapped from her, probably murdered at the behest of the Solares. On “an ordinary Sunday” she and Enzo and Lenu and (for just that day) Pietro are cavorting outside, and they suddenly realize Tina has gone missing.

The disappearance of Tina ruins the rest of Lila’s life. She just never gets over it, partly because despite her many successes in business (making money selling, conquering digital techniques) and her finding a real man worthy of love, Enzo; despite all this, I say, in comparison to all Lenu or Elena achieved (the education, the book writing, the belonging to more upper class and therefore interesting, enlightened, enjoyable worlds), Lila has been defeated. She was turning to her children’s futures vicariously. Her son, after all by Stephano, Rino, is a deep disappointment to her: he could not escape his patriarchal brutal and anti-intellectual environment; and she poured her hope and dreams into Tina. At the same time that Lila gave birth (child by Enzo), so too Elena, truly pregnant by Nino (this cad they have both over-rated), has had a daughter, who comes to be called Imma (Elena’s mother’s name abbreviated). When Tina, Lila’s daughter is (presumably) kidnapped and killed, and enough time goes by that Lila realizes she will never have Tina back, Lila discards the business; and causes (by her angry behavior) her loving partnership with Enzo to break up.  There is only so much punishment Enzo can stand.  Lila estranges herself from everyone but what she finds in her computer and the library. It’s poignant to me how she turns back to the library (so have I, more than once), now to read and learn and write of Naples. Elena/Lenu does try to get Lila to produce a typescript that she, Elena, can edit and give to a publisher.  But Lila will or cannot conform enough.  How I felt for Lila.

Towards the end of Perduta Bambina, in another permutation of this mother-daughter paradigm, Elena finds herself caring for her mother in her mother’s old age, and forgiving her mother, her cruelty, denseness, jealousy of Elena (which but for Maestra Oliviero would have precluded Elena’s education ticket out of working class women’s lives).  We also see that part of the reason for Elena’s success as an author is her mother-in-law’s nurturing of her, a mother-as-mentor – a very ambivalent relationship.  Maestra Oliviero, the spinster elementary school teacher, is responsible for getting Elena’s parents to send her to junior high (this is a US term so I refer to its equivalent in Italy).  Prof Nadia Galiani encourages and introduces Elena to the right people; and lastly, Adele, Pietro’s mother mentors her and publishes Elena’s first novel.  In contrast, no one takes an interest in Lila once she is taken out of school at fifth grade (her father throws her out a window when she demands at age 10 to go); her mother, Nunzia means well but is very weak.  Nunzia dies off-stage.  This mother-daughter paradigm is central to all Ferrante’s work, while the friendship exploration remains almost unique to the four books, however thoroughly gone into — there are other women friends in these books, sister relationships.

Margherita Mazzucolena as Elena — when my daughter Izzy is in her usual skirts, with her glasses on she reminds me of this actress in this part and I am so proud of her

I found myself more than any of the other three identifying with Elena. This changed after I read Christa Wolf.  I finally after I had read Christa T: Christa T is Christa Wolf as open angry rebel, deeply alienated, hurt, striking out, and I can understand that and indirectly have acted that way myself (to the point of destruction of friendships), but the character who came closest to me is Elena. Consequently I got angry with her as I rarely do for characters. I could not understand how she could leave Pietro, a good man, supportive and economic support; yes he did not help her with her work, sabotaged it in part, with him she began to lead the dependent wife-life, but I felt that was forgivable as there was still room for her to go to a conference say, have a temporary liaison.

Jack Farthing (Warleggan in Poldark) as Gianni-Joe in Lost Daughter would also be perfect for Pietro in the Neapolitan Quartet

I found The Ferrante Letters so satisfying to read because all four authors (Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards) are open about this bonding; I had not come across this kind of talk about a woman’s book by women since reading Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern’s Speaking of Jane Austen. There is not only such a thing as l’ecriture-femme, one of its signs is the woman reader gets into sincere earnest dialogue with the characters and reflects on central issues of her life.

Audible set of the four from the BBC

The end of the fourth book brings us right back to the beginning of the first; we return to the two small girls and their dolls; either Lila or someone else leaves one of the original dolls (or a facsimile) in Elena’s post box, a sign that Lila has not been murdered but chosen finally to find peace in retreat (rather like Mary, Lady Mason, in Trollope’s Orley Farm, which I am now engrossed by). The second book, Nuove Cognome, opens with Elena shockingly and beyond retrieval, throwing Lila’s hard-fought for box of diaries in the Arno, whence her writing of these four books. She acknowledges or believes that all her fiction writing comes out of Lila’s ideas, first child’s book, talk. I think the fourth is aesthetically the sloppiest and overlong. It meanders and repeats itself. It stops and starts — my feeling is Starnone was too much in it, making it too “normalized” with Ferrante struggling for ambiguity, circularity. I know I need to re-read all four and will discover so much more prepared for and anticipating what is to come and see so much more than the first time through. I am prepared to buy a full subscription for HBOMax when the third season of My Brilliant Friend finally comes to US TV.

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Movie Poster

Olivia Coleman as Leda Carusa now 48 at the end of the film (one of the best reviews I’ve come across of book & film by Kayti Burt)

The Lost Daughter is not a satisfactory translation of the Italian title: much closer is The Depressed or Saddened Daughter and it refers as much to Leda and her relationship with her crude unsatisfactory inarticulate mother (it reads like a precis for Elena and her mother). Leda is also identifying far more strongly with Nina, the beautiful young woman on the beach with the spoilt daughter, Elena (the name keeps coming back), whose doll it is that Leda takes away and plays with, abuses, dresses all summer. Nina (played by Dakota Johnson in the film) is headed for a frustrated life with a dense bully of a violent husband, watched over and controlled by the sister-in-law, Rosalia (actress not listed), who is ecstatic at having become pregnant after many years of marriage; Nina is too mindless, and has not begun to break away from a lying culture, so one might say she is a lost daughter too.

The book opening:

Leda is having, or in the middle of a car accident, as the book opens. She is exhausted, wearied (her teaching job is like that of a US adjunct, she never achieved any high appointment as did her husband from whom she is separated) and needs a break. To the hospital come friends, her two daughters, Bianca and Marta and even her husband, Gianni, whom they live with, and who, she says, was a wonderful tender father when he had time to pay attention to his daughters. He won their love far more easily than she has. She remembers as she decides to go to the shore (an Ionian beach, probably middle class, and for privacy), her mother working on her (through fear) to stay safe by issuing threats of how she’s going to get drowned if she goes too close to the water. At the close of the book as the film she comes near to drowning herself.

One there she sees this huge clan of a family, Neapolitan, they are part of the clan she has escaped from. She recognizes they are enjoying themselves, but also that they are godawful in their manners. obnoxious, and the whole thing a powder keg waiting to erupt. They push other families to give them more room; she refuses she’s not quite sure why. They become hostile to her and when she leaves someone throws a hard thistle at her back, leaving a painful wound (it is also a plant which, for the superstitious, carries ill-wishes). Soon after she has made a habit of this morning “rest” (she brings papers and books), Elena goes missing; Leda finds her because she remembers the hat that Elena is wearing, her mother’s. Bu the child carries on whining (I find myself using this word for once) and vexing everyone because her doll has gone missing.
We learn in a last sentence of a section, Leda put said doll in her bag. She tells herself she’ll bring it back to the beach tomorrow, put it out there and it’ll be taken as found but she cannot get herself to give up this doll.

We then get a weaving of present time adventures with many memories. Here the book is much more successful because Gyllenhaal will not use voice-over and fears offending conventional women in the audience who have given up their lives to their children and now perpetually lie to themselves to make it seem a far happier and fulfilling choice than it ever can be.

Some of these memories:

An academic truly upper class woman named Lucilla (Dagmara Domińczyk in the film) visits and can cater to Leda’s daughters and win them over because unlike Leda, Lucilla doesn’t have to cope with them 24/7. “The woman did her enormous harm” Leda thinks now. Her children start to hit her and at first she doesn’t respond, then says stop it, and then hits them lightly but repeatedly. They do prey on her. They want her to be their doll, and I’m astonished at her that she permits this. They are jealous of one another and nag at her. At one point she becomes so over-wrought as she tries do her work, she puts Marta outside the room and then somehow the glass shatters in the door. Child not hurt, but the text quivers with her intensity of trauma and upset, she feels herself in continual crisis. But the woman also knew how to network and had connections and sent one of Leda’s papers to a Professor Hardy and at a conference, he praised her highly, got the paper published (of course they went to bed together). She remembers the difficulty of using opportunities at the university to work towards being considered for positions – how hard that is. Tell me about it. I never knew how. She wanted to act out rage but nowhere to act it.

Present time:

One day she actually tells the older pregnant woman, Rosaria about abandoning her children for 3 years. The woman of course is shocked. She actually longs to confide in Nina because she (mistakenly I feel) bonds with Nina and thinks Nina could be someone she could confide it. How wrong she is she discovers at the film’s end when Nina stabs her with the hat pin she bought for Elena. The older handyman, Gianni (Lyle in the film, Ed Harris) has come to visit and they discuss wives and husbands and their children. He offers to cook a fish he has caught; he is a good cook. He stays at first (she thinks) so he can lie to his friends about having sex. They end up confiding in one another about their relationships with their children, he boasts about how good his has been despite his early separation from his wife. He sees the doll, recognizes it, but chooses not to tell. Leda talks of how her own mother would disappear once in a while and scold the harder when she returned (this is a memory in the book transposed into this dramatic scene). In both book and film Leda tries to watch a movie one night and is made fun of by the young men who ridicule the film (one I couldn’t recognize, a sentimental one Towards the end of the story there is a dancing sequence with Nina dancing with her boor of a husband after having spent the afternoon having sex with him, and Leda, first Giovanni and then Gino (the young man who wants to go to bed with Nina and for whom Leda is ready to give up her room). It’s strange that Leda should see herself as in competition with this woman or even reach out to her –- it is so useless. But such is life.

The book returns us to the beach for her last day; she is warned that as she has produced the doll and given it back, she should get away as now the Neapolitan family will feel they have a right to have a grudge against her. The film has the near car accident that occurred at the opening of the book occur now, together with a near or acted-out suicide (to spite her mother who so threatened her not to go near the shore). In both she rolls back, and the very ending has her calling her daughters (or they call her) and we see the intense relief she experiences when they say they were worried about her. She is cheered, gladdened, and finds strength to sit there and gather herself together emotionally once more to return home to her apartment, probably in Turin — where Elena, one of the two heroines of Neapolitan Quartet, ends up, nowadays a center for Northern writers. Either way as in life nothing is resolved though much experience inwardly and some outwardly has been traversed, considered, perhaps understood better.

Naples, Old Neighborhood in My Brilliant Friend

The two girls as children reading Little Women together (same film)

Ellen