Oxford by Edward Thomas

I think most book bloggers will identify with this situation: THE book we read and never got around to reviewing.  Of course, there are dozens that would fit that category, but I imagine we all have one in particular which we wish we'd reviewed at the time - either because it was so good, or because we've wanted to link back to it on many occasions.  But the memory of reading it has simply faded. That book, for me, is Oxford by Jan Morris, given to me by my father when I came up to Oxford - and read about five years later, which isn't bad going for my reading schedule.  It's absolutely fantastic, that much I remember - but not much else.

In order for it to avoid a similar fate, I shall now write about Oxford (1903) by Edward Thomas.  Imaginative titles, these fans of Oxford come up with, no?  This was a gift from my friend Daphne, although I can't remember quite when.  Being published in 1903, perhaps I should have saved it for a tricky year when I do A Century of Books again in 2014 (this is still the plan!) but instead it's come under Reading Presently (I'll give you a proper update in due course.)

All I knew about Edward Thomas before reading this came from Helen Thomas's excellent biographies/autobiographies, and having read one or two of his poems (i.e. 'Adelstrop', twice).  Well, Oxford didn't teach me a lot about him either, as - understandably - he doesn't write very much about himself.  But his sensibilities are in every line.  Supposedly he writes about Oxford past and present, through the lenses of the students, the dons, and the servants - but really he is writing prose-poetry.  There are anecdotes and portraits, true, but he is clearly a poet rather than an historian or chronicler, still less the creator of a guide book (although he would later write some).

Would any of those professions give space for this description of a college garden?Old and stories as it is, the garden has a whole volume of subtleties by which it avails itself of the tricks of the elements.  Nothing could be more romantic than its grouping and contrasted lights when a great, tawny September moon leans - as if pensively at watch - upon the garden wall.  No garden is so fortunate in retaining its splendour when summer brusquely departs, or so rich in the idiom or green leaves when the dewy charities of the south wind are at last accepted.

It's lovely, and accordingly I love it (as mentioned before, I am much more at home with poetic prose than poetry) - but you will understand why I shan't try to give a factual précis of the material Thomas covers, because the writing is everything here.  I read Oxford very slowly, over the course of a few months, and I think that's the best way to read it.  It certainly shouldn't be taken out on the High Street if you want to find the bus station, not least because the book is over a hundred years old.

I have lived in Oxford for nine years, but there was very little in here that I recognised as being here today - perhaps the fields in Grandpont, and the view over Port Meadow (for now...), but not the rest.  The people have changed, the environment is no longer the way Thomas saw it.  Things change more slowly in Oxford than elsewhere, perhaps, but the ignorant rich no longer have access to Oxford (whatever the tabloid press might suggest.)  Legions of servants who know each undergraduate by time are similarly products of a bygone era.

Having said that, his portraits of personality types in 'undergraduates of the present and past' did hit home.  Once the trappings of the 1900s were tidied away, there still exist, in outline, the figures he depicts.  The mediocre student who does a bit of sport, a bit of studying, a bit of everything... the arrogant 'intellectual' who becomes disillusioned by the ignorance of his tutor... the man who speaks at the Oxford Union, 'There and at afternoon teas with ladies he is known for the lucidity of his commonplaces and the length of his quotations'.  I wonder which of Thomas's portraits was I... This section of the book was probably my favourite.  Not as poetic as the rest, but the only section where his aim was humour - and very amusing it was.

So, for a guide to Oxford, Oxford is hopeless.  Even as an historic record, it is hugely flawed.  But as a beautiful book, occasionally funny and always luxuriously written, it is a huge success, and I heartily recommend it.  For a more cogent and calm history, with writing beautiful in a very different way, make sure you also pick up Jan Morris's Oxford.

Two Classic Children's Books

A Century of Books has led to me reading more children's books than usual in 2012.  The debate about whether or not adults ought to read YA fiction (a phrase I hate) is probably best left for another day - but I think most of us understand the call towards unashamed classic children's fiction, which doesn't have the slightest pretence to being adults' literature.

First, very speedily, a suggestion Claire mentioned when I was struggling to fill in 1909 - Ann Veronica went back on the shelf for another day (next to Rebecca West, amusingly enough) and Beatrix Potter came off instead.  Well, actually, since I don't have a copy of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, I downloaded the free ebook from Project Gutenberg, and read it on my Kindle for PC.  It's lovely - of course it is.  Peter Rabbit's sister Flopsy and her wife Benjamin have quite a few children - 'They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.'  (Which picture book writer today would use the word 'improvident'?  Or 'soporific'?  Love you, Beatrix.)

You probably know the story.  Wicked Mr. Macgregor is back, and does his best to kidnap the Flopsy Bunnies... will he manage it?  Can you guess?  (By the way, this cartoon is an amusing counterpart to Beatrix Potter's bunny stories.)  It feels a bit like I'm cheating with 1909 - but I suppose Potter is more influential than most of the other authors featured in A Century of Books.  And it was delightful!

*  *  *

A whistle sounds, a flag is waved.  The train pulls itself together, strains, jerks, and starts."I don't understand," says Gerald, alone in his third-class carriage, "how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time."And yet they do.

This seems like a very apt quotation from E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle (1907), because she is best known (at least in our household) as the author of The Railway Children.  Her own writing, then, successfully combined the possible - if unlikely - story of children living near a railway, and this novel where all manner of extraordinary things happen.  But it is, perhaps, the possible events threaded through the novel which made it most effective, in my eyes.

Everything starts off believably.  Siblings Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen are bored during their summer holidays, spent with one of those eternal Mademoiselles of children's fiction from this period.  Only this one is not cantankerous or hysterical, and is quite happy to let them go off to explore.  On their exploits, they discover (as one does) a beautiful castle, with grounds replete with marble statues, etc.  And - look! - a sleeping princess!  She awakes, after Jimmy (somewhat reluctantly) kisses her - and she takes them through to see her jewels.  One of these is a magic ring, she confides, which can make the wearer invisible.  Only they have to close their eyes for a bit whilst it works.  And, yes, it works!

But the princess is rather surprised.  It turns out she is, in fact, Mabel - the housekeeper's niece - and wasn't expecting the ring actually to turn her invisible.  And thus their adventures begin...

There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real.  And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, anything may happen.

And anything does happen.  Invisibility, expanding, swimming statues, ghosts...  I prefer my novels' fantastic elements to be rather more restrained, with parameters neatly set.  This all felt a bit scattergun, but I suppose Five Children and It is similar and that doesn't bother me, but that's probably because I grew up reading Five Children and It, and this is my first reading of The Enchanted Castle.  I have a feeling that this would feel a much more coherent book for those who loved it as a child.  As for me, sometimes it seemed like dear E. Nesbit was making it up as she went along.

What saved it completely, though, was her delightful tone.  I wrote, in my post on The Railway Children, that I'd no idea E. Nesbit was so witty - and that continues here.  There are plenty of asides and sly nudges to the reader - a wit that was probably put in for the parent, but could well be appreciated by the child too.  Alongside the amusing style, my favourite aspect were the non-fantastic relationships - between siblings, between the children and Mademoiselle, between Eliza the maid and her young man, and between... no, the last two I shall leave you to find out for yourself.

It was all good fun.  And yet I'm going to throw my copy away.  Because it looks like this now...

Ooops!  TV tie-in paperbacks from the 1970s weren't built to last, were they?

Two lovely children's books to round off 2012.  Just one book left for A Century of Books... a biography for 1970.  Any guesses?

Three Men on the Bummel - Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome has been on my radar recently, since Catherine at Victorian Secrets sent me a new biography of him - Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton - which I hope to read soon.  More on that from the publisher's website here.  But before I got Catherine's message, and subsequently the book, I was already thinking about Jerome - because I've recently finished Three Men on the Bummel, the sequel to his very well-known novel Three Men on a Boat, which I reviewed here.  It also takes the coveted 1900 place on my Century of Books.

George and Harris rejoin Jerome (our narrator) as they go off on the bummel.  What is a bummel, you ask?  Well, Jerome answers the question for us, but not until the final page.  I'm going to save you the mystery:

"A 'Bummel'," I explained, "I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when 'tis over."

Theirs takes the form of cycling through Germany, and commenting on the things that happen there.  Cycling holidays were rather the craze, and travel guides for Europe were equally popular, but the narrator is keen to correct the reader who might have picked up the book for the wrong reason:

I wish to be equally frank with the reader of this book.  I wish here conscientiously to let forth its shortcomings.  I wish no one to read this book under a misapprehension. 

There will be no useful information in this book. 

Anyone who should think that with the aid of this book he would be able to make a tour through Germany and the Black Forest would probably lose himself before he got to the Nore.  That, at all events, would be the best thing that could happen to him.  The farther away from home he got, the greater only would be his difficulties. 

I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte.  This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home upon me by experience.

Well, he's not wrong there!  If you thought Three Men on a Boat went off on a lot of tangents, then you'd have to psyche yourself up to read this - there isn't really anything but tangents.  They'd cycle for a bit (well, it took some time to get even as far as the holiday itself) and something would remind the narrator of a past event, or he'd wander off on a pages-long anecdote about something that happened earlier in the week, etc. etc.  It was often difficult to work out what was past and what was present, so tenuous was any attempt at linear narrative.  But did that matter?  No, of course not.  Not in the slightest.  Jerome K. Jerome is a hilarious writer, and that is the point of Three Men on the Bummel.

The anecdotes interweave and overlap, and are so long, that it's difficult to give you a flavour of his writing - but I did find one excerpt which was short enough to type out and shows you how funny Jerome can be:

He handed me a small book bound in red cloth.  It was a travel guide to English conversation for the use of German travellers.  It commenced "On a Steamboat," and terminated "At the Doctor's"; its longest chapter being devoted to conversation in a railway carriage, among, apparently, a compartment load full of quarrelsome and ill-mannered lunatics: "Can you not get further away from me, sir?" - "It is impossible, madam; my neighbour, here, is very stout" - "Shall we not endeavour to arrange our legs?" - "Please have the goodness to keep your elbows down" - "Pray do not inconvenience yourself, madam, if my shoulder is of any accommodation to you," whether intended to be said sarcastically or not, there was nothing to indicate - "I really must request you to move a little, madam, I can hardly breathe," the author's idea being, presumably, that by this time the whole party was mixed up together on the floor.  The chapter concluded with the phrase, "Here we are at our destination, God be thanked!" (Gott sei dank!)" a pious exclamation, which under the circumstances must have taken the form of a chorus.

Quite a lot of the novel's humour comes from the stereotype that Germanic cultures are organised, regimented, and orderly.  Any humour depending on national archetypes is apt to make us feel a little uncomfortable, but hopefully that wouldn't ruin the book for you.  The narrator is, any how, greatly admiring of this trait - and if we were to ignore any British novel which cast Germany in a negative light, it would wipe out most of the first half of the 20th century.  I'm sure most of us are willing to accept a book as being from the time it was written.

Three Men on the Bummel was read while I was myself 'on the bummel' - through the Lake District - and I was able to smile wryly at the humorous misadventures the heroes experienced at the hands of transport and weather, and was only too grateful that I haven't ridden a bicycle since I was 14.  It's been so long since I read Three Men on a Boat that I'd be hard pressed to compare them minutely, or choose a favourite, but this certainly isn't a poor relation - it's very, very funny and one of the silliest books I've read in years.

A.A. Milne's first book

I seem to be having a little spate of reading author's first books (look out for Agatha Christie's coming up soon!) and I decided a good way to tackle one of the remaining years of A Century of Books would be a re-read of A.A. Milne's first - Lovers in London (1905).  I wrote a little about it back here, in January 2010, but that was mostly about the topic of print-on-demand books.  Lovers in London is one of the very few POD books I own, and it isn't very attractive - but it's impossible to find a non-POD edition anywhere, mostly because Milne disowned the book and bought back the copyright to prevent anyone reprinting it. 

That will probably make you assume that it is appalling, and it isn't at all.  It might only be for Milne completists, but it is nonetheless interesting to see where and how he started.  As you might expect, it is about young lovers - only at the beginning they haven't met.  Edward (or Teddy) is the narrator in the mould Milne wrote so well at the beginning of his career - the jovial, cricket-loving, occasionally-writing-for-Punch sort of upper-middle-class man; Amelia is his godfather's daughter, travelling to England from her native America.  We're early let into the obvious secret - that by chp.24 (and there are only 125 pages; these are not long chapters) Amelia and Edward will be betrothed.

It's all very cheery and insouciant and very AAM in his sketch-writing days.  If you've had the pleasure and privilege of reading The Day's Play, The Sunny Side, The Holiday Round or things like that (and if you haven't, you should) then you'll recognise the sort of fun they have:

As we went under the bridge to get to the elephant-house Amelia insisted on buying buns for the rhinoceros.
 
"But they don't eat buns," I objected.
 
"He will if I offer it to him," said Amelia confidently.
 
"My dear Amelia," I said, "it is a matter of common knowledge that the rhinoceros, belonging as it does to the odd-toed set of ungulates, has a gnarled skin, thickened so as to form massive plates, which are united by thinner portions forming flexible joints.  Further, the animal in question, though fierce and savage when roused, is a vegetable feeder.  In fact, he may be said to be herbivorous."
 
"I don't care," said Amelia defiantly; "all animals in the Zoo eat buns."
 
"I can tell you three that don't."
 
"I bet a shilling you can't - not straight off."

 I instanced the electric eel, the ceciopian silk moth, and the coconut crab.  So Amelia paid for our teas.  But in the elephant-house the rhinoceros took his bun with verve - not to say aplomb.

The most successful sections are such as these - when Amelia and Teddy wander around and indulge in frivolous conversation.  It's witty - not the structured, repeatable sort of wit we meet in Wilde, but the variety that puts a happy smile on one's face.

Some chapters were less well done, to my mind, and these tended to be where Milne's imagination got the better of him - particularly one where action wandered (in Teddy's mind) to a desert island.  A little too fanciful, and a little too silly.  But for the most part, it is all very entertaining and jolly.  What Teddy writes about himself could equally be said of Milne:

I am a harmless, mild-mannered person.  There is nothing "strong" about my work; nothing that calls for any violent display of emotion on the part of my puppets.  I doubt if there could be an illegitimate canary (even) in my stories...

I can't see quite why Milne took so against Lovers in London.  If it is not up to the standard of his next few books, it isn't so far behind them as to make it embarrassing.  If it were available in bookshops across the land, I wouldn't hesitate in telling you to get a copy to enjoy on a rainy Sunday afternoon - as it is, in pricey POD editions, you'd be much better off hunting for the much cheaper, much more attractive editions of slightly later books by AAM.

The Railway Children - E. Nesbit

I'm still having trouble filling up the first twenty years of 20th century, so decided to take recourse to a reliable candidate for 1906.  When I started this project there were a list of authors I thought would come in handy for the decades I know less about.  Some I've read this year (Muriel Spark, Paul Gallico), some I haven't yet (Milan Kundera, Penelope Fitzgerald) but E. Nesbit was always on that list, and likely to appear at least once before the end of 2012.  I haven't read The Railway Children since I was about eleven, and I thought (given how often I've seen the film) that it was about time for a revisit!

Well, what on earth can I say about The Railway Children?  Surely - surely - you've all read it, or at least seen the film?  No?  Someone at the back hasn't?  I'll whip through the basics of the plot quickly, and then give you my 2012 response in bullet points.  M'kay?

Bobbie (Roberta), Peter, and Phil (Phyllis) are three young siblings who, when their father leaves mysteriously, must move with their mother to the countryside and 'play at being poor'.  While she scrapes together money by writing stories, the children grow to know and love the railway and station.  It becomes the focus of their lives, and their various exploits and adventures are connected with it - whether rescuing an injured boy playing paperchase, preparing a party for the station master, or ripping off petticoats to stop a train derailing in a landslide.

Here's how I responded to it in 2012...

• It all happens so much more quickly than I remembered!  I suppose I'm used to the pacing of the film, and of course perception of time changes over the years, but I was amazed at how speedily E. Nesbit dashes through the events.

• E. Nesbit is funny!  There's an arch, dry humour that I hadn't spotted the first time around.  It first crops up on the opening page, where Phyllis is described simply as 'Phyllis, who meant extremely well.'  I'm not going to say that The Railway Children is a raucous knockabout, but this humour prevents Nesbit stumbling into over-earnest territory.

• Lordy, she's sexist.  Par for the course in 1906, I daresay, but she doesn't seem to be using irony when the doctor says "You know men have to do the work of the world and not be afraid of anything - so they have to be hardy and brave.  But women have to take care of their babies and cuddle them and nurse them and be very patient and kind."  *Shudder*

• However, there is such a lovely feel to reading this book.  A mixture of the qualities inherent in the story, characters, setting - but also, of course, a little journey back to my own childhood.  Not only did I read and watch The Railway Children, but I grew up next to a railway.  No station, and no steam trains of course, but the noise of trains still takes me back.

• Er, yes... yes, I did cry at the end.

Man and Superman - George Bernard Shaw

One of the weirder tangents my thesis has taken me on is the depiction of Satan in 20th-century literature... not a topic I feel entirely at ease with, but needs must, and it has led me in the direction of some intriguing texts.  Most entertaining was George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1903) - which helpfully ticks off one of the tricky years at the beginning of A Century of Books.

Although I've read a few Shaw plays, I don't think I've ever seen one performed.  This one would be great fun to watch, although it is apparently rarely performed in its entirety.  There are four acts - Acts 1, 2, and 4 are set in upper-class society with Shauvian topics of marriage and left-wing morals.  Act 3, normally excised, is... set in hell.  As you do.  But I won't jump the gun - let's rewind back to Act 1.

Ann has recently lost her father, and is waiting to hear whom her father appointed her guardian (for, although her mother is still alive, she seems fairly useless).  Most likely candidate is Roebuck Ramsden, a no-nonsense, traditional sort of chap, whose chief horror is the spectre of Socialism.  Said spectre is represented by Tanner, something of a pessimist but rather a wordy, witty one.  To Ramsden's horror, Tanner and he have been chosen to be co-guardians.  Tanner sees through Ann's guise of unworldly innocence, to the determined young woman inside:

She'll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she'll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She'll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.

A man who certainly does not see through this guise is poor hapless Octavius.  He's very sweet, but utterly besotted with Ann and incapable of seeing her faults, even when Tanner points them out to him.  Especially then.  And we're all set up for a lovely comedy of manners, with some handy dichotomies thrown in: right-wing/left-wing, conventional/'advanced', romantic/cynical, serious/playful.  Being Shaw, it's not quite as insouciantly blithe as it would be in the hands of some playwrights.  He gets his politics in - gently, in the first two acts, in the linguistic tussles of Ramsden and Tanner, which are great fun.

The big moral quandary comes in with Ann's sister Violet, who (we find out) is pregnant.  Ramsden and Octavius are horrified, while Tanner congratulates her on her progressive nature.  All is not quite what it seems, and it's a rather clever bit of playing with a common early-20th century dilemma.

Then Act 3.  Which is set in Hell, and features Don Juan, a statue, and the Devil (amongst others).  This act is almost invariably omitted from productions of Man and Superman, and one can see why.  Shaw intends to draw parallels between these characters and those of the play proper - indeed, the play started in response to the challenge to write one in the tradition of Don Juan - but it's all a little heavy-handed (as Shaw can be) and probably rather costly to stage.  The Devil is not an unsympathetic character, and has very advanced views on warfare, considering this is pre-WW1:

In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one boy runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly.  And this, the chronicle concludes, shews the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk.

On and on this act goes, until eventually - with an intellectually improved audience, I daresay, but also a rather bored and confused one - we return to the characters we know and love, and witty wordplay becomes, once more, the order of the way.

And Shaw is witty!  He doesn't specialise in those twisty, meaningless bon mots of Oscar Wilde, which are so clever and a little wearing (except in the incomparable Importance of Being Earnest) but a more extended pattern to his writing.  Wilde relies on the epigrammatic individual line; Shaw's paragraphs flow, with ingenious pacing and regulated logic, and produce humour that way.  Just as an example, here are Tanner's thoughts on marriage:

Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their ignominy.

Man and Superman ended up not being useful for my chapter, but it was great fun to read.  I think I might return to Shaw's plays in December, if the 1900s and 1910s are still proving tricky years to fill...

And what happened to Ramsden, Ann, Violet, Tanner, Octavius and all?  I bet you can guess at least one outcome...

The Spinster Book - Myrtle Reed

Image source, and online text

There has been a bit of a theme on SiaB this year, hasn't there?  Lots of books for, and about, unmarried women - because of the research I've been doing.  You'll be hearing more about metamorphosis and talking animals later in the year, so get ready for that... Anyway, The Spinster Book by Myrtle Reed is the earliest of the books I've read this year - published, as it was, in 1901.  Myrtle Reed was only my age (26) which is perhaps too young to be penning anything with 'spinster' in the title - and, indeed, she never became an old spinster, or an old anything, as she committed suicide when she was 36.  I learnt all this after reading the book; it would, perhaps, have coloured my view of what is a witty and exuberant examination of men, women, and marriage.

Quite why it is called The Spinster Book I'm not sure, unless it is intended to act as a guide for the uninitiated.  It certainly doesn't linger on the single state for long - instead, leaping headfirst into a discussion about men.  This was perhaps the most openly satirical chapter - if I had read some of the others first, I might have thought Reed serious (if misguided) for 1901 is a long time ago, and her 'advice' might well have been current.  I couldn't tell whether the beautiful lay-out of the book, with bordered margins and notes at the side to tell you the main topic of the page (none of which, I note, is available in the free ebook edition - just sayin') was itself part of the satire, or simply a throwback to design which was not, in 1901, particularly distant.  But nobody could read this and imagine Reed's tongue to be anywhere but in her cheek:

How shall a girl acquire her knowledge of the phenomena of affection, if men are not willing to be questioned on the subject?  What is more natural than to seek wisdom from the man a girl has just refused to marry?  Why should she not ask if he has ever loved before, how long he has loved her, if he were not surprised when he found it out, and how he feels in her presence? 

Yet a sensitive spinster is repeatedly astonished at finding her lover transformed into a friend, without other provocation than this.  He accuses her of being "a heartless coquette," of having "led him on," - whatever that may mean, - and he does not care to have her for his sister, or even for his friend.

The Spinster Book is something akin to a satirical exploration of men, women, and love - not really in the style of an advisory guide, but closer to natural history.  Reed writes of men and women as though she were neither, and merely watching them at an amused, or concerned, distance.  She is full of sage, simple advice:

In order to be happy, a woman needs only a good digestion, a satisfatory complexion, and a lover.  The first requirement being met, the second is not hard to obtain, and the third follows as a matter of course.

And who can blame her if the contemplation of mankind in the throes of romance makes her somewhat cynical?

The average love letter is sufficient to make a sensitive spinster weep, unless she herself is in love and the letter be addressed to her.  The first stage of the tender passion renders a man careless as to his punctuation, the second seriously affects his spelling, and in the last period of the malady, his grammar develops locomotor ataxia.  The single blessedness of school-teachers is largely to be attributed to this cause.

Although Reed is being tongue-in-cheek throughout, The Spinster Book is still interesting as a window on society in the early 1900s.  True, affections and engagements were probably not bestowed and withdrawn quite in the manner Reed suggests, but it is taken as read that a man will barely know a woman before he proposes, and that a woman ought to turn down a few men before she settles upon one (in contrast to the post-WW1 supposed mentality of grabbing any man one can.)  Cynicism about marriage is a trope of comic writing which has been around since Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and doubtless before, but through this cynicism one can always discern a portrait of contemporaneous marriage and relationships - through a glass darkly, but it's there.  Failing that, The Spinster Book - though not satire at its most sophisticated or thorough - is still good for a giggle.

(As usual, clicking on the sketch will give you a larger, more readable, image... enjoy!)

The Spinster Book
Lesson No.1: Get lots of cats.
Lesson No.2: errr...

Books I Borrowed...

There are a few books I've borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I'm going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it's fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it's entirely possible that I'll get carried away, and write far too much... well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today... I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence - V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he'd see more of human life if he adopted layman's clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice - as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town - where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won't recognise him...

Once in his position as canon, Smith's new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology - improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don't think one would need to have faith to love this.  It's very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there's even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages - E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and 'Girl-of-the-Period', Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments - and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 ('We Meant To Be Happy') Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many 'surplus women' - only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first - 'The Marriage of Rose Barlow'.  It's rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin - the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, 'The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.'  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella - the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I'd expect from Delafield - but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny - Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny 'rescues' Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions... but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn't seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party - Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel's incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum... perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn't much care what happened.  Even though it's a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!

The World I Live In - Helen Keller

I was trying to remember who told me about The World I Live In (1908) by Helen Keller, when I realised that none of you did.  This joins Yellow by Janni Visman and Alva & Irva by Edward Carey (both wonderful novels) in being a book I happened upon at work in the Bodleian, and decided to buy for myself.  And, like them, it turned out to be a good reading experience - although rather different.

I had heard of Helen Keller, of course, although I must confess to having thought her British rather than American.  For those who don't know the name, Keller lived from 1880-1968 and at 19 months' old had an illness which left her completely blind and deaf.  She spent seven years with barely any proper communication with others; she describes it as a period during which she was not alive - then, when Keller was seven, 20-year old Anne Sullivan became her teacher.  With Sullivan's patient assistance, Keller used hand-spelling to communicate, and became rather more eloquent than most other young women.  She wrote The Story of My Life in 1903, which I have not read; the essays collected within The World I Live In were written during Keller's twenties, and make for fascinating reading - and certainly not for some sort of novelty value, but because Keller is, in her own right, incredibly intelligent, something of a philosopher, and entirely an optimist.  Indeed, the NYRB Classics edition I have includes Optimism: an essay written in 1903, which includes this excerpt:

I, too, can work, and because I love to labour with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all.  I used to think I should be thwarted in my desire to do something useful. But I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless.  The gladdest labourer in the vineyard may be a cripple.  Even should the others outstrip him, yet the vineyard ripens in the sun each year, and the full clusters weigh into his hand.  Darwin could work only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy.  I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.  It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.

 When I say that Keller's worth as an author is not merely as a novelty, I mean that she should not be patronised, nor her writing viewed as some sort of scientific experiment.  She is too good and perceptive a writer for that.  But, of course, Keller offers a different understanding and interaction with the world than most writers would.  The sections I found most fascinating were towards the beginning, where Keller writes about hands.  She divides this into three sections: 'The Seeing Hand' (how she uses touch as her primary sense); 'The Hands of Others' (how hands reveal character), and 'The Hands of the Race' (where the explores hands in history and culture.)  Her perspective is not entirely unique, I daresay, but I certainly haven't encountered documented elsewhere, nor can I imagine it done more sensitively, or with such a good-humoured demeanour:

It is interesting to observe the differences in the hands of people.  They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality.  I never realised how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton's collection of casts.  The hand I know in life has the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit.

[...]

I read that a face is strong, gentle; that it is full of patience, of intellect; that it is fine, sweet, noble, beautiful.  Have I not the same right to use these words in describing what I feel as you have in describing what you see?  They express truly what I feel in the hand.  I am seldom conscious of physical qualities, and I do not remember whether the fingers of a hand are short or long, or the skin is moist or dry. [...] Any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and which my affection translates to my memory.

As I say, it is these early sections which I found most captivating; similarly, the essay on smell gave a wonderful insight.  I hope it is obvious that I intend no offence when I say it reminded me of Flush by Virginia Woolf, where the dog's primary sense is smell, and the world is focalised through this perspective.  Keller does not feel that her experience of life is any less full than anybody else's - the senses of touch, smell, and taste give her a vivid comprehension of the world and, what is more, a deep appreciation of it:

Between my experiences and the experiences of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge.  For I have endlessly varied, instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere whose radiant activity enfolds us all.  The thrilling energy of the all-encasing air is warm and rapturous.  Heat-waves and sound-waves play upon my face in infinite variety and combination, until I am able to surmise what must be the myriad sounds that my senseless ears have not heard.

I have to confess that the second broader section of The World I Live In left me cold.  In it, she describes - at length - her dreams, since it is often 'assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science.'  Well, perhaps they do.  But I am allergic to people describing their dreams, it is utter anaethema to me (as my housemates now know!) and I skipped past this section.  If you have a greater tolerance for dream-descriptions than I do, perhaps it is just as interesting as the first section.

The final parts of the book were added from elsewhere, for the NYRB edition: the optimism essay, mentioned above, and 'My Story', written when she was 12, and quite astonishingly mature for that age - let alone for a girl who had only learnt language from the age of seven.

That is what astounds me most about Helen Keller's book: that someone who came late to language should progress in it so quickly and maturely.  Regardless of the reasons why she could not speak, read, or listen, the fact that she had seven years without language, overcame this, and wrote so beautifully and intelligently  - well, it's astonishing.  Keller is wise, sensitive, generous, and philosophically fascinating.  I'm grateful to NYRB for bringing The World I Live In back into print in 2003, and would recommend this to anybody interested in intelligent, lovely writing.  Here's a wonderfully insightful paragraph from Keller to finish:

It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara.  I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books.  What a witless masquerade is this seeing!  It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing.  They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren state.

Another book to get Stuck into:

Halfway to Venus by Sarah Anderton
If this were in a thesaurus it would be listed under 'antonym' rather than 'synonym' - Anderton had one arm amputated early in life, and Halfway to Venus is a very interesting book that combines memoir with an overview of the absence of hands in art, religion, literature, and history.  As such, it makes a fascinating comparison with Keller's writing on the primacy of hands in the same.

The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton

I've nearly come to the end of my pile of must-review-before-the-end-of-2011 books (and I really should have spaced them out a bit, perhaps... oh well, we'll have a bit of a rest after Christmas.  Or an avalanche of my Books of 2011 posts.  We'll see.)

Now, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) is a curious little book, not least because the central importance of it doesn't reveal itself right until the end - at which point the rug is pulled from under your feet, and everything you've read takes on something of a new dimension.  Hmm... I don't think it'll spoil the book if I tell you the revealed theme, but in case you don't want to know I'll hide it in a link.  The Man Who Was Thursday would make an ideal companion read to (spoiler fans click here) this.  Ok, confused?  Good.

The Man Who Was Thursday is subtitled 'A Nightmare', which I wasn't expecting, given that I know Chesterton best as a humorist.  Nor does the subtitle come into play for quite some time.  We start with Gabriel Syme, a member of secret anti-anarchist police, who meets anarchist Lucian Gregory at the party of a poet.  The opening scenes, where these characters debate the structure or chaos of poetry, are as amusing as anything found in this whimsical, witty decade, if a little more philosophical and theoretical than usual.

"The poet delights in disorder only.  If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

"So it is," said Mr. Syme.

"Nonsense!" said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox.

It's all very jolly and garden-party-esque - cucumber sandwiches all round.  Syme and Gregory exchange verbal quips stridently, but without intending any of their barbs to hit home.  Indeed, far from being offended, Syme agrees to go with Gregory to an underground anarchist meeting, so that Gregory can prove what Syme doubts: that he is serious about anarchism.

What follows is a rather lovely piece of satirical reasoning.  Gregory is a serious anarchist - and had previously asked his leader how he could blend into the world, to perpetrate his ideology:

I said to him "What disguise will hide me from the world?  What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?"  He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face.  "You want a safe disguise, do you?  You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?"  I nodded.  He suddenly lifted his lion's voice.  "Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!"  he roared so that the room shook.  "Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then."  And he turned his broad back on me without another word.  I took his advice, and have never regretted it.  I preached blood and murder to these women day and night, and - by God! - they would let me wheel their perambulators.

Clever.  But Syme manages to outwit Gregory, and get himself elected to the central council of anarchists, where each is assigned the name of a day of the week.  Syme, as the novel's title suggests, is Thursday.  Head of them all is the mysterious Sunday.

That's as much as I shall reveal of the plot - it becomes something of a intoxicating mix of spy novel, epigrammatical social novel, and even philosophical/theological.  The subtitle 'nightmare' is odd, but the style certainly has a dreamlike quality - swirling from one event to another, with twists and surprises along the way.  It's a little madcap, but never to the extent that you think Chesterton's been at the opium.

I don't think it's the sort of novel that would be published now - it's too varied and unusual.  Which I think is great, of course, but probably wouldn't satisfy the demands of a marketing department.  Chesterton still remains a bit of a mystery to me, and The Man Who Was Thursday is intriguing and admirable rather than lovable, but I would recommend it to readers who enjoy satire and surprises, washed down with a bon mot or two.


Others who got Stuck into it:


"Weird. Nightmare-ish. Imaginative. Chestertonian." - Sherry, Semicolon


"Despite its philosophizing, its humor makes much of it a very light book, and some of the more "adventurous" scenes would make an awfully good film--there's even a car chase." - Christopher, 50 Books Project


"To say that the novel develops a nightmarish quality is not to say that it’s scary. I think perhaps most nightmares are only scary to the person who dreams them." - Teresa, Shelf Love

"The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs!"

Rachel (Book Snob), Claire (Paperback Reader), and I were discussing - in the wake of Virago Reading Week, which gave so many ideas to so many of us - the fact that we hadn't read nearly enough Elizabeth von Arnim. I think the most any of us had read was one - although all of us were pretty good at buying her novels. And so we hatched a plan to read The Caravaners (1909) together. I forget exactly how we chose that title in particular, but I'm glad we did. Rachel has already posted an exceptionally good review; Claire has stalled, I believe. I'm going for the better-late-than-never approach (since I'd foolishly agreed to post in the middle of My Life in Books week) and here are my thoughts about The Caravaners. Which, to get ahead of myself, I loved.


I'd only read The Enchanted April before (my thoughts here) which is light, bright, and sparkling and shouldn't have worked, but did. It is all about the power of a holiday in a beautiful place to change people for the better. The Caravaners is not... or, at least, that happens quietly in the background, to a secondary character. Our narrator, chronicling his trip, is Baron Otto von Ottringe. He's not, shall we say, a charmer. He has forthright views on the subordinate position of women, the need for the German army to quash England (I misread '1909' as '1919' at first, on the title page, and was rather shocked - this novel would not have been published a decade later), and basically every opinion that differs from his own being nigh-on heretical. And, naturally, it is a duty and a joy to instruct others about their errors - Otto anticipates that such instruction will be gratefully received each time.

All in all, Otto isn't the ideal holiday companion - but the lure of the company of a pretty woman convinces him to leave Germany and go on a month's caravaning holiday in England. It is to help celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary - his current wife Edelgard, true, has only been his betrothed for a handful of years, but when you add that to the duration of his previous marriage to Marie-Luise...

I fail to see why I should be deprived of every benefit of such a celebration, for have I not, with an interruption of twelve months forced upon me, been actually married twenty-five years? [...] Edelgard seemed at first unable to understand, but she was very teachable, and gradually found my logic irresistible. Indeed, once she grasped the point she was even more strongly of the opinion than I was that something ought to be done to mark the occasion, and quite saw that if Marie-Luise failed me it was not my fault, and that I at least had done my part and gone on steadily being married ever since.

You begin to see the sort of man with whom we are dealing. A lot of novelists in the early-20th century (and still today) incorporate a ridiculous character into their work. Someone whose opinions and manner are absurd but possible, and who is there to have his views held up for ridicule, or fond laughter, depending on the situation. It takes a brave author to make this kind of self-delusional character the narrator. The novel inevitably becomes two-layered: the character's voice on top, and the reality that the author wants you to see, behind that. Perhaps the most famous example is Diary of a Nobody; my favourite is Joyce Dennys' Economy Must Be Our Watchword. At first I thought Otto was a Pooter-esque character, but it soon become clear that he wasn't. Pooter is absurd, but we can't help loving him. Otto is reprehensible and obnoxious - even the most charitable reader is unlikely to develop a fondness for him. And that's what makes The Caravaners so delicious to read - he is constantly lampooned by his own words. I know at least one reader who tossed the book aside because of Otto's character - but I think the more you disagree with his misogynistic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, arrogant, selfish, militaristic standpoint, the more you will love watching Otto being mocked by von Arnim and naively unaware of his unpopularity. He is SO unself-aware, and yet it is somehow believable that he would be! I loved this sort of thing:

It is the knowledge that I am really so good-humoured that principally upsets me when Edelgard or other circumstances force me into a condition of vexation unnatural to me. I do not wish to be vexed. I do not wish ever to be disagreeable. And it is, I thin, downright wrong of people to force a human being who does not wish it to be so.

I haven't even introduced you to the other members of the caravaning holiday. Frau von Eckthum is the beautiful woman whose company persuaded Otto to consider the holiday:

I know she is different from the type of woman prevailing in our town, the plan, flat-haired, tightly buttoned up, God-fearing wife and mother, who looks up to her husband and after her children, and is extremely intelligent in the kitchen and not at all intelligent out of it. I know that this is the type that has made our great nation what it is, hoisting it up on ample shoulders to the first place in the world, and I know that we would have to request heaven to help us if we ever changed it. But - she is an attractive lady.

It is conversations between Otto and Frau von E which most enjoyably reveal his self-delusion. He acknowledges that his lengthy expositions on all matters political and social meet only with the iterated reply "Oh?" - but into that syllable Otto reads approval, admiration, docility, and agreement. The reader, needless to say, does not.

Other members of the party include Lord Sidge, who is entering the church (Otto is the most unashamed snob, and treats Sidge rather differently when he learns about the Lord part) and Jellaby, a Socialist. It was in his interactions with Jellaby that I had my moments of sympathy with Otto. Not on a political standpoint, I must add, but because whenever Jellaby encounters Otto in inactivity, he says "Enjoying yourself, Baron?" How infuriating that must be! I think we are supposed to love Jellaby. I could not.

I'm rabbiting on, so I'll ignore the other characters - none of whom are as important as Edelgard, whom I've barely touched on. Otto's wife starts the novel being everything that he envisages a wife should be. As the holiday continues - this is where there are shades of The Enchanted April - she becomes aware that she should be treated better. It starts with hints like this:

She had put my clothes out, but had brought me no hot water because she said the two sisters had told her it was too precious what there was being wanted for washing up. I inquired with some displeasure whether I, then, were less important than forks, and to my surprised Edelgard replied that it depended on whether they were silver; which was, of course, perilously near repartee.

Ooo, perilous. During The Caravaners you constantly hope that Edelgard will escape Otto's clutches, or at least change him for the better... I shan't spoil for you whether or not she accomplishes that.

For those who might feel a little uncomfortable at the ridiculing of a German on English soil, perhaps I should add that von Arnim (as her name suggests) was married to a German herself - and not happily. She later referred to her husband as the 'Man of Wrath', and he was even sent to prison for fraud. I suspect Otto is in part a portrait of Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, rather than an attack against the German people more generally.

The Caravaners is so, so different from The Enchanted April that I don't now know quite how to think of Elizabeth von Arnim. An author whose writing I considered gentle and beautiful has now added satirical, witty, and biting to her arsenal. What I do know is that she is quite brilliant, and I unreservedly recommend either of those novels - and am keen to discover what's next. Elizabeth von Arnim admirers - which should follow?

Thanks Rachel and Claire for getting me finally to read my second E von A - I had great fun! Oh, and - the title to this blog post is not from The Caravaners. Can anyone tell me where I found it?

Love's Shadow - Ada Leverson

Well, Bloomsbury have done it again. I'm starting to sound increasingly like a self-appointed marketing director (and I do feel a little responsible for Miss Hargreaves, which I'll be writing about later in the week) but I can't help it when the titles they're reprinting are just so darn good. Today I'm talking about Love's Shadow by Ada Leverson, first published in 1908.

Elaine at Random Jottings has been an online-friend for over five years, and I read her blog everyday - as she has said in one of her latest posts, we have the same opinions of almost every book, especially when it comes to the first half of the 20th century. And when I discovered that she'd recommended Love's Shadow to Bloomsbury for their Bloomsbury Group reprint series, I knew I was in for a treat.

The novel is the first in a trilogy called The Little Ottleys (perhaps more will be forthcoming from Bloomsbury?) and the Ottleys in question are Edith and Bruce, married for a few years. Elaine, in her recent review, charmingly and accurately, describes Bruce as Mr. Pooter without the charm - I think his character can be summed up by this:

'He often wrote letters beginning "Sir, I feel it my duty," to people on subjects that were no earthly concern of his.'

Edith is obviously fond of him, and parries his ridiculous jibes and moans with a light-hearted wit which is both very amusing to read and an act of supernatural tolerance. Bruce really is the most ghastly imaginable husband, obsessed with being granted his due 'reverence' - from his son, his parents, his wife, and more or less everyone else. And like most preposterous characters, he is exceedingly vain. A fabulously witty chapter (Chapter 27, fact fans) chronicles his report of a first foray into amateur dramatics. In later chapters he devotes most of his time and energy to the two lines he has been given, but Chp.27 is so cleverly structured, a vignette of his vanity, self-delusion, and inability to tell a story, that I wish I could reproduce it in full.

This marriage lends the trilogy its name, but Love's Shadow follows a flock of others, in an amusingly complex array of romantic entanglements, unrequited attachments, and refused proposals. (To set the tone, the union of Lady and Charles Cannon is explained peripherally thus: 'Having become engaged to her through a slight misunderstanding in a country house, Sir Charles had not had the courage to explain away the mistake.') Hyacinth Verney is the centre of romantic mishaps, the sort of character who can say, with equanimity; 'I quite agree with you that it would be rather horrid to know exactly how electricity works'. Perhaps because she is attractive in the way that women seemed to be in 1908 - when introduced to a Mrs. Raymond, the latter 'looked at her with such impulsive admiration that she dropped a piece of cake.'

How to describe the web? Hyacinth loves impulsive Cecil who loves the impressive Mrs. Raymond who falls for Cecil's uncle. Sir Charles is Hyacinth's ward, but also quite smitten by her - as is, we suspect through the disapproval, Bruce. And then there's Hyacinth's female companion Anne... Love's Shadow is flung in so many directions that it's more or less pitch black - except of course Love's Shadow isn't. You can tell that Ms. Leverson was a friend of Oscar Wilde - she is consistently witty, though without his love of epigrams, and the novel sparkles with good-humoured teasing, joie de vivre, and clever plotting. On the back of this edition, alongside Elaine's recommendation, Barry Humphries perspicaciously compares Ada Leverson to Jane Austen and Saki.

Another Bloomsbury Group reprint, another must-read. If you've been holding out, just give in and buy the lot - it's a library of witty, wise, brilliant books which will stand the test of time, because they already have stood the test of time. And once more, kudos to Penelope Beech and her cover illustrations - both cover and Ex Libris page include silhouette illustrations of representative scenes from the novel, and add to the charm of this exceptional series. Thank you Elaine, thank you Bloomsbury.