Fiction

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Elizabeth, Darcy and Jane

The two hundredth anniversary of my favorite book was celebrated a couple of days ago.  I re-read it at least once a year and then I get into the various spin-offs, the best of which are by Pamela Aiden and P.D. James.  I haven’t read any of the zombie ones and don’t intend to read them.  I will then watch Colin Firth go swimming.

In his happy birthday post for the New Yorker, William Deresiewicz wrote

Two hundred years. But there seemed little chance, two hundred years ago,  that many people would remember either the novel or its author by now. The draft  that she produced at twenty-one was rejected by a London publisher sight unseen.  Other disappointments followed, and after a series of personal upheavals, she  gave up writing altogether. But circumstances stabilized and hope returned, and  by the time of her death, just four years after “Pride and Prejudice” came out  (four years during which she finished “Mansfield Park,” and wrote “Emma” and “Persuasion” from scratch), her brother was willing to venture the claim that  her novels were fit to be placed “on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth.”

How she got from there to here is a long story. The public soon forgot her,  but her memory was kept alive, like Bach’s, among the cognoscenti. George Eliot  reread all six of her novels aloud with her lover George Henry Lewes before  setting sail on “Middlemarch.” Mark Twain and Charlotte Brontë hated her;  Rudyard Kipling adored her; Henry James learned more from her than he was ever  willing to admit. Virginia Woolf installed her at the head of the canon of  English women novelists (“the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose  books are immortal”). F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling certified her academic  prestige. Then came the movies, and feminist criticism, and more movies, and  Colin Firth, and the fan fiction, and now the ever-growing, ever-changing  multi-platform media phenomenon and global icon.

One can re-read Pride and Prejudice again and again even knowing the story by heart.  You want to tell Elizabeth to beware of Wickham and Jane not to worry Mr. Bingley will come though in the end.  And Mrs. Bennet will always be insufferable. Back when I was teaching workshops on sexual harassment, I would name my scenario characters after those in Pride and Prejudice and once or twice one of the women would catch on.

Here are Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.  Elinor Lipman watched all the film versions for us and the Huffington Post. “I announce that the head-and-shoulders winner of Best Mr. Darcy is Colin Firth (1995 Masterpiece Theatre, 300 minutes.)”  I agree.  But back to Mr. Deresiewicz

So why do we love the novel so much? Because while Austen sacrifices  Elizabeth’s feelings, she lavishly indulges ours. Austen’s heroes usually aren’t  the wealthiest men around, or the handsomest. In many of her novels, there is  something troubling about the way that things work out. But not in “Pride and  Prejudice.” Here she gives us everything we want: the wittiest lines, the  silliest fools, the most lovable heroine, the handsomest estate. And a hero who  is not only tall and good-looking, but the richest and most wellborn man in  sight.

He’s also kind of an asshole, which makes it even better. Do women love  assholes, the way that everybody says? Well, if the novel’s epic popularity is  any proof, they seem to love to win them over, anyway. “Tolerable, but not  handsome enough to tempt me”—Darcy’s famous insult, the first time he  and Lizzy meet. That’s the real story, underneath the one about Wickham and  Bingley and Jane, the misperceptions and coincidences. Darcy wounds Elizabeth’s  sexual pride, and her victory comes—and with it, ours—when he’s made to recant  and repent. Wish fulfillment doesn’t get much wishier than that. Austen tells us  that our feelings aren’t necessarily right, but boy does she ever make the  lesson feel good.

May Pride and Prejudice be read for another two hundred years.  (And if you haven’t read the book, but just seen one of the movies, please read it – you don’t know what you are missing.)  Time to start my annual reading!

Title page from the first edition of the first...

Title page from the first edition of the first volume of Pride and Prejudice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Reading Dickens and other stuff

I haven’t written about books for a long time but I am always reading more than one book at a time.  So here is what I’ve been reading the last week or so.

We all know that at Christmas time there are endless versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” on television, but when, if ever, was the last time you actually read the book?  I was probably in my early teens when I read it last.  This year we decided to purchase a copy which I just finished reading last week.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It is nicely illustrated by Greg Hildebrant who used as models various friends and relations.

Dickens wrote in his 1843 introduction

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D.

I think we should all read it and/or watch our favorite movie version at least once a year.  (Here is one persons opinion of the 10 best television and film versions.)  It can teach us something about tolerance and old fashioned Charity.

One of my retirement projects is trying to figure out what books we actually own.  I had the idea of creating my own database and then stumbled upon LibraryThing.  It is a nifty online way to not only keep track of your books, but also to share with others.  You can post reviews, read what others think, and there are a lot of queries and statistics to play with.  Turns out to be a lot of fun in addition to being useful and easy to use.  You can also request free books in exchange for a review.  The book I reviewed for December was “Crime of Privilege” by Walter Walker.  It is a mystery which will be released soon.  Do not spend your money on this thinly disguised Kennedy family mash-up.  So far there is one other review posted and it is not good either.

Crime of Privilege: A Novel by Walter Walker

I am about half way through John Barry’s book about Roger Williams and separation of church and state.  It is fascinating history beginning in England and James’ efforts to make the Church of England more orthodox and more Catholic.

Roger Williams and the Creation of the…

Highly recommended.

And in between Barry, I am re-reading some Georgette Heyer.  Did you know there is a third book to what is called the Alastair trilogy? (“These Old Shades”, “Devil’s Cub” and “The Infamous Army”)  I’ve just ordered volume 3.  Heyer is still readable and fun.  Her stories remind me of  film comedies where people get into impossible situations but somehow all turns out right.  I have fun imagining them as movies.

It is getting cold out so pick up a book and curl up and read.

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P.D. James and Jane Austen

I need to explain that I re-read Pride and Prejudice at least once a year.  I loved the early PBS version of the book, but that has been replaced now by the Colin Frith version which I own on DVD.  I’ve also dipped into some of the sequels and expansions (most are horrible) to feed by habit.  

P.D. James is one of my favorite writers.  I have read all of her mysteries. One of my favorites is An Unsuitable Job for a Woman which introduced the young Cordelia Gray.  Adam Dalgleish her primary detective is not only a police inspector, but also a published poet.  Her books are literate and the mysteries complex and interesting.  So when I saw that James had written a kind of sequel to Pride and Prejudice I ordered a copy immediately.  And I was not disappointed.

Death Comes to Pemberley

With her usual elegance, James tells brings us to the Darcy estate six years after Elizabeth Bennet married her Mr. Darcy.  They now have 2 children and Elizabeth has clearly taken hold as mistress of Pemberley.  All the other characters make their appearance including George Wickham who is still a wild neer do well and his wife, Elizabeth’s sister Lydia is still tends to hysteria.  They are at the heart of the mystery.

Liesal Schillinger in her review last week in the New York Times book review writes

James clearly understands that many readers feel as close an attachment to Austen’s characters as they do to their own relatives and friends. So she cannily begins by furnishing answers to the natural question: “Where are they now?”

How right it feels to learn, as James informs us, that Bingley and Jane moved away from Netherfield soon after their marriage, wanting to put distance between them and the ever-querulous Mrs. Bennet at Longbourn. What a delight to read that tone-deaf, humorless Mary Bennet has married a “thin, melancholy” rector, “given to preaching sermons of inordinate length and complicated theology.” How apt that the evil seducer George Wickham, after marrying Lizzy’s frivolous sister Lydia, worked as a secretary for the foppish baronet Sir Walter Elliot (a character from Austen’s novel “Persuasion”) until Lydia’s “open flirtation” with the baronet and Wickham’s simpering attempts to ingratiate himself with his employer’s daughter met “finally with disgust.” And what a treat to see Bingley’s snobbish sisters, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, get their comeuppance — and Harriet Smith (of “Emma”) her reward.

Above all, James will delight Austen’s devoted fans by showing Darcy and Lizzy to be (if anything) more in love and better matched than anyone might have hoped, six years into their marriage.

If you love Austen and you love James or you love one or the other, I think you will love this book.

(Illustration by Skip Sterling)

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Summer Reading

I was away for a few days last week and did what I always do in Vermont: hike a little and read and relax a lot.  There are several books in my sister’s library I re-read once a year:  Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright.

Understood Betsy

This is the story of a little orphan girl around 1900 who has to leave the home of her aunt in an unspecified mid-western city and move to near Putney, Vermont.  She learns self-sufficiency, kindness and, most of all, what it takes to be happy.  My sister’s hardback is so old, it was published when Dorothy Canfield has not yet added the Fisher.  It was published in 1917.  The book is like the Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the way in which they talk about how to do things like churn butter and make applesauce.  And of course, it is about Vermont.

Gone-Away Lake is also a children’s book.  First published in 1957, it tells the story of young, almost teens who discover an abandoned resort on a lake that became a swamp after a dam was built.  They discover a brother and sister fallen on hard times who moved back to where they had once spent summers.  They have adventures and keep the discovery a secret as long as they can from their parents.  It is a book about accepting differences couched in a summer vacation story.  There is a sequal, Return to Gone-Away in which one of the abandoned houses is purchased and restored by one of the families. 

Elizabeth Enright

Elizabeth Enright won a Newberry Honor award for Gone-Away Lake.

My other favorite thing to do is to poke around a wonderful used bookstore in Brattleboro, Brattleboro Books.  (They, like all bookstores, need a little press.) This year the treasure I unearthed by Dorothy Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker.  I had not thought about it or read it in many years, but the minute I spotted the book, it all came back to me.  It is the story of a young woman who solves a mystery and discovers herself. (Is there a theme to these books?)

The heroine finds a note in a hurdy-gurdy and follows a trail to uncover a the secret of the note writer’s murder.  It is an old-fashioned follow the clues where ever they lead mystery with some romance thrown in.   Gilman wrote the tightrope walker in 1979 in between writing her better known Mrs. Pollifax spy stories.

So now you know what I read on my summer vacation. 

 

 

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Josephine Tey and Dick Francis

I had just finished re-reading Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes when I learned of the death of Dick Francis.  While they could not be more different, both are favorites of mine.  Josephine Tey specialized in elegant stories with very little violence and no blood while Dick Francis always had a “tough guy” hero who at some point gets beaten up (or injured somehow) and has to be nursed back to health, usually by the love interest.  Tey wrote only eight mysteries between 1929 (The Man in the Queue) and 1952 (The Singing Sands ).  Francis, on the other hand wrote more than 40 beginning in 1962 with Dead Cert.

Dick Francis was the Queen’s Jockey and famous in British racing circles before he turned to write mysterties.  According to his obituary in the New York Times

…Mr. Francis was already a celebrity in British sporting circles. Named champion jockey of the 1953-54 racing season by the British National Hunt after winning more than 350 races, he was retained as jockey to the queen mother for four seasons and raced eight times in the Grand National Steeplechase.When Devon Loch, the horse he was racing for the queen mother in the 1956 Grand National, collapsed in a spectacular mishap just before he would have won, Mr. Francis feared, as he put it in his autobiography, that he would be remembered as “the man who didn’t win the National.” This setback, along with the accumulated miseries of injuries, forced him into early retirement at the age of 36.

The New York Times published this well known picture of Francis on Devon Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse.

Drawing on his experiences as a jockey and his intimate knowledge of the racetrack crowd — from aristocratic owners to Cockney stable boys — the novel contained all the elements that readers would come to relish from a Dick Francis thriller. There was the pounding excitement of a race, the aura of the gentry at play, the sweaty smells from the stables out back, an appreciation for the regal beauty and unique personality of a thoroughbred — and enough sadistic violence to man and beast to satisfy the bloodthirsty.

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Mr. Francis was a formulaic writer, even if the formula was foolproof. He drew the reader into the intimate and remarkably sensual experience of the world of racing. His writing never seemed better than when his jockey-heroes climbed on their mounts and gave themselves up to what he called “the old song in the blood.”

This self-contained world was, of course, a reflection of a broader universe in which themes of winning and losing and courage and integrity have more sweeping meaning. As the critic John Leonard wrote, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoyevsky because you don’t like God.”

Tey also created worlds.  Each of her eight mysterties is set in a different world.  Although little is know about Tey (Elizabeth Macintosh), she was born in Inverness and attended a physical training college in Birmingham.  Miss Pym Disposes is set at a similar sort of college where the students (all young women) study to teach phys ed and practice what we would now call physical therapy.

The writer, Natasha Cooper, wrote in a short essay on Tey

Until I started to think about this piece I had always assumed that my devotion to Josephine Tey’s novels had most to do with the age at which I first read them. As an impressionable twelve- or thirteen-year-old I revelled in the gentle, unusually rational decency of her good characters and found the domesticity of her settings appealing. The elegant simplicity of her style makes her work easy to enjoy at any age and some of the novels, particularly Brat Farrar with its predominantly young cast, might well have been written specifically for teenagers.

But once I started to reread some of the novels the other day, I realised that there was more to my delight in her work. Her obsession with the masks people wear and the truths they hide is one that I share. All crime writers must be concerned with the ways in which criminals disguise themselves and are found out by their investigators, but Tey’s interest went beyond that.

…In Miss Pym Disposes she plays with the idea of misread identity in several different ways in the characters of the heroine, an easily mockable spinster who happens to have written a brilliantly successful psychology textbook, and the three physical training students who provide the murderer, victim and chief suspect.Like most of Tey’s villains, Pamela Nash in Miss Pym Disposes is beautiful, successful, adored – and so full of vanity that she cannot conceive of anything (even someone else’s life) being more important than her own wishes…

I also first read Tey as a teenager by discovering Miss Pym and Brat Farrar. 

As the Grumpy Old Bookman said in his 2005 entry

Josephine Tey, the English crime writer, died in 1952; but if you go to Amazon.co.uk and type in her name, you get 172 results; and on Amazon.com you get 109. In other words, the lady is still in print, is still published in a wide variety of formats, still selling, and still being read. That being the case, it is worth having a look at her life and methods in order to see what might be learnt.

So celebrate Dick Francis by picking up one of his books (I particularly like the early ones) and rediscover (or discover) Josephine Tey both are well worth the time.

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Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and Vicki Barr

Nancy Drew figured in the recent hearings for Sonia Sotomayor to become a judge.  It seems that Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ruth Ginsberg, and Sonia Sotomayor all read the series when they were growing up.  I have to say that I hated the Nancy Drew books.  Oh, I’ve read one or two when they were there and there was nothing else to read, but I much preferred Cherry Ames (the nurse who solved mysteries) or Vicki Barr (the flight attendant who did the same).

In her article in the New York Times, Jan Hoffman recounts the many successful women who read, enjoyed and consider Nancy Drew a role model.

Touchstone, pole star, reflecting pool. Often what women remember about the books speaks to who they were — shy girls seeking inspiration; smart girls seeking affirmation. The series even gave voice to girls who rebelled against the Girl Sleuth’s pearl-necklace perfection.

All told, the women’s recollections capture the impact of a formulaic, ghostwritten series approaching its 80th year.

…

Since its debut in 1930, the series has thrived in a germ-free bubble, scarcely brushed by time and social upheaval. Nancy Drew, 16 or 18, depending on the edition, is a daddy’s girl, living with her father, Carson, a lawyer — her mother conveniently died when she was 3 — and housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, in a comfortable home in River Heights where the words “Amber Alert” have never been heard.

With curiosity and confidence, she attacks mysteries and solves them, helped by her friends Bess, who is always “pleasingly plump,” and George, a slim tomboy. There’s a harmless boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, about whom the actress Ellen Barkin once snickered, “He was like her driver to me.”

But others feel the way I do about Nancy

“Nancy is too perfect,” said Laura Lippman, 50, who writes a popular series about Tess Monaghan, a detective with questionable taste in boyfriends and an aversion to rules. Even Nancy’s father “is helpless in front of her perfection. She requires Bess and George to constantly talk about her perfection. Bess is fat and George is unfeminine and they are not as fabulous as Nancy.”

In the very early days of the internet and email, I participated in a discussion group with a number of women.  The topic of Nancy Drew came up and I famously wrote that I didn’t like her because you never felt she ever used the bathroom.  This is the perfection Lippman is speaking about.

Vicki Barr and Cherry Ames were also mid-westerners with supportive families but they left those families to pursue their professions and dreams.  They had interesting friends and were not the center of their own universe although they were the center of their cicles. 

Cherry Ames became a nurse to serve during World War II.  The first six books, Student Nurse, Senior Nurse, Army Nurse, Chief Nurse, Flight Nurse, and Veterans’ Nurse specifically discuss the war, the war effort, and her role.  Her brother went to fight in the war.  I liked her because she actually did stuff. Instead of Ned Nickerson, Cherry had doctors and other professional men hanging around.  But Cherry also taught us that one has to study to achieve our goals.  The first two books are set during her nurse training days.

But my favorite is Vicki Barr.  The books are set just after the end of World War II when passenger flights were becoming more popular and less of a novelty.

She reads this ad and talks her way into the class as she in not quite old enough.  In fact, she has to get a letter from her parents giving permission.

“If you are twenty-one to twenty-eight, and single – if you are a registered nurse, or if you have at least two years of college or of business experience in dealing with people – then here’s the most appealing job in the world!  Apply tomorrow!”

 

Vicki Barr, like Cherry Ames. had a profession for which she had to be trained.  She lived in an apartment in New York City with other stewardesses as they were then called.  The first book is about their training which was quite extensive and talked about responsibility for passenger safety.  The women who were Vicki’s frends and roommates were diverse, if not racially than in background and even age.  She flew a lot of different routes and involved herself in the lives of her passengers which is how she came to solve mysteries.  Like Cherry, Vicki had cool boyfriends like the pilot, Dean, and newspaper man, Pete.  The boyfriends were always enlisted to help her solve the case, but not to rescue her.

I still read mysteries and I still prefer women sluths, but in response to Jan Hoffman’s question,  “And who was your Nancy Drew?”  I have to say Vicki Barr.  Besides, the first one was published the year I was born.