It's no mystery...

... that I love mysteries, esp. series mysteries, but I don't always write about them here. {Was that a sign of relief I just heard?}  Maybe I'm a little self-conscious about how many of them I read, maybe I usually can't think of anything interesting enough to say about them, or maybe it's that it's hard to say what happens in them without saying what happens in them, if you follow me. And sometimes the 22nd book in the series can be a lot of fun to read, but I'd still feel like it's a stretch to come up with reasons why I liked it. So, maybe if I really like one I'll try to say something about it, and if it's just a good book, I'll just say I read it and it was a good book. :)

Even though I quickly forget* what happens in most of them, I almost never re-read mysteries, but I will listen again to one I've read. Since I've been eagerly anticipating The Late Scholar, Jill Paton Walsh's new Lord Peter Wimsey novel, I was happy to find the first one, Thrones, Dominations, on the library's audiobook shelf. I remember liking it when I read it the first time, and I loved listening to it this time. This is the book that Dorothy L. Sayers left unfinished, and it seems very true to what I remember of her books, or at least that it 'feels' like them and works in its own right. It's set in 1936, when George V dies and rumors begin to circulate about King Edward and his romance with an American divorcee. {When Peter disappears on one of his mysterious ops, his mission has to do with retrieving some papers that the King has left careless lying about during one of his weekend house parties.) Peter and Harriet are newlyweds, settling into their new house in London, decorated for them by the Dowager Duchess, with Harriet adjusting to her new self as Lady Peter.  {There's a wonderful scene at the beginning when Peter's cantankerous Godmother visits Harriet to 'see what Peter has married.'} Someone is murdered, but who cares?  The scenes between Peter and Harriet are what we came here for.

* This is mortifying:  I was looking at the mysteries on my own reading list the other day, and saw an author there who's new to me, and started thinking I should finally look for one of his books, only to realize somehow the next day that not only have I read two of the books that I still have on the list, but that according to what I wrote on my own blog I was underwhelmed by them. :)

The other book I just finished (also as an audiobook, but just because I found it that way sooner} is Through the Evil Days, the eighth book in Julia Spencer-Fleming's series about Russ van Alstyne and Clare Fergusson.  When I was first listening to this, I realized that almost none of the series that I read is set in the U.S., especially in the present day; I got a little distracted trying to think of any (and could only think of Faye Kellerman's books).  Russ is the strong, sensible police chief in a small town in the Adirondacks, and Clare is the town's new Episcopal priest, and now Russ's wife.  She's pregnant, and Russ is struggles with the fact that he didn't want a child. As the story begins, a man kidnaps a little girl and set fires to the house he has taken her from, killing her foster parents. This happens just as Russ and Clare are leaving for their honeymoon in a remote cabin on a lake, and each of them faces a crisis that they can't bring themselves to talk about. In an odd way, I liked the fact that I could almost see the plot unfolding and the strands connecting as I read. This is probably a thriller more than a mystery (you know in general who the bad guys are, and you just need to find out what's going to happen to everyone), but it's set during a crippling winter storm, so there is much peril and plot-thickening, and the ending was well done. There's been a little bit of time between this book and the last one, and I'm finding that the series has really grown on me.

A young Elizabeth

{Jenkins} in 1934, from today's Persephone Post, just because their timing is so perfect.

I just noticed that this portrait I had found of Virginia Woolf, once before, was painted in the same year {several years, maybe even ten, after they met}. It shows her in the Woolfs' flat in Tavistock Square.

The View from Downshire Hill

My father bought me a charming little house in Downshire Hill in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. I was to live in it continuously for fifty-five years until an accident which severely restricted my ability to walk forced me to move into a flat nearby in Hampstead.
      Built in 1832, the house was one of a pair of the style that showed the last flicker of Regency architecture. Its narrow frontage had three sash-windows, one above the other, whose upper panes had glazing bars in Gothic arches. It was not convenient; it had only two rooms and small landing on each floor - and a roomy double-basement, the front of which contained two generous cupboards, transformed by shelves into a larder and pantry, but originally meant, as one saw by the fleur-de-lys shaped airholes in the upper panes of each door, to accommodate truckle beds for servants. The kitchen range now enclosed a coke boiler. My father cut the spacious, beautifully aspected top front room into a small sitting room, a bathroom and upstairs lavatory. One of the previous owners ... had installed a bath on the top landing surrounded by a wooden horse-box, with the result that steam had reduced all the wallpapers on the top floor to hanging ribbons.
    The offices at which I worked during the war were all on the 24 bus route, so that on the return journey I often got off at Camden Town and walked up the Chalk Farm Road, passing a good many humble but active second-hand furniture shops which, owing to air raids and general disturbance of people's homes, were able to assemble a collection of chairs, tables, chests of drawers and looking-glasses such as I could never have afforded in normal conditions, and still have now, when the process of antique furniture have skyrocketed. ... I was able. even with my small means, to do away with the Edwardian furniture from home with which I had originally furnished the house, and replace it with pieces of about the 1820-1830 period. Even in those favorable circumstances, I could not have afforded the 1790-1820 range, but I had no unsatisfied longing when I saw how harmonious the interior of 8 Downshire Hill at last became. I had in all this much help from my mother; her standards were rigorous. It was not that she did not sympathize with my love of antique furniture; one of the most charming things I have, she gave me -- a bow-fronted chest of drawers topped by a beautiful oval looking-glass on a little stand with drawers in it, which had belonged to her grandmother. But she felt that shabbiness was not to be tolerated even for the sake of elegance.

     
There's almost nothing I like to read more than a literary biography with hundreds of pages, and a family tree, and pictures, and footnotes, and a bibliography that I turn to long before I finish the book because I already want to read more about the subject.  So it's really kind of wonderful that I can be so captivated by a literary memoir that has none of these things. :)

I first learned about Elizabeth Jenkins a few years ago, when people were reading The Tortoise and the Hare, and then I read (and also loved) her biography of Jane Austen.  I would always be drawn to a writer who is both a novelist and a biographer, and thanks to the college library, I was able to find

this memoir. And thanks to the college library's academic practices I have had this book checked out since (ahem) sometime in 2012. Since it's due back (with no more renewals) next September, I thought I should probably get it read. :)

The real reason I picked it up again was that I had just read a book {a different kind of literary memoir} that pushed all of my reading buttons, and I was feeling a little restless, wanting to read something that I might like as much.  This was perfect; I loved this book.  An interesting, wide-ranging life told on a small scale, so that the things that happen on the next page are often surprising.

As in, when E.J. was a student at Cambridge, the Principal of her College was Lytton Strachey's sister {'to know whom, even slightly, was one of the experiences of a lifetime'}.

As I was going down from Newnham, Miss Strachey asked me, with her usual detached elegance, if I would like an introduction to Virginia Woolf?  It seemed to me, at the time, that life could afford no more exciting prospect. I was almost speechless. She added, encouragingly:  'She's always asking me why I don't send her any of my young ladies.' However speechless, my enthusiasm and gratitude must have made themselves plain, for she then gently added that people in Bloomsbury Society were apt, sometimes, to be rather unkind in what they said. I exclaimed that I was sure I should not mind that. She had given me the warning, but nothing was going to prevent my rushing toward the precipice. ...
      Mrs. Woolf's simple note arrived, asking me, if I were free, to come to them on Thursday evening after dinner. The address was Tavistock Square ... As her subsequent invitations were all of the same kind, my recollection of them begins with going on foot, through the dusk and silence of Doughty Street, through the brisk modern cheerfulness of Russell Square, to the gloom, once more, of Bedford Square, where a bust of one of the Dukes of Bedford stood on a plinth in its gardens, under sweeping boughs.
      Tavistock Square, of later date than other Bloomsbury squares, had a many-windowed, lofty brick frontage. The Woolfs occupied a flat on one of the upper floors, and Leonard Woolf himself came down the stairs to let me in. His gentle kindness, his simplicity and his distinction made an unforgettable impression on me, which never altered. He and Mrs. Woolf were alone in a sitting room on the upper floor. The furniture was covered in worn cretonne upholstery, the walls were painted in a series of latticed arches, done, as I afterwards heard, by Mrs. Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, in the curious idiom, hyper-fashionable at the time, of a startling absence of perspective, and a sort of staggering crookedness. There were lighted candles on the mantelpiece and their light was strengthened by the glow of a large coal fire.
      Virginia Woolf was tall and angular. Her face, despite a slightly exaggerated length, was very beautiful. Her nose was delicately aquiline, her eyes, a bluish grey, very large and deep-set. At that time she was wearing her silvery-grey hair brushed back from her forehead and pushed behind her ears, reaching half-way down her neck. It was an era when skirts were very short, and her extended legs were exposed, stretched out, long and fragile, like stems of old-fashioned clay pipes. I was struck at once by her complete lack of self-consciousness. ...
      The conversation was not exactly interesting in itself, but of extreme interest because it was uttered by them. Some of it concerned young people who had left home to be independent but were struggling to make ends meet. Suddenly Mrs. Woolf said, with an introspective stare, as if she were looking at something under glass:  'Are you poor, Miss Jenkins?' Snatching for an appropriate reply, I said:  'Well, not necessitous' and they both burst out laughing.

There's a lot more in the book like this -- brief glimpses of her friends {including Elizabeth Bowen}, and writers she likes {or doesn't}; stories about how she came to write her books and become involved in other projects {she was one of the founders of the Jane Austen Society}.

There's a chapter later in the book where she talks about Vera Brittain {another writer she doesn't like} and her book Testament of Youth:

...none of the subsequent books equalled the reclame of that first one, in which the subject, her experiences as an army nurse in the 1914 war were so deeply felt and so important in themselves, they overpowered any personal elements. The subject floated her.

I remembered that passage not just because I loved that last phrase, but because it seemed like this lovely, very personal book is the exact opposite. Even when she was talking about people I didn't know, her descriptions were worth reading because they were uttered by her. 

I would love to read more of her books now, though they are hard to find. Has anyone read Harriet?
     

{I found the image of 8 Downshire Hill here.  I was not
meaning to go house-hunting while I was
looking for it, but I will be moving into this one,
down the street, as soon as possible. :) }

Only {dis}connect: Elizabeth Jenkins and Angela Thirkell

 

In 1946...I had an offer from Mr. Wadsworth, the literary editor of the Manchester Guardian, to review books for him. I did this for about two years. The one over which I worked the hardest was Dr. Chapman's Jane Austen:  Facts and Problems ... I was of course severely limited as to space, and I worked to the uttermost of my capacity to celebrate the exceptional qualities of the work within these limits. I was rewarded by a postcard view of Oxford, on which was written: 'Thank you, RWC.'
      I also recall the number of novels that came my way by Angela Thirkell. It was a very interesting professional experience to have to read carefully works so widely popular, by a cultivated writer, which one found abhorrent. My reading of them coincided with my horror of Marxism; I recoiled from them in indignation because they seemed so amply to justify the abuse and contempt poured on the middle classes by Marxist writers. I re-read one or two of these novels lately, and my impressions of them were even stronger than I remembered. I still admired, but with a more developed professional insight, the light touch and airy pace, and the easy capacity to place characters before the reader, but I was again chilled by the writer's insensitivity, amounting almost to moral idiocy. One of her characters complained that now there were no members of the family still in the armed forces the posts were so dull; it used to be nice to get letters from the Front; a remark only to be equaled by one from a character in another work, who, complaining of the wretched quality of the cakes, said that one might as well be still in the war again. Mrs. Thirkell's very interesting group of immediate ancestors included Rudyard Kipling but this heredity, in her written works at least, was not evident.

 

from The View from Downshire Hill: a memoir, by Elizabeth Jenkins

Oh, dear. :)

More of a must-read now...

'Washington Square is perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's,' said Graham Greene. {read on Goodreads}

{image found here} 

Only connect: Virginia Woolf and George Eliot

When Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," what did she mean?  The observation was made in an essay that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement to mark the centenary of George Eliot's birth, in November 1919. Before writing it Woolf immersed herself in Cross's Life and in the novels -- 'in order to sum her up once and for all,' as she wrote to a friend, with a note of self-mockery.
      ... In the essay, she begins by describing the accomplishment of the early works, Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, which seem drawn from Eliot's own rural experiences and are peopled with characters so true to life that readers forget they are fictional. 'We move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do ...' Woolf writes. ...
      It is in contrast with this sure-handedness that Woolf makes reference to Middlemarch. Here is her full characterization:  'It is not that her power diminishes [after the early novels], for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.'
     'With all its imperfection.' What are these imperfections? Woolf gives few specifics, though she cites Eliot's unwillingness to let one sentence stand for many and contrasts it with the delicacy shown by Jane Austen in Emma. ('Whom are you going to dance with?' asked Mr, Knightley, at the Westons' ball. 'With you, if you will ask me,' said Emma; and she has said enough,' Woolf writes. "Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we should have looked out of the window.')

from My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead

{This didn't fit in with anything I wanted to say about this wonderful book yesterday, but I loved it, so here it is.}

{Illustration from an 1898 edition of Emma, found here.}