callmemadam: (countrygirl)
‘I wish I had your garden. Mine is so new!’
‘I wish I had yours. A new garden! Why, it’s like a blank book that you mean to fill with verses.’
‘If you can write!’

From Gardener’s Nightcap, Muriel Stuart
callmemadam: (countrygirl)


The other day I was a few minutes early for a hairdresser’s appointment, so nipped into the charity shop opposite. There amongst the usual rubbish was the familiar grey spine of a Persephone book. Whipped it out and found it was one I’d been wanting to read. As-new condition, complete with bookmark. Gardener’s Nightcap by Muriel Stuart is the chatty, random thoughts type of gardening book it’s so nice to dip into. Here’s a taster from the beginning:
‘And then to bed, to lie with one’s face to the uncurtained window, thinking of seed-sowing, and pruning and mulching, and slug hunting, and this year’s done, and next year’s doings, and all the other garden preoccupations that obtrude themselves so pleasantly before a gardener sleeps.’

I feel I was meant to find this book.

callmemadam: (reading)
stillmissing

‘There was nothing in life that Susan Selky could have done to prepare for the breathtaking impact of losing her son.’

That’s not a spoiler; it’s on the first page of Still Missing, a book first published in 1981. Susan waves as her six-year-old son Alex turns the corner before walking the two blocks to school. He never arrives and has apparently vanished without trace. The missing child is a theme that never fails to harrow, being every parent’s nightmare, and there are many fictional works on the subject. One thinks immediately of Marghanita Laski’s Little Boy Lost, The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, and of countless mystery stories. The fear goes deeper than modern fiction, way back into fairy tale and folklore: Hansel and Gretel, children stolen away by gypsies, even by fairies or the Erlkönig.

In Still Missing we suffer with Susan (and with the policeman in charge of the case) as she copes with her devastating loss, police camping out in her house, media attention and the shocking realisation that the world is not as good a place as she had believed. Worse comes when the case is closed and Susan refuses to give up hope although everyone, including her estranged husband, tells her that she should start to move on. As if! It’s a good book, which I found gripping; nearing the end, I read faster and faster, hoping that little Alex would be found alive and well. I do question, though, whether it really deserved to be reprinted by Persephone? I can’t see that it’s a better book than, say, Jodi Picoult might write on the same subject.
callmemadam: (studygirl)
whirlwind

This is the second new release Persephone have sent me and to be honest I wasn’t much looking forward to reading it because of the heavy subject matter: Ginzburg’s sufferings as a result of Stalin’s Purges of the late 1930s. Anyone coming to this book without prior knowledge of Russian history might think it a work of fiction, so fantastic are the charges brought against Ginzburg and other Party loyalists, so nightmarish the atmosphere of fear and suspicion.

Eugenia Ginzburg was an academic, married and with two children, when she was arrested in 1937, as the Great Purge began. Although completely innocent of ‘terrorism’ she was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment (it turned out to be eighteen years) and this book covers the first three years of her incarceration. For two years she was officially in solitary; then, with other ‘politicals’, she was moved, in a railway truck labelled ‘special equipment’, out to a labour camp which seemed to be at the ends of the earth. She describes the area as ‘neolithic’. If you’ve read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, the privations described in the book come as no surprise but Ginzburg keeps your interest throughout because it’s such a personal story and she writes so vividly of her fellow prisoners.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of her experiences is the passionate desire to live, when so often it must have seemed easier just to give up and die. Through interrogation, punishment, malnutrition, illness, frostbite, the loss of her family, she never gave up. It’s a great testament to her physical endurance but above all to her mental strength, that she kept going all those years. She stayed sane by reciting poetry, of which she seems to have memorised an astonishing amount. She describes her joy when, officially still in solitary but now with a cell mate, she is able to borrow books from the prison library and the two of them almost go blind, reading, reading, reading in poor light. That was luxury compared with life later on in the camp where so many others died. Once her sentence was completed, Ginzburg was condemned to remain in exile and was not ‘rehabilitated’ until 1955.

There have been criticisms of the book, which Rodric Braithwaite discusses in an Afterword. Ginzburg remained a Communist, blaming Stalin but never Lenin for the ‘mistakes’ which resulted in possibly twenty million deaths. As a Party member, she was perhaps partly responsible for what happened. Fellow survivors have pointed out inconsistencies in her story and have described her as ‘lucky’ or only interested in what happened to her fellow intellectuals. As Braithwaite points out, we who have never lived under a dictatorship have no right to throw stones. Whatever its faults, it’s a remarkable and important book. Into the Whirlwind was first published in the UK in 1967. It makes me angry that even after this and similar testaments appeared, some people in the West, (Eric Hobsbawm, frex), remained wilfully blind to the evils of Soviet rule. As for Philby and his ilk, they are beneath contempt.
callmemadam: (reading)
wilfredeileen

This is Persephone Book 107 and I received my copy from the publisher. It’s unusual for Persephone to reprint a book first published in 1976, whose author is still alive. A little research showed that second hand copies are unaffordable so a reprint makes sense, especially as it’s a book about the effects of the First World War. I was casting around thinking of other books published around the same time. For example, in 1975 Martin Amis published Dead Babies, Malcolm Bradbury The History Man and David Lodge Changing Places. Julian Barnes and Ian McEwen had barely started their glittering careers. These are significant authors of the time. I mention this because the remarkable thing about Wilfred and Eileen is that it reads as if it had been written between the wars. Jonathan Smith was writing a book completely against all current trends, which as an English teacher he must have known. In his Afterword to this edition he mentions his admiration for Siegfried Sassoon’s prose works, especially Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and he has perhaps captured something of Sassoon’s tone in his own writing.

Wilfred and Eileen is a love story based on the lives of real people and it’s an inspiring tale. I was nearly put off the whole book in the first chapter by the tiresome undergraduate chatter of Wilfred and his friends at Trinity, Cambridge but it’s a necessary introduction because Wilfred and Eileen meet at the May Ball. Wilfred is fiercely ambitious, planning to be a famous surgeon. Eileen is rich, bored, and wanting something useful to do with her life. The two fall in love and marry secretly, as both families are against the union. Then comes the war and Wilfred enlists, to Eileen’s distress. He throws himself into military life with the same zeal he previously applied to his medical studies, all the time thinking of Eileen and exchanging letters with her. Then he is shot in the head.

Wilfred isn’t expected to recover but Eileen brings him back from France and gets him into the right hands. Even with the progress he makes, he will never be a doctor. Jonathan Smith says that he now sees the book as more Eileen’s story than Wilfred’s, and I can understand why. Wilfred’s courage and will power lead him to contemplate a different sort of life to the one he planned, but one that will still be worthwhile. He can only do this with Eileen’s help. She’s saved him once and now he will make the most of ‘the life she gave him’. It’s an extraordinary story told in a very matter of fact way.

In this centenary year there are many books out dealing with the First World War. I mentally compared this with the more recent My Dear I Wanted to Tell You which has a similar storyline. Both are well worth reading. I was careful not to read the press release, the Afterword or any reviews before starting Wilfred and Eileen and this made the book all the more surprising. If you look up Jonathan Smith, you find him an interesting person: an inspiring teacher (Dan Stevens was one of his pupils) and also the father of Ed Smith, the cricketer and TMS commentator. What a talented family!
callmemadam: (woman's magazine)
womansplace

A Woman’s Place 1910 – 1975 was part of my recent Persephone trawl. I found it one of the best general books on the subject that I’ve read. Ruth Adam charts the changing attitudes towards women’s work during the twentieth century. Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out covers some of the same ground; Adam points out that there was already a surplus of women *before* the First World War. Many women, of course, had always worked outside the home: mill girls, agricultural workers, domestic servants and shop assistants. The changes applied to middle and lower middle class women, especially those with professional qualifications which seemed to threaten male bastions. Many people, women as well as men, considered that housekeeping and bringing up children was woman’s highest calling, and the ideal. Two world wars changed that. The new assumption was that homemaking could easily be a part time job while women did war work. This led to further social changes as provision had to be made for looking after children while their mothers worked. For the first time the state became responsible for infant care.

After each world war, everything changed again and once more women were expected to stay at home. It’s depressing to read how (with a few noble exceptions) Labour Party and Trades Union members were a major obstacle to women’s equality at work. Now, we take equal pay for equal work for granted, but many bitter battles were fought over it. (The only job I would except from equal payment is that of women tennis professionals. With Wimbledon starting tomorrow, we shall see again that women players are far less entertaining than male ones.) I found the first part of the book livelier than the second. When writing about the early years, Ruth Adam quotes extensively from novels of the time; H G Wells, John Galsworthy and George Gissing are just some of the authors referred to. (I was immediately fired up to read Ann Veronica and thought I would be able to get it free for the Kindle. Unfortunately not! Yes, I know it’s on Project Gutenberg but I still haven’t found a simple way to transfer files from there to my Kindle.) I think Ruth Adam was perhaps less comfortable writing about the sixties and seventies (she was born in 1907). The quotations disappear and from being sure about what was right and necessary (votes, equal pay), she finds herself on less safe ground and questions whether the sexual revolution was altogether a good thing for women. The back dustwrapper flap of the Persephone edition tells us that Ruth Adam ‘wrote twelve novels … all of them concerned with social issues.’ No mention of her work for Girl comic.
Girl, Susan and nursing )
callmemadam: (Barbara)
Yesterday morning, very early, I went to the huge car boot sale at Ashley Heath, the first time I’d been for about three years. It was a glorious drive over the heathland in the early morning sun. That journey always makes me feel very Hardy-ish; I imagine the road white and dusty instead of Tarmac and one of his lone travellers trudging along it. On the way there I saw cattle browsing on the verges and on the way back a group of darling little foals. Miles I tramped round that huge field without finding anything, not being in need of a new lavatory, a surf board, or any of the myriad wares on sale. I couldn’t help remembering wonderful finds I’d had there in the past and told myself that anyway, it was a nice healthy country walk in the sun. It was really warm! Then, in the very last row of all I spotted these and asked the price. I expected to be told ‘pound each’ (which I would have paid), but no: ‘£1.50 for the four?’ ‘Yes please!’ Worth going then, and the book I most wanted, the Ruth Adam, still has its bookmark. I had the best of the day, too, because later it clouded over and wasn’t so nice.

ashleyheathpersephones
callmemadam: (reading)


List
The Testing of Tansy, Winifred Norling
Superfluous Death, Hazel Holt
Started Early, Took my Dog, Kate Atkinson
Berry & Co., Dornford Yates
A Good Yarn, Debbie Macomber
Few Eggs and no Oranges, Vere Hodgson
Starter for Ten, David Nicholls
Agatha Christie:
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder is Announced
4.50 from Paddington
Troubles, J G Farrell
The Surgeon, Tess Gerritsen
The London Eye Mystery, Siobhan Dowd
The Girls of the Hamlet Club, Elsie J Oxenham
thoughts )
callmemadam: (reading)


After my lucky find of this book I read it the same day, for the first time. I was predisposed to like it; The Secret Garden was my favourite book when I was a child, as anyone must know by now. The Making of a Marchioness was first published in two parts, the second called The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. It still reads like two books, of which the first is pure delight. How easily the prose flows along! The book was written in ten days and the opening has a Mrs Dalloway quality about it. How real Miss Emily Fox-Seton seems and how delightful the descriptions of the furnishing of her bed-sitting room, the savings and contrivances by which she turns herself out so respectably! True, there are reminders that the future for a poor spinster may be bleak but then, hurrah, a fairy tale ending. Lovely.



The second part of the book is quite different and a reminder that fairy tales can be Grimm. Emily continues a happy, thankful, holy fool while the story turns into a Victorian melodrama. (Several times in the text another character remarks that Emily is ‘Victorian’. The book was published in 1901.) In bleak depictions of marriage we see a violent, abusive husband and a selfish, unemotional one. Which is Emily’s? You’ll have to read the book to find out.



As so often, it’s the hardship parts of the book which I enjoyed most. In A Little Princess my favourite chapters are the ones where Sara is reduced to the level of a servant, living in a bare attic, just as the chapters about Katy Carr’s illness are the best in What Katy Did. Is this perverse or do other people feel the same?
I just had to read A Little Princess again and enjoyed it very much. The transformation scene in the attic is wonderful:
This is what she saw. In the grate there was a glowing, blazing fire; on the hob was a little brass kettle hissing and boiling; spread upon the floor was a thick, warm crimson rug; … on the bed were new warm coverings and a satin-covered down quilt;
From cold and hunger to warmth and ‘rich, hot, savoury soup’; the fantasy of so many of the Victorian moral tales about poor children which I have such a weakness for.
A Little Princess is still in print, with plenty of modern paperback editions.
callmemadam: (woman's magazine)
Lovely picture today on the Persephone Post. What a cold room that must have been, with those enormous windows and a coal fire!
callmemadam: (woman's magazine)


I have admired Elizabeth Taylor’s novels for many years so I waited impatiently for the arrival of The Other Elizabeth Taylor by Nicola Beauman. It’s the first ‘Persephone Life’ and handsomely produced. The book was planned as an authorised biography but Beauman decided publication must be postponed until Elizabeth Taylor’s husband John had died. Their children then objected to the book and disowned it. It’s not clear if this was because they didn’t like the truth being told about aspects of their mother’s life or because they felt there were things in the book that were not true. Controversy usually assists sales but sensation-seekers will not find much to excite them. The real problem with a life of Elizabeth Taylor is the lack of sources. She was intensely private, threw out many of her own papers before her death and insisted that her friend Robert Liddell destroy all the letters she had written to him. So there are no diaries and few reminiscences and the book is based largely on internal evidence from the novels (dangerous) and the letters which did survive: those written to Shock! )
callmemadam: (countrygirl)
For Christmas, I was given the Persephone Books edition of Kay Smallshaw’s How to Run your Home without Help, first published in post-war, rationed Britain in 1949. No, it wasn’t a subtle hint that an educated person could write their name in the dust on the piano. I asked for it because I am interested in these old housekeeping books. Read more... )

Profile

callmemadam: (Default)
callmemadam

August 2024

S M T W T F S
    123
456789 10
11121314151617
18192021222324
2526 2728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 10th, 2025 10:10 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios