Lunch Hour Haul

Thank you for yesterday, you're all very lovely. The blogosphere really is precious to me - so much more than people who don't blog or read blogs could imagine.

As a reward for your kindness, I'm going to show you some more books that I bought... yes, more. Last Friday I popped out to a couple of charity shops during my lunch break, and bought eight books. Well, actually I bought nine, but one of them was for a friend. So that's normal, right? Oh, what the heck, all the money went to charity.


Strange Meeting - Susan Hill
The Bird of Night - Susan Hill
I'm ever more impressed by Hill's novellas, and have heard great things about Strange Meeting. In my head it was a ghost story; I'm happy to see it isn't. The blurb for The Bird of Night enticed me, that I remember - what the blurb said, I have completely forgotten.

One Thing Leading to Another - Sylvia Townsend Warner
I think I might have a few of these stories collected elsewhere, but was tempted by this book in case there were some I *didn't* have... and, I confess it, for that cover.

The Thinking Reed - Rebecca West
I wanted to get a Virago, seeing as it was Virago Reading Week, and this one called out to be. All I know about it is what cropped up in my research a while ago - the Book Society Newsletter said: "However, there is very much besides intellection here. There is that precious quality of making a special vividness and new reality out of familiar scenes; there is feeling, deep, though restrained; there is clever character-drawing; there is satire; there is a central idea and plan in the book; and there is the pleasure for the reader of being taken up into the interior of the book’s world through the medium of Miss West’s lucid and intimate style."

Voices at Play - Muriel Spark
A collection of plays and stories by Spark for the BBC.

Love of Seven Dolls - Paul Gallico
Somehow I still haven't read any Gallico, but this one definitely intrigued me. Seems somewhat creepy, but in the way I can cope with, and thus enjoy.

Theatre - W. Somerset Maugham
Another author I feel I ought to have read, and haven't - since I'm currently enjoying a couple of theatrical autobiographies, this could be a logical next step.

All Quiet on the Orient Express - Magnus Mills
Have read, borrowed from Annabel (Gaskella) - MUST write about soon and, more importantly, return to her!

As always - comments, thoughts? Have you read any of these?

Cheerfulness Breaks In

Thanks for all your kind comments on yesterday's post - you've all made me think, and I believe I've set some of you off thinking too, so Thoughts are being had! What a shame Virago Reading Week is over, but what fun it was. Plus I have two little joint-reads planned with a couple of bloggers, which will be fun - one for a much-loved author, and one for an author I have been meaning to read more by. All will be revealed in due course...

My Monday was a little glum, truth be told - one of those days where you feel sad but don't know why. I used my usual tactics to fend this off: hot chocolate; sitting in a park; calling my parents to have a chat. The last of these was lovely, but not too cheery - please join me in wishing Our Vicar's Wife a speedy recovery from being not-very-well. The hot chocolate, however, was lovely. The park was cold, but I did read a few pages of my book before leaving it - difficult to turn the pages with gloves on.

But this is heading somewhere - I was wondering if you had any books you relied on to cheer you up? Or if you need something new when you're feeling a bit down? I would say The Provincial Lady for me - almost never fails to make me smile - but at the moment (as I think I mentioned the other day) I'm finding non-fiction much easier to read than fiction. And so I'm continuing with To Tell My Story by Dame Irene Vanbrugh, and really enjoying it. I'll write more about that when I've finished, but I think it's the best bet for getting a smile back on my face - especially since having hot chocolate in bed is unlikely to go well.

Let me know how reading can help cheer you up - I look forward to your ideas!

Thoughts coming out of Virago Reading Week...

I hope you don't mind a slightly musing-meandering post today, on a topic I've thought about quite a lot, but seems to fit with a week of thinking about Virago. I hope I've expressed myself properly, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.


One of the things that annoys me a little (other than not being certain whether I should have used 'that' or 'which' in this sentence) is when, at book group, someone says "Hmm, do you think this is just a book for women?" or "--just a book for men?" and then turns to me, quizzically. I am of the opinion that the ideas of 'men's books' and 'women's books' are mostly marketing tools, and pretty insulting to any individual reader whose subjective reading experience shouldn't be boxed up like that. And, speaking personally, when I think of the categories 'men' and 'women', I don't particularly identify myself with either of them. I'm simply me. Of course I am a man, but I don't recognise myself in the portrait of men that is held up by those shoving war novels and football sticker books etc. in the corner marked 'male reading'.

That's one of the things that comes to light, reading Viragos and Persephones - which, of course, I love. Both describe themselves, to different degrees, as publishing books for women (although I do remember, in an early Persephone Quarterly, a little article about Persephone Men - we apparently made up, at that point, 10% of subscribers). The Women's Press is even more open about it! Naturally I'm not complaining about this. Virago, especially, have done an astonishing and necessary job of bringing neglected writers and neglected novelistic topics to the fore. Rachel wrote brilliantly and movingly about this last week. I hope she won't mind if I quote a couple of excerpts from it:

I have always been interested in women’s writing and history, but never to the extent I became interested in it at university. There I learned for the first time how women had been sidelined from literature and history; how they had been allowed to become an unspoken, unmentioned background figure, sewing in the parlour while the men were at war; scribbling away at trivial, unworthy of note novels about their limited domestic sphere; living unrecorded, undervalued, hidden lives, prevented from having a voice.

[...]

So thank goodness for Virago. Thank goodness that I can read something intelligent and witty and thought provoking by a woman, that isn’t a shallow, cliche ridden pastel coloured novel about sparkly rings and mini breaks. The women who invented Virago, and the authors that originated their list, believed that women deserved better than this, and I heartily agree. We are complex, conflicting, passionate, intelligent, political, ambitious individuals who cannot be distilled into one concrete definition or given one path to happiness.

My question is... where does this leave me? Please don't read anything cross into that; those of you who know my blog probably won't, I hope. I just always wonder, when I read about the incredible job that feminist presses have done, what sort of literary and social antecedents I can claim as my own. Of course, as a feminist myself I can get on board with the rediscoveries and re-evaluations being performed, and perhaps I can even put myself in a line of those who value the domestic and the topics which had long been erroneously considered inferior to tales of war and politics etc. (really, who could possibly want to read a novel about war over a novel about, say, a family preparing for a wedding? Each to their own, I suppose.) But, as a man, I seem to have only a legacy of the type of people who sidelined these novelists, and caused the problems which Virago and others helped in the direction of resolution. I have little empathy for monarchs and prime ministers (neither, however, exclusively male professions), and none for soldiers or leaders in war - I have sympathy, but not empathy. Where are the histories of quieter, homelier men? Where are narratives of male lives lived unassumingly and with great beauty? This, naturally, is not the fault of the publishing houses which unveiled the issue - nor is it their responsibility. But I do always muse, when wonderful posts like Rachel's appear, quite what it is that I see when I look over my shoulder.

Song for a Sunday

Kate Walsh is one of my favourite singers, and one I discovered through the free-song-of-the-week on iTunes, but I only just got around to downloading her first album Clocktower Park. This is a lovely song from that album - 'It's Never Over'.



For previous Sunday Songs, click here.

Favourite Viragos

Thanks for your lovely comments on yesterday's post! Let's keep the Virago Modern Classic mood going (thanks again Rachel and Carolyn!) Here's a little bit of serendipity for you - I had no idea that suc
h a thing as Google Docs existed until today at work, when my boss asked me to open it. Lo and behold, not only did my Yahoo address automatically set me up with a Google Docs account, but I had three messages (or files or, I suppose, documents) - the third, sent earlier this month, being a complete list of Virago Modern Classics! Thank you, LALindsay, whoever you are - presumably something to do with the VMC group on LibraryThing?

(some of my favourite covers)

It has enabled me to count up all the VMCs I've read - not the ones I own; that's probably about twice this number, but out of 553 VMCs published, I have read a respectable 59. Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the list of those I've read, if you're interested - feel free to ask me about any of them, or tell me which ones I *should* have read that aren't listed. To be honest, quite a few I read in non-VMC editions. I didn't even know the Brontes and Austen had had the Virago treatment. But there are still a fair few on the list that have found their way to me courtesy of Virago - and it is those I'll be choosing from for my favourite VMCs. So, Provincial Lady and myriad Jane Austen novels, even though I love you I'm afraid you shan't be appearing on this list - because I didn't meet you between those distinctive green borders. Fair's fair.

Ok, here are five Virago Modern Classics I love, cherish, and adore. I'm afraid the pictures are of varying sizes; if someone can tell me how to get bigger images of the covers on LibraryThing, that would be much appreciated for future use...


The Love Child - Edith Olivier
(VMC #46)

This one will surprise none of you, I suspect... Olivier's novel, about a lonely spinster who conjures her childhood imaginary friend into life, is short but powerful. Don't be put off by a slightly fey cover - The Love Child is clever, moving, and one I'll be re-reading many times. Well do I remember picking it up on a whim, for mere pence, in the charity shop on Little Clarendon Street (Oxford). For some reason I had no other book with me, or had just finished one, for I immediately went round the corner to a public garden (the one, in fact, pictured) and started it. And was blown away by how good it was.


Mother and Son - Ivy Compton-Burnett
(VMC #394)

I was trying to remember which Virago title was the first I read between those distinctive green spines... without my reading diary to hand, I'm not sure, but it might well have been Mother and Son. My mum loathes Ivy Compton-Burnett, but a lady in our village lent me this, telling me to give Ivy a go. I'm ever grateful to Jay for introducing me to this most divisive of authors - you definitely either love or hate - and her dialogue-packed novels of family intrigue and enjoyably futile, highbrow exchanges.

A Very Great Profession - Nicola Beauman
(VMC #406)

The place where Persephone started, Beauman's very accessible look at many and various middlebrow female authors is bound to have you filling a notebook with ideas for future reads. Chapters are cleverly divided up into topics like 'Surplus Women'; 'Sex'; 'Psychoanalysis' etc. An invaluable resource for anyone even vaguely interested in the sort of books in the VMC line - and now available from Persephone.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead - Barbara Comyns
(VMC #238)

A title I don't shut up about, this Comyns novel is surreal and domestic at the same time, and takes pride of place amongst my slightly quirker taste in novels. But nobody is quite like Comyns - and while I want to thank Virago for bringing her novels to a wider audience, I also want to ask why they've let almost all of them drop off the VMC list? (Ditto The Love Child!)


The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West
(VMC #32)

Probably the best novel I have read associated with war - in this case, as the title suggests, the return of a soldier, and the messy familial and romantic tangles which ensue. Also incredibly sensitive about shell shock and bereavement - all packed into one slim volume.


Hope that has given you some tips for further VMC reading! Do ask about any of those below, should you want to know my opinions.


Viragos I have read:
(in order of VMC-publication)

1. Mr Fortune’s Maggot : Sylvia Townsend Warner
2. The Life and Death of Harriett Frean : May Sinclair
3. The Return of the Soldier : Rebecca West
4. The Third Miss Symons : F.M. Mayor
5. The Vet’s Daughter : Barbara Comyns
6. The Love Child : Edith Olivier
7. The Yellow Wallpaper : Charlotte Perkins Gilman
8. The Professor’s House : Willa Cather
9. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont : Elizabeth Taylor
10. The Little Ottleys : Ada Leverson
11. The Tortoise and the Hare : Elizabeth Jenkins
12. Keynotes and Discords : George Egerton
13. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths : Barbara Comyns
14. All Passion Spent : Vita Sackville-West
15. Angel : Elizabeth Taylor
16. Miss Mole : E.H. Young
17. Diary of a Provincial Lady : E.M. Delafield
18. Sisters by a River : Barbara Comyns
19. No Signposts in the Sea : Vita Sackville-West
20. The Lifted Veil : George Eliot
21. Two Days in Aragon : Molly Keane
22. One Fine Day : Mollie Panter-Downes
23. A Game of Hide and Seek : Elizabeth Taylor
24. The Enchanted April : Elizabeth von Arnim
25. The Skin Chairs : Barbara Comyns
26. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead : Barbara Comyns
27. The Stone Angel : Margaret Laurence
28. The New House : Lettice Cooper
29. Olivia : Dorothy Strachey
30. Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir : Vita Sackville-West
31. The Brontës Went to Woolworths : Rachel Ferguson
32. The Way Things Are : E.M. Delafield
33. Thank Heaven Fasting : E.M. Delafield
34. The Story of an African Farm : Olive Schreiner
35. Mrs Miniver : Jan Struther
36. Emma : Jane Austen
37. Pride and Prejudice : Jane Austen
38. Sense and Sensibility : Jane Austen
39. Persuasion : Jane Austen
40. Mansfield Park : Jane Austen
41. Northanger Abbey : Jane Austen
42. Villette : Charlotte Bronte
43. Wuthering Heights : Emily Bronte
44. Agnes Grey : Anne Bronte
45. Try Anything Twice : Jan Struther
46. Jane Eyre : Charlotte Bronte
47. Ethan Frome : Edith Wharton
48. Crewe Train : Rose Macaulay
49. Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman : Sylvia Townsend Warner
50. Mother and Son : Ivy Compton-Burnett
51. A Very Great Profession : Nicola Beauman
52. I Capture the Castle : Dodie Smith
53. Provincial Daughter : R.M. Dashwood
54. 84 Charing Cross Road : Helene Hanff
55. Rebecca : Daphne du Maurier
56. My Cousin Rachel : Daphne du Maurier
57. The Flight of the Falcon : Daphne du Maurier
58. Loitering with Intent : Muriel Spark
59. Excellent Women : Barbara Pym

Virago Reading Week

I think, sadly, I've read all the VMCs I'll manage this week (total: one) so I'll talk about Virago in general instead! A few bloggers have written about how they discovered the world of Virago, and I thought I'd join in. And tomorrow I'll muse on some of my favourites, time permitting...

I had quite an odd journey to Virago, which started with a little Everyman book called Modern Humour. Putting 'modern' in the title of anything is a risky business, and this volume was published in 1940. I bought it because it featured something by AA Milne that wasn't collected elsewhere, and AAM was my first grown-up literary love (that sounds odd, given his status as a children's writer, but he was also the first writer-for-adults whom I really loved.)

Anyway - included in this volume were two pieces by E.M. Delafield (which, incidentally, you can read here). I'd never heard of Delafield - I didn't even know if 'E.M' was a woman or a man, although the tone of the piece led me correctly to suspect the former - but I loved these pieces. They're actually from As Others Hear Us, which is one of my very favourite books, but at the time I only had Delafield's name - and took myself to Worcestershire's library catalogue. All they had in Pershore Library was a large print edition of The Provincial Lady Goes Further - so that was my induction to the world of Delafield.

Ok, that - and the 4-in-1 Provincial Lady book I subsequently bought - wasn't actually in a Virago edition. The first Virago Modern Classic I read was about six months later: Provincial Daughter by EMD's own daughter, R.M. Dashwood. But it was the Provincial Lady books which gave me a taste for Virago Modern Classics, even before I knew what they were...

Fast-forward about 18 months, and I was a member of an online reading group that, seven years later, I am still a proud member of. They love all things Persephone, but they also enthuse about Virago like nobody's business - which led to me buying those green spines wherever I spotted them at a reasonable price. Elizabeth Taylors flocked to my house. Elizabeth von Arnims gathered on my shelves (and I've still only read one of them.) Many more than I have read have arrived. And aren't the matching green spines something to behold? I will always choose one of those over the latest VMC - whoever chose to get rid of the green spines made one of the worst marketing decisions in the world. (By the by, for the background workings of Virago and their takeover by Little Brown, from being an independent press, is detailed fascinatingly in Simone Murray's Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics).

Thankfully, however, old VMCs turn up in a lot of charity shops, and my collection has grown steadily over the years. Some seem impossible to find; some proliferate. They have provided me with some of my favourite reads - they have also included some I thought dreadful, but the good outweight the bad. Virago don't seem to embody a reading taste in quite the way they used to - perhaps because, when they were an independent press, all VMCs had to pass the taste level of a small group of people - but, looking at those 1980s reprints, all of which were originally published before I was born, and many of which were reprinted before I was born too - I can be confident that I'll find something that will at least intrigue me. Check back tomorrow to see which titles I've loved most over the years... although I suspect you can already guess some of them.

If you've blogged about your introduction to Virago, do let me know - and if you haven't, then tell me about it in the comments here!

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns

It's about time I paid heed to Virago Reading Week, which has been popping up all over the blogosphere this, er, week. Thanks Rachel and Carolyn! I love it when publishers are hailed in this manner - long-term SiaB readers may recall I ran an I Love Hesperus week many moons ago, and of course have enjoyed Persephone readalongs, and cheered from the sidelines for NYRB Classics. As luck would have it - it certainly wasn't my organisational ability - I happened to be halfway through a Virago when the week began, and even my current sluggish reading pace has allowed me to finish off The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns.


Props to Thomas (that's a good American expression, right? As is that 'right?' there.) for his Virago banner, by the way. If you think you recognise those pics, head over here for Thomas' competition.

It's no secret that I love Barbara Comyns - she's probably in my top five favourite authors, certainly top ten - and I'm fast reaching the end of her books. Just two novels to go... so I'm treasuring them as I go, and The Skin Chairs is no exception.

When I first started reading Comyns, I thought her novels were bizarrely different from one another, in terms of style. It's only now, looking back, that I realise I started off with the three most disparate I could have chosen - Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and The Juniper Tree. Having read more of her books, I realise that she does have an identifiable tone - surreal but matter-of-fact; an unnerving but captivating mixture, and one which leads to a very unusual angle on events. As shown most effectively in The Vet's Daughter, but also on occasion in The Skin Chairs, even cruelties are dealt with in this unshockable, even tone. Here's an example:

When she had gone we let Esme's mice loose in the sitting-room, although they didn't seem to enjoy it much, keeping close to the skirting board most of the time. There used to be a girl in our village who was continually beaten by her parents and I remembered she used to walk like that, close to the walls.

Lest you think this is a miserable book, I must add the scolding given to children when they sit on some graves: 'Nanny found us and said that we had no respect for our bottoms or the dead.' There are plenty of laugh-aloud moments.

The Skin Chairs is told in the voice of ten-year-old Frances, one of six children, who must go and stay with her Great-Aunt's family: 'My mother[...] sometimes became tired of us and would dispatch us to any relation who would agree to have one or two of the family to stay.' Shortly after this, and having endured Aunt Lawrence's unwelcoming home, Frances' father dies and the rest of her family move to an unlikeable, small modern house. Relative poverty is a theme throughout Comyns' writing, and she relishes writing of their privations - nightdresses made out of old sheets; 'not being able to play with paint', and so forth.

As with other Comyns novels, not much happens. This one has a little more of a central thread through it than some, in terms of the family's destiny, but Comyns is best at her bizarre hangers-on. Chief amongst these is Mrs. Alexander, with her red-purple hair, turbans, mustard-coloured car, and golden shoes (repainted each evening by her chauffeur.) She keeps monkeys, and cleverly builds a wall after buying a piano, so that the bailiffs can't remove it when she goes into debt. Then there is young widow Vanda, who neglects her baby, but thinks she's doing a good job as the infant never goes short of orange juice. How Comyns thinks of all the tiny details, I can't imagine. So many are bizarre and wonderful - unexpected, but not dwelt upon - and always mentioned so calmly.

The first day at school was not so bad as I expected. The worst part was when most of the girls trooped off into the dining-room and we had to eat our sandwiches in one of the classrooms. The only other occupant was a particularly plain girl wearing a patch plaid blouse and eating a pork pie. She said she adored eating pork pies and ate them in her bath.

And those skin chairs of the title? Yes, they're human skin, and belong to a Major who lives in a large house in the village. They pop up near the beginning of the novel, and reappear every now and then - with some significance, but the true justification for the novel being called The Skin Chairs doesn't rest with that. I think they're the perfect symbol for what Comyns does best: the domestication of the surreal; the macabre passed over with matter-of-fact interest, and no more - there is probably a girl eating a pork pie close by, which will be equally involving.

If you haven't read any Comyns yet, I urge you to do so (The Skin Chairs is going for a penny on Amazon.) The more I read of her, the more I feel sure that she has been unjustly neglected - and is one of the most intriguing novelists of the twentieth-century.