tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83110058675553477972024-03-05T01:42:27.571-06:00The Bamboo Bookcaseelizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-92158958911989950172013-03-30T11:54:00.001-05:002013-03-30T11:54:27.659-05:00My Attempt to Join the Violent Reading SocietyI loved Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books when I was little, and the last time I reread them, I realized that they weren't just great stories. They're great sources for finding new books. I found one of my favorite books of 2012, <i><a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/08/why-you-should-take-advice-from.html" target="_blank">The Beloved Vagabond</a></i>, thanks to Betsy's recommendation in <i>Betsy and the Great World.</i> The best book in the Betsy-Tacy series for recommendations, though, is the last one, <i>Betsy's Wedding</i>. That's the one in which Betsy marries Joe, and the two of them begin their lives together as struggling writers, just as real-life Maud and her husband Delos Lovelace did. It's fascinating to read this book because it gives you an idea of what it might be like to be a young literary couple in 1914 Minneapolis, and it was even more fascinating for me to see what that couple would have been reading.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cwDVlTGFIDuS_638PAD7LIFLRH5rBOeIkwJDSJLjK5r78MOKbFl8aAJ_TzQB1SYq1OiQJaUWE14vyFRzk_AL-YVFv75ejSSirFD_iOV3bUu40E5Q5pVcY3FTUob1macrscgPKsFRnwU/s1600/IMG_0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="353" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cwDVlTGFIDuS_638PAD7LIFLRH5rBOeIkwJDSJLjK5r78MOKbFl8aAJ_TzQB1SYq1OiQJaUWE14vyFRzk_AL-YVFv75ejSSirFD_iOV3bUu40E5Q5pVcY3FTUob1macrscgPKsFRnwU/s400/IMG_0001.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Betsy and Joe get engaged in this illustration by Vera Neville.</div>
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Betsy and Joe are friends with other young Minnesota writers, and they all get together regularly to share what they have been reading and writing. They call their group "The Violent Reading Society," parodying a "sedate and ladylike" book club in Minneapolis called "The Violet Reading Society." At club meetings, everyone has to bring a book to recommend to the others. They read their selections out loud and then argue about them -- sometimes loudly and vehemently, which is why they are the <i>Violent</i> Reading Society -- all while drinking tons of coffee. Here's how one of their meetings starts:</div>
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" 'First member to get both hands up reads first!' boomed President Jimmy Cliff.</div>
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Up and down the firelit living room, books, notebooks, and pencils clattered to the flood as members hastened to obey the unexpected order for two hands. One plump, dimpled pair rose with suspicious ease and the President nodded at the plump, dimpled owner.</div>
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'You win, Patty. No doubt because I warned you. However, this club is all for cheating, so you may read. And how nice that you have brought one of my favorite books!'</div>
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Tib's bewildered voice came through the hubbub of protest. 'But I never saw a club run like this! Don't you have any rules of order?'</div>
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'Miss Muller,' answered the President, 'this club is very anti rules of order.' "</div>
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Maud and Delos Lovelace in real life.</div>
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So I decided that if I couldn't join the Violent Reading Society, I would at least take a look at their reading list. What did fun-loving young writers in 1914 Minnesota read? Apparently, the Violent Reading Society likes some of the same kinds of books I do: comic writing, adventure stories, literary fairy tales, mysteries, coming-of-age stories. They read some depressing books too, but they tend toward the light-hearted in literature. (Later in the book, they almost kick Tib's awful boyfriend out of the club for insisting that everyone read serious fiction only, such as Theodore Dreiser and George Bernard Shaw.) These are the books and authors that are mentioned in <i>Betsy's Wedding</i>:</div>
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<i>Messer Marco Polo</i>, Donn Byrne</div>
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<i>Sentimental Tommy</i>, J.M. Barrie</div>
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<i>Penrod</i>, Booth Tarkington</div>
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<i>The Song of the Lark</i>, Willa Cather</div>
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<i>Speaking of Operations</i>, Irvin S. Cobb</div>
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<i>Bird and Bough</i>, John Burroughs</div>
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<i>Spoon River Anthology</i>, Edgar Lee Masters</div>
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<i>archy and mehitabel</i>, Don Marquis</div>
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Leonard Merrick</div>
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G.K. Chesterton</div>
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Sherwood Anderson</div>
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Stephen Leacock</div>
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Charles Dickens</div>
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Jack London</div>
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Some of these are authors and books I know very well (especially Charles Dickens and Jack London), but most of them were new to me. I decided to begin with <i>Messer Marco Polo</i>, which I'd never heard of before, and read my way through the list. I'll write about <i>Messer Marco Polo </i> in my next post, but for now I will just say that I loved it. The Violent Reading Society turns out to have been well worth joining.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-7936156584656689512013-03-16T16:08:00.003-05:002013-03-16T16:08:33.205-05:00A Stack of Books and a Dream HouseI teach at a university, and I use its library all the time for teaching resources and research and other work-related things. But a short while ago I realized that the university library also has novels. And then I never got any work done ever again. Okay, not really, but I did have a moment of amazement when I discovered that my library has some hard-to-find novels, ones that I have been searching for in every used bookstore for years. Here is most of my first haul:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRGAXhisGw1VnrFKJva-sfMfHc7aa5qRvV5ChbU2E5babqqAfhLQrO2zVJPK9So_tlKVahIB8hYrpRjjduedPhKBo0aFZj4QChBr9u942YuKZNJ3Vn_QDhBl7bn0CWZudaxwsi9QZxtyo/s1600/IMG_3396.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRGAXhisGw1VnrFKJva-sfMfHc7aa5qRvV5ChbU2E5babqqAfhLQrO2zVJPK9So_tlKVahIB8hYrpRjjduedPhKBo0aFZj4QChBr9u942YuKZNJ3Vn_QDhBl7bn0CWZudaxwsi9QZxtyo/s400/IMG_3396.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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Two E.H. Young novels, <i>Celia</i> and <i>Jenny Wren</i>; two Georgette Heyers; Mollie Panter-Downes' <i>One Fine Day; </i>and two D.E. Stevenson novels, <i>Mrs. Tim Gets a Job</i> and <i>The House on the Cliff</i>. I also got Mollie Panter-Downes' <i>London War Notes</i> and two more D.E. Stevensons, <i>Shoulder the Sky </i>and <i>The Blue Sapphire.</i><br />
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I was so excited about all of the D.E. Stevenson books because I had just read <i>Mrs. Tim of the Regiment</i> and <i><a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2013/01/feeling-missish.html" target="_blank">Miss Buncle's Book</a></i>, and I wanted more. The first one I read was <i>The House on the Cliff</i>, which Stevenson published in 1966.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvgDS_e7FgnoIKelhc2b4x1Zp3gyHS7g7XL9b_xESWmtd-xf42vaQzGMEnVj0jHRkCYV1Ng1__BhC_hpXKcKvSB2sepeIG2xjdvTKt-VKH6ZYSZlpeejyUJVdVIihQzrwfE8aaWjtae1o/s1600/1966.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvgDS_e7FgnoIKelhc2b4x1Zp3gyHS7g7XL9b_xESWmtd-xf42vaQzGMEnVj0jHRkCYV1Ng1__BhC_hpXKcKvSB2sepeIG2xjdvTKt-VKH6ZYSZlpeejyUJVdVIihQzrwfE8aaWjtae1o/s400/1966.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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(You can see above what my copy looks like in its library binding, but I think this is probably the cover it had originally.)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvA6hZrkWLs4zTnsqyp2q_dsd3zYEhVoaCOZIgKmY3cKu5YgjX36dN-nTANqjBjQQev6DsKjGhS5VNh6iuep8kKuwHCz6nczDrY39Jk6eCX71vUym1u3ko8ognyGl-mkjd3wM3AqvC078/s1600/1978.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvA6hZrkWLs4zTnsqyp2q_dsd3zYEhVoaCOZIgKmY3cKu5YgjX36dN-nTANqjBjQQev6DsKjGhS5VNh6iuep8kKuwHCz6nczDrY39Jk6eCX71vUym1u3ko8ognyGl-mkjd3wM3AqvC078/s400/1978.jpg" width="268" /></a></div>
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(And here is the hilariously cheesy cover of the 1978 edition.)</div>
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<i>The House on the Cliff</i> is a perfect example of one of my favorite genres, the girl-gets-a-house book. You know the kind of story I mean. It's about a woman who buys or inherits a house. Ideally it should be a beautiful old house in a gorgeous setting, and there should be a community of eccentric neighbors. Sometimes there is a villain who wants to force the woman out, as in Elizabeth von Arnim's <i>The Benefactress</i>. Sometimes there are children who come to live in the house, as in Elizabeth Goudge's <i>Pilgrim Inn</i>. The woman almost always falls in love, but her most important relationship in the book is the one she has with her house.</div>
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The woman in <i>The House on the Cliff</i> is Elfrida Ware, and she is a struggling young actress in London, overworked and underfed. The house (spoiler: it's on a cliff) is in Devonshire, and it's not exactly beautiful, but it is strong and old and solidly built. Elfrida inherits it from a grandmother she never knew, and here is what one of the lawyers handling the will has to say about it:</div>
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"It's a real house. It has been there, sitting on top of the cliff for hundreds of years; it looks as if it had grown there, like a mushroom ... no, not like a mushroom (they're impermanent); it's more like a fine old tree, deeply rooted in the soil."</div>
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And that description explains why I love this kind of book. I love the idea that a house can give you a sense of permanence, that it can connect you to the landscape, that it can be so deeply rooted that you get your own roots just by living here. Elfrida's house is exactly the right kind of house to give her roots. It has everything: a bedroom that looks out on the sea, an ancient kitchen full of blue-and-white china, flower gardens, fruit trees, a farm with pigs and a cow, a stream with banks of primroses and violets -- oh, and it also comes with a cook and gardener who don't even want wages. So basically the ultimate wish-fulfillment house.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwyWrdclrkazeKnUbu71LCH9juqclpMa8H16P_oh-El_jvewRw_VAQJ_5nVcdgQEQDLvzlaU1ed9N1xH1SM53VSHjK3i4MZnKfezikRcd1YdWFNsGEh27859y229EZp6NsUNpMxoaXJWg/s1600/house+on+a+cliff+parc+naturel+marin+d'iroise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwyWrdclrkazeKnUbu71LCH9juqclpMa8H16P_oh-El_jvewRw_VAQJ_5nVcdgQEQDLvzlaU1ed9N1xH1SM53VSHjK3i4MZnKfezikRcd1YdWFNsGEh27859y229EZp6NsUNpMxoaXJWg/s400/house+on+a+cliff+parc+naturel+marin+d'iroise.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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(I live in an apartment in a part of the world that doesn't really have cliffs. But maybe I should relocate to somewhere more like <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/12611735" target="_blank">this</a>?)</div>
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It's not just the perfection of the house that makes <i>The House on the Cliff</i> so satisfying. The story has all of the right elements. There is a character who is scheming to steal the house away from Elfrida, there is a child who comes for a life-changing visit to the house, and there are several men who might be romantic matches for Elfrida, one of whom is thoroughly unlikable. This book also has many of the qualities that I loved in the other D.E. Stevenson books I've read. <i>The House on the Cliff</i> isn't as witty as the Miss Buncle books, but it has the same sense of humor, the same sort of quirky characters, and the same absorbing interest in the everyday details of life. I think that those are the things that keep me searching for more and more books by D.E. Stevenson.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-1005523807805809762013-02-19T18:45:00.002-06:002013-02-19T18:45:21.191-06:00The Female Quixote (Also, Manatees)I'm sorry that I've been absent from blogging for a little while. There was some extra work, and there was also an unexpected trip which involved swimming with these creatures:<br />
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(Manatees are both cute and terrifying in person.)</div>
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I haven't been posting, but I have been reading a lot. One of the best things I've read over the past few weeks is Charlotte Lennox's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Female-Quixote-Girlebooks-Classics-ebook/dp/B0013MXX0S/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1361319048&sr=8-2&keywords=female+quixote" target="_blank">The Female Quixote; or, the Adventures of Arabella</a></i>. I was surprised by how much fun I had reading this book. I picked it up because I'd read that it was a favorite of Jane Austen's but I thought that the subject -- a parody of <i>Don Quixote</i>, written in 1752, about a young woman who reads too many romances -- might be somewhat dry. Fortunately, I was wrong: <i>The Female Quixote</i> is hilarious and charming.</div>
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It's about Arabella, who grows up on her country estate away from regular society, and becomes obsessed with the 17th-century French romances that she reads. She takes these books as an accurate portrayal of the world, and she lives her life as if she were a heroine in a romance. I didn't know much about this kind of romance before reading <i>The Female Quixote</i>, but I learned that they were hugely popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were massive tomes -- <i>Artamene, or Cyrus the Great</i>, by Madeleine and Georges de Scudery, took up ten volumes and might be the longest book ever written. All of the romances were set in a highly fictionalized ancient world, in places like Greece, Egypt, and Persia, and they all involve noble ladies whose beauty and wit drive men to perform epic acts of heroism to win them. When the characters in these romances aren't being captured by bandits or enchanted by sorceresses, they are delivering long, flowery speeches. In spite of all of this, I really want to read <i>Artamene</i> now. But I don't think I'm capable of making it through the original French version, even though <a href="http://www.artamene.org/" target="_blank">the whole thing</a> is available online.<br />
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So Arabella lives in one of these fantastic romance worlds. In her mind. In real life, she is the only daughter of a Marquis, living alone with her father in an amazing house with gardens and a vast library. For me, that world is romantic enough. In fact, one of the things I loved about <i>The Female Quixote</i> was how much it reminded me of a Georgette Heyer romance. Arabella has some things in common with Eustacie in <i>The Talisman Ring</i>, the young woman who dreams of marrying a bandit, or possibly being sentenced to the guillotine. Both books also have a character called the Beau -- the one in <i>The Female Quixote</i> is a vapid fashion-plate with the wonderful name of Mr. Tinsel.<br />
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(The real Beau, George "Beau" Brummel, by Richard Dighton, 1805.)</div>
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I loved Arabella from the moment I heard that "from her earliest Youth she had discovered a Fondness for Reading." Arabella is also beautiful, well-dressed, and possesses "an Air of Dignity and Grace." But what really draws everyone to her is her intelligence. Yes, she is delusional, but she's so eloquent and witty that people tend to believe her delusions. She even attracts two suitors who want to marry her, and most of the plot of the book revolves around her relationship to them. How can Arabella choose between the man who truly loves her and the man who wants her money? It's especially hard because she won't even let anyone declare his love to her:</div>
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"However specious your Arguments may appear, interrupted <i>Arabella</i>, I am persuaded it is an unpardonable crime to tell a Lady you love her ... I am certain, that <i>Statira, Parisatis, Clelia, Mandana</i>, and all the illustrious Heroines of Antiquity, whom it is a Glory to resemble, would never admit of such Discourses.</div>
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Ah for Heaven's sake, Cousin, interrupted <i>Glanville</i>, endeavouring to stifle a Laugh, do not suffer yourself to be governed by such antiquated Maxims! The World is quite different to what it was in those Days ...<br />
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I am sure, replied Arabella, the World is not more virtuous now than it was in their Days, and there is good Reason to believe it is not much wiser ..."<br />
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<i>The Female Quixote</i> deals with the virtues of both worlds -- the world of the romances and the contemporary world of the 18th century -- and it makes fun of them both. And even though I live more than 250 years later than Arabella, and I've never read a 17th-century romance, I found the whole book really funny. There are wonderful scenes which bring the two worlds into collision, such as the scene where Arabella goes to Bath, and we get to see what an ancient heroine would do when confronted with the fashionable set of 1752. I bet Jane Austen loved that scene too.<br />
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<i>The Female Quixote</i> isn't as perfect as a Jane Austen novel, but it's easy to see why it was one of her favorite books. I think that anyone who loves Jane Austen will probably love this book too.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-343095899234382702013-01-29T20:50:00.002-06:002013-01-29T20:50:47.441-06:00Miss Mole<i>Miss Mole</i> is my favorite of the E.H. Young books that I've read. Which is not that many -- she wrote thirteen novels, and I've read only four of them: <i>Miss Mole, The Misses Mallett, Jenny Wren, </i>and <i>Celia</i>. But <i>Miss Mole</i> is the one that I try to force people to read, because it's so good.<br />
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I think that E.H. Young was a genius at characterization. How did she make her heroines so flawed and so likable at the same time? Hannah Mole seems completely real to me. She's a plain woman of about forty, a farmer's daughter with a good education and very little money, who is forced to make her living as a housekeeper. She is occasionally self-pitying, deceitful, and sharp-tongued, but all of her faults are offset by her imagination, her love of beauty, and her kindness to everyone around her. Also, like all of E.H. Young's heroines, Miss Mole has beautiful feet. (Isn't it strange when you find that kind of quirk in an author? It's like in L.M. Montgomery books where all of the heroines have thin, pale faces, or in Josephine Tey mysteries where the villains always have pale blue eyes.) Oh, and also, Miss Mole has a scandalous secret in her past. I love a misfit heroine with a scandalous past!<br />
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Miss Mole takes a job as housekeeper to a widowed minister, a controlling man with high principles, and she befriends his two daughters. As I've come to expect from an E.H. Young novel, the family relationships are wonderfully complex. But as Miss Mole sees it, every relationship is full of possibility. One of the things I like best about this book is the way that Miss Mole is constantly imagining that something good is just about to happen to her -- that the curmudgeonly old neighbor will leave her a fortune in his will, that the dashing uncle of the family will fall in love with her and take her away to a new life. What really happens to her, though, is completely unexpected. I probably should have seen the end of this book coming, but I did not, and I loved the surprise.<br />
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(I love the cover art by Ruth Cobb in <a href="http://www.yesterdaysgallery.com/pages/books/21227/e-h-young/miss-mole" target="_blank">this first edition</a>, published in 1930.)</div>
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Reading E.H. Young books will make you want to live in Radstowe, Young's fictionalized version of Bristol, with its lovely old buildings and river mists. I have no idea what actual Bristol is like, but fictional Radstowe is gorgeous. Some of my favorite parts of the book are the scenes where Miss Mole walks around Radstowe, drinking in the beauty of the city and imagining things. Take this passage, for example:</div>
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"There was her walk on the hill overlooking the water, with the bright tree showing through a grey mist which seemed to darken when the wings of a swooping gull flashed through it: there was the sound of unseen ships hooting or booming at the turn of the river and, at her will, she had been able to imagine them as huge amphibians, calling to each other as they floundered in the water and sought the hidden banks, or she could acknowledge them as the sirens of ships which were coming home from distant places or setting out on fresh voyages, and standing up there with the soft rain on her face, she had marvelled at the richness of human life in which imagination could create strange beasts though facts were sufficient in themselves ..."</div>
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(This is a 1920s souvenir postcard of Bristol, and is basically how I imagine Radstowe.)</div>
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I think that Miss Mole must be a little like E.H. Young herself. Young does the same thing that Miss Mole does: she transforms her world into something beautiful, without ever forgetting the reality behind it. That is a marvelous gift, and it's what makes <i>Miss Mole</i> the book that I push into people's hands, demanding that they read it right now.</div>
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Read this book right now!</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-23720132552683210492013-01-27T10:58:00.001-06:002013-01-29T21:53:05.992-06:00The Dark Fairy Tale of The Misses Mallett<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8131" target="_blank"><i>The Misses Mallett</i> <i>(The Bridge Dividing)</i></a>, by E. H. Young, was the least cozy and most unsettling of all of <a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2013/01/feeling-missish.html" target="_blank">the "Miss" books that I read recently</a>. But I loved it. The blurb on the back of my Virago edition says, "Of Young's twelve witty novels, this, her fourth, first published in 1922, is the most reminiscent of Jane Austen." That blurb is why I bought the book in the first place, but I didn't really see much Jane Austen in <i>The Misses Mallett.</i> Yes, it's about sisters in a wealthy family who are contemplating the prospect of marriage, and it is witty and satirical, but it's much less <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> and much more a kind of dark retelling of Cinderella.<br />
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There are four Misses Mallett. The best characters, as far as I'm concerned, are the two eldest sisters, Caroline and Sophia, two old ladies who refuse to acknowledge their age. Caroline is stout and dashing, while Sophia is tiny and sweet, but they both delight in rouge and debutante dresses. They could easily have been pathetic figures, but E. H. Young makes them seem magnificent. I especially wanted to hang out with Caroline, who leaves French novels around her parlor and tells shocking stories about her heart-breaking days. "We're all wrapped up in cotton-wool nowadays," she says. "I ought to have lived in another century. I, too, would have adorned a court, and kept it lively! There's no wit left in the world, and there's no wickedness of the right kind." And even though Caroline is deluded about her past -- she never really shocked anyone, and her love affairs have been mainly imaginary -- her eccentricity adds to the fairytale atmosphere of the book. She does seem to belong to another century, or to a magical time that never existed. When Caroline tells her outrageous anecdotes, her stepsister Rose remembers "her childhood, when, like a happier Cinderella, she had seen her stepsisters, in satins and laces, with pendant fans and glitter jewels, excited, rustling, with little words of commendation for each other, setting out for the evening parties of which they never tire. They had always kissed her before they went, looking, she used to think, as beautiful as princesses."<br />
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(Edmund Dulac's illustration of Cinderella at the ball, 1910.)</div>
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The story of <i>The Misses Mallett</i> is really about the two youngest Misses Mallett and their tangled relationships. It's about the calm, secretive Rose and her niece Henrietta, a prickly young woman with her own Cinderella story. Henrietta's father was disowned by his family for making a bad marriage, and Henrietta was raised in poverty by her mother. After her mother dies, she comes to live a life of wealth and status with her aristocratic sisters. It's at that point that Henrietta falls in love with Francis Sales, the country squire who might be the prince to her Cinderella. The problem is that Rose is also in love with Francis, and the other problem is that Francis is already married to someone else.</div>
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Even though this is a romance, the most compelling relationships are the ones between the Malletts, especially the complicated relationship that Henrietta has with Rose. But what I really loved in this book were the fairy tale elements: the coaches, the balls, the gowns, the enchanted forests and lakes, and the disturbing twist that E. H. Young puts into each of these. Henrietta meets her lover by a moonlit lake, but she ends up rejecting him. The sisters attend a fantastic ball, but it ends not in a coronation but in a death. I loved how all of the characters kept shifting roles -- each one seems like Cinderella at some point in the story, but at other points they are foolish stepsisters, wicked witches, an evil stepmother, or a fairy godmother. I was anxious to see which (if any) of the Misses Mallett would live happily ever after. And even though this is not a thoroughly happy book, I found the ending very satisfying. It made me want to read everything that E. H. Young ever wrote.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-15072085104724098192013-01-10T14:11:00.001-06:002013-01-10T14:11:10.677-06:00Feeling MissishThis week I realized that, somehow, all of the books I was reading had "Miss" in the title. I read <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Miss-Buncles-Book-D-E-Stevenson/dp/1402270828/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1357846303&sr=8-2&keywords=d+e+stevenson" target="_blank">Miss Buncle's Book</a></i>, by D.E. Stevenson, and its sequel<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Miss-Buncle-Married-D-E-Stevenson/dp/1402272529/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y" target="_blank">Miss Buncle Married</a></i>, and I also read two books by E.H. Young, <i>Miss Mole</i> and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Misses-Mallett-Bridge-Dividing-ebook/dp/B000JQUY2O/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357846907&sr=1-2&keywords=misses+mallett" target="_blank">The Misses Mallett</a></i>. I must have been in the mood for a certain type of book: a book with quirky characters in a picturesque town, a book that is cozy and unsettling at the same time, a book about an unmarried woman who sees herself as being almost too old to have a romance, but not quite.<br />
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I was going to write about all four books -- and all six Misses -- in this post, but I ended up having more to say than I thought I would. So I'll start with the two D.E. Stevenson books, <i>Miss Buncle's Book</i> and <i>Miss Buncle Married</i>.<br />
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(This is not how I imagine Miss Buncle. Even after she gets a new hat.)</div>
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(This is a better cover, a 1930s/40s edition that I found in <a href="http://www.dalyght.ca/DEStevenson/des_monahan/hb_30_40.html" target="_blank">this fantastic collection of D.E. Stevenson cover art</a>. I'm still amazed that the internet contains a collection of D.E. Stevenson cover art!)</div>
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<i>Miss Buncle's Book</i> is the coziest of this group, about the sleepy village of Silverstream, where Miss Buncle lives. Miss Buncle is "a thin, dowdy woman of forty" with no money, a terrible hat, and an inability to express herself in conversation. But she also has a gift for seeing everyone exactly as they are and then writing her observations down. She publishes a novel set in a thinly-disguised version of Silverstream, and in the novel the two sides of her personality are reflected: she bases a character on herself, a quiet old maid, but she is also represented in her book by a Golden Boy, a magical godlike character who walks through the village and changes everyone's lives. In the actual village of Silverstream, it's Miss Buncle who transforms the village -- by writing her book and showing the villagers what they are really like. So<i> </i>this is a book about a book, and it's totally metaliterary. For one thing, Miss Buncle's book is written in the same style as <i>Miss Buncle's Book</i>, if that makes sense. Miss Buncle is supposed to have written her book in deceptively simple language that makes the satirical portraits of her neighbors even funnier. And D.E. Stevenson combines simplicity and satire in the same way. The difference is that Miss Buncle is a more innocent writer: she writes the truth about her friends without seeing that it's funny, whereas D.E. Stevenson is definitely in on all of the jokes. And the jokes are very funny, like E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia books, only with a metaliterary twist. Oh, and later, Miss Buncle writes a <i>second </i>book in which the character based on her writes a book, and the metaliterariness (if that's a word) gets completely out of control.</div>
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(This is the most recent edition of <i>Miss Buncle Married</i>.)</div>
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(But look at this cover from the 1970s! It's like an old Harlequin Romance.)</div>
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I'm not going to worry about spoiling the ending of <i>Miss Buncle's Book</i>, because the sequel is called <i>Miss Buncle Married, </i>so you already know how it turns out. <i>Miss Buncle Married</i> finds the former Miss Buncle trying to navigate her world without publishing novels about it. She does seem to wield a frightening power in the first book -- she can control people's lives with her writing! In the second book, she's trying to avoid using her artistic power because of the repercussions that she suffered earlier. But she can't stop observing people and meddling with their lives. She befriends a pompous artist and his wild children, and she tries to direct the course of the romance between her nephew-in-law and his girlfriend. But things don't go quite the way she plans them, which leads to some hilarious scenes in this book, and also to some disturbing ones. In the end -- and now I am going to give away the ending of the book -- Miss Buncle decides that the best way to control other people is to be a wife and mother. This is the part that <a href="http://shelflove.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/miss-buncle-married/" target="_blank">Teresa from Shelf Love</a> found so off-putting, and I agree, although I see why Stevenson ends the book this way. But: "She had a man -- all her own -- with his life to make or mar; a house -- the house of her dreams -- where her lightest word was law," and soon she will have a child "to cherish and control." Wow, D.E. Stevenson. That's a disturbing way to put it. It doesn't mean, though, that I'm not dying to read the third Miss Buncle book (I'll never be able to stop calling her Miss Buncle, even though the third book is called <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Two-Mrs-Abbotts-D-E-Stevenson/dp/0002438070/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_har?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357848625&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=two+mrs.+abbots" target="_blank">The Two Mrs. Abbotts</a></i>), which should have a new edition out in the U.S. next year. </div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-67720372565115483682012-12-30T17:09:00.000-06:002012-12-30T17:09:02.326-06:00The Heir of Redclyffe and My EmotionsI'm ending the year by finishing a book that I've had on my to-read list for a long time, <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2505" target="_blank">The Heir of Redclyffe</a></i>, by Charlotte Yonge. I first heard about this book in <i>Little Women</i>, when Meg finds Jo "eating apples and crying over <i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i>," and then <a href="http://tbr313.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Lisa May</a> mentioned it back in November. (And now I can read <a href="http://tbr313.blogspot.com/2012/01/heirs-of-redclyffe.html" target="_blank">her review</a> -- I've been waiting to finish the book myself first.) I thought that if Jo and Lisa May both liked it, it would probably be excellent, and I was not disappointed. <i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i> actually kept me up late because I couldn't stop reading it -- a thing that book blurbs always say will happen, but that rarely happens to me because I really, really like sleep.<br />
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(<i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i> was published in 1853, but this is the 1882 edition with illustrations by Kate Greenaway.)</div>
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One of the reasons I found <i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i> so engrossing was that I disliked Philip Morville so much. He's such a well-drawn character: his role in the story is that of the villain, but he isn't really villainous, just arrogant and condescending and snobbish. (Oh, and he calls Dickens "cheap rubbish," and he dismisses <i>Le Morte d'Arthur</i> as being for children only. Grrrr.) He's basically decent, though, and he doesn't really mean to do the awful things he does. I could imagine him being the friend of a friend -- <i>someone</i> could like him, but I couldn't. I loved the scene where Philip's cousin Guy, the hero of the book, is telling a story, and Philip interrupts him with a Latin tag, a quotation from Horace -- because Philip is <i>exactly</i> the kind of person who would interrupt someone else's story with a Latin tag -- and when Guy caps Philip's quotation with the next line from the Horace poem, Guy mispronounces a Latin vowel, and Philip freaks out. It's the word "ovium" ("of the sheep"), and Guy says "ah-vium" instead of "oh-vium," to which Philip says, horrified, "Do anything but take liberties with Horace!" This is hilarious because it's a ridiculously small mistake, and I would be so impressed if any of my students could quote Horace like Guy. But Guy's pronunciation reveals that he hasn't had an aristocratic education at a private school, and that's what horrifies Philip. Ugh, <i>Philip</i>.</div>
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(Look at Guy's sad eyes in this Kate Greenaway illustration! How can Philip be so terrible to him?)</div>
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I liked Guy Morville, and I liked Amabel, who is underappreciated by her family and taught to think of herself as "silly little Amy," but who turns out to be secretly strong-minded. But my favorite character was Amy's brother Charles. I was surprised when I encountered Charles, because he seemed so familiar to me. It was like seeing a beloved actor in a new role. And then I realized that I knew Charles because he must have been the inspiration for Aubrey Lanyon in my favorite Georgette Heyer romance, <i>Venetia</i>. There are some differences between the two, but both Aubrey and Charles are bookish invalids who suffer from "a disease of the hip-joint" (that's a quotation from both Heyer and Yonge). Both have a cutting wit, and both tyrannize over their sisters. And even though Aubrey and Charles are fundamentally selfish, I can't help liking them both. Charles makes me happy every time he deflates Philip's pompousness with one of his jokes.</div>
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(Guy doing some gardening.)</div>
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I was glad that I read <i><a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012_11_01_archive.html" target="_blank">Sintram and His Companions</a></i> before I read <i>The Heir of Redclyffe, </i>because the story of Sintram informs the whole novel. Guy Morville admits that he is "foolish about Sintram," and that he sees himself as the title character. Sintram is the Viking prince who is followed through his life by two terrifying figures, an impish little man in a pointy hat, who turns out to be Sin, and a pale old man dressed in bones, who turns out to be Death. Guy identifies with Sintram so much because he too is fighting against his own sinful nature, struggling against his family's violent past, and trying to make his peace with death.<i> </i>Charlotte Yonge even recasts some scenes from <i>Sintram</i> in <i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i>: a storm at sea, a melancholy Christmas spent in solitary meditation, the separation of the main character from his true love. I do think it's a little strange that Guy keeps referring to the woman he loves as "my Verena." Verena is not Sintram's true love; she's his <i>mother</i>. I mean, I know Guy is talking about Verena's saintly influence on Sintram, but still.</div>
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(Verena, illustrated by Gordon Browne.)</div>
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Like <i>Sintram</i>, <i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i> is a sad story. But <i>Sintram </i>is more of a gloomy fantasy, while <i>The Heir of Redclyffe </i>is a tragedy. I did cry over it, just like Jo March. But I loved it, and I'm hoping to read more books by Charlotte Yonge in 2013. (<i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3292" target="_blank">The Clever Woman of the Family</a></i> is on my bedside table right now.)</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-89663324691748115012012-12-24T23:55:00.000-06:002012-12-25T00:01:11.876-06:00Christmas with Rat and MoleThe Christmas scene that I love the most might be the one from <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/289" target="_blank">The Wind in the Willows</a></i>, the chapter called "Dulce Domum" ("Sweet Home"). I love its contrast between the cold winter night and the warm, bright home full of feasting and friends. To me, that's the essence of Christmas, and<i> </i>Kenneth Grahame does it so well.<br />
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Nothing makes me feel colder than reading about Mole and Rat as they travel their cold road through the village, watching all the cozy scenes of domestic life through the windows of the houses. They are especially affected by the sight of a sleepy canary in his cage, which makes perfect sense, because he is their exact opposite. Mole and Rat are independent animals with their own cares and worries, but the canary is a pet who is cared for completely. He never has to go outside in the winter. In fact, his cage is like a little house, making him the ultimate inside animal: he's so domestic that he has a house <i>inside</i> a house. Meanwhile Mole and Rat are freezing outside: "Then a gust of bitter wind took them in the back of the neck, a small sting of frozen sleet on the skin woke them as in a dream, and they knew their toes to be cold and their legs tired, and their own home distant a weary way."<br />
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(Arthur Rackham's illustration of Mole and Rat in the snow.)</div>
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But then nothing makes me feel warmer than reading about Mole's house, once the field-mice show up to sing a Christmas carol. At this point the Rat has warmed up the house by lighting a fire. Mole hasn't been in his house since the spring, and the only food he has is an old sausage, a box of hardtack, and a tin of sardines, but the Rat finds four bottles of beer left in Mole's cellar. (<i>The Wind in the Willows </i>contains much more alcohol than one would ever find in a contemporary children's book; it's like the <i>Mad Men</i> of children's literature.) And then the young field-mice arrive to sing a carol at Mole's door, and the Rat invites them in for mulled ale and a feast (which one of them will have to go out and buy). This is where Mole and Rat finally get the domestic warmth that they longed for earlier in the story. "It did not take long to prepare the brew and thrust the tin heater well into the red heart of the fire, and soon every field-mouse was sipping and coughing and choking (for a little mulled ale goes a long way) and wiping his eyes and laughing and forgetting he had ever been cold in his life."</div>
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(Illustration by E.H. Shephard.)</div>
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There is so much to think about in this chapter: how the animals never mention Christmas, except vaguely in the carol (maybe because, as we see in "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," they worship Pan); how the class differences between Mole and Rat show themselves (Mole's house, with its skittle-alley and yard art, is decidedly middle-class, while the Rat and his other friends are more aristocratic). But what I really like about "Dulce Domum" is how well it describes the experience of going home for the holidays. It covers all aspects, beginning with "the last long stretch, the home stretch, the stretch that we know is bound to end, some time, in the rattle of the door-latch, the sudden fire-light, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travellers from far over-sea." Then there is Mole's unsettling feeling that things are different than he remembered them -- in his case, his house is smaller and shabbier than the places of his new life -- and finally, there is his joy at homecoming and his realization that his old home will be part of him forever. He sees "the value of some such anchorage in one's existence." He doesn't want to leave his new life, "but it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."</div>
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This is the season when I'm glad I have my own anchorage, and I wish you all an anchorage in your existences, of one sort or another. Merry Christmas!</div>
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(Another illustration by Arthur Rackham, this one of Rat and Mole about to enjoy some Christmas beer.)</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-54905432922294605902012-12-20T14:23:00.000-06:002012-12-20T14:36:03.677-06:00Christmas with SherlockEvery year I almost forget, and then happily rediscover, that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a Sherlock Holmes Christmas story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." (It's in <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661" target="_blank">The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</a></i>, and you can also read or listen to the story online <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Blue_Carbuncle" target="_blank">here</a>.) It's satisfyingly Holmesian -- London streets with gaslights, surly criminals, eccentric behavior from Sherlock -- and also satisfyingly Christmasy, with frosty weather and a Christmas goose. There are many things to love about "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle:"<br />
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1. The way that Holmes comes across the goose. Of course he doesn't go to the store and buy one. No, the goose appears slung across the back of a mysterious figure in the streets of London on Christmas Eve. The man with the goose is attacked, Holmes' policeman friend Peterson tries to stop the attack, and everyone but the officer runs away, leaving the goose in the street. Naturally Peterson takes the goose to Holmes to see what he makes of the incident, and Holmes concludes that Peterson should eat the goose himself. Would I eat something for my Christmas dinner that had been dropped in the street under mysterious circumstances? Probably not. But obviously it's a good thing that Peterson does roast the goose, because that's how he discovers that hidden inside the goose is an extremely rare jewel, the blue carbuncle.<br />
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2. The blue carbuncle. What <i>is</i> it? I spent way too much time thinking about this question. According to Holmes, it's "more than a precious stone. It is <i>the </i>precious stone." At first I thought it was a diamond, because Peterson tells Holmes that it can cut glass. It's "brilliantly scintillating," and diamonds can be blue, or at least bluish.</div>
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(For example, the Hope Diamond is blue.)</div>
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But Holmes says that the stone is "remarkable in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is blue in shade instead of ruby red." Carbuncles are red jewels, either garnets or rubies. But this can't be a ruby, because blue rubies are sapphires, which are lovely but not particularly remarkable. The blue carbuncle has to be completely fictional. Then I discovered, though, that blue garnets do exist. They were discovered in Madagascar in the 1990s. They won't cut glass, and they aren't worth as much as Holmes' blue carbuncle, but they are bright blue, sparkly, and very rare.</div>
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(You can buy your own blue carbuncle <a href="http://www.civilminerals.com/id104.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)</div>
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So now I think that Conan Doyle was prescient. The jewel in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" wouldn't be discovered for a hundred more years.</div>
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4. The opening scene, where Watson discovers that Holmes has been spending the post-Christmas holiday dissecting a hat:</div>
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"I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back lay a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of examination.</div>
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5. The conclusion that Holmes draws from the evidence of the hat about the hat's owner: "He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral regression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him."</div>
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5. The way that Holmes gets a witness to produce evidence by betting him he doesn't know the information Holmes needs: "When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pink'un" target="_blank">'Pink 'un'</a> protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet."</div>
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7. The cheerfulness of this story, even in the midst of crimes like theft and assault. Sherlock Holmes seems to be in such a good mood during the whole "Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." Maybe it's the Christmas spirit.</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-36440579237519054212012-12-17T18:26:00.001-06:002012-12-17T18:26:16.767-06:00Christmas in The Box of Delights<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Delights-York-Review-Childrens-Collection/dp/1590172515/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355789227&sr=1-1&keywords=box+of+delights" target="_blank">The Box of Delights</a></i>, written by John Masefield in 1935, is a classic children's novel, but I read it for the first time last Christmas. Before last year, I didn't even know that John Masefield wrote children's books. I thought he was just the <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Salt-water-poems-ballads-John-Masefield/dp/1178339408" target="_blank">Salt Water Ballads</a></i> guy, the guy who wrote "Sea Fever." ("I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide/ Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.") But then I got a book called <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spellbound-Fantasy-Diana-Wynne-Jones/dp/0753461447/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355789124&sr=1-1&keywords=spellbound+diana+wynne+jones" target="_blank">Spellbound</a></i>, a compilation of Diana Wynne Jones' favorite fantasy stories -- highly recommended, by the way -- and in that book I read an excerpt of <i>The Box of Delights</i>. Now John Masefield is one of the authors I read every Christmas.<br />
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<i>The Box of Delights</i> is about Kay, a boy who comes into the possession of a magical box during his Christmas holidays. The title is also a description of the book itself, which is crammed full of every possible thing you could want in a story, at least if you were a boy in the 1930s: time travel, jewel thieves, wolves, an evil wizard, talking animals, gangsters who fly stealth airplanes, mysterious strangers, gods and goddesses, pirates, and magical transformations on almost every page. This book is a lavish entertainment.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyyQUCRAYq2bVVzxwOn8CDMMoRu6SjmyNKQAr5OFpV-I0mzDh5ZmqFQ6ImAVOcAFOXfxAELRaGFif4aptVGn16LXnMgph51waBnGtW0ppN1AHKRrF8L5milJDUxuC_7rjLLvJhaQmv4Xc/s1600/Box-of-Delights-780.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyyQUCRAYq2bVVzxwOn8CDMMoRu6SjmyNKQAr5OFpV-I0mzDh5ZmqFQ6ImAVOcAFOXfxAELRaGFif4aptVGn16LXnMgph51waBnGtW0ppN1AHKRrF8L5milJDUxuC_7rjLLvJhaQmv4Xc/s640/Box-of-Delights-780.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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(The endpapers, illustrated by Judith Masefield, give you a sample of some of the book's variety.)</div>
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Its Christmas scenes are lavish too, especially the Christmas party that Kay and his friends attend at Tatchester Palace. They have "the biggest and most glorious Christmas Tree that had ever been seen in Tatchester," decorated with glass globes and electric lights, and stuffed full of incredible toys. It takes John Masefield almost two pages to describe all of these toys: whistles, drums, popguns, swords, dolls, teddy-bears, trains and railways, airplanes, farms, zoos, aquariums, soldiers, bricks, books, sewing kits with silver thimbles, costumes, jewelry, toy boats, and all kinds of candy. And there's more:</div>
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"All round this marvellous tree were wonderful crackers, eighteen inches long. The Bishop made all the children stand in a double rank round the tree, each with one end of a cracker in each hand. The musicians struck up a tune and they danced in the double rank three times round the Christmas Tree. Then the Bishop gave the word: they pulled the crackers, which went off with a bang together, like cannons. And then, inside the crackers there were the most lovely decorations -- real little tiny coats of coloured paper that you could put on, with the most splendid hats and necklets like real gold."</div>
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(A <a href="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ORIGINAL-BATGERS-CRACKERS-BOX-TOP-LABEL-FIREWORKS-1930s-/390480112641" target="_blank">1930s label</a> for a box of Christmas crackers. I love how happy the random dragon in back is.)</div>
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This is a book in which one boy gets everything he has always wanted. That doesn't just include Christmas presents. In one scene, Kay enters an enchanted forest and meets Herne the Hunter, the horned spirit of the woods, who grants some of Kay's lifelong wishes by turning him into a stag, a wild duck, and a fish. The forest is just as rich and beautiful as Kay's Christmas party:</div>
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"... For there he was in the forest between the two hawthorn trees, with the petals of the may-blossom falling on him. All the may-blossoms that fell were talking to him, and he was aware of what all the creatures of the forest were saying to each other: what the birds were singing, and what it was that the flowers and trees were thinking. And he realized that the forest went on and on for ever, and all of it was full of life beyond anything he had ever imagined: for in the trees, in each leaf, and on every twig, and in every inch of soil there were ants, grubs, worms; little, tiny moving things, incredibly small yet thrilling with life.</div>
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'Oh dear,' Kay said. 'I shall never know a hundredth part of all the things there are to know.'</div>
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'You will, if you stay with me,' Herne the Hunter said."</div>
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(George Cruikshank's print of Herne the Hunter, 1840s.)</div>
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Later in <i>The Box of Delights</i>, Herne takes on the role of Santa Claus, taking Kay for a ride in a glittery, icy sleigh driven by a team of flying unicorns. Is it strange that two of my favorite Christmas books -- <i>The Box of Delights</i> and <i><a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/12/christmas-in-dark-is-rising.html" target="_blank">The Dark is Rising</a></i> -- feature Herne the Hunter? I think that Susan Cooper must have been inspired by <i>The Box of Delights</i>, even though <i>The Dark is Rising</i> is so different in tone. <i>The Box of Delights</i> has some serious moments, but it's not a work of epic fantasy. It's more like a magic show that keeps unfolding enchantment after enchantment. That's exactly the kind of experience I want to have at Christmas.</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-18076203315066130732012-12-14T20:00:00.001-06:002012-12-14T20:00:43.828-06:00Christmas With JeevesI don't think that P.G. Wodehouse was the biggest fan of Christmas. First of all, there is <a href="http://wodehouse.ru/tt171201.htm" target="_blank">the comic essay he wrote for <i>Vanity Fair</i></a> in 1915, in which he skewers the whole tradition of gift-giving. (I love the cynical modern child at the end of the essay who sneers at his Christmas present -- a silver cigarette case -- and then languidly re-gifts it to his manservant.) And then there are all the lines in Wodehouse stories referring to Christmas as an annoyance, like this one from "Jeeves and the Greasy Bird:"<br />
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"Jeeves was in the sitting-room messing about with holly, for we would soon be having Christmas at our throats and he is always a stickler for doing the right thing."<br />
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But in spite of that, I think that the Wodehouse story "Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit," from <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Very-Good-Jeeves-ebook/dp/B0051GST06/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1355533074&sr=8-4&keywords=very+good%2C+jeeves" target="_blank">Very Good, Jeeves</a></i>, is the perfect lighthearted Christmas read.<br />
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This is the story in which Bertie Wooster falls in love with Bobbie Wickham, and he cancels his holiday trip to Monte Carlo so that he can spend Christmas with her family. He defends his choice to a disappointed Jeeves:<br />
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"'In the first place, does one get the Yule-tide spirit at a spot like Monte Carlo?'<br />
'Does one desire the Yule-tide spirit, sir?'<br />
'Certainly one does. I am all for it.'"<br />
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One might expect this Christmas to turn into a traditional Dickensian holiday. Christmas with friends at their country house -- that's exactly like the Christmas scene in <i>The Pickwick Papers</i>. But Wodehouse redefines the Yule-tide spirit in this story, and it ends up not being Dickensian in the slightest. Wodehouse's Yule-tide spirit isn't the feeling of goodwill and merriment that you get in <i>The Pickwick Papers; </i>it's more like a high-spirited sense of mischief. Traditional Christmas activities like carol-singing and dancing recede into the background, and instead everyone in the story focuses on playing practical jokes on each other. It all culminates in the kind of Christmas morning that only Bertie Wooster would have:<br />
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"I could have sworn I hadn't so much as dozed off for even a minute, but apparently I had. For the curtains were drawn back and daylight was coming in through the window and there was Jeeves standing beside me with a cup of tea on a tray.<br />
'Merry Christmas, sir!'<br />
I reached out a feeble hand for the restoring brew. I swallowed a mouthful or two, and felt a little better. I was aching in every limb and the dome felt like lead, but I was now able to think with a certain amount of clearness, and I fixed the man with a stony eye and prepared to let him have it.<br />
'You think so, do you?' I said. 'Much, let me tell you, depends on what you mean by the adjective 'merry.''"elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-84454057250899170962012-12-12T20:20:00.002-06:002012-12-12T20:20:19.374-06:00Christmas in The Dark is Rising<i>When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;</i><br />
<i>Three from the circle, three from the track;</i><br />
<i>Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;</i><br />
<i>Five will return, and one go alone.</i><br />
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Every year around this time I find that verse jingling around in my head. I might be a little obsessed with the book that the verse comes from, Susan Cooper's 1973 book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Is-Rising-ebook/dp/B000FBJHPS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1355273691&sr=1-1&keywords=the+dark+is+rising" target="_blank">The Dark is Rising</a></i>. It's the second in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Is-Rising-ebook/dp/B008O4PR2A/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1355273691&sr=1-2&keywords=the+dark+is+rising" target="_blank">a series of five books</a>, but it was the first Susan Cooper book I read when I was a child. It's my favorite in the series, and it works as a stand-alone novel too (although I can't imagine anyone not wanting to read the entire series after this one). And it's a wonderful Christmas book.<br />
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If <i>The Blue Castle</i> has the most romantic Christmas, <i>The Dark is Rising</i> has the most magical one. The story begins on midwinter's day and ends on Twelfth Night, and it features lots of the English and Celtic traditions associated with that time. There are traditions that I've practiced myself, like hanging up holly and going caroling, and there are folk rituals that I only know about from <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Bough-ebook/dp/B008473PB2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1355273910&sr=1-1&keywords=the+golden+bough" target="_blank">The Golden Bough</a></i>, like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wren_Day" target="_blank">Hunting of the Wren</a>. In <i>The Dark is Rising</i>, all of those traditions are recast as part of a literal battle between light and dark.<br />
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This book has some of the same plot points that I love in the <i>Harry Potter </i>books: an epic battle between good and evil, a boy who finds out on his eleventh birthday that he has special magical powers, a kindly but cryptic wizard who mentors him. But <i>The Dark is Rising</i> is more mysterious and sometimes scarier than the <i>Harry Potter</i> books. Susan Cooper can make the basic elements of winter -- snow, long nights, flocks of winter birds -- seem eerie and threatening. Behind the whole book is the idea that this time of year is dangerous; that the sun might not actually return. It makes the fires and festivities of Christmas seem all the more joyous in contrast.<br />
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(Christmas in <i>The Dark is Rising</i> features terrifying mobs of rooks like the ones in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/10/ghost-stories-spookiest-place-in-britain" target="_blank">this picture</a>.)</div>
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I love the Christmas Eve scene in <i>The Dark is Rising</i>, where the children go caroling, and the song "Good King Wenceslas" becomes a time-traveling device. And I also love Christmas Day with the family of Will Stanton, the hero of the book. He's the youngest of nine children, so he has the kind of busy and bustling holiday that you get in a big family, with all of its traditions and quarrels and merriment. This is what Christmas is like in Will's household:<br />
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"Hints and glimmerings and promises of special things, which had flashed in and out of life for weeks before, now suddenly bloomed into a constant glad expectancy. The house was full of wonderful baking smells from the kitchen, in a corner of which Gwen could be found putting the last touches to the icing of the Christmas cake. Her mother had made the cake three weeks before; the Christmas pudding, three months before that. Ageless, familiar Christmas music permeated the house whenever anyone turned on the radio ... Straight after breakfast -- an even more haphazard affair than usual -- there was the double ritual of the Yule log and the Christmas tree.<br />
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"For it was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and all the world. This was a brightness, a shining festival, and while its enchantment was in the world the charmed circle of his family and home would be protected against any invasion from outside. Indoors, the tree glowed and glittered, and the music of Christmas was in the air, and spicy smells came from the kitchen, and in the broad hearth of the living-room the great twisted Yule root flickered and flamed as it gently burned down."<br />
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(I would like to have a Yule log! If I had a fireplace.)</div>
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I can't think of Christmas without thinking of that scene. Also, every time I hear that it's going to snow, I quote <i>The Dark is Rising</i> to myself: "<i>This night will be bad. And tomorrow will be beyond imagining</i>."</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-41883035939172086302012-12-06T13:58:00.000-06:002012-12-06T14:24:10.273-06:00Christmas in the Blue CastleChristmas is coming, people! It's time for my most cherished holiday ritual, which, of course, is reading books. As the holiday gets closer, I'll revisit some of my favorite Christmas scenes in literature. I've already started reading <i>Little Women</i> out loud with my husband. I'm thinking, like Sarah from <a href="http://www.pinkofperfection.com/2012/12/a-simple-christmas/" target="_blank">Pink of Perfection</a>, that it might inspire my Christmas this year. (Can I convince my family to perform amateur theatricals?) But there are so many literary Christmases that I want to take part in. For the rest of the month, I'll occasionally be posting about the Christmas scenes that I love, and maybe I can manage to have a holiday that includes aspects of all of them.<br />
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(1896 illustration of <i>Little Women</i> by Frank T. Merrill.)</div>
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I'll start with the Christmas scene that I think is the most romantic: Valancy's Christmas from L.M. Montgomery's 1926 novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Blue-Castle-ebook/dp/B006YLXCL8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354821375&sr=1-1&keywords=blue+castle" target="_blank">The Blue Castle</a>. </i>This is one of my favorite books ever, and I plan to write about it at great length later. (Spoilers follow. Well, one spoiler, anyway.)</div>
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For now I just want to say how much <i>The Blue Castle</i> makes me want to spend Christmas on a lake in Ontario. Maybe in Bala, the town in Muskoka that is supposed to be the inspiration for <i>The Blue Castle</i>. (They have <a href="http://www.bala.net/museum/" target="_blank">an L.M. Montgomery museum</a>! Let's all go.) But I doubt that any real place could be as solitary and beautiful as the cabin on (fictional) Lake Mistawis where Valancy and Barney live, the little house that is so perfect that Valancy names it after the place she always dreamed she would live, her imaginary "Blue Castle." This is what it's like on Lake Mistawis in winter:</div>
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"Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour -- the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings -- torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Icy-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cozy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder."</div>
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(This is <a href="http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/blue-pond-japan/" target="_blank">a frozen lake in Japan</a>, not Canada, but I found it on <a href="http://pinterest.com/blackbirdpie/living-in-the-blue-castle/" target="_blank">this</a> wonderful <i>Blue Castle</i>-themed board on Pinterest.)</div>
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Okay, yes, I live in Florida, and I wear a sweater when the temperature gets below 70 F (21 C). But I'm pretty sure that if I were ever surrounded by such wintry loveliness, I would be exactly like Valancy: snowshoeing through the woods and skating on the frozen lake, too happy to catch a cold.</div>
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Valancy's life with Barney out on Lake Mistawis is her escape from the rest of the world, especially from her terrible family. But even if you don't need to escape from anything, there is something to be said for spending a holiday the way Valancy does: alone in a cabin with the person you love (and a couple of cats). Barney and Valancy celebrate Christmas with a dinner of roast goose, which they share with their cats, and a bottle of dandelion wine, which I hope they finish themselves. It sounds so relaxing:</div>
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"They had a lovely Christmas. No rush. No scramble. No niggling attempts to make ends meet. No wild effort to remember whether she hadn't given the same kind of present to the same person two Christmases before -- no mob of last-minute shoppers -- no dreary family 'reunions' where she sat mute and unimportant -- no attacks of 'nerves.' They decorated the Blue Castle with pine boughs, and Valancy made delightful little tinsel stars and hung them up amid the greenery."</div>
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(Christmas at my parents' house, where it does snow occasionally.)</div>
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<i>The Blue Castle</i> Christmas isn't exactly my ideal holiday, as I would like to see my family, and also maybe have indoor heating. But it's close.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-54482459353126476192012-12-03T14:47:00.001-06:002012-12-03T14:47:25.850-06:00The Magician's Nephew and its DelightsI haven't been writing a lot lately because it's the end of the semester, which is a time of frantic grading for me. But somehow I have still managed to get in a lot of reading. This week I came across an essay that a student wrote on C.S. Lewis' <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Magicians-Nephew-Version-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B001I45UF2/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354565586&sr=1-1&keywords=magicians+nephew" target="_blank">The Magician's Nephew</a></i>, and I realized that I couldn't remember the plot of that book at all; it had been such a long time since I'd read it. Obviously it was my duty to stop grading and reread <i>The Magician's Nephew</i> immediately. It's work-related, right? That doesn't count as procrastination.<br />
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(This is the first edition, published in 1955.)</div>
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Rereading the Narnia books as an adult hasn't always been successful for me. <i>The Horse and his Boy</i>, for example, turned out to be way more offensive than I remembered, and it was so disappointing. And I get tired of all of the villainous vegetarians, educational reformers, and independent women. All of the characters who would be sympathetic ones in an E. Nesbit novel are the bad guys in the Narnia books. So I was surprised at how much I enjoyed <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>.</div>
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Maybe it's because <i>The Magician's Nephew</i> is the most E. Nesbit-like of all of the Narnia books. There is a reference to <i><a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/08/welcome-to-e-nesbit-week.html" target="_blank">The Story of the Treasure Seekers</a> </i>in the first paragraph, and Polly and Digory, the main characters of <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>, are really similar to the Bastables children. (Except that they are much less hilarious.) When Polly and Digory plan to explore an abandoned house or make a smuggler's cave with packing-cases and ginger-beer bottles, it's straight out of the Bastables' playbook. They even sound like the Bastables when they talk, especially in the beginning when they are speculating about Digory's mysterious uncle:</div>
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"'Well, either he's mad,' said Digory, 'or there's some other mystery. He has a study on the top floor and Aunt Letty says I must never go up there. Well, that looks fishy to begin with.'</div>
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'Perhaps he keeps a mad wife shut up there.'</div>
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'Yes, I've thought of that.'</div>
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'Or perhaps he's a coiner.'</div>
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'Or he might have been a pirate, like the man at the beginning of <i>Treasure Island</i>, and be always hiding from his old shipmates.'</div>
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'How exciting!' said Polly. 'I never knew your house was so interesting.'"</div>
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(Illustration by Pauline Baynes from the 1955 edition.)</div>
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So much of <i>The Magician's Nephew</i> reminds me of the E. Nesbit book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Story-Amulet-ebook/dp/B0082ZJTUM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354567143&sr=1-1&keywords=story+of+the+amulet" target="_blank">The Story of the Amulet</a></i>. Both books are about objects that allow their bearers to travel magically: Polly and Digory have magic rings that take them to different worlds, and the children in <i>The Story of the Amulet</i> have a magic necklace that lets them travel back in time. Both books have imperious ancient queens who appear in present-day London, scholarly gentlemen who are interested in Atlantis, and mystical scenes that take place at the beginning of the universe. But it's fascinating to see C.S. Lewis's different take on these ideas. E. Nesbit's ancient queen is mildly annoying, her mystical scene is based on Egyptian mythology, and her Atlantean scholar is a kindly old man with a passion for learning. C.S. Lewis has a truly wicked queen, a mystical scene that is based on <i>Genesis</i>, and an Atlantean scholar -- Digory's uncle, and the magician of the title -- who is pure evil.</div>
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(H.R. Millar's illustration of the Queen of Babylon causing chaos at the British Museum, from <i>The Story of the Amulet</i>.)</div>
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(Pauline Baynes' illustration of the Queen of Charn causing chaos on the streets of London, from <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>.)</div>
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<i>The Magician's Nephew</i> has delights of its own, though, that are not found in any E. Nesbit book. I love the Wood Between the Worlds, a peaceful, drowsy woodland dotted with ponds that serve as portals between dimensions. (I also loved how these portals showed up in Lev Grossman's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Magicians-Novel-Lev-Grossman/dp/0452296293/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354567391&sr=1-1&keywords=magicians" target="_blank">The Magicians</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Magician-King-Novel-Magicians/dp/0452298016/ref=pd_sim_b_1" target="_blank">The Magician King</a></i>, which are must-reads for any Narnia fans.) One of the ponds leads to Narnia, of course, but it's Narnia in its earliest days. That was one of the things I had forgotten about <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>: that it's the story of the creation of Narnia. It explains the origin of the witch, the wardrobe, the talking animals, even the lamp post. It's fun to see all of these things popping into existence.</div>
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(Aslan in the process of creating Narnia's animals.)</div>
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<i>The Magician's Nephew</i> is the best Narnia book that I've reread so far. I might try rereading <i>The Silver Chair</i> next. Although I just looked at it, and it starts out complaining about "co-educational" schools where the teachers don't beat the students, so ... maybe I should just reread another E. Nesbit book.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-58787699569874942282012-11-28T13:46:00.003-06:002012-11-29T12:36:29.951-06:00The Creepy Christmas Story of Sintram and his Companions<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">After reading <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2825" target="_blank">Undine</a></i>, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqu</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px; line-height: 19.190475463867188px;">é</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">,
I moved on to the next de la Motte Fouqu</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px; line-height: 19.190475463867188px;">é</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> novella, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2824" target="_blank">Sintram and His Companions</a></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">. I read the 1845 volume that includes
both stories, with an introduction by Charlotte Yonge, the same edition that Jo
wants for Christmas in the first chapter of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Little
Women.</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> It makes sense that Jo would want this book for Christmas, because </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sintram </i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">is a Christmas story. But it’s
not about a cozy, comforting Christmas like the one in </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Little Women</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">. It’s about a series of bleak, demon-haunted Christmases
celebrated by Vikings in the icy mountains of Norway.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
her introduction, Yonge says that de la Motte Fouqu</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px; line-height: 19.190475463867188px;">é</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> intended some of his
stories to reflect specific seasons. </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Undine</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">
is a story about spring, while “the stern, grave ‘Sintram’” is a winter tale.
Yonge is right: </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sintram</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is mainly set
in the cold, dark heart of winter. It’s the story of Sintram, the son of a
brutal knight and a saintly nun, who spends his life torn between those two
influences. Sometimes Sintram gives in to his violent side and joins his father
in burning and pillaging villages; at other times he is overwhelmed by guilt
and spends his time in solitary prayer, and it’s not clear which side will win
out. Sintram finds himself in particular difficulties when a French knight and
his wife – Folko and Gabrielle – come to Norway and become guests at his father’s
castle. Sintram wants to be like Folko, who is the epitome of the chivalrous,
courtly knight, but he is tempted by his lust for the beautiful Gabrielle.</span></div>
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(Sintram being knighted by Folko, illustrated by Gordon Browne.)</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
found this story difficult to read, and the character of Sintram difficult to
like. But I did like the wildness of the landscape and the characters – I love
that Sintram is so wild and strong, for example, that he would break the
strings of a regular harp, and so he has to play music on a special giant harp
strung with bear-sinews. And I liked the creepy, supernatural aspects of the
story. According to Yonge, <i>Sintram</i> is
inspired by a 16<sup>th</sup>-century D</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px; line-height: 19.190475463867188px;">ü</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">rer engraving called “Knight, Death and
the Devil,” which shows a warrior on horseback accompanied by Death, who looks like a skeleton
crowned with serpents, and the Devil, a little horned creature with a goat-like
face. These creepy figures are Sintram’s companions, although they change their
appearance throughout the book.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(Albrecht D</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.571428298950195px; line-height: 19.190475463867188px; text-align: left;">ürer, "Knight, Death and the Devil.")</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Death
usually looks like a tall, pale man dressed like a pilgrim, with clattering bones
hung all over his robes. The best dialogue in the book occurs when he talks to
Sintram, as in this scene when Sintram is giving him a ride back to the castle:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“’Draw
thy garment closer around thee, thou pale man, so the bones will not rattle,
and I shall be able to curb my horse.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘It
would be of no avail, boy; it would be of no avail. The bones must rattle.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘Do
not clasp me so tight with thy long arms, they are so cold.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘It
cannot be helped, boy; it cannot be helped. Be content. For my long cold arms
are not pressing yet on thy heart.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSrlW70ePb9tDV8VzATLQTScNE8RHTB-Wd4JQGv_EXKfvF5W1AaW3u4VoG4MnPREh6wzBQIgBotosyIzDdLW0PaLg2Ft38sv1TTidhbcUZG3nHkfDs4OceEjoSgJk8-CoFo1qzPHnteZ0/s1600/sintram8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSrlW70ePb9tDV8VzATLQTScNE8RHTB-Wd4JQGv_EXKfvF5W1AaW3u4VoG4MnPREh6wzBQIgBotosyIzDdLW0PaLg2Ft38sv1TTidhbcUZG3nHkfDs4OceEjoSgJk8-CoFo1qzPHnteZ0/s400/sintram8.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(Gordon Browne's illustration of the tall, pale pilgrim.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Devil, on the other hand, appears in the form of a little man dressed in fur,
with one long feather in his cap. When he first meets Sintram he claims that he
is a snail-hunter:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“’Why
should you find fault that I go hunting here for snails? … I know how to
prepare from them an excellent high-flavoured drink; and I have taken enough for
to-day; marvelous fat little beasts, with wise faces like a man’s, and long
twisted horns on their heads. Would you like to see them? Look here!’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And
then he began to unfasten and fumble about his fur garment; but Sintram, filled
with disgust and horror, said, ‘Psha! I detest such animals! Be quiet, and tell
me at once who and what you yourself are.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘Are
you so bent on knowing my name?’ replied the little man. ‘Let it content you
that I am master of all secret knowledge, and well versed in the most intricate
depths of ancient history.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuXf7HylbytJ0n99ZE3GxCi01TzZ3VWl5u8b9xVglBLcpwwu5JtKyvGHztZxTAFJKtW8uV2AMawJp113hM_lrgY1wbK9ncEW4vr_E9y9_fxIt9mYioVnyXd8CuWalVfzhaOQI8h7ijOGw/s1600/sintram10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuXf7HylbytJ0n99ZE3GxCi01TzZ3VWl5u8b9xVglBLcpwwu5JtKyvGHztZxTAFJKtW8uV2AMawJp113hM_lrgY1wbK9ncEW4vr_E9y9_fxIt9mYioVnyXd8CuWalVfzhaOQI8h7ijOGw/s400/sintram10.jpg" width="387" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That’s
right. The Devil is an ancient historian. As a classics professor married to an
ancient historian, I found this hilarious. The Devil knows all about classical
literature and mythology, as we see when he tempts Sintram to run off with
Gabrielle by telling him the story of the Judgment of Paris. Every time Sintram hears about the beauty of Helen, he wants to seize Gabrielle. So we can add <i>Sintram </i>to the list
of works about the dangers of studying classics – and before I started this
blog, I had no idea how many such works were out there. But now I know that
classics will make you see demons (as in <a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/10/these-stories-feature-my-favorite.html" target="_blank">“The Raven,”</a> <a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/10/this-story-will-keep-you-awake-and.html" target="_blank">“Green Tea,”</a> and
basically everything by <a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-story-that-made-me-afraid-to-grade.html" target="_blank">M.R. James</a>), arouse evil lusts, and turn you into a
sorcerer (which is what the Devil is trying to do to Sintram). But it’s not just
Greek and Roman mythology that is evil in this book. The pagan traditions of the Norsemen come in for their
fair share of criticism, including a heathen Christmas tradition practiced by
Sintram’s father that involves swearing an oath over a golden boar’s head.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Despite some wonderful
details such as these, the plot of <i>Sintram</i>
tends to drag. Sintram’s temptations are interesting; his repentance, not so
much. But if you are looking for something really creepy, dark, and grim to
read for Christmas, look no further.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsIQyjUJcZyztl6Kq1rZNc062SsPiTntT_TeuoTFtYQ-SxblwPI8XJr49ZnFbacD06dBxgEU7gYTlLptqVfrtphqcj4p0HRAd-mF7IwnEWH0FFPNvfl42hEVjSUe-Ge9sA2_AKXA6YOiY/s1600/sintram15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsIQyjUJcZyztl6Kq1rZNc062SsPiTntT_TeuoTFtYQ-SxblwPI8XJr49ZnFbacD06dBxgEU7gYTlLptqVfrtphqcj4p0HRAd-mF7IwnEWH0FFPNvfl42hEVjSUe-Ge9sA2_AKXA6YOiY/s400/sintram15.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-463918169224793382012-11-23T21:34:00.002-06:002012-11-23T21:34:25.447-06:00Literary Leftovers: An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving<br />
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<a href="" name="_GoBack"></a>I’m fascinated by all descriptions of
food in literature. So this Thanksgiving I found myself reading a lot about
traditional Thanksgiving feasts, which I enjoyed very much, even though I am a
lifelong vegetarian who has never tasted a turkey. I thought that I would spend
part of yesterday writing about my favorite Thanksgiving story, Louisa May
Alcott’s “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving.” But I was wrong, because this story
is all about food, and after my own Thanksgiving feast, I couldn’t even think
about more food. Today, on the other hand, everything in “An Old-Fashioned
Thanksgiving” sounds appetizing again.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr1g4ZM07BvFJaCvjCKAV1tXXIMc96hYwMptGSIu3vrQ9Rsd1-IMtf5Mqn0b4zNtKAKsn4lfEnEKAqvVOxeWO7jQS3nNArINv04ySZ4-O4IPh6XvAKIdPL62kIFISTQGSWod1o16WROf8/s1600/60500005%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr1g4ZM07BvFJaCvjCKAV1tXXIMc96hYwMptGSIu3vrQ9Rsd1-IMtf5Mqn0b4zNtKAKsn4lfEnEKAqvVOxeWO7jQS3nNArINv04ySZ4-O4IPh6XvAKIdPL62kIFISTQGSWod1o16WROf8/s400/60500005%5B1%5D.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
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(From <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10136" target="_blank">Mrs. Beeton's <i>Book of Household Management</i></a>, 1871.)</div>
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This story is in <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27567" target="_blank">volume six of <i>Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag</i></a>, a six-volume set of short stories that Alcott
published between 1872 and 1882. The stories in this volume are for small
children, and are fanciful tales of talking animals or dolls, or moral stories
in which children learn to behave (although there is at least one story, “Poppy’s
Pranks,” about a little girl who continually gets into trouble and never learns
her lesson). “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving” is different from the other stories,
though. It’s longer, it seems to be written for a slightly older audience, and
it’s a nostalgic story of life in the 1820s.<o:p></o:p></div>
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(The 1929 edition of <i>Aunt Jo's Scrapbag</i>, from<a href="http://louisamayalcottismypassion.com/2011/11/23/an-old-fashioned-thanksgiving/" target="_blank"> this website</a>.)</div>
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“An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving” is about a family of eight
children growing up in a New Hampshire farmhouse. It’s one of Alcott’s stories –
like <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i> – which is
about how much better country life is than city life, and how much better the
ways of the past were than those of the present. The appeal of this story is in
the quaintness of the New Hampshire children’s lifestyle, in the happiness of
their family life, and in the trouble they get into when they are unsupervised.
The parents have to leave unexpectedly at the beginning of the story, and the
children decide to make Thanksgiving dinner themselves. (So basically the same
plot as “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” but with better food.) Another
appealing thing about this story is the abundance of delicious food that it
describes:<o:p></o:p></div>
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had come; the crops were in, and barn, buttery, and bin were overflowing with
the harvest that rewarded the summer’s hard work. The big kitchen was a jolly
place just now, for in the great fireplace roared a cheerful fire; on the walls
hung garlands of dried apples, onions, and corn; up aloft from the beams shone
crook-necked squashes, juicy hams, and dried venison – for in those days deer
still haunted the deep forests, and hunters flourished. Savory smells were in
the air; on the crane hung steaming kettles, and down among the red embers
copper sauce-pans simmered, all suggestive of some approaching feast.”</span><br />
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It was so interesting to read this story after reading Sarah
Josepha Hale. <i>The Good Housekeeper</i> (written
about forty years before the Alcott story was published) has recipes for all of
the food mentioned in “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving,” including cider
apple-sauce, hasty pudding, Indian pudding, brown bread, baked apples, and roast
turkey. If Tilly and Prue, the two oldest girls in “An Old-Fashioned
Thanksgiving,” had owned a copy of Hale’s cookbook, they would have known that poultry
should be stuffed with parsley, sage, winter savory, and marjoram. But, going
on their memory of the dish, they stuff the turkey instead with catnip and bitter
wormwood. It’s particularly funny to read this passage after reading what Hale
has to say about stuffing: “It is needless to repeat over again the ingredients
for stuffing, way of making gravy, &c. A female who has sense enough to
cook a dinner will manage these things to her own liking and means. It is not
necessary to good cooking, that every one should season alike.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Tilly and Prue also ruin their plum-pudding, which turns out
“as hard and heavy as one of the stone balls on Squire Dunkin’s great gate.”
But if you believe Hale, plum-pudding is terribly unhealthy, so maybe that’s
just as well. Hale says, “The custom of eating mince pies at Christmas, like
that of plum puddings, was too firmly rooted for the ‘Pilgrim fathers’ to
abolish; so it would be vain for me to attempt it. At Thanksgiving too, they
are considered indispensable; but I may be allowed to hope that during the
remainder of the year, this rich, expensive and exceedingly unhealthy diet will
be used very sparingly by all who wish to enjoy sound sleep or pleasant dreams.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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(Cozy scene illustrated in the 1929 edition of <i>Aunt Jo's Scrapbag</i>.)</div>
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Fortunately, Tilly and Prue make enough successful dishes to
give their entire family a satisfying Thanksgiving feast. Their menu features
turkey with stuffing and onions, cranberry-sauce, mince pies, nuts, apples,
oranges, and “vegetables of every sort.” This is the basic Thanksgiving menu suggested
by Sarah Josepha Hale (although hers is fancier and includes more meats), and the
same Thanksgiving meal that Alcott portrays in other books of hers; <i>Little Men</i>, for example. Hale was the
driving force that made Thanksgiving a national holiday, but I think that
Alcott must have played a role in popularizing its traditions. Except for the
mince pies and plum-pudding (and the catnip stuffing), my family had a
Thanksgiving dinner very similar to the one in “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving.”
I think that we have both Alcott and Hale to thank for that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-78931486759441130852012-11-21T20:00:00.001-06:002012-11-21T20:00:57.015-06:00Reading Sarah Josepha Hale on ThanksgivingThis week I've been reading some of the works of Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who made Thanksgiving an official U.S. holiday.<br />
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(Portrait of Sarah Josepha Hale by James Reid Lambdin, 1831.)</div>
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She was the editor of <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/" target="_blank">Godey's Lady's Book</a></i>, which was a wildly popular Victorian magazine featuring stories, poems, plays, recipes, household tips, and wonderful fashion spreads. Through her magazine, Hale became a huge influence on American society. She promoted U.S. authors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edgar Allen Poe. She was an arbiter of taste and an advocate for abolition and women’s education. After the Civil War, she started campaigning to make Thanksgiving an official holiday that could unify the country.</div>
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(This is the letter Hale wrote to Abraham Lincoln asking him to make Thanksgiving an official holiday. You can read <a href="http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mal&fileName=mal1/266/2669900/malpage.db&recNum=0" target="_blank">the whole thing</a> at the Library of Congress website.)</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Hale’s 1839 book on household management, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Early-American-Cookery-Housekeeper-ebook/dp/B00A3M180Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1353547674&sr=1-1&keywords=sarah+josepha+hale" target="_blank">The Good Housekeeper</a></i>, is a fascinating
read. (You can read it online <a href="http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/books/book_11.cfm" target="_blank">here</a>.) It’s an instruction manual on how to be the perfect Victorian woman: in
control of her household, maintaining her family’s health, improving the
morality of her husband and her community.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Hale was also a novelist, and at the end of <i>The Good Housekeeper</i> she provides some novelistic scenes of domestic life:</span></div>
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“Be particular that the dinner is in the very best style,
Ruth; and pray see yourself that the ducks’ feet are crimped. I would not, for
the universe, this should be forgotten, to-day. The feet are Mr. B____’s tit-bit,”
said Mrs. B. to a girl who acted as an upper domestic or sort of housekeeper.
Mrs. B. strove, as much as possible, to imitate European customs. … The truth
was, Mrs. B. had been invited to a very select party of the fashionables; she
wished to outshine all the ladies, and a new dress and set of pearl ornaments
were to be the price of the dinner in general, and the ducks’ feet in
particular.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mrs. B. has been neglecting her husband’s digestion, though,
so he isn’t impressed by her fancy dinner. He doesn’t touch his crimped ducks’
feet (I still don’t know what exactly crimped ducks' feet are), and he doesn’t buy his wife a
set of pearl ornaments. <i>The Good
Housekeeper</i> is there to make sure that sort of thing doesn’t happen. It’s there,
as the dedication says, to teach every woman how to “promote the health, comfort,
and prosperity of her family.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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(Victorian Thanksgiving cards are all about the domesticity of women.)</div>
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Does that scenario with Mr. and Mrs. B. sound familiar to you? It did to me, and
it’s not because I like to serve my husband crimped ducks’ feet. It’s because
it’s the same kind of moral lesson that you get in a Louisa May Alcott book. <i>The Good Housekeeper </i>kept reminding me
of different scenes from Alcott books: the girls who go to too many fancy parties
and eat too much cake in <i>An Old-Fashioned
Girl</i>, the mothers who neglect their children’s diet and education in <i>Little Men</i>, Rose’s cooking lessons in <i>Eight Cousins</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Hale and Alcott seem to share a lot of the same ideas about
food, too. Like hot bread, which Rose is forbidden to eat in <i>Eight Cousins</i>. Hale seems to be a little
obsessed with how bad hot bread is for you, returning to the topic over and
over again: “But it is the <i>hot bread</i>,
lying undigested, and of course <i>hard and
heavy</i> in the stomach, which prostrates the system, and thus makes the
mental fatigue injurious.” Hale wants everyone to eat cold whole-wheat bread,
which she calls, unappetizingly, “dyspepsia bread.” She says that bread-baking
is the finest accomplishment of a lady, a sentiment which is echoed in <i>Eight Cousins</i> by Uncle Alec, who tells Rose,
“When you bring me a handsome, wholesome loaf, entirely made by yourself, I
shall be more pleased than if you offered me a pair of slippers embroidered in
the very latest style.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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(<a href="https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/553/Bread_Plate_Centennial" target="_blank">Victorian bread plate</a>.)</div>
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There is more to <i>The Good Housekeeper</i> than nutritional diatribes. It's a reference book filled with all kinds of information, from how to manage
your servants to how to get ink out of your mahogany furniture. It’s filled
with recipes, some of which I really want to try, like squash pie (flavored
with rose water and nutmeg) and rice snowballs (whole cooked apples inside
balls of rice pudding). This book is also packed with strange and intriguing bits of trivia,
like the frightening tale of the lady who washed her face with rum: <o:p></o:p></div>
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“A lady, in consequence of a nervous affection in her jaw,
had used rum for fourteen years to wash in – not a drop of water had touched
her face and neck during that time. She was not very old, but her skin looked
as dry and shriveled as a baked sweet apple – you could scarcely put down a pin’s
point without touching a wrinkle.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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(I imagine fashionable ladies, like these from an 1855 issue of <i>Godey's Lady's Book</i>, being horrified by this story, which is meant to show the evils of alcohol.)</div>
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<i>The Good Housekeeper</i> is an excellent book to read on a busy day like the one before
Thanksgiving. You don’t have to make a major time commitment to it; it’s the
kind of book you can just dip into when you have a spare moment and want something
entertaining. And it's a perfect companion to the other<i> </i>thing I'm reading for Thanksgiving -- Louisa May Alcott's story "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving." More about that story tomorrow.</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-66028736811042705392012-11-19T16:34:00.000-06:002012-11-19T16:46:46.255-06:00Undine, the Original Manic Pixie Dream Girl<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m
still on a Louisa May Alcott kick, and I’m also reading all of the books that
she mentions. Last week I picked up <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2825" target="_blank">Undine</a>
</i>by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, because it’s the book Jo wants for
Christmas in <i>Little Women</i>. Actually
Jo wants <i>Undine and Sintram</i>, two
novellas by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque. I haven’t finished <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2824" target="_blank">Sintram</a></i> yet, but I enjoyed <i>Undine</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(The first edition, published in 1811.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
like <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2825" target="_blank">this translation</a> of <i>Undine</i>, with
an introduction by Charlotte Yonge. (Another author on my reading list – Jo
reads her book <i>The Heir of Redclyffe</i>
while crying and eating apples.)</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Undine</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is based on the
kind of folktale which involves a man marrying a water spirit. I’ve read a lot
of these stories, so I can tell you: never marry a water spirit. Don’t even date
them. It almost never turns out well for the human. The problem is that water
spirits are usually so beautiful that humans can’t resist them, and that’s the
case with Undine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">(Another example of this folktale is the Greek story of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dish_Thetis_Peleus_Louvre_CA2569.jpg" target="_blank">Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis</a>. Sure, their relationship starts in a cute way, with Peleus holding onto Thetis while she turns into snakes and lions and all kinds of crazy things, but it doesn't end well.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Undine
is the adopted child of an old fisherman and his wife. She shows up soaking wet
on their doorstep one evening, claiming to come from a land of golden castles
and crystal domes. When she grows up, she wins over the first man she meets
with her beauty and her quirky, childlike charm. Undine is an early version of
the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Pixie_Dream_Girl" target="_blank">Manic Pixie Dream Girl</a>: she’s a free spirit who doesn’t follow social
conventions, and she broadens the worldview of the guy who falls in love with
her. That guy is a knight named Huldbrand who stops by the fisherman’s cottage.
He becomes entranced with Undine from the first moment he sees her – when she
surprises him by meeting his gaze without blushing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(John William Waterhouse, "Undine," 1872.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Undine
is odd. Before Huldbrand meets her, he hears her splashing bucketfuls of water
against the cottage wall, which she thinks is a hilarious joke. She enjoys
making fun of her parents and running off into the forest for no reason. When
Huldbrand says something she doesn’t like, she bites him. Undine’s parents
think that she is refusing to grow up and “give over this frolicsome childishness of hers.” But in typical Manic Pixie
Dream Girl fashion, Undine remains adorable, no matter what she does. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(Illustration by Arthur Rackham from the 1909 edition of <i>Undine</i>.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Undine’s
behavior makes sense once she reveals that she isn’t human. She’s a water
spirit who came to live on land. She explains to Huldbrand that each element of
the world is inhabited by spirits:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The
wonderful salamanders sparkle and sport amid the flames; deep in the earth the
meagre and malicious gnomes pursue their revels; the forest-spirits belong to
the air, and wander in the woods; while in the seas, rivers, and streams live
the widespread race of water-spirits. These last, beneath resounding domes of
crystal, through which the sky can shine with its sun and stars, inhabit a
region of light and beauty; lofty coral-trees glow with blue and crimson fruits
in their gardens; they walk over the pure sand of the sea, among exquisitely
variegated shells, and amid whatever of beauty the old world possessed …”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(Gorgeous Rackham illustration showing Undine in her element.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So
this is where I started to like Undine, after she makes her confession to
Huldbrand. She reveals her true self to her husband – and he doesn’t believe
her. He keeps telling himself that “his lovely wife was under the influence of
one of her odd whims, and that she was only amusing herself and him with her
extravagant inventions.” And this is where I started to dislike Huldbrand. Even
in the moments when he believes Undine’s story, he’s still freaked out by the
idea that his wife might be a water spirit. What did he expect? Her uncle is a
brook!</span></div>
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(Huldbrand and Undine in a 1901 illustration by Harold Nelson.)</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Undine’s
mysterious uncle Kuhleborn is my favorite character in the book. Sometimes he appears
as a brook, sometimes as a tall, pale man who can dissolve into a torrent of
water. He’s an eerie figure who tends to show up suddenly peering into people’s
windows. And he’s dangerous, especially to anyone who mistreats Undine. I can
understand being scared of him, but I’m still disappointed in Huldbrand for
being scared by Undine’s otherworldliness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(As you can see from this Rackham illustration, Huldbrand has already met a goblin, so a water-spirit shouldn't be too much of a stretch for him.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It's so wrong that Huldbrand loves Undine before he marries her, and then starts to be afraid of her once she has a soul. It turns out that elemental spirits don’t have souls, but
they can get them by having sex (or, as Undine puts it, through “the most
intimate union of love”). So Undine wakes up after her wedding night with a
soul. I find that disturbing – a man has to give her a soul by sleeping with
her? – but I’m glad that Undine doesn’t completely change after her ensoulment.
She’s able to love, but she’s still an inhuman water spirit. After her marriage,
she seems even stronger and more magical: she can carve a stone with her
fingers and calm flood waters. One of the things I liked best about this book
was watching Undine's transformation. She starts out as a Manic Pixie
Dream Girl, but she ends up as a powerful goddess.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And anything bad that
happens to Huldbrand as a result of marrying a water spirit? He totally
deserves it.</span></div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-82962814109346937652012-11-14T16:33:00.001-06:002012-11-14T16:35:13.469-06:00Why I Read Understood Betsy Every NovemberWhen it gets cold outside -- or at least as cold as it ever gets here in Florida -- there are certain books I reread to put myself into a wintry mood. Anything with a snowstorm in it, like <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Is-Rising-ebook/dp/B000FBJHPS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1352930319&sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Dark is Rising</a></i> or <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Nine-Tailors-ebook/dp/B008JVJDOQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1352930345&sr=1-1&keywords=nine+tailors" target="_blank">Nine Tailors</a></i>. Anything by Louisa May Alcott, for sledding and snowball fights. Anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder, for terrible winters that make me glad I live in Florida in 2012. One of the best winter books, though, is <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5347" target="_blank">Understood Betsy</a></i>, written by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in 1916.<br />
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(This is my copy of <i>Understood Betsy</i> here on the right, on the actual bamboo bookcase.)</div>
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The winter in this book is satisfyingly cold, the way winters should be. <i>Understood Betsy </i> is set in Vermont, in an old farmhouse whose windows are rattled by icy winds. The snow piles up so deeply there that falling into a snow drift is like falling into a cavern. At first, Betsy doesn't like the idea of cold weather. It scares her, and she can't see any beauty in the cold countryside:</div>
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"She shrank together in her seat, more and more frightened as the end of her journey came nearer, and looked out dismally at the winter landscape, thinking it hideous with its brown bare fields, its brown bare trees, and the quick-running little streams hurrying along, swollen with the January thaw which had taken all the snow from the hills."</div>
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(Betsy arriving in Vermont and being allowed to drive her uncle's horses, illustrated by Ada C. Williamson, 1916.)</div>
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But a few months later she has totally adjusted to cold weather. We see her running happily through the frozen woods with her family's huge dog, rescuing her friend from a snow drift, and making maple sugar candy in the snow:</div>
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"She found a clean white snow-bank under a pine-tree, and, setting her cup of syrup down in a safe place, began to pat the snow down hard to make the right bed for the waxing of the syrup. The sun, very hot for that late March day, brought out strongly the tarry perfume of the big pine-tree. Near her the sap dripped musically into a bucket, already half full, hung on a maple-tree. A blue jay rushed suddenly through the upper branches of the wood, his screaming and chattering voice sounding like noisy children at play."</div>
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( I will always be fascinated by snow candy! <a href="http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/2007-02-01/Make-Jack-Wax-Maple-Candy.aspx" target="_blank">Here</a> is a tutorial on making it. Maybe I'll try it this year when I'm visiting my family in the snowier regions of the U.S..)</div>
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In 1916 New England, winter seems to last for three seasons -- March and October are just as cold and snowy as January. That helps to make <i>Understood Betsy</i> the coziest book ever. The farmhouse has a warm kitchen with a tea kettle perpetually humming on the stove, and every possible cozy thing happens in that kitchen. Making popcorn, baking pies, reading out loud by lamplight, listening to the dog snore. And the kittens! Oh, the kittens.</div>
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(There is a reason why the cover is full of kittens, and the reason is that this is one of the greatest kitten books ever written.)</div>
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I remembered this book from my childhood as being primarily about kittens. Maybe that's partly because of the kittens on the cover, but I think it's mostly because <i>Understood Betsy</i> features incredibly cute kittens doing incredibly cute things. The book isn't really about kittens, though; it's about children's education. It's about Betsy's journey from her city life, where she's sheltered and spoon-fed, to her country life, where she learns to be independent and think for herself. Dorothy Canfield Fisher was an advocate for educational reform. But let's not forget that she was also an amazing describer of kittens, because that's pretty important too.</div>
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(Charles Livingston Bull, "Kittens with Mother," 1916. This print reminds me of the scene where Betsy's cat Eleanor carries her kittens inside to keep them warm for the winter.)</div>
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Winter is important in <i>Understood Betsy</i>. In the city, Betsy is told that she's sickly, and she's never allowed to feel cold. Once she gets to the country, though, she's allowed to run around in the cold, and it makes her stronger. By the end of the book, Betsy and her dog are "careering through the air like bright-blown autumn leaves" -- it's like she's part of the winter landscape now.</div>
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(Betsy's friends help her get used to playing outside in this illustration by Ada C. Williamson.)</div>
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Also, the cold Vermont weather is always being contrasted with the warmth of the farmhouse, and the warm hearts of the people who live there. Winter in this book is all about interior coziness and exterior merriment. And that's exactly what I want for my winter this year.</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-85923294741076608992012-11-09T13:52:00.001-06:002012-11-09T15:31:43.713-06:00The Thrilling and Shocking Tales of OuidaBooks keep leading me to more books. Sometimes I choose a book based on the fact that a character liked it. But sometimes I choose a book because it was too scandalous and shocking for a character to read. That's what happened when I read Louisa May Alcott's <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl. </i>In <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i>, good girl Polly refuses to read the thrilling novels that her city friends love. And that made me want to read one of those thrilling novels.<br />
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(Girls in the latest fashions from <a href="http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/godeys-ladys-book/">Godey's Lady's Book</a>, 1874.)</div>
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Polly's friends in <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl </i> are sophisticated bad girls. Alcott describes them as "a room full of young ladies ... all very much dressed, all talking together, and all turning to examine the new-comer with a cool stare which seemed to be as much the fashion as eye-glasses. ... Several of the more frolicsome were imitating the Grecian Bend, some were putting their heads together over little notes, nearly all were eating confectionery, and the entire twelve chattered like magpies." These girls wear only the latest fashions, are more interested in love affairs than school, and behave as if they're in their thirties, even though they are teenagers. This is what Gossip Girl would be like if it were set in Boston in the 1860s. (And I would love that show <i>so much</i>; someone please make it!)</div>
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(The Grecian Bend was a trendy and scandalous dance, and also the name of the fashionable posture caused by wearing a tight corset and a big bustle.)</div>
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Here's what one of the fashionable crowd in <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i> has to say about books:<br />
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"'Oh, have you read <i>The Phantom Bride</i>? It's perfectly thrilling! There's a regular rush for it at the library; but some prefer <i>Breaking a Butterfly</i>. Which do you like best?' asked a pale girl of Polly, in one of the momentary lulls which occurred.</div>
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'I haven't read either.'</div>
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'You must, then. I adore Guy Livingston's books, and Yates's. 'Ouida's' are my delight, only they are so long, I get worn out before I'm through.'"</div>
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(<a href="http://www.fineartphotolibrary.com/catalogue/PN1500" target="_blank">She</a>'s a library patron!)</div>
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And that's when I decided that I had to read a thrilling novel by Ouida. "Ouida" was the pen name of author Maria Louise Rame (1839-1908). She wrote historical romances that shocked some Victorian sensibilities. She also wrote <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7766" target="_blank">A Dog of Flanders</a></i>, which I will never, never read, because I have a thing about tragic dog stories. Instead I read <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37178" target="_blank">Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories</a>.</i></div>
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I can see why teenage girls in the 1860s might have loved Ouida. Her stories are full of bad role models: unbelievably beautiful ladies who drip with diamonds and leave trails of broken hearts behind them. One lady fleeces her suitor out of all of his money. Another one literally kills a man by rejecting him. The men in Ouida's stories tend to be careless dandies who gamble, drink, and toy with ladies' affections -- until they meet the right girl. Or they are silent, heroic soldiers whose reserve is broken down by love. I have to admit that I love that kind of romance, and here it is in its purest form.</div>
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(The super glamorous Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, painted by Charles Phillips in 1736. This is how I imagine Cecil Castlemaine, only with more jewelry.)</div>
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For example: </div>
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"The new-comer was a tall and handsome man, of noble presence, bronzed by foreign
suns, pale and jaded just now with hard riding, while his dark silver-laced
suit was splashed and covered with dust, but as he bowed low to her, critical
Cecil Castlemaine saw that not Belamour himself could have better grace, not my
Lord Millamont courtlier mien nor whiter hands, and listened with gracious air
to what her father unfolded to her of his mission from St. Germain, whither he
had come, at great personal risk, in many disguises, and at breathless speed,
to place in their hands a precious letter in cipher from James Stuart to his
well-beloved and loyal subject Herbert George, Earl of Castlemaine.”</div>
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If you made it all the way through that sentence, you might like this book. Ouida's stories are short, but her sentences will wear you out. Also, I think that this book might contain the most vocabulary words I've ever had to look up, starting with "gage" (a pledge, or an object left as a guarantee of good faith). Basset? Minauderies? Pulvillios? Lappets? Bohea? (All words I had to look up just in the first few pages of this book! They turn out to be, respectively, a musical instrument, small ornamental cases, powders for wigs, decorative frills, and a strong China tea.)</div>
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(A powdered wig and lots of decorative frills on Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott, painted by Thomas Gainsborough, 1778.)</div>
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But if you can put up with all that, there are some wonderful and hilarious moments in this book. I love some of the satirical things that Ouida says about her aristocratic characters: "Lady Elmers's pride was to possess the smallest terrier that ever took daisy tea and was carried in a monkey-muff." And my favorite line: "She is about as tenacious and resentful of objectionable contact as a sea-anemone."</div>
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(Fancy lady from a 1760s engraving.)</div>
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Reading the stories of Ouida might make you feel like a fashionable Victorian teen. Get ready to swoon over the romance and giggle over comic scenes, like the following one from "Lady Marabout's Troubles." Lady Marabout has been trying her best to arrange a marriage for the Hon. Val, but Val's iciness is making it difficult. In this scene, Val admits to Lady Marabout that the eligible bachelor -- the one they have been expecting to propose at any minute -- is leaving London without proposing. He's abandoning the icy Val for an even icier sea voyage and hunting expedition:<br />
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"'Well, love, <i>what did he say</i>?' asked Lady Marabout, breathlessly, with eager delight and confident anticipation.<br />
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Like drops of ice on warm rose-leaves fell each word of the intensely chill and slightly sulky response on Lady Marabout's heart.<br />
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'He says that he goes to Cowes to-morrow for the Royal Yacht Squadron dinner, and then on in the <i>Anadyomene</i> to the Spitzenbergen coast for walruses. He left a P.P.C. card for you.'<br />
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'<i>Walruses!' </i>shrieked Lady Marabout.<br />
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'Walruses,' responded the Hon. Val."</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-15432245885813678562012-11-04T11:56:00.002-06:002012-11-04T16:32:43.264-06:00My New Appreciation for an Old-Fashioned GirlNow that my month of scary stories is over, I'm back to reading classic books for girls, starting with Louisa May Alcott's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Old-Fashioned-Girl-ebook/dp/B0083Z5RKM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1352047970&sr=8-2&keywords=old+fashioned+girl">An Old-Fashioned Girl</a></i> (1870).<br />
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(This is the 1902 edition.)</div>
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I like <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl </i>much more now than I did when I was little. Back then, I was mainly interested in the first half of the book, about a country girl who comes to stay with three city children, but I didn't really like any of the children. Polly, the old-fashioned girl of the title, doesn't read novels unless they are "improving reading," she suffers in silence when forced to lunch on macaroons and ice cream (poor girl!), and she's shocked at a musical when the actors use slang and wear skimpy outfits. I didn't think it would be fun to hang out with her.</div>
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(A thrilling novel, some fancy pastries, an operetta: basically my perfect day.)</div>
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I'm not even sure that Louisa May Alcott would want to hang out with young Polly in these scenes. I mean, Alcott preferred writing thrillers, even though her public kept demanding moral tales. She might have disapproved of macaroons, but she was definitely in favor of slang. <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i> is full of hilarious slangy expressions: frizzles, thingumbob, prink, wad, curly pow, fiddlestick, stunner, jiffy, whirligig. I love the slang used by city girl Fanny, who keeps calling her brother a "provoking toad." When Fanny uses the word "band-boxy," it's so slangy that Alcott has to step in to explain herself:</div>
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"I deeply regret being obliged to shock the eyes and ears of such of my readers as have a prejudice in favor of pure English by expressions like the above, but, having rashly undertaken to write a little story about Young America, for Young America, I feel bound to depict my honored patrons as faithfully as my limited powers permit. Otherwise, I must expect the crushing criticism, 'Well, I dare say it's all very prim and proper, but it isn't a bit like us ..."</div>
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(Polly, from the 1870 edition.)</div>
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Now when I read <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i>, I can see that Polly isn't always so prim and proper. Sometimes she seems a little more like Alcott -- or at least like Jo from <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Little-Women-ebook/dp/B0082Z1CVQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1352049367&sr=8-3&keywords=little+women">Little Women</a>. </i> There is a great scene where Polly sneaks off to go sledding, and when she's asked what Fanny would say about her uncouth behavior, she says, "Don't know and don't care. Coasting is no harm; I like it, and I'm going to do it, now I've got a chance; so clear the lul-la!" Which is so awesome. <i>Clear the lul-la</i>!</div>
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(Granville Perkins, "Winter Sports--Coasting in the Country," 1877. According to <a href="https://www.plymouth.edu/magazine/issue/winter-2005/the-case-of-james-edward-wright/">the article</a> where I found this image, in 1850, only boys were allowed to sled ("coast") on the big public hills. In 1869, it's still pretty shocking behavior for Polly.)</div>
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So in the first half of the book, Polly is a little preachy, but she also has these moments when she's pretty cool. And then, in the second half of the book, everyone grows up, and Polly gets even cooler. She comes back to the city to live an independent life as a music teacher. Yes, she's still self-sacrificing, and she still dresses "like a Quakeress." But she does have a cool place of her own that reminds me of my first apartment. It's so small that she has to have a sofa that converts into a bed. (Who knew that the Victorians had convertible sofa-beds?) Polly doesn't have a lot of money, but she seems very happy in her little room with her kitten and her canary. She's also happy with her bizarre diet, which she thinks is simple and healthy: toast, bread-and-milk, baked apples, cake, honey, and cream. Seriously, how is that better than macaroons and ice cream?</div>
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(Now I want a <a href="http://www.marthastewart.com/315748/baked-apples">baked apple</a>.)</div>
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Also, Polly has really amazing friends: "Polly came to know a little sisterhood of busy, happy, independent girls, who each had a purpose to execute, a talent to develop, an ambition to achieve ... Young teachers, doing much work for little pay; young artists, trying to pencil, paint, or carve their way to Rome; young writers, burning to distinguish themselves; young singers, dreaming of triumphs ..."</div>
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(Gertrude Offord, "Interior of the Old School of Art, Norwich," 1897.)</div>
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Polly's sculptor friend Becky is someone I would like to hang out with. I love Becky's statue of the woman of the future. This woman is "strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied." At her feet she has a needle, pen, palette, broom, and ballot-box, showing her ability to sew, write, paint, clean, and -- most importantly -- vote. Polly's friends are suffragettes! Those are some progressive friends for an old-fashioned girl to have.</div>
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(Votes for Women poster by Hilda Dallas, 1909.)</div>
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Louisa May Alcott would definitely want to hang out with this crowd. And in fact she <i>is</i> hanging out with this crowd, in fictional form. Polly's friend Kate King, "the authoress," has to be a self-portrait of Alcott. She is "odd-looking" and boyish, she has a rollicking sense of humor, and she has "written a successful novel by accident." She's even going to write a book like <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i>; she says, "I must put you in a story, Polly. I want a heroine, and you will do." </div>
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(Grace Cossington Smith, "Quaker Girl," 1915. I know it's the wrong time period, but it totally reminds me of Polly in her apartment.)</div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">Kate King gets everyone to join in an impromptu picnic in the art studio, saying hilariously, "Now then, fall to, ladies, and help yourselves. Never mind if the china don't hold out; take the sardines by their little tails, and wipe your hands on my brown paper napkins." Some of the girls have to use flat shells for plates and eat with paint knives, but there is "a freedom about it ... an artistic flavor to everything, and such a spirit of good-will and gayety ..." </span></div>
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Reading the picnic scene is the closest I will ever get to being at a party with Louisa May Alcott. There are many things to love about <i>An Old-Fashioned Girl</i>, but that is the thing I love the most.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-82525552746982674632012-10-31T17:29:00.004-05:002012-10-31T18:21:03.357-05:00This is the Last Halloween Story of the SeasonThis is the last Halloween book I'll be recommending this season, and it's the best. It's the book I've been rereading every Halloween without fail ever since I discovered it several years ago. It's not free, but it's so good that I'm writing about it anyway. It's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lolly-Willowes-Review-Classics-ebook/dp/B004J4WLZA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1351719068&sr=1-1&keywords=lolly+willowes" target="_blank">Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman</a></i>, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, published in 1926.<br />
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Lolly Willowes, the title character, begins her life like the heroine of a romance. She is orphaned, she leaves her family estate to live with her brother in London, and there she becomes a quirky, misunderstood spinster. She's everyone's favorite aunt, but she longs for something she can't really express. Then she shocks her family by moving out to the country, to a small village full of odd inhabitants. This is the point where you would expect Lolly to meet a man, fall in love, and start a new life. But this is not that kind of story.<br />
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(George Clausen, "The Road, Winter Morning," 1923.)</div>
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<i>Lolly Willowes </i>is not a story where a woman meets a man. It's a story where a woman meets the Devil. And it's not about falling in love; it's about finding freedom. By becoming a witch. "One doesn't become a witch," Lolly says to the Devil, "to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It's to escape all that -- to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others ..."<br />
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(Illustration of a witch by Australian artist Margaret Clark, from <i>The Florist Shop</i>.)</div>
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This book makes a witch's life sound pretty appealing, especially if you, like Lolly Willowes, are somewhat unconventional and a little introverted. "That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches," Warner says; "they do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you are out all night, pry and commiserate when at length you return. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!"</div>
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(Paul Nash, "The Forest," 1930.)</div>
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The Devil is also very attractive in this book. Maybe it's because he's not very much like the traditional Devil. He's a huntsman, as the title says. The woods belong to him, and he's more like Pan than Satan:</div>
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"Whistling to himself, a man came out of the wood. He walked with a peculiarly slow and easy gait, and he had a stick in his hand, an untrimmed rod pulled from the wood. ... She thought he must be a gamekeeper, for he wore gaiters and a corduroy coat. His face was brown and wrinkled, and his teeth were as white and even as a dog's."</div>
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(Constant Troyen, "Gamekeeper and Dogs," 1854.)</div>
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There are so many things I love about this book. But one of the main reasons I read it every Halloween is that Sylvia Townsend Warner does such a wonderful job of describing autumn. I love the scene where Lolly, still living in London, goes into a little shop and finds all of the beauties of the autumn countryside:</div>
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"Fruit and flowers and vegetables were crowded together in countrified disorder. On the sloping shelf of the window, among apples and rough-skinned cooking pears and trays of walnuts, chestnuts, and filberts, was a basket of eggs, smooth and brown, like some larger kind of nut. At one side of the room was a wooden staging. On this stood jars of home-made jam and bottled fruits. It was as though the remnants of summer had come into the little shop for shelter. ... 'Which one would you like, ma'am?' he asked, turning the bunch of chrysanthemums about that she might choose for herself. She looked at the large mop-headed blossoms. Their curled petals were deep garnet colour within and tawny yellow without. As the light fell on their sleek flesh the garnet colour glowed, the tawny yellow paled as if it were thinly washed with silver. ... 'I think I will take them all,' she said. ... When he brought her the change from her pound-note and the chrysanthemums pinned up in sheets of white paper, he brought also several sprays of beech leaves. ... They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination."</div>
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(Wenzel Mussill, 1828-1906, "Study of Fruits and Nuts."</div>
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I really just want to keep quoting all of my favorite passages from <i>Lolly Willowes</i>, but there are so many of them! You should just get the book and read it. Even when Halloween is over, it's still the perfect book to read in the fall, or the winter, or any time you're in the woods, or any time when you feel a little witch-like.</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-54440041112780641272012-10-29T16:17:00.000-05:002012-10-29T20:45:18.974-05:00These Stories Prove the Scariness of Birds, Cats, and BooksI've been reading scary stories all month. But now I'm down to my absolute favorites -- the books that I reread every year at Halloween. Like the <i>Works of Edgar Allan Poe, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Works-Edgar-Allan-ebook/dp/B0082YWACM/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1351543265&sr=1-5&keywords=poe" target="_blank">vol. 1</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Works-Edgar-Allan-ebook/dp/B0082YW9JG/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1351543265&sr=1-12&keywords=poe" target="_blank">vol. 2</a></i>, and the <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Edgar-Allan-Complete-Poetical-ebook/dp/B004UJJJQS/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1351543265&sr=1-6&keywords=poe" target="_blank">Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe</a></i>, which I read again last weekend. "The Raven," which is in the <i>Poetical Works</i>, is near the top of my required-reading list for Halloween.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXYHyAkXXrq_mJ5D01XB9mdTwsKU19WgunViBU2WW9QCqTD9jQi5DPx6U1wt9_LeanEkgEYwiFAqXt3YaLc69YRyLK2AFHpSZKNTp-QEPnYRt7Kp06xR-Sa9AGh8D9reKpQMRoFsb7Eog/s1600/DoreRavenCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXYHyAkXXrq_mJ5D01XB9mdTwsKU19WgunViBU2WW9QCqTD9jQi5DPx6U1wt9_LeanEkgEYwiFAqXt3YaLc69YRyLK2AFHpSZKNTp-QEPnYRt7Kp06xR-Sa9AGh8D9reKpQMRoFsb7Eog/s400/DoreRavenCover.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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(Cover of the 1884 edition, with illustrations by Gustave Dore.)</div>
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I don't know why I'm so drawn to stories where reading old books leads to horror and madness. But I am, and that is what "The Raven" is about. It starts with a guy who is up late reading his rare books "of forgotten lore." That's exactly what drove Mr. Jennings insane in <a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/10/this-story-will-keep-you-awake-and.html" target="_blank">"Green Tea."</a> Not to mention basically everyone in all of <a href="http://thebamboobookcase.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-story-that-made-me-afraid-to-grade.html" target="_blank">the M.R. James stories</a>. Do not stay up late reading old books, people! </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlzh7afhAAwfsioUTRGdaIYPVM7HNqpbow0RC0GUCdNFcjtmWo9QZnI5Z0hQ3WUOiKxgcTpFFWlf3obRM0lDYLOGrz9YGNm5uU1fR4itj7XLa6jPOgNnmXV-3BORtuQ7TA6LucrzBOzw/s1600/raven0003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlzh7afhAAwfsioUTRGdaIYPVM7HNqpbow0RC0GUCdNFcjtmWo9QZnI5Z0hQ3WUOiKxgcTpFFWlf3obRM0lDYLOGrz9YGNm5uU1fR4itj7XLa6jPOgNnmXV-3BORtuQ7TA6LucrzBOzw/s400/raven0003.jpg" width="281" /></a></div>
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(Because look at this Dore illustration. What if you're dozing over your books and the creepy little face of your dead girlfriend sidles up beside you?)</div>
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Not even if you have a very fancy library like the guy in "The Raven:" purple silk curtains, a fireplace, armchairs upholstered in violet velvet, and a bust of Pallas Athena over the door. (Do you think it would be bad luck to decorate a room exactly like that? Because I might do it.)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFklEfB9kH6txR0I1kMh5A2NgIFePPjvpslWlmAilvD4OsAJOlRthwqTK7ejjOB-fUqs3KC4Otj7N3urXnkvjWkXsO7UnFU4c71yTDZl69tU9nVT9ixF2tji9hPMdziPCsZPBbb8U8-o4/s1600/mothology+armchair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFklEfB9kH6txR0I1kMh5A2NgIFePPjvpslWlmAilvD4OsAJOlRthwqTK7ejjOB-fUqs3KC4Otj7N3urXnkvjWkXsO7UnFU4c71yTDZl69tU9nVT9ixF2tji9hPMdziPCsZPBbb8U8-o4/s400/mothology+armchair.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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(This <a href="http://www.mothology.com/default.asp" target="_blank">Mothology</a> armchair is no longer available, but that store would be a great resource for a Poe room. I need <a href="http://www.mothology.com/Decorative_Accessories_p/m-clawc.htm" target="_blank">these</a> and <a href="http://www.mothology.com/Decorative_Accessories_p/m-lilystemc.htm" target="_blank">this</a> and also <a href="http://www.mothology.com/Decorative_Accessories_p/m-altar-5.htm" target="_blank">this</a>.)</div>
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If I have learned one thing from the ghost stories I've read this month, it is this: reading at night will make you see demons. You might see a ghost, or a transparent monkey, or a raven with fiery eyes, a lordly demeanor, and a message of eternal despair. Either way, maybe it was a bad idea for me to start a blog recommending old books? Please try to read them in the daylight.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzVm6vL0dxlB9Ze6BbIMSJ6d-Eb0ZFA5cbhS4Clgw29jB8LvJp3-LOH17xQVx7SGnb2u6piIN9CXAAHrn2oDMHImTKboQHlnbTfAQelNjxs2DIk_fUgSTEuHWWRrDsBqqvF5YFojGRozY/s1600/raven0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzVm6vL0dxlB9Ze6BbIMSJ6d-Eb0ZFA5cbhS4Clgw29jB8LvJp3-LOH17xQVx7SGnb2u6piIN9CXAAHrn2oDMHImTKboQHlnbTfAQelNjxs2DIk_fUgSTEuHWWRrDsBqqvF5YFojGRozY/s400/raven0001.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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(Dore illustration of the demonic bird and the amazing silk curtains.)</div>
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I really like almost everything by Poe. I love his gorgeous, creepy images: the drowned city with its jeweled sculptures in "The City in the Sea" (in the <i>Poetical Works</i>), the mossy catacombs in "The Cask of Amontillado," the stained glass windows and lavishly-colored rooms in "The Masque of the Red Death" (both stories are from vol. 2 of<i> </i>the <i>Complete Works).</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVQqCdqR1-XVZM6azxCNek4nXDRbY7ZkuuHqCo9pG9qevXQ5JRc5SNZPoj2_MbTwgA0qrMGiaLaYG1PPI0j6EB6COnegepi1X5OPw_SSkr06s8zSYCBITITSScyrCt_VOGeb6MMZBdb3A/s1600/william+heath+robinson.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="391" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVQqCdqR1-XVZM6azxCNek4nXDRbY7ZkuuHqCo9pG9qevXQ5JRc5SNZPoj2_MbTwgA0qrMGiaLaYG1PPI0j6EB6COnegepi1X5OPw_SSkr06s8zSYCBITITSScyrCt_VOGeb6MMZBdb3A/s400/william+heath+robinson.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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(Illustration by W. Heath Robinson, 1900.)</div>
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Also, I love Poe's language. I even love it in my least favorite Poe story, "The Black Cat" (vol. 2 of the <i>Complete Works</i>). "The Black Cat" was the hardest story for me to get through because of the graphic violence -- the narrator kills his wife and tortures his pet cat. It's seriously disturbing. But it was worth it to get to this great line: "... I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! -- by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman -- a howl -- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation."</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSB6ZvkB_j5EzwDJn1Dru1kdip3DKzMzrciLLDC2StfNQ09ZgIqrZMmOhQV8RDAEcaWcHo0t_1WSa4CShiDFru16z60gNtcvQDKbHD-9sn-K98Fv40XOl55T7aysgLlyqSQr-raUwVJGg/s1600/fritz+eichenberg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSB6ZvkB_j5EzwDJn1Dru1kdip3DKzMzrciLLDC2StfNQ09ZgIqrZMmOhQV8RDAEcaWcHo0t_1WSa4CShiDFru16z60gNtcvQDKbHD-9sn-K98Fv40XOl55T7aysgLlyqSQr-raUwVJGg/s400/fritz+eichenberg.jpg" width="271" /></a></div>
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(Illustration by Fritz Eichenberg, 1943.)</div>
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I'm pretty sure that I've heard this sound too, also from a certain black cat, when she shows up with her prey in my bedroom in the middle of the night.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOR5gfTlDFRwdUnjzc-eFzMhyphenhyphen7a5lj3jHXlkR7go5d8sn_Gw9DyERxx7689IKKxormltBm8pxJ1IFgK7mLdz2wh51XUEGg5VrAJ8lTQk9cuZ8NEEM3EX5yCNkXT1LFrtGgc9wROdMcWLg/s1600/DSC01139.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOR5gfTlDFRwdUnjzc-eFzMhyphenhyphen7a5lj3jHXlkR7go5d8sn_Gw9DyERxx7689IKKxormltBm8pxJ1IFgK7mLdz2wh51XUEGg5VrAJ8lTQk9cuZ8NEEM3EX5yCNkXT1LFrtGgc9wROdMcWLg/s400/DSC01139.JPG" width="300" /></a></div>
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(She also has fiery eyes. And fangs. Is it possible that I summoned her by reading old books late at night?)</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-82418312703919701912012-10-26T22:52:00.002-05:002012-10-26T22:52:52.860-05:00This Story Involves Both Kinds of SpiritsSo it's October 26, and there are five days left until Halloween. That means that I have five days left of reading classic ghost stories. I love these stories, but I'm starting to feel like I need a break from the constant atmosphere of terror. Statues are starting to freak me out a little. And so are paintings, and Gothic architecture, and fog. Let's all read some comic ghost stories for a couple of days, okay? And let's start with the ghost stories of Jerome K. Jerome, who was one of the most hilarious writers ever.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTzVQWSZ4lKEIXIbqCanfjVZUfkm67MTNu5tli2QYls4lJnd5bcLVJ9okRa_SmtkO6YDBwhlR_r2kcdWrvg1a8ro4psFizhsnP7x-IJpjjkDtlmJUkpj7RnpDx7__Rva5fhFdbYiHgFRU/s1600/Jerome+K+Jerome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTzVQWSZ4lKEIXIbqCanfjVZUfkm67MTNu5tli2QYls4lJnd5bcLVJ9okRa_SmtkO6YDBwhlR_r2kcdWrvg1a8ro4psFizhsnP7x-IJpjjkDtlmJUkpj7RnpDx7__Rva5fhFdbYiHgFRU/s320/Jerome+K+Jerome.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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(One of these guys is Jerome K. Jerome, and the others are the friends who show up in his book <i>Three Men in a Boat</i>.)</div>
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Jerome K. Jerome's novel <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/308" target="_blank">Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog)</a></i> is my go-to book when I want to be cheered up. It's amazing that anything written in 1889 could still be so funny today. And Jerome also wrote the funniest ghost stories ever, in a book called <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1993" target="_blank">Told After Supper</a></i>. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-IAwJZGOHOVr7qFDegEubhHy2YkYKnuN0TY_dZtyfdbz0R-u42ebGpAh4TV6uT71LaJF4IVrHO2ArpTWdlHqRLhY8x7N3TSPTVY3i1kMh4XSBF8oPxdGeDhTLEbR_vga4hkGrM7anrIE/s1600/DSC_0012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-IAwJZGOHOVr7qFDegEubhHy2YkYKnuN0TY_dZtyfdbz0R-u42ebGpAh4TV6uT71LaJF4IVrHO2ArpTWdlHqRLhY8x7N3TSPTVY3i1kMh4XSBF8oPxdGeDhTLEbR_vga4hkGrM7anrIE/s320/DSC_0012.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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(The 1891 edition. You can download it from the previous link, or you can <a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/toldaftersupper00jerorich#page/n9/mode/2up" target="_blank">read it online</a>, with all 96 or 97 illustrations.)</div>
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<i>Told After Supper</i> is a short book about a drunken Christmas party that ends with everyone telling a ghost story. Ghost stories used to be a traditional part of a British Christmas party (that's why <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46" target="_blank">"A Christmas Carol"</a> has ghosts in it), and most of the stories I've been reading this month were meant to be read at Christmas in England, not at Halloween in the United States. Jerome says that Christmas is the one night a year when the average ghost gets to walk around on earth. "Why on Christmas Eve, of all nights in the year, I never could myself understand," he says. "It is invariably one of the most dismal nights to be out in -- cold, muddy, and wet. And besides, at Christmas time, everybody has quite enough to put up with in the way of a houseful of living relations, without wanting the ghosts of any dead ones mooning about the place, I am sure. There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas -- something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails."</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9xbekPg_Ex7RKchIVJkZ_N_vnxaVK1rx0FwoCZPaCUEY6rRKqrbdPK9-HP1LIIohvRk4xjtQ2fGjQtHj03lzJZnm85r-qrXmEGaZsETIKfcj4H5ewJUBSzTi9nY62dJ_qAW7BT3ddaIc/s1600/toldaftersupper00jerorich_0029.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9xbekPg_Ex7RKchIVJkZ_N_vnxaVK1rx0FwoCZPaCUEY6rRKqrbdPK9-HP1LIIohvRk4xjtQ2fGjQtHj03lzJZnm85r-qrXmEGaZsETIKfcj4H5ewJUBSzTi9nY62dJ_qAW7BT3ddaIc/s400/toldaftersupper00jerorich_0029.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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(I love the illustrations by Kenneth M. Skeaping in the 1891 edition.)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAY6aVF5Hb3lAYTMW_CP2PWeTRrZrBnFfqKWsCeLFD8iIM8N4EuVTFYN4CxF7MMzCzrhZxAndpv15zUIJGTfaDPPm8jz8umWu74GU7eO6hkkq9k27NIOFA5T5sbhFIRnxPLXJjhSnAQ7s/s1600/toldaftersupper00jerorich_0070.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAY6aVF5Hb3lAYTMW_CP2PWeTRrZrBnFfqKWsCeLFD8iIM8N4EuVTFYN4CxF7MMzCzrhZxAndpv15zUIJGTfaDPPm8jz8umWu74GU7eO6hkkq9k27NIOFA5T5sbhFIRnxPLXJjhSnAQ7s/s400/toldaftersupper00jerorich_0070.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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(And I love how he keeps putting snails throughout the book.)</div>
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Jerome makes fun of the whole genre of Christmas ghost stories in this book. Each of the stories told by the party guests parodies a different kind of ghost story: the sentimental kind about the ghosts of lovers, the "ghastly and terrible" kind, the true ghost story, the story about the ghost who reveals a buried treasure. My favorite is the curate's story, which is told so badly that no one can follow it:</div>
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"'Well, then, my uncle went into the garden, and got his gun, but, of course, it wasn't there, and Scroggins said he didn't believe it.'</div>
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'Didn't believe what? Who's Scroggins?'</div>
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'Scroggins! Oh, why he was the other man, you know -- it was his wife.'</div>
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'<i>What</i> was his wife -- what's <i>she</i> got to do with it?'</div>
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'Why, that's what I'm telling you. It was she that found the hat ...'</div>
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'Look here, do you know what you are talking about?' we asked him at this point.</div>
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He said 'No,' but he knew it was every word of it true, because his aunt had seen it herself.'"</div>
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(Appropriately, the curate's story is introduced with an initial letter made out of two bottles of liquor.)</div>
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As the party progresses -- and more punch is consumed -- things become more and more chaotic, until finally an actual ghost makes an appearance. And in the end, the poor narrator is left in a very embarrassing situation, for which the whole book turns out to be an explanation and excuse. "Slurs have been cast and aspersions made on me by those of my own flesh and blood," he says. "But I bear no ill-feeling. I merely, as I have said, set forth this statement for the purpose of clearing my character from injurious suspicion."</div>
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(A ghost, illustrated by Skeaping.)</div>
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It's nice for a change to encounter some ghosts that won't haunt my nightmares. <i>Told After Supper</i> left me amused, not terrified. Amused -- and possibly wanting a drink.</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311005867555347797.post-10487522898491258702012-10-24T13:58:00.000-05:002012-10-24T14:03:05.534-05:00These Stories Bring Paintings to Life in the Most Horrifying Way PossibleLast week at a used bookstore a title caught my eye. Actually it was just a word: "hauntings," and I thought, <i>Perfect!</i> Because I don't expect my obsession with scary stories to end any time soon. Well, not until Halloween is over, at least. So I bought the book: <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hauntings-Other-Fantastic-Tales-Vernon/dp/1551115786/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1351097757&sr=1-1&keywords=vernon+lee" target="_blank">Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales</a>, </i>by Vernon Lee.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir5u6tj01jHMnA8vagzwZ_KT9Xxs_Aj00COQQZgV2qQEA3Ki4jwplAF5cYgVBfA45pIErA_NxqfTqJgsKeS-dop53kF6Tn7Po-l6KzdIzSZsYEBSe9oj58BcrykorzpL5c3r9tj_HYlTw/s1600/hauntings+and+other+fantastic+tales.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir5u6tj01jHMnA8vagzwZ_KT9Xxs_Aj00COQQZgV2qQEA3Ki4jwplAF5cYgVBfA45pIErA_NxqfTqJgsKeS-dop53kF6Tn7Po-l6KzdIzSZsYEBSe9oj58BcrykorzpL5c3r9tj_HYlTw/s400/hauntings+and+other+fantastic+tales.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I hadn't read anything by Vernon Lee before this book. Maybe it's because her work, which was published in the 1870s-1890s, fell out of favor in the 1900s. The editors of <i>Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales</i> have this great line in the introduction where they say that the recent rediscovery of Vernon Lee's work has made her come back from the grave "like the revenants that people her work." Creepiest description of literary scholarship ever!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI4gyunq6SBdBnA-AjhGnOqpxkB_Uipa1Hew2eyw-wemkOg93FbyYjRnQTOhmhHjOPZfmFm9kyX-AAi0U21Vy3I7Fa6mRllnzcC8CySkVj9WCVTIARflpKA7ArJ8EkRc0JUVp-EES_zuk/s1600/Vernon_Lee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI4gyunq6SBdBnA-AjhGnOqpxkB_Uipa1Hew2eyw-wemkOg93FbyYjRnQTOhmhHjOPZfmFm9kyX-AAi0U21Vy3I7Fa6mRllnzcC8CySkVj9WCVTIARflpKA7ArJ8EkRc0JUVp-EES_zuk/s400/Vernon_Lee.jpg" width="315" /></a></div>
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(Portrait of Vernon Lee by John Singer Sargent, 1881. I prefer not to imagine her as a zombie, but I think she would probably have liked the idea.)</div>
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"Vernon Lee" is actually the pen name of Violet Paget. Or it began as a pen name -- she ended up being called "Vernon" by her friends. She lived in Italy and wrote about art history and the philosophy of art. She was fascinated by old paintings, early music (she played the harpsichord), and the past in general. All of her scary stories are about the past -- about the frightening way that the past can haunt the present.</div>
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If you want to read the stories of Vernon Lee, you should get her short-story collection <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hauntings-ebook/dp/B00847SHJ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1351102613&sr=1-1&keywords=vernon+lee" target="_blank">Hauntings</a></i>, which is available as a free ebook.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiayoYfAAJ0MT9you8Xpyf4pHcspMo6WLAoYhCWP8qMwzyRUiQGzy5Hfz_zxUnAa9YvFdxKUcDvR0xdJxGCEwGQssF9xp2ALP6x1HlAzTMZTFA2eGd3EVLIsnLk_ExqTtvDwiNe2baJBUg/s1600/Hauntings.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiayoYfAAJ0MT9you8Xpyf4pHcspMo6WLAoYhCWP8qMwzyRUiQGzy5Hfz_zxUnAa9YvFdxKUcDvR0xdJxGCEwGQssF9xp2ALP6x1HlAzTMZTFA2eGd3EVLIsnLk_ExqTtvDwiNe2baJBUg/s400/Hauntings.JPG" width="225" /></a></div>
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(You can get <a href="http://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/136490/vernon-lee-pseudonym-of-violet-paget/hauntings-fantastic-stories" target="_blank">this first edition </a>of <i>Hauntings</i>, from 1890, for $600. Almost all of the copies of this edition were destroyed in a warehouse fire. Was it caused by evil ghosts of the past? I'm going to say yes.)</div>
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<i>Hauntings</i> has so many of my favorite things in it:</div>
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1. Long sentences. Super long, lyrical sentences, like this one from "Dionea:"</div>
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"Your boys can go and see the big ironclad at Spezia, and you shall come with me up our lanes fringed with delicate ferns and overhung by big olives, and into the fields where the cherry-trees shed their blossoms on to the budding vines, the fig-trees stretching out their little green gloves, where the goats nibble perched on their hind legs, and the cows low in the huts of reeds, and there rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of the brooks, from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices of unseen boys and girls, singing about love and flowers and death, just as in the days of Theocritus, whom your learned excellency does well to read."</div>
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2. Gorgeous scenery. Mostly the kind that makes you want to go to Italy, right now. There are landscapes like the one above, but there are also lovely little villages, the canals of Venice in the moonlight, and magnificent old houses furnished with priceless antiques. Of course all of these places are haunted by evil spirits. But you will still want to go see them.</div>
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(John Singer Sargent, The Grand Canal, Venice, 1907.)</div>
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3. Creepy portraits that bring their dead subjects back to life. Almost every story in <i>Hauntings</i> is based on a real painting:</div>
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("Amour Dure" uses Bronzino's Portrait of Lucrezia di Panciatichi as inspiration for an evil ghost who returns to torment an art historian.)</div>
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("Oke of Okehurst" uses Whistler's <a href="http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foxweb/huntsearch/DetailedResults.fwx?collection=art&reqMethod=Search&Searchterm=46393" target="_blank">portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell</a> dressed as Orlando as inspiration for an evil ghost who returns to torment a painter.)</div>
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("A Wicked Voice" uses Corrado Giaquinto's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CarloBroschi.JPG" target="_blank">portrait of Farinelli</a> as inspiration -- guess for what? Hint: it's not a <i>friendly</i> ghost.)</div>
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4. Classical allusions. Vernon Lee doesn't just put in allusions; she conjures up the feeling of the classical past. She can make you feel the awe and fear that the classical gods inspired, and it's so real that it gives you goosebumps. This happens in my favorite story, "Dionea." It's told through the letters of a kindly old scholar who is living in Italy and writing an endless book about the Greek and Roman gods. He's writing about how remnants of pagan belief survive in modern folklore. What he doesn't realize is that it's not just belief that has survived: an ancient goddess has returned in human form and is living in his village.</div>
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(Spoiler: it's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aphrodite_Anadyomene_from_Pompeii_cropped.jpg" target="_blank">Aphrodite</a>.)</div>
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It turns out that you might not want to have the goddess of love as your neighbor. She starts out as an unruly child, then chaos begins to happen all around her, and finally there are tragic results.</div>
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(<i>Definitely</i> do not anger <a href="http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/S10.19.html" target="_blank">this goddess</a>. Or please her. Or come anywhere near her; it never turns out well.)</div>
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In fact, all Vernon Lee stories end with tragic results. Don't expect a happy ending in this book! But the ending of "Dionea" is so good; it might be the entire reason why this story is my favorite. It's so good that I'm going to break my usual rule and quote it here. Stop reading now if you don't want to hear the end of the story:</div>
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(Image of Aphrodite riding a goose from <a href="http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K10.3.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)</div>
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"Of Dionea I can tell you nothing certain. We speak of her as little as we can. Some say they have seen her, on stormy nights, wandering among the cliffs: but a sailor-boy assures me, by all the holy things, that ... he met at dawn, off the island of Palmaria, beyond the Strait of PortoVenere, a Greek boat, with eyes painted on the prow, going full sail to sea, the men singing as she went. And against the mast, a robe of purple and gold about her, and a myrtle-wreath on her head, leaned Dionea, singing words in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling around her."</div>
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<i>Goosebumps.</i></div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17825540813779206354noreply@blogger.com0