regshoe

I haven't been posting much lately—a combination of a busy and somewhat stressful time at work, frequent loud drilling noises from my housemate who's a bit too fond of DIY (mechanical droning does not agree with my sensory issues; I would try to negotiate about it, but while I'm at home nearly all the time I don't think there's much that could be done) and now this heatwave, which is not the weather for concentrated thinking. However, a few books...

I started but did not finish The Forest of Hours by Kerstin Ekman (1988; translated by Anna Paterson, 1998). This is the story of a wild troll who lives in the forest and, over the course of many years, has various encounters with humans, which gradually change his own nature. I did enjoy the first part of the book, which has some really good nature descriptions and strange but interesting ideas, and which made me very much want to go birdwatching in the forest in Sweden. Unfortunately the elements I disliked in Blackwater were very much here too, and it eventually got too grimdark for me (and somewhat undermined the interest of the story, I thought), so I abandoned it. luzula, I remember you saying the language in the original is particularly good—I was intrigued by the translator's note at the start, which explained how some archaic and dialect-specific Swedish had been translated into Scots and Old English to give a similar sense of time and place, but in practice, at least in the bit I read, the Scots words were very few and felt jarringly out of context. Disappointing, but I am glad I read those early bits with all the good birds.

Strife and Peace by Fredrika Bremer (I can't find the original publication date anywhere, but the English translation is by Mary Howitt, 1853). A bit lighter than Hertha, this book is set in the mountains of Norway, where an old widow named Mrs Astrid comes to settle with her Norwegian steward, Harald, and her Swedish maid, Susanna. Harald and Susanna constantly argue about everything, especially the vexed question of which of their countries has the more beautiful scenery, bigger cities, tastier fish, better system of weights and measures, etc. etc. But Mrs Astrid has a dark and mysterious past, and eventually things between her, Harald and Susanna get a bit more dramatic. It's the kind of book that's good fun if you don't take it too seriously! I thought Harald's eventually-revealed good heart didn't entirely make up for how annoying he is, but Susanna's growing appreciation for Norway and its people was kind of sweet despite him. I very much enjoyed the sentimental-novel drama of the last part of the plot—long-lost relatives reunited by contrived coincidence, everyone nearly freezing to death in the mountains and all—and also the beautiful nature descriptions, as well as all the Norwegian scenery, folklore and history with which Bremer intersperses the story.

(So, do I want to go birdwatching in the forest in Sweden or in the mountains in Norway? I have heard some good things about fjords and white-tailed eagles...)

A London Home in the 1890s by Mary Vivian Hughes (1937). The third of Hughes's autobiographical books, this one covers her developing teaching career, then her very happy marriage and family life. I was most interested in the first part of the book, in which Hughes describes her work in teacher training at Bedford College, discussing various educational questions and the daily life of students and teachers—that kind of intimate and detailed first-hand look at 1890s women's education is very interesting historically, and the account of her travels in America and Canada while attending an educational conference was fun. There is a strain of rather self-satisfied conservatism in Hughes's writing, which becomes more prominent when she starts talking about marriage and family life (despite the pioneering work in what many would consider a feminist field, she was clearly a very happily normal sort of woman, and can be a bit nasty about it), and that part of the book was less interesting, although the description of life as a young family in a London flat and later in a suburban house did have some more good historical stuff.

Penal Servitude by William Beauchamp Nevill (1903). William Beauchamp Nevill, the son of a peer, was convicted in 1898 of financial fraud of some kind (I didn't follow the details; his case apparently received a lot of media attention and so he assumes readers are already familiar with it, and doesn't go into great detail) and sentenced to five years' penal servitude. When he got out, he wrote this book about the experience. It includes a summary of his own time at Parkhurst Prison; several chapters dealing in great detail with various aspects of prison life in general—the hierarchy of prison officials, the scheme of work done in prisons (I was slightly surprised at the variety of this—Nevill worked at knitting stockings, farm labour and bookbinding, amongst other things), prison rules, prison hospitals, various types of prisoner and their interactions, prison food (a particular concern of Nevill's, which you can understand from looking at the diet in question) and so on; and a discussion of prisons policy and reform. Nevill is very much in favour of reform—the last part of the book includes detailed praise for some reforms made during and after his own time in prison, and some scathing criticism of arguments against—but, himself keeping up a bracingly matter-of-fact tone throughout, he does also think that the awfulness of prison life has been exaggerated and sensationalised in some quarters (I wonder what he made of 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'; there are no references to Wilde or his writings on prison). Anyway, I of course read the book for Raffles fandom reasons, and it certainly provides a good deal of useful detail relevant to Bunny's fate after 'The Gift of the Emperor', as well as being a very interesting bit of history in its own right.

It's baby bird season! Goslings on the river, starlings in the streets, blue tits getting very near fledging in the garden nestbox... lots of interesting birdwatching to do, and accompanied by some good reading.

Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story by Max Beerbohm (1911). This is a satirical novel set at Oxford in the Edwardian period, about Zuleika Dobson, granddaughter of the Warden of the fictional Judas College. Zuleika is so incredibly beautiful that when she arrives in Oxford on a visit to her grandfather all the undergraduates immediately fall in love with her (i.e. exactly like Julian Fleming, naraht, you were right...!). We see the unfolding of her stormy (?) love affair with the undergraduate Duke of Dorset, as both of them rapidly fall in and out of love with each other over the course of a few days, and he swears dramatically that he will die for love of her (by flinging himself into the river at the end of the boat races). All this takes place in a colourful Oxford setting, with digressions on the history of the colleges, intricacies of undergraduate customs, exclusive student clubs, the vital importance of who will bump whom on the river, etc. etc. It's a very silly book: the absurdities of both Oxford life and sentimental love stories are taken to ridiculous extremes and satirised endlessly, assisted by Beerbohm's fearsome vocabulary (this book made me very grateful for my e-reader's built-in dictionary, although even that was stumped more than once). It's a bit much at times, but overall good fun. (I loved the bit where Beerbohm, justifying his ability to narrate from an omniscient perspective, goes on a long tangent about the Muses of History and Literature and how Zeus gave him the magical ability to become a ghost and see into the minds of his ostensibly-real characters).

Beck and Call by Annick Trent (2021). Yes, 2021! luzula, who beta-read this book, recommended it and, thinking the historical setting sounded interesting, I decided I would make an exciting foray into the world of modern romance novels and give it a try. Set in 1790s England, it's the story of the romance between two valets: William, with a sometimes politically dangerous interest in literature and bored in his life serving an irritable provincial gentleman, and Edwin, who's being blackmailed for his (untrue) scandalous history of theft. They meet at a country-house gathering attended by their respective masters and quickly take a liking to each other; unfortunately, Edwin's blackmailer happens to be William's brother... I did very much enjoy the historical stuff! The setting is fascinating and Trent has clearly done their research: the atmosphere of political paranoia and repression in a Britain reeling from the shock of the French Revolution; the mundane lives of servants (I loved the sense of how busy the servant characters' lives are, and how little time and space they have to themselves—scenes are constantly getting interrupted by random housemaids walking past, summons from the gentlemen and so on—and the sense of precarity in working lives governed by the whims of upper-class masters); literature, literacy and the intellectual world amongst the lower strata of society; the place of women in all these things; etc. etc. There's also an entertaining cast of side characters, including other valets and members of William's family. The romance was a bit less to my taste, however. I did like both William and Edwin, enjoyed their relationship and was certainly rooting for the happy ending, but I think on the whole I prefer shipping characters from originally non-romance stories to stories where the romance is the canon—and I prefer the characters not to begin a sexual relationship until the emotional situation between them is resolved (...or at least as resolved as it's ever going to be, in the case of some of my OTPs).

Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School: Life, Diary and Letters by George R. Parkin, volume 2 (1898). Something of a slog at times, but even more fascinating history than the first volume! This one chronicles the migration of the entire school to west Wales for a year to escape an outbreak of typhoid fever caused by Uppingham's terrible sewers (contemporary relevance there—both in the upheaval caused by epidemics and in the exacerbation of the epidemic by political indifference and malice); and Thring's later years back at Uppingham, exploring such subjects as his views on schooling in general, his literary tastes, his handling of issues of ~morality~ and ~impurity~ at the school, his thoughts on women's education (surprisingly progressive) and his wider political opinions (tediously wrongheaded in exactly the way you'd expect). Lots of good stuff, and definitely makes me want to write Raffles fic about the views of Raffles's school headmaster on his later life...!

Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham: Life, Diary and Letters by George R. Parkin, volume 1 (1898). Read for Raffles and wider Hornung fandom reasons. Hornung attended Uppingham School in the 1880s, and this inspired Fathers of Men as well as the school backstory of the Raffles books. I was looking for historical sources on what Hornung's, and hence Raffles's and Bunny's, schooldays might have been like, and found this. Uppingham in the 1880s, it turns out, was no ordinary 19th century public school: its headmaster, Edward Thring, was a determined and brilliant reformer who built Uppingham from a small country grammar school into a famous and influential public school, all based on his own daringly novel ideas about how school and education ought to work, and apparently became very famous and successful. Lots of interesting historical side-paths to wander down. I especially enjoyed the early parts about Thring's own schooldays at Eton (more or less exactly what you'd expect from Eton in the 1830s). The later diaries about day-to-day life at Uppingham were certainly interesting from a historical and fandom research point of view, although sometimes irritatingly vague on the details. But it has given me some ideas to mull over about Raffles.

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). More romantic and slashy Jacobite-themed adventure novels! This one kind of approaches the Jacobites at a tangent: the main plot is about our hero David Balfour's quest to thwart the schemes of his evil uncle, a very appropriate adventure novel story, but after David is kidnapped on board a ship, he meets the historical Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, who's travelling back and forth between France and the Appin Stewarts' lands in the Highlands, and much of the rest of the book is taken up with Alan and the other Stewarts' Jacobite drama. This is actually the first book of Stevenson's that I've read, and I found the prose and story much less engaging than e.g. Flight of the Heron (well, it's not everyone who can write like Broster...), but it was entertaining, and the relationship between David and Alan (within a few hours of first meeting, after they fight side by side against the sailors who've kidnapped David and are threatening to murder Alan: He came up to me with open arms. 'Come to my arms!' he cried, and embraced and kissed me hard upon both cheeks. 'David,' said he, 'I love you like a brother.') was good fun.

The historical parts of the plot involve the Appin murder—the murder, in 1752, of Colin Roy Campbell, government factor on the forfeited Jacobite estates in Appin. Alan Breck Stewart was the main suspect; the novel establishes his innocence! Eventually a relation, James Stewart of the Glens, was tried very unfairly indeed and executed as an accessory to the murder (these events are mentioned in The Gleam in the North), but who actually dunnit has apparently never been established, and the book doesn't clear that up either. Now, there's another mystery here: Stevenson sets the book in 1751, moving the actual date of the murder by a year; he points out the anachronism in the preface, and I was expecting that there'd be some important reason why the events of the novel had to take place in '51, but... there isn't? Unless I've missed something, there was no reason not to set the fictional plot in the right year for the real murder. Very odd.

I read this illustrated edition on Project Gutenberg. The back of the ebook, after the main text, has all the illustrations repeated at full size, and not realising this going in I thought the book was going to be about 50% longer than it actually was and was somewhat surprised when it suddenly ended. Perhaps that's why I found the ending very abrupt, but it did seem that things weren't really tied up as much as they could have been—in particular, the Appin murder and who's going to hang for it is still unresolved at the end. One final point—lovely as the illustrations are, the text describes David as being a foot taller than Alan, but the illustrator consistently depicts them as about the same height. I think this is cowardly and I'm glad this illustrator never got their hands on Flight of the Heron.

Er, altogether this was a good one!

A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics by John Addington Symonds (1883 and 1891 respectively). I've been meaning for a while to do some proper reading of these late nineteenth-century works on homosexuality, and I thought these looked a bit more accessible than e.g. Edward Prime-Stevenson's 700-page brick. They were indeed very interesting stuff. The first is a study of the history, nature and development in Ancient Greek society of what Symonds calls paiderastia, which could probably have done with more of a classical background than I have to appreciate properly, but which provided some illuminating context for some of the twentieth-century books I've already read—there's so much Greek stuff in books like Maurice, etc. The second is an overview of contemporary attitudes to and writing on homosexuality, divided into various different contexts—e.g. legal, medical, anthropological and what Symonds amusingly calls 'vulgar errors'. As a summary of a diverse range of opinions and perspectives it's fascinating. I especially enjoyed the account of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's views in the chapter headed 'Literature—Polemical', and Symonds's own views and arguments—much more sympathetic than a lot of those he quotes and discusses, and his criticism of the more ignorant and bizarre of these was enjoyable. He concludes with a list of 'suggestions in relation to law and education', which make an admirable progressive argument to read from the 1890s.

I've also been reading more about Symonds on Rictor Norton's website. He is a fascinating and significant figure, well worth knowing more about.

Pink Sugar by O. Douglas (Anna Masterton Buchan) (1924). I really enjoyed some things about this and other things about it really irritated me, so it's an interesting one overall! It follows Kirsty Gilmour, who after a youth of being dragged on constant travels by her stepmother takes a house in rural Tweeddale and settles down into her first stable home. She's joined there by an old aunt and by three children, relatives of a friend of Kirsty's and in need of somewhere to stay while their widowed father deals with his grief by travelling. We also meet Kirsty's new neighbours, of various characters, social classes and professions, in some detail. The book lays great stress on the importance to Kirsty of finally having a home of her own, and I really liked this aspect of the story, relationships between characters, places and the idea of home being one of my favourite things in fiction. I can see what oursin meant recently about houses in Douglas's books (I mean, the place is called 'Little Phantasy'—hardly subtle, is it—but I think it's an enjoyable fantasy!). I also enjoyed the relationship between Kirsty and the local clergyman's sister Rebecca as a portrayal of a believable antagonism between two characters who are both sympathetic, and who I both liked, although I thought the resolution of their conflict left something to be desired.

As for the things I didn't like—first, the idea that people who dislike and don't want to be around cruel children (I don't say 'badly-behaved'; that's not the issue) are being unreasonable. I actually thought Bill's 'badness' seemed more important than it was apparently supposed to be—I kept thinking some big dramatic thing would happen and some significant point would be made, but it never came to anything. More importantly, the book's main romance went from mildly annoying to very annoying by the end, and managed to sour quite a lot of what was otherwise good about the story. In the middle there's a bit where Kirsty meets a woman who lives happily unmarried with another woman and has a rich and full life and has a bit of a revelation; I couldn't help feeling that in a better book (or at least one I'd have liked better) that would have been foreshadowing the ending, but as it is it was just sort of there.

First, a couple of D. K. Broster fandom things, thanks to theseatheseatheopensea: Flight of the Heron is now available as a pdf on archive.org; and here is another photograph of Broster herself, in academic dress and accompanied by a little magazine bio that must have been written while she was working on FotH!

According to Gibson by Denis Mackail (1923). A loose series of comic stories which Mackail narrates in character as himself, recording the absurd but entertaining tall tales told to him by Gibson, a mysterious eccentric from his club. The stories themselves feature ghosts, improbable scientific developments, political intrigue and various involved and contradictory backstories for Gibson himself, about whom Mackail's fictional persona eventually discovers a little more of the truth... The stories were good fun—the style and sense of humour are very much reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse—but nowhere near as good as Greenery Street, which was a bit of a disappointment.

Afoot in England by W. H. Hudson (1909). More lovely nature/travel writing—this one is about Hudson's various adventures travelling around England (by which he, as so often in literature, means the south of England) on foot and by bicycle, staying in remote villages and famous cities, observing both the natural world and the people he meets and writing about it all in beautiful detail. There are various interesting local places, the Roman ruins at Silchester (I recognised the name Calleva from Rosemary Sutcliff!), watching the midsummer sunrise at Stonehenge, more on the avian residents of Salisbury Cathedral and lots more, all illustrated with some absolutely gorgeous descriptive writing and enlivened by Hudson's sometimes slightly odd but usually interesting opinions. (I've just learnt from his Wikipedia page that he was a supporter of Lamarckian evolution—still within the bounds of scientific respectability at this time, but it's still somehow funny to think of it overlapping with the beginnings of the modern conservation movement).

Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane (1917). Well, this is something of a book! It's set at a girls' school and deals with the relationship between two teachers: Clare Hartill, the de facto head of the school who rules with a sort of domineering manipulativeness and is widely adored by the girls, and Alwynne Durand, a new and very young mistress who quickly becomes a favourite with the girls and best friends with Clare. (I shipped it from the omelette onwards, of course). Also important is the relationship between Clare and one of her protégés, the thirteen-year-old and academically brilliant Louise Denny, whom we see struggling with the standard of work in the higher form into which Clare has promoted her alongside a difficult and unhappy home life. It all ends badly. That Clare and Alwynne's relationship is a lesbian one is never stated in so many words, but is almost kind of taken for granted by the book—others characters talk about how Alwynne is acting as though she was in love, how obviously Clare is incompatible with the idea of marriage for Alwynne, and so on. Apparently this book inspired The Well of Loneliness, and I can definitely see the resemblance, in the ideas about what lesbians are and how relationships between women work, and in the shape of the ending. This book has a really, really bad ending. ( A rant about the really, really bad ending ) It was still worth reading! Interesting historically as well as in the intrigue at the school—there are some great moments of characters trying to manipulate each other at cross purposes and totally misunderstanding each other's intentions, very darkly funny. Also, poor Louise. :(

Work is pretty full-on at the moment (the usual busy season plus some extra bits—all very interesting but hard work) and my brain is more or less fried this evening, but I'm attempting a books post anyway...


The Small Room by May Sarton (1961). This book is set at a women's college in the northeastern US, where main character Lucy Winter goes to work as a lecturer after breaking off her engagement. It's concerned with questions about how the academic and the personal interact, centring around Lucy's discovery that a star student has plagiarised an essay and a conflict amongst the faculty over whether the college should employ a resident psychiatrist. I didn't love it, but it was certainly interesting. I think certain aspects have aged poorly—the anti-psychiatrist characters seem to see their position as deeply emotionally important to their identities as teachers, but from a modern perspective they're just trying to deny healthcare to people who clearly need it out of a weird oblivious obstinacy. On the other hand, there's a lesbian relationship portrayed in a surprisingly modern way—neither character is especially likeable, but they're good characters and their relationship is quite casually dealt with and placed on a level with the het relationships in the book.

Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson (1937). Aaargh, this book is so good and I don't know how to describe how good it is. Right, so: it opens in 1936 at a bazaar for the benefit of a charity supporting 'distressed gentlefolks' (I wonder when those stopped being a thing?); an attendee meets one of the gentlefolks, an unassuming old lady named Grace Scrimgeour, is affected by the sight of her poverty and wonders 'how does this happen'?, and the rest of the book spends 450 pages answering that question. It follows Grace and her family of sisters from her birth in 1870 throughout her life, examining in detail exactly how a woman raised in an upper middle-class Victorian family ends up sinking slowly into inexorable poverty, unable to do anything to escape her fate or improve her prospects, and along the way a great deal else about the lives of women of that class and era. Ferguson has an amazing talent for conveying the atmosphere of a setting and the shape of a character's thoughts through perfectly-chosen details and brilliantly-crafted phrases—the helpless outrage of Grace's eldest sister after her marriage and first pregnancy shatter the sheltered innocence of her Victorian girlhood; the horrifyingly casual cruelty of the father who isn't, in intention, really a bad person but simply a natural product of what his society requires of men; the stultifying restrictedness of the lives of the unmarried sisters, and their gradual despair as they age through their twenties and thirties without the promised fulfilment and come to terms with how little they'll ever be able to have or achieve; many terrible moments of social awkwardness.

All the details of nineteenth-century life and society are brilliant and beautifully used, and Ferguson knows the subjects she's writing about very well indeed. This book is one of the best things I've ever read for conveying a sense of time passing, change and loss, amongst plenty of other things. She is eloquently, intelligently furious about sexism, and shows with brutal clarity how it plays out in the attitudes and actions of both men and women, how in a society-scale injustice like this the victims of the system are also its perpetrators and vice versa, and how it stunts and thwarts nineteenth-century women's lives. This book is so, so good—absorbing in the early sections, increasingly harrowing towards the end, by turns horrifying, embarrassing, tragic and funny, always beautiful and endlessly engaging. If it has a flaw, it's the attitudes towards class—those remarks about people knowing their place sit rather oddly alongside the rest of the book, but I can ignore them against everything it does so well. Anyway, it's really good! Highly recommended.

Letters of John Cockburn of Ormistoun to His Gardener 1727-1744, edited by James Colville and published by the Scottish History Society in 1904. A recommendation from Naomi Mitchison! John Cockburn, owner of the estate of Ormistoun in East Lothian, was a fanatical agricultural reformer; he spent much of his time living near London, and so wrote these letters to his gardener Charles Bell with instructions about the management of the gardens, farmland and plantations of the estate. The letters are full of fascinating historical and horticultural detail—Cockburn is remarkably forward-looking in his views of agriculture and economics, setting out some very modern ideas about economies of scale, creating markets for new products and such things, and the minutiae of managing fruit trees, vegetable seeds, the care of planted saplings, pigeons, etc. etc. are all interesting. I also enjoyed the letters for the sense they convey of the writer's personality—the tone is a mixture of earnest zeal for improvement and good work and obstinate impatience at how much less earnestly zealous everyone other than Cockburn is. (His frustration at how if only Bell would read his letters properly, the things that need doing would get done and he wouldn't have to keep repeating himself, was very amusing, and also very modern—I think a lot of people feel the same way about work emails...).

First of all—since I believe there are a few people reading my journal who are mostly on Discord and/or Tumblr—if anyone would like to try out Dreamwidth/get to know the site better, starterpack has just got going and looks like being an excellent resource!

I've spent the last few days going, OK, I need to read a short book next to make sure I can fit it in before the end of the year, and have managed to do this three times before actually running out of year, so that worked. :D Here they are...

Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson (1901). I wanted some nice light non-fiction to complement my Yuletide reading, so went browsing the 'Birds' category on Gutenberg.org, as you do. I'm very happy to have found this! It's beautiful nature writing—both in Hudson's eye for detail and for imaginative and well-observed description, and in his ideas and arguments. The book is structured as a series of essays covering such topics as the beauty of the wood-warbler, the nesting habits of jackdaws, the tragic decline of the raven in lowland England, the folklore surrounding owls and, especially interestingly, Hudson's views on contemporary conservation questions, particularly hunting and egg-collecting. Hudson lived in England in later life and wrote this book there, but he grew up in Argentina, and his descriptions of the countryside and birds of the West Country are interspersed with anecdotes and wildlife from the South American pampas, which I really enjoyed (the upland goose sounds like a lovely bird). The angles taken on everything are always original and interesting, and the whole thing is a delight to read.

White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1887). A Jacobite adventure from the author of Imre: A Memorandum, oh yes :D This book is set in the summer of 1746, when our plucky young hero Andrew Boyd, the son of a Highland landowner, stumbles across a Jacobite fugitive hiding amongst the heather. Andrew and his father take in the man, who introduces himself as Lord Geoffry Armitage, and Andrew more or less textually falls in love with him. Then the Hanoverian soldiers arrive... It's all a very gripping adventure—a much less ambitious book than Flight of the Heron, of course, not so historically detailed and IMO much less geographically convincing. It's also sentimental and a bit overly sensational (I guessed the big plot twist in the first chapter)—but nonetheless a very fun read for all that. I liked the relationship between Andrew and Geoffry, all the more for knowing the author probably did mean it like that, and I enjoyed the drama of the soldiers—I thought Captain Jermain was a good portrayal of how much damage the carelessly powerful can cause without necessarily being malicious. (Keith Windham wouldn't like him at all!). And, you know—I'd have to check the dates, but I don't think it would be terribly difficult to cross it over with Flight of the Heron...

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1910). This is a boarding school story, which I always like, and it's a turn-of-the-century Australian novel that isn't by E. W. Hornung, which made for an interesting comparison!—this is a side of Australian life Hornung presumably didn't see much of. The story opens with twelve-year-old Laura Rambotham being sent off to school in Melbourne, and follows her subsequent adventures and misadventures there. My overall feeling is that it's a good book but not necessarily a very enjoyable one. For one thing it's a painfully accurate depiction of the experience of being twelve years old, not knowing how to say or do the right thing and suffering terrible embarrassment as a result. Laura is a very interesting character, deeply flawed and painfully sympathetic, but the other characters all seemed more or less unlikeable, and there's very little warmth to the book's relationships. It is pretty subtextually queer, which was interesting—Laura is continually uninterested in boys, and repeatedly clashes against social expectations about it in ways that again were both very true to life and kind of excruciating to read. At one point she falls in love with an older girl in that sort of desperate, jealous way of a crush when you're an insecure teenager with no way of understanding your own feelings. The ending seemed to be trying to introduce more hope, but did very little to justify it, and felt oddly incomplete as a result—I felt there was a whole extra novel in those hints about Laura's future in the last chapter.

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett (1995). I decided it was time for a Discworld re-read! This was the first time I'd re-read this one since reading The Phantom of the Opera, of which it's a parody, so there were quite a few more jokes and references to get, which was very enjoyable. And Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg in general are as good as ever, individually and together.

A Social History of the English Countryside by G. E. Mingay (1990). I found this one on archive.org while searching for Oliver Rackham's The History of the Countryside, and thought, hey, that looks relevant to my interests too...! It was indeed very interesting. It's pretty much what it sounds like from the title, and covers all sorts of aspects of life in the English countryside—agricultural work, land ownership and class hierarchies, food, housing, disease and medicine, religion, games, etc. etc.—from the middle ages to the twentieth century. Lots of really interesting stuff in there, including some information on things I was aware of but didn't know a great deal about, like the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century. It is an overview rather than going into tons of detail about specific things, and there were a couple of places where I felt a bit more detail would have been helpful—but nevertheless, in general it's a very interesting and enjoyable overview.

And, technically, Sir Isumbras at the Ford by D. K. Broster (1918) again. :D It was great fun getting to revisit this one, and having to pay such close attention to the details of the text made for an interesting reading experience. I think the weaknesses were a bit more obvious this time through—it is just a bit contrived and overly-sentimental in places—but overall I still like it a lot, especially Raymonde—reading her first few scenes with the knowledge of what's really going on and how it all goes later on was an especially good bit for re-reading, I thought.

( This review is technically a spoiler for my latest fic )

Hertha by Fredrika Bremer (1854; translated by Mary Howitt, 1856). This is an early feminist novel telling the story of Hertha Falk, a bright and determined woman living in a fictional Swedish town, who undergoes various personal misfortunes and struggles against both small- and large-scale manifestations of sexist oppression throughout her life. As a novel I didn't think it was particularly brilliant—much of the plot is improbable and a bit silly in its twistings and revelations, the pacing is odd and the narrative is frequently interrupted by long didactic speeches. But, having said that, there are some very good bits of imagery in there—Hertha's dream of being barred from the tree of life is a good one, as is the chapter where the people are all gathered in a field outside the town the night after their homes are destroyed by fire—and the cast of minor characters is great (I loved the cheerful and capable Mimmi Svanberg, and Ingeborg). Anyway—as a piece of history, however, this book is fascinating. The portrayal of just what women in the nineteenth century had to contend with is appropriately awful—Hertha's stern father, having had a change of heart after almost dying, promises her that he'll give her control over the property to which she can't legally gain access without his permission, and then simply never keeps his promise: a vivid illustration of a point that so many social-justice-oriented British novels of the period miss, that personal benevolence can't be relied upon to fix society-wide wrongs—and women's legal situation seems to have been—at least, Bremer argues that it was—even worse in Sweden than elsewhere. But this novel changed that! After its publication it began a national conversation on the Woman Question, which led to improvements in women's legal rights and the founding of the country's first women's higher education institution. All very fascinating stuff—I always enjoy learning about history by reading fiction from the period, and this was a particularly good one for that.

Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison (1952). I'd been wanting to check out Naomi Mitchison's books for a while—she wrote what seems like a ridiculous quantity and variety of books over a long career—and this was a good one to begin with! It's a modern fairytale, of sorts: it starts out as what seems like a fairly straightforward parody tale set in Fairytale Scandinavia—the main character Halla is an abandoned princess who is raised by dragons, who we see indignantly justifying their position in the conflict between dragons and heroes, and who meets various mythical creatures and people including unicorns and Valkyries. But later on Halla's story becomes more complex and more unusual, and the action moves across Europe to Constantinople and further into history, bringing in questions about society and religion, all while Halla struggles to find her place amongst it all. By the end it's become something else entirely. I really, really like this book! It took me a while to get to grips with what it was really trying to do, but by the last third or so I was just admiring the achievement. Mitchison's prose is absolutely gorgeous, a really strong and vivid storytelling style, and I was impressed with how well she balances maintaining a fairytale feel with discussion of subjects that might not come up in a typical fairytale. The nature descriptions are utterly lovely throughout, from the wild things in the Scandinavian forests of Halla's early life to the ship's voyage near the end. And I very much appreciated how the story handles (or doesn't, lol) its suggested het romance—a real breath of fresh air compared to how such stories typically go. In fact the entire ending is one of the best ones I've read anywhere in a while—some elements of it, especially the big twist, felt unexpected at the time but, as soon as I thought about them for a bit, absolutely appropriate. (And now I kind of want Halla/Steinvor femslash where the adventure continues... hmm, one to add to the Yuletide shortlist???)

More historical researches...

Redcoat: The British Soldier In the Age of Horse and Musket by Richard Holmes. This is an account of the lives, adventures and deaths of British soldiers in the period from the Seven Years' War of the mid-eighteenth century to the Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth—so slightly later than The Flight of the Heron, but still very useful for getting some background on the sort of life Keith Windham would have been used to! It's not a chronological history—the major wars are the setting rather than the subject matter—but an exploration of various aspects of army life: recruitment and training, going on campaign, hierarchy, politics, discipline, habits and culture, marches, battle, etc. etc. It's written in a very accessible, engaging style that's enjoyable to read, and is full of all sorts of interesting and useful bits of information on everything from weaponry, how commissions and promotion worked and the social and political background of military affairs to how soldiers wore their hair and what food they cooked and ate (and what they drank. There's a lot of drink in this book). This turned out to be relevant to more than one of my fandoms—the stuff about the Peninsular campaign is a good background to those chapters of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and some of the descriptions of daily life in the army were familiar from Monstrous Regiment (although Holmes claims that Sweet Polly Olivers were rare in real life—but then, how would he know? :P).

Culloden and the '45 by Jeremy Black. Another Jacobite history, this one concentrating on the political and military background to the '45, with more about the international situation than internal Scottish affairs. It turns out the international situation in the mid-eighteenth century was really complicated! But I understand a bit more now about why France and Flanders were such a big deal and what Keith was doing before being unexpectedly dragged off to Scotland. Black's musings on the fortunes of Charles Edward's campaign, and speculations about the various places where things might have happened differently, were also very interesting. He argues strongly against the 'Whiggish' view of history (i.e. the 'bound to be top nation' school of thought satirised in 1066 And All That) that history is a matter of the march of progress towards the present day, and that the Jacobites and everyone else who opposed the inevitable progressive victors were doomed to failure from the start—in fact, there were plenty of ways it could have been otherwise, and very nearly was. All intriguing stuff!


...and some fiction!

From a Swedish Homestead by Selma Lagerlöf (1899; translated by Jessie Brochner, 1901). This is a collection of short to medium-length stories, ranging from small-scale domestic stories set in contemporary Sweden to saints' lives in medieval Italy and legends of ancient Rome. The stories are all more or less fairytale-ish in style and mood, many of them with religious elements and tone, and Lagerlöf's style works really, really well for this kind of thing—the writing is vivid and utterly gorgeous. Actually I think I enjoyed this one more than Gösta Berling's Saga, just because I felt like I 'got' the style much better in this kind of context. Lagerlöf is great at blending the magical, larger-than-life fairytale feeling of her settings and plots with a very detailed portrayal of complex human emotions and motivations—an old woman's loneliness and isolation and the blending of fear and sympathy for the spirits of the dead in 'Old Agnete', a mother's grief over the illegitimate child who won't be buried in her husband's family tomb in 'The Inscription On the Grave'. Really good stuff!