dovegreyreader scribbles

The Castrato and His Wife ~ Helen Berry

'Historical facts about men and women born in obscurity are not easy to come by...[they] leave a body of historical evidence that is like a fine old musical instrument long infested with woodworm: some material traces of the original do survive, but these have become pock-marked with holes, till all that is left is a fragile shell and hollow space...'

Helen Berry's coda at the end of her excellent book The Castrato and His Wife is perhaps a salutory reminder of Hilary Mantel's assertion in her recent televised interview with James Runcie, that as soon as we learn history we should learn to be suspicious, that we should question. There is clearly much we cannot know for sure, but there are legitimate ways of constructing that history as Helen Berry elaborates.

'This book has endeavoured to squeeze a tune from ephemeral materials using the different varieties of time-tempered fragments that are left to us: not just the written words, but the objects, art, and the music that are the legacy of previous generations...

And Helen Berry offers a reference to an overview of this approach to history citing another book which sounds equally readable Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History by Mark M.Smith, and again I am reminded of Hilary Mantel showing us her shelf of reference files and reading out the odd but contemporaneously Tudor contents of one folder.

You may recall that a few months ago, the ink barely dry on the proof copy, I was waxing lyrical about this book  which had arrived from Oxford University Press, Well, it has just been published, so now you can find out the mysteries of the life of the castrato for yourselves.

I'm not sure what it may be about the eighteenth century that makes my eyes glaze over, perhaps a little too far back for comfort and not helped by the fact that the literature has always defeated me despite my best efforts. Clearly all that was needed was an angle that would interest me and this new world of surgical interference and musical intrigue was just the ticket.

Now let's be honest, the book is interesting on many accounts but it is the castrato aspect that intrigues isn't it, and Helen Berry offers a fascinating background to the history and the world of castration, illegal even when a young Tenducci was parted from his bits by an intinerant barber-surgeon wielding his special shears, which could and did double for animal or human use. And all sufficient to leave our lad singing higher up the register and it was off to music school he went. Women in this era banned from church choirs, so someone had to sing the top line.

Moving from Italy to England, Tenducci became quite the celebrity pin up boy, his picture adorning many-a young girl's wall, and when he started to sing in public he quickly established a fan base. The X Factor is clearly only a re-hash of what has been ever thus because with fame came the adulation for Tenducci that we associate with the celebs of today. And all this despite the castrati's barrel chest and

'disproportionately long limbs, making their heads look small in relation to their bodies...'

and the subsequent ridicule this attracted from the cartoonists of the day.

Yet the rumours of relationships with women were rife to the extent that Tenducci was even cited in marriage separation cases, having to flee the country on more than one occasion. He was also absolutely useless with money, so if he wasn't being hunted down by cuckolded husbands he was being chased to pay his debts. Heaven knows what they threatened him with because to be honest... thinking about the fate of poor old Abelard of Heloise fame, well the worst has already been done by the barber's shears hasn't it.

I'm giving a potted and populist version of a rigorous and scholarly work here, meticulously researched and referenced, but for all that the research does not weigh heavy, it is eminently readable. Helen Berry presents her information in the most accessible way, exploring a great deal in the process including fascinating attitudes to sexuality, male beauty and effeminacy in men, (to which women of the day were thought to be more attracted) and the assumed unconsummated love of the castrati...though having assumed they 'couldn't' it is never quite clear what they might have been able to do. It would seem no one thought to write it down in any detail.

So who'd have thought a book like this would prove to be a page-turner, but when Tenducci reached Dublin, well things were really about to hot up. At the pinnacle of his career in the mid 1760s, and invited to Dublin to sing operas in English, it is a meeting with the young Dorothea Maunsell, the daughter of a wealthy barrister, that will really put a bit of a spanner in Tenducci's works.

It was in Dublin some twenty years earlier that Handel's Messiah had received its world premiere to international acclaim, and brought with it a cultural fillip to the city, perhaps not unlike the one happening yet again and which I have witnessed on several recent trips. Eager to be in with the 'it' boy and rubbing shoulders with celebrity, the Maunsell's invited Tenducci into their home where he quickly took on the role of musical mentor to young Dorothea, and, on the basis that surely no mischief could ensue, they spent long periods of time in each other's sole company.

The ensuing elopement, clandestine marriage and quite how the family addressed the humiliating scandal kept me on the very edge of my seat. Dorothea had been raised to make a good society marriage and have children, not to run off with a eunuch, and hell hath no fury like a barrister scorned it would seem. And of course I won't reveal the shocking lengths (well I was shocked) to which Thomas Maunsell resorted in order to try and force his daughter into submission, because that would be to give away the most riveting part of the book. But never underestimate the power of a woman in love either, and when you know that Dorothea subsequently published an account of her ordeal that gives you some clue as to her resilience.

Oh yes, and if you read it for yourself you will discover the mystery of what Tenducci 'may' have carried in his breeches.

But the added reach and attraction of a book like this rests for me in the trails of interest that it opens.

I wanted to go off and look at paintings by Caravaggio,

I wanted to listen to the Scottish ballads.. 'Roslin Castle,' 'The Braes of Ballenden,' and 'Lochaber' made famous by Tenducci.

Is 'the witty Duchess of Gordon', who gets a mention, the same Jane, Duchess of Gordon as in mother of Georgiana, who married the 6th Duke of Bedford and built Endsleigh I wonder. If so I'm sure there is a painting of her in the collection at Port Eliot.

Tenducci sang in Plymouth in 1786 to great acclaim, and I wonder where exactly.

I hadn't listened to the Pergolesi Stabat Mater in ages, now I needed to.

And just what was this aria from Artaxerxes, the first all-sung opera in English, made so popular by Tenducci that even Jane Austen was a little sick of hearing it so many times.

And most of all, with a trip to Dublin coming up on Bloomsday earlier this year, I mapped out a little Tenducci trail around the city just to walk in his and Dorothea's footsteps. It's not hard, having read this book to visit Dame Street and imagine...

or wonder if Tenducci nipped in here for a quick chop after an evening performance...

and then to wander along here, the fashionable street that Dorothea's parents had moved to..

and wonder which house it may have been.
Which one had Tenducci visited and there courted his impressionable young fan...

I also like Helen Berry's next suggestion in her coda...

'By engaging with reconstructed sounds, visiting sites of interest, and touching material traces, as well as reading and looking hard in archives, both historian and reader may in future be able to gain a deeper insight into the long-forgotten cadences, the pulses and social rhythms of previous generations.'

So for all that a book like this is written to give us another version of a lesser-known history, perhaps it is also about sparking the imagination of the reader and letting them take their own journey with it. I know I have done exactly that, and how good to find that as a result, I am friends with the eighteenth century at last, though I haven't quite gone the whole hog and pinned a picture of Tenducci on my wall....yet.

 

 

Whim is me...

I'm trying hard with the Booker longlist reading this year I really am, and it is no reflection on the quality of the list, which after all I can't comment on until I have read in its entirety, but I was suddenly drowned by a huge wave of ennui at more reading to prescription.

Sometimes I love directed reading, sometimes not, and I can see that I may have shot myself in the foot here because there we are about to finish a shared year of reading War & Peace together and before that we conquered Ulysses. It could be argued all prescriptive enough reading processes in their own way.

But I've done a lot of that day-to-day directed reading as well recently, and most willingly before meeting and talking to the authors at Port Eliot Festival, but I was dipping into a book that had arrived from OUP, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (who writes a blog Text Patterns here) and suddenly I found myself very comfortably esconced on Planet Jacobs with Alan's idea...

'....my commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim.'

There's a great deal more to Professor Jacob's arguments, this is an OUP book after all, and having decided that I absolutely did need to read at Whim that very minute I didn't really want to read this one cover to cover either (sorry Alan) though I will eventually. So what follows is is in no way a definitive representation of the arguments, more a sifted version that held relevance for me at that particular moment, ideas that gave me pause for thought.

I browsed Alan Jacobs's dissection of some of the books out there which go for the prescriptive angle, most of which I have on my shelves.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die gets short shrift from Alan

'...dreadful...violation of the sovereignty of Whim'

and I've always felt the same, love the pictures but the book has felt wrong from the start...not a single book by Penelope Fitzgerald in there. How to Read Like a Professor comes under much scrutiny too and Jacobs argues both the fors (the promise of expertise may be attractive to some) and the againsts (reading = drudgery).

For a marginalia-ist like me there is an interesting section about writing in books and with reference to library books. A heinous crime to many including me, a sort of looting of the future reader's mind in a way, which is why I always have to have my own copy of a book and which, once written in I never lend out... it would feel like lending out my diary. Alan Jacobs and I are kindred spirits, no good putting a question mark in the margin for me and Alan, the question and the thought needs to be written down, a chance to recapture what you were experiencing when you first read the passage, and from which your future self may benefit. If I do that it needs to be somewhere in the book itself.

The reader of the library book is 'not allowed' to write in the book but the fact that they do, far from being seen as loutish book behaviour could be seen as an indication of the

'admirably irrepressible and responsive readers who can't afford their own books.'

And for those who may be squinting to see what that card says, it came from Slightly Foxed some years ago and yes, you need to have due regard for your viscera if you stealeth a book from my library.

Balancing that process of marginalia for Alan Jacobs is the suggestion that this can all be overdone, the continuity of reading interrupted and to the detriment of the reader. Uninterrupted flow might be an essential aspect of the book, in Alan's words

'I was blaming the road for my own riding of the brakes.'

Some books may require a lot of commentary, others only a little and ..

'Lord help the person who annotates a Harry Potter book or the latest John Grisham. In books of that kind momentum is not to be squandered.'

There is what looks like a really interesting section on e reading and in particular the Kindle, and it's not all bad news, plus some commentary on the current fashion for sharing your progress with a book page by page online as if in a race, which just might be. However by now I am so overcome by Whim that I am done with the distraction of Alan Jacobs's book (a sentiment which I have a feeling Alan would understand and even applaud ) because I now want the pleasures of reading back.

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. ("I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing," Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. "Can I go back to my books now?") Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made. They take care of themselves; they always do go back to their books.

Yes indeed, Whim was me so I settled down with a huge pile of books to pay attention to my Inner Whim and settled on three that I really did want to read now and I am right back in my reading groove with each of them.

Fortunately for me I was not overcome with paying attention to my Inner Whim before I had made a start on the Booker longlist with The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes, and the book already a victim of the pencil. However I can now see that reading this novel may just have contributed to my increased susceptibility to all this, because I'm not sure I'm going to read anything else on the list that will match up to it.

The truth is actually that I love it so much I don't want to risk finding something on the list I might like more.

Rubbish thinking isn't it.

I'm wondering what you may be reading now and why, and how's your Inner Reading Whim faring today??

 

The Alice Behind Wonderland ~ Simon Winchester

I do have all the books, all dipped into over the years, Morton Cohen's Lewis Carroll A Biography, considered the definitive work, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild - A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach, the book that purported to have discovered definitive reference to those lost pages of Lewis Carroll's diary. Pages that seem to have been dated around the time that there was the unexplained and irreconcilable rift with the family of Alice Liddell, Carroll's muse for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the young subject of the controversial photographs. Then there is The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf and The Agony of Lewis Carroll by Richard Wallace and so it goes on, the author of Alice in Wonderland it seem a never-ending subject for reinterpretation and renewed understanding.

I'm not quite sure where the Lewis Carroll, 'guilty' or 'not guilty' of offences against children debate rests at the moment, though there is little doubt in my mind that, were he to be judged in the context of present-day sensibilities and safeguarding awareness, he'd be banged to rights pronto for 'that' over-revealing photo and not allowed near a child unless supervised.

And there can be little doubt that Alice Liddell, was an ethereally beautiful and photogenic little girl with a gaze that almost defies description, so when The Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester arrived I was in half a mind whether to read it or not. Would this be more of the same-old same old or perhaps a different perspective on a man, who for all his perceived faults and transgressions left us the legacy of one of the most famous children's books of all time.

Coming in at just under 100 pages I decided I could afford to risk it and was almost pleased to discover that Simon Winchester has tip-toed around the paedophile sensation approach, acknowledging that the absent diary pages do leave room for 'ambiguity and speculation' but steadfastly refusing to tread further on those egg shells. Simon Winchester prefers to explore his subject through the medium of the photography, a burgeoning phenomenen of which Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast. And a very good exponent of the craft he was, not only capturing the images but doing his own developing too. Carroll's photographs are recognised as of the highest compositional standard and I was interested to discover that many of the originals now lie in the vault of the Princeton University library. Copies are available but it has been declared, by the current Curator of Manuscripts, that the actual Alice picture itself will not see the light of day again, ever, for fear of light deterioration. Simon Winchester clearly did his level best to lay eyes on those originals whilst researching this book but

' after some courteous chafing, I felt obliged to abide by his ruling.'

 There is a fascinating potted history of Carroll's life in a rather decadent and loutish Oxford and his unusual elevation to a Fellowship at Christ Church college whilst still an undergraduate; an honour which guaranteed him lifelong residence, food and a grant of £25 a year with no requirement to work  for any of it, so clearly someone somewhere recognised something about him worth rewarding.

Simon Winchester includes a good account of the history of photography woven around the life of Lewis Carroll, his friendship with Family Liddell, the mysterious falling out and the later life of Alice too. I had no idea that one of the very few signed copies of Alice in Wonderland was given by Alice as a gift to a young Princess Elizabeth, or that the original manuscript, which I have
often looked at in the British Library, was presented to the British people by a group of US book lovers after the Second World War. It had originally been in Alice's possession and sold to a US buyer when she hit hard times but eventually handed over with great ceremony  and received by the Archbishop of Canterbury no less,

'as an expression of thanks to a noble people who held Hitler at bay for a long period single-handed.'

And it's obvious that this postcard from The British Library was my bookmark for this read, a fascinating little book that explores a life we think we may know well enough, but recounted from a really unique angle, so an interesting and useful addition to the Lewis Carroll shelf....and now it occurs to me...

I may never have read the original.

How on earth has that not happened.

Have you read it?

The original rather than an abridged version?

The Castrato and His Wife ~ Helen Berry

I thought it only fair to warn you that, come the autumn, we will be mostly talking about eunuchs on here and I'll agree that's not in our usual sphere of discussion.... and I was determined to avoid all use of pun and inuendo until I read that first line out to Bookhound and he remarked that in that case I'd got off to a really bad start.

You may certainly ask why eunuchs and I will tell you that it's because, despite all my new rules about keeping hands off proof copies until nearer publication date, I have just finished reading The Castrato and His Wife by Helen Berry, to be published by Oxford University Press...eventually...sorry in my haste to read it I've lost the blurb that came with it. I'll write more fully later in the year but just have to whet your appetites for this one, get it reserved at the library quick, even if you have not an ounce of interest in the subject, the story is quite incredible.

It's a gripping account of the life of the famous Italian castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, but also a foray into the social mores of the eighteenth century; a century which where fiction is concerned for some reason my eyes glaze over, but where accounts of real life wake me up again.

So who knew... well I certainly didn't and I have been completely mesmerised by a world of which I knew little though may have feigned a passing interest, perhaps hearing that only recording of the voice of a castrato on the radio, or thinking that I knew all eunuchs were about four foot tall because of seeing them on Carry On films, when in fact the opposite is true. The long bones carry on growing in the absence of the hormonal starting and stopping associated with puberty so castrati have disproportionately long limbs which make their heads look small, and barrel chests from all the vocal training (must guard against that when the next Vocal Harem choir season starts...good name for a choir in this context eh)

It's all involved a bit of an SRN brush up on the physiology of testosterone which with the pride of lions that reside here I should know all about, yet for some reason when I started to recount a few details to the chaps ...

'Do you know in the 1730s they used to wait for the man who castrated the pigs to visit so that he could...

and suddenly for some reason they were gone, vanished. Bookhound finding an excuse to go and play with his new windows, the Gamekeeper off to strim around his pheasant pens, so I haven't been able to share anything about this amazing book with anyone yet.

I won't go into too much detail now but with its themes of gender, passion, intrigue and obsession the book is riveting and makes you feel as ashamedly inquisitive as any eighteenth century nosey parker, especially when you get to the moment when Tenducci weds, and you realise that a Georgian version of Twitter would have been deafening with all this to talk about. The injunctions would have been flying around because there was a great deal of speculation about what may or may not have resided in Tenducci's breeches...and when you hear what may have done...well yes, knock me down with a feather etc.

In many ways and thankfully we can never truly know the quality of the castrati voice, but how I'd love to have heard Tenducci sing Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, I mean just imagine...

And imagine my surprise when I discovered that he actually sang on the stage of the original Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and even at a music festival in Plymouth.

Then I start digging around myself for more historical context to Tenducci's life because this was the era of Admiral Nelson, the Battle of Trafalgar loomed, Georgiana was marrying into the Bedford family and planning to build the little cottage orne up the lane at Endsleigh and lo there is mention that her mother the Duchess of Gordon was a patron of Tenducci.

Much more about the book when I get my hands on a finished copy later this year because I am now desperate to see the illustrations, portraits, letters, tickets etc but I know it will be yet another to add to my ever-increasing Best Books of 2011 list for sure....what a fabulous reading year this is.

But now I'm intrigued, I see Imogen Robertson's latest novel Anatomy of Murder has castrati as a theme but are there any others ???  I have it here waiting to read as soon as I've fought the Spanish campaign with Stella Tillyard and The Tides of War, and I'm also taking regular sojourns in late nineteenth century artistic Glasgow with Jane Harris and Gillespie and I, great books all.

How about you...good reads on the go??

 

The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation ~ Thomas Kessner

So having established that I had little interest in the rise of American aviation, but that wrapped around an interesting and controversial life I could be tempted, I embarked on The Flight of the Century - Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation by Thomas Kessner (published today by Oxford University Press) with an open mind and a huge and vacant vault in the old knowledge bank ready to be filled.
In which case I couldn't have chosen a better and more balanced account because Thomas Kessner prioritises his material carefully assigning a mere three pages to the event that could have spun the book out to a thousand pages, the kidnap and subsequent murder of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's son Charles Junior, thus bringing the book home in a very readable and completely fascinating 340 pages, and a read that got me out of any clearing up/ housework/ ironing for the three days that I was reading it...sorry, he's just taken off, can't hang about.
Any voyeuristic notions into the digging of the dirt were confounded but ultimately not disappointed as throughout the book Thomas Kessner offers rational and well-argued evidence for the rise and fall of this great American hero.
The fall from grace came with the education-poor but experience-rich Charles Lindbergh's increasingly Fascist leanings which toppled into outright support for Hitler during the Second World War, and even I could sense the distress that this must have caused the American nation, who having lionised him then had to somehow distance themselves from their hero. Thomas Kessner admirably charts the rise of this astonishing young man, hoisted somewhat unwillingly onto the pedestal following an epic feat of endurance so in keeping with his character traits that, on reflection it comes as little surprise that Lindbergh made that solo first airborne crossing from America to Paris on May 20th 1927.
The book held me completely in its thrall apart from a couple of interludes, when the aviation industry detail lost my interest very briefly which was more than compensated for by the Lindbergh content, as the barnstorming aerial stuntman who had diverted his energies into helping to organise a fledgling airmail post service across the US, set his sights on the greatest challenge.The attrition rate was high for the postal aviators, of forty or so pilots over thirty were killed flying poorly maintained and obsolete planes.
Diversion from flight path ::
It all reminded me of the last-minute package holiday to Yugoslavia that a student-nursing friend and I had bought for £48 in 1973 from someone who couldn't go.
We were flying from Luton Airport with that thankfully now obsolete company Court Line and, as we climbed the steps into our bright pink aeroplane to be greeted by a flight attendant clad in Mary Quant designer uniform, were quite (verging on very) distressed to see the words Royal Mail clearly visible beneath the plane's luminous new livery, whilst happy (sort of) to find ourselves seated next to four trainee Catholic priests headed for the same holiday as us (another story best left untold).
Back on flight path :: Raised in a dysfunctional family and torn between unreconciled parents, Charles Lindbergh seemed to take limited emotional coping strategies into adulthood but countless other practical skills that would serve him well for the immediate task in hand. When the $20,000 prize was offered for the first flight from New York to Paris it was inevitable it would eventually be chocks away for Spirit of St Louis and this self-reliant, obsessive and reserved young man.
The competition was fierce, aviation still very much in its infancy, fraught with danger and with an embryonic misunderstanding of the technical know-how required to get a heavy lump of machinery airborne.
The French airmen Nungesser and Coli, immortalised on a commemorative stamp (yes, one in my old stamp album)  had died in their attempt to fly from Paris to New York in early May 1927 and unsurprisingly Lindbergh's main US competition for the prize failed to make it off the runway, thanks in no small part to the fitted kitchen and luxury sofas installed on the aircraft to make the Atlantic crossing that little bit more bearable.
Lindbergh, in contrast,

'changed the competition from a tawdry contest over money and personal pride into something nobler'

shaving every extra ounce of weight from his plane and its contents,even trimming the edges off his charts and probably taking laxatives the night before the flight.
Sorry I made that bit up, but it seems likely given that he sat perched in his flying fuel tank halfway across the Atlantic (and you're right he couldn't see out of the front) anguishing  over the weight of a lump of mud that had become attached to the fuselage during take off.
The account of the build up to the departure and then the flight itself is surprisingly moving and had me reading late into the night, spell-binding Boy's Own stuff that gripped the entire world at a time when the only heroes available were those forged in the crucible of battle. Charles Lindbergh emerged in that deeply scarred post-Great War period when the futility of the Jazz Age was at its height and the search for something more meaningful was becoming increasingly urgent, the world needed a new kind of peace-time hero and Charles Lindbergh was to be the one.
Mobbed by a crowd of 100,000 when he arrived at Le Bourget airport in Paris on the night of May 21st 1927, after his mammoth 33hrs 30mins 29.8secs flight, and with bits of Spirit of St Louis pulled off for souvenirs (wonder where those are now) things were apparently even worse when Lindbergh headed to the UK a few days later to be met with even more adulation. Croydon Airport had never seen the like before or since apparently.
Arriving in Paris Lindbergh was famously offered a chair to sit on which he politely declined having been doing little else for almost a day and a half.
What followed was the birth of celebrity almost as we know it. Plagued by the press, every move, every word followed and analysed and the denouement entirely predictable for a young man (Lindbergh just 25yrs old) whose single-mindedness had suited him admirably for feats of endurance but left him inflexible and ill-equipped to cope with the immediate demands of fame and adulation, and when it came to marriage and children... oh dear.
So there you have it, and I've barely scraped the surface of the book with this account but am now a burgeoning expert on all things aeronautical and Lindberghian and what an astonishing reading experience this has been, and I have also spent some pleasurable time reading this Lindbergh website, and this page in particular for fascinating Lindbergh encounters.
I am now very intrigued by the seemingly acquiescent figure (in Thomas Kessner's account) of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and have snapped up the five volumes of her diaries and letters (thank you for the recommend in comments last week) as well as some of her other writing (said to be sentimental but I'm keen to read) and a biography to find out more.
Meanwhile, as aeronautical mania raged across the US, Charles Lindbergh devoted much time and energy to promoting the cause, flying Spirit of St Louis around every state and eating sixty nine formal dinners along the way; the hero-worship grew to immense proportions and one can only be worried for the babies given the strange names as a result.
I wonder how little Aerogene fared in her later life.

Katherine Mansfield and a prize draw

I am making slow, steady progress through Volume 5 of Katherine Mansfield's letters and when I've finished I will start again where I should have done, with Volume 1. I now have a complete set and they have captured my imagination wholesale but I just can't desert Katherine in Volume 5 now.
It is 1922, the final year of Katherine's life, she has left Montana in Switzerland for Paris where she is in the midst of some very whacky (what NHS Blog Doctor would call Wibble) treatment under the auspices of Ivan Manoukhin. By all accounts something of a charlatan with a pretty poor bedside manner as he administers what turn out to be useless daily doses of X rays to Katherine's spleen in an effort to halt the progress of her pulmonary tuberculosis. The sessions are called seances which perhaps adds a further element of  wibble, and they are cripplingly expensive, which doubtless confirms that it probably is wibble. Double confirmation comes in the words of Manoukhin himself

'I can promise to cure you, to make you as though you have never had this disease.'

But with our PhDs in Hindsight we know this is 1922 and as Dorothy Crawford explained so cogently, Mycobacterium tuberculosis amongst the most ancient of human pathogens, thought to have jumped from cattle to humans some 15,000 - 20,000 years ago, and it would be another thirty years before successful drug treatments emerged. Katherine clings desperately onto even the faintest promise of good health yet day by day feels worse and worse, though living in constant expectation that she will turn a corner at any moment,

' Manoukhin says in three weeks I shall have a real reaction & then be able to do even less than that for the next three weeks. Its rather like waiting to have an infant - newborn health.'

'Ten minutes after a seance I am so dead tired I feel as if I had swum across Wellington harbour.'

'This man squeezes three hundred francs a time out me...if it is all my eye at the end I shall look awfully silly and dear knows what will happen.'

John Middleton Murry has joined her in Paris and apart from daily sorties to the clinic for treatment Katherine, increasingly weakened and debilitated, spends much of her day in bed. Despite being in desperate need of money she has  little energy or inspiration for writing stories, yet whilst that muse seems to evade her Katherine still needs to write something somehow to survive, and so letters to friends become her daily oxygen and a prolific correspondence emerges.
Each letter reflects moments of joy and hope as she continues to pin her chances on this treatment and they make terribly poignant reading, but Katherine also has a brusqueness about her, and her tolerance for long-suffering friend Ida Baker, currently keeping Chalet des Sapins afloat on a shoestring budget back in Switzerland, is stretched to the limit and diminishing daily. Yet Ida is essential to Katherine, if only to mind the flea-ridden cat Wingley, she can't afford to fall out with her and so a letter of repentance often follows hot on the heels of a stinker.
But then would tolerance be even a remotely possible virtue when the effects of the wibble treatment mean that,

'After 5 doses of X rays one is hotted up inside like a furnace and one's very bones seem to be melting.'

or

' One burns with heat in one's hands & feet and bones, then suddenly you are racked with neuritis, but such neuritis that you cant lift your arm. Then ones head begins to pound. It's the moment when if I were a proper martyr I should begin to have that awful smile that martyrs in the flames put on when they begin to sizzle.'

It's all so involving. Reading letters again proving the most fascinating way to explore a life, not quite so 'served on a plate' as a biography and always interesting to apply your own interpretations and arrive at your own conclusions. Katherine Mansfield's short story The Prelude I discover was the third book produced by the Woolf's Hogarth Press, 300 copies at 3/6d each, but you don't even have to pay that much.
A copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Selected Stories (including The Prelude) to three lucky winners.
Names in comments as long as, to give me hope, you tell me you haven't written your Christmas cards yet either (fib if necessary).

Deadly Companions : How Microbes Shaped Our History by Dorothy Crawford and a prize draw.

Now where were we?
Ah yes, rats (three fleas on the average black rat) and bubonic plague so perhaps first I'd better issue a health warning.
If you happen to be one of those people ( and there is no shame in this, there are many of you) who read about a disease over breakfast, by lunchtime are convinced that you have it and by dinner you can't face food because it's obvious you won't live much longer, then this might not be the best book for you.
Even if a bout of bubonic plague is seeming most unlikely, no Xenopsylla cheopsis (rat flea) to your certain knowledge has regurgitated its stomach contents containing 25,000 bacteria into your bloodstream, and you have no excruciatingly painful buboes ready to rupture (hope you're not eating porridge) that you are aware of, really no amount of reassurance from Dorothy Crawford or I is going to help if you are that way inclined, just don't read Deadly Companions, How Microbes Shaped Our History.
Meanwhile the rest of us can just plunge headlong into this fascinating cauldron of disease and putrefaction and emerge so well-informed that you'll wonder how you've managed this long without knowing it all.
If it crawls, flies, wriggles, squirms or just plain magics itself through the air the whole disease trail is mapped out down the ages, and though I'll admit I got slightly bogged down in the early epidemiology sections( but plenty of you will eat all that up easily) I soldiered on because I knew there would be glorious treats in store and I wasn't disappointed as you can tell already.
I am now a bulging buboe of  disease information, stick a needle in me and I could give you the lot.
In those days when I worked (now seeming like many light years ago) I had within reach of my right hand something called The Spotty Book. This was a real face-saver, a sort of vade mecum to cope with the myriad phone calls I would get about florid rashes and incubation times and can you get shingles from someone with chickenpox (no) and might this be scabies(possibly) and waaaaaahhhhhh we've found head lice. I might have sounded like I was reeling it off out of my head but in fact I would be frantically rummaging for the disease in my Spotty Book for fear of muddling my Parvovirus B 19 with my Coxsackie or my Impetigo with my Erysipelas.
Dorothy Crawford moves in a much bigger world than rural Devon and chapters like Microbes Go Global, explaining as it did quite what happened when crowd disease microbes hit the Americas, made for a succession of 'did you know' moments.
Did you know for example that most microbes jumped from domestic animals to humans but the Americans were such efficient hunter-gatherers that very few animals remained to be domesticated, just the odd turkey, couple of guinea pigs, few llamas, one or two alpacas, none of which transmit too much of note.They were reasonably disease free until the Europeans arrived and shared so generously causing a 90% decrease in Native American population over the next 120 years.
That's staggering because there had been 100 million of them to start with.
The background to the history of disease transmission should by rights be quite deadly boring but not in the hands of Dorothy Crawford with this informative quote from 1547,

' The cause of these impediments or infyrmytes doth come many ways, it maye come by lyenge in the sheets or bedded there where a pocky person hath the night before lyenin, it maye come with lyenge with a pocky person, it may come by syttenge on a draught or sege where as a pocky person did lately syt, it may come by drynkynge oft with a pocky person, but specially it is taken when one pocky person doth synne in lechery the one with another.'

Don't say you haven't been warned.
Our anaesthetist friend John Snow gets a mention for tracing the 1854 London cholera outbreak to the Broad Street pump which is probably a good time to mention that a prize copy of both Deadly Companions by Dorothy H. Crawford and Blessed Days of Anaesthesia by Stephanie J.Snow up for grabs today from Oxford University Press. Names on the operating list in comments and we'll lance the boil choose the two winners once it's come to a head eventually.

Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac

George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte found Balzac's books distasteful but after my first one I'm impressed, and there's no quick way to impart all this, so if you have the time, be my guest, get the coffee on and settle down for dovegreyreader Bigs Up Balzac.
In fact I have given myself quite an extraordinary surprise by reading  Eugenie Grandet, because it was excellent, start to finish. I was expecting a bit of a plod because I had quite thought of Balzac as probably impenetrable and dense because everyone always speaks of him in hushed, reverential tones which have always implied an insurmountable degree of difficulty to me.
Pshaw or words to that effect.
I suspect Eugenie Grandet was a good launching point into Balzac. Just under 200 pages and I was quickly drawn into the realist writing and Family Grandet of Saumur, as mother and daughter Eugenie cope with the tyrannic cruelty of a miserly husband and father who, despite having the wealth of Croesus stashed in his room, purports to have not two sous to rub together,

'Financially speaking, Monsieur Grandet had the qualities of both a tiger and a boa-constrictor. He had the art of lying in wait, hidden, studying his prey for a long time, and finally jumping on it; then he would open his purse, gulp down a load of coins, and lie down again quietly to digest, like a serpent, impassive, cold, and methodical.'

Allegations abound of Balzac's insufferable and garrulous attention to detail, all likely to leave a reader feeling on the brink of asphyxiation and rising claustrophobia with no gaps and silences, nothing left to the imagination; well none of it held any quarter here because I just wallowed in this tale of life in rural France. Admittedly I felt a good deal of ambivalence towards the characters, little seemed destined to arouse my sympathies so perhaps I hadn't been encouraged to imagine much in those lives beyond the page as I drank in all the extraneous detail, but I suspect a second read would deal with that.
Kicking off my need-to-know-much-more about Honore de Balzac with the little Hesperus Brief Lives biography by David Carter was probably a good move. Bite-sized digestible chunks of Balzac's life plus handy little snippets such as the anecdote about the women scrabbling on the floor for locks of his hair when he had it cut.
With my interest now waxing obsessive I delved further and spent good money (£3) at Book Barn on an old  copy of Balzac by the superlative Stefan Zweig, whilst leaving behind a shelf full of well-thumbed and beautifully pencil-annotated Complete Works.
Let's not run before we can walk etc
Thanks to Stefan I discovered that it was all down to Balzac's attention to women in his writing that gained him such a loyal following,

'Women always have a preference for a writer who is concerned with their problems, and Balzac's predilection for his women characters whom he depicted as the unhappy, misunderstood victims of man, the allowances he made for their failings, his sympathy with abandoned, outcast or ageing females...'

Plenty of detail from Stefan Zweig about Balzac's legendary writing routine too, the white robe, the stack of special paper with a blue-ish tinge to prevent eye strain, only raven's feather quill pens would do, and the coffee, a special three-bean brew (Bourbon, Martinique and Mocha and why aren't Costa serving up a Balzac Latte?) mixed only by the man himself and an estimated 50,000 cups downed in his lifetime.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm also thinking Balzac may have invented the fashion for the obligatory long drawn-out Parisian literary death.
A jolly good Parisian death seems to outdo any other death anywhere ten times over, and Balzac notched up a fine selection of gruesome and messy ailments ,dropsy, peritonitis, blisters and gangrene for which the treatment of choice in 1850 included a hundred leeches on his stomach.
Stefan Zweig gives an incredibly moving account of Balzac's demise following his carefully stage-managed arrival for the first time at his recently completed Parisian dream home, Pavillon Beaujon. The house would be glowing with light and bursting with fresh flowers to impress the mistress who had finally become his wife (perhaps suspecting this wouldn't take long) only to be rapidly faced with a fulminating bout of death from all his complaints combined,

'Balzac died at half-past ten on the evening of August the 17th, 1850. His mother was the only person present, his wife having long since retired. His end was terribly lonely.'

David and Stefan between them certainly equipped me to face the demons and my first foray into the world of Balzac.
As always there is an informative introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, in this case written by Christopher Prendergast and in which he offers an interesting take on the definition of a classic and the value of multiple readings,

' A better way of construing the 'identity' of  the classic would be to see it as that which is porous to multiple reading, hospitable to changing interpretations, in which something can always be found which hasn't been noticed or stressed before. This can apply to the re-readings of individuals over time as well as to shifts of taste and pre-occupations across generations of readers.'

That all set me to thinking about 'my classics', those books which read so differently each time I pick them up and how I wish I'd read Balzac years ago to benefit from all those multiple readings, then I feel a mild sense of panic, does anyone else?
So many good books still to be read.
But take heart because I've managed a Parisian link with tonight's stocking filler prize draw, don't miss it whatever you do.

Shining a light on my Woolfian confusion

I'm seriously hoping others feel as I do when they first read a Virginia Woolf novel...very confused verging on completely at sea.
I seem to have no bearings, no signposts and I muddle on through feeling mildly shipwrecked, desperate for some bit of passing flotsam to cling onto.
In the back of my mind always that pressure that Virginia seems to exert invisibly...everyone else adores one, understands one, knows EXACTLY what one is doing, so sad that you fail to see it.
Over the years I've learnt not to panic because eventually I will see it.
It took five long rounds with Mrs Dalloway before I suddenly realised that I loved the book and I think it may take at least that many trips To the Lighthouse before I'm getting it.
It was actually Margaret Atwood who got me into this mess but also helpfully and reassuringly out of it again. I was browsing through her fabulous book Writing With Intent : Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005 and noticed a piece on To the Lighthouse. I didn't read it, just impulsively thought it would be good to read some Virginia and then I'd see what Peggy thought, and anyway my edition was that lovely Oxford World's Classics with the mesmerising cover painting, part of Dame Laura Knight's At the Edge of the Cliff.
I wanted to pick it up there and then.
You have to see a Dame Laura Knight picture for real to truly appreciate the depths of ultramarine that she uses for the sea in her paintings, it must be the purest essence of lapis lazuli ever to grace a paint brush and so I was perfectly in the mood for To the Lighthouse as I set off.
Rapidly bemused but little shafts of brilliance were penetrating the fog  and here's what the 19 year-old Peggy thought,

'Why go to the lighthouse at all, and why make such a fuss about going or not going?
What was the book about? Why was everyone so stuck on Mrs Ramsay, who went around in floppy old hats and fooled around in her garden, and indulged her husband with spoonfuls of tactful acquiescence...why would anyone put up with Mr Ramsay, that Tennyson-quoting tyrant, eccentric disappointed genius though he might be? '

Well quite, the young Peggy and the older me are in accord again,

'In Woolfland, things were so tenuous. They were so elusive. They were so inconclusive. They were so deeply unfathomable.'

The light is a bit intermittent here too at the moment so I have paused my reading to give time to reflect, in fact I'm almost dashed on the rocks but for the fact that Mrs Ramsay is a knitter  of 'reddish-brown hairy stockings' and we knitters must stick together. There's something significant in there I'm sure, knitting round and round, row after row, and turning to Volume III of Virginia's diaries (remember that hardback set bought for £1 each at a book sale?) I was hoping for some authorial enlightenment,

' 27th June 1925...the sea is to be heard all the way through it...'

' 20th July 1925...I think though that when I begin it I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches & roots which I do not perceive now...'

' 8th February 1926...I am rather tired, a little tired, from having thought too much about To the Lighthouse. Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely. Murry says my works won't be read in 10 years time...I am now writing as fast & as freely as I have written in the whole of my life; more so - 20 times more so - than any novel yet. I think this is proof that I was on the right path; & that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there.'

and finally,

' 21st March 1927...Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are ! Soft & pliable, & I think very deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time. This I feel about the dinner party, & the children in the boat; but not of Lily on the lawn. That I do not much like. But I like the end.'

On her second read 43 years later Margaret Atwood saw the light,

' How was it that this time, everything in the book fell so completely into place? How could I have missed it - above all the patterns, the artistry- first time through... the way time passes over everything like a cloud, and solid objects flicker and dissolve...some books just have to wait until you're ready for them.'

I should know by now that I can't read a book by Virginia Woolf in the same way that I may read any other book. This is truly reflective reading, little instalments which plant seeds of brilliant word-thought long after the page is turned, and in this case the on-off beam of the lighthouse lamp feels like a constant and perfectly regulated shaft of light alternating with darkness throughout the book and I'm starting to 'get it'.
In fact I think I'm ready to set off To the Lighthouse again now.
This may all take weeks but hopefully not 43 years.

Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World by Stephanie J. Snow

Funny how now that I no longer work in a GP's surgery all things medical and bookish, whether it be in the news or on my shelves are holding a fascinating appeal. I hope that's not my sub-conscious clinging onto a previous life for fear of letting it go, it would have to be my sub-conscious because the rest of me is fair bursting with joy and happiness at all this t----i-----m----e which stretches out each day and which like most people I have no trouble filling.
Perhaps it's just good to read something I know a little bit about, and in the case of anaesthetics it really is a very little bit, but Stephanie Snow's book, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia : How Anaesthetics Changed the World published by Oxford University Press, would be of interest and entirely readable even if you knew absolutely zilch.
However you do know that any book about the history of anaesthesia and early surgery is duty-bound, somewhere between the front cover and the end, to detail the terrible account of Fanny Burney's anaesthetic-less mastectomy and to Stephanie Snow's credit she sorts all that on the first page.
For me this was a wise move because if I know it's coming in a book I start to feel sick with apprehension.
Just need to get it over with.
So I was fine once past page three and then deeply interested to find out exactly how nitrous oxide was discovered and had no idea that we have Sir Humphrey Davy to thank for that. Early in the book and throughout it becomes clear that most gaseous investigators experimented on themselves and their close friends, so dinner at Humphrey's was always quite a laugh and there was probably a queue at the door. Davy himself 

' utterly absorbed by nitrous oxide..just seeing the bag caused Davy to desire the gas'

so I assumed a level of addiction must have been the price he paid for his discovery.
But it was the work of a Soho general practitioner John Snow (Stephanie is married to his great great great nephew) in the mid 1800s which really advanced the whole idea of painless surgical intervention and also unleashed a huge moral dilemma over the whole issue of pain and the unconscious state which all seems impossible to even entertain these days.
Pain had always been considered an essential facet of life, whether character building, spiritually improving or otherwise so there were challenges a-plenty but there is no doubt that advances were assisted by endorsements from Queen Victoria. She who famously utilised pain relief in the shape of chloroform administered by John Snow whilst she was in labour. Patrick Bronte was another early convert to anaesthesia for his cataract surgery and Charlotte even considered having her front teeth 'extracted and rearranged' if there was ether involved.
It is against this Victorian social backdrop that Stephanie Snow locates the development of anaesthetics as a bona fide medical entity. The pages turned rapidly in this book because it's all fascinating and whilst I may wince at Fanny Burney's dilemma I couldn't help but smile at John Hoare's.
Unsuccessful surgical intervention without anaesthetic in the search for a fistula in his nether regions (and I won't recount, it would make your eyes water) was borne heroically and just left John complaining lightly of 'smarting in the parts' (that is 'parts' not 'pants' but it was probably both).
Clearly pain thresholds were an issue as much then as now.
But the discovery of pain relief caused a seismic and far-reaching shift in social attitudes and created religious schisms of mammoth proportions,

'The new generation of Victorians who knew anaesthesia to be a routine blessing of modern society could no longer stomach physical suffering in any form'

The change in society's attitudes was noted by William James to be 'a strange moral transformation' and there is much to explore in the light of this new approach to pain which had never really struck me quite so forcefully before. Palliative care will follow as a natural progression, by 1868 public hanging and thereby a public infliction of pain will become unacceptable while prevention of cruelty to animals will come to the forefront of the political agenda.
Stephanie Snow steers her impeccable research through into the 20th century, pursuing the growth and establishment of anaesthetics as a regulated medical discipline and yet the research seems to sit lightly and readably on the whole and we love that here. I emerged from this engrossing book a good deal wiser and clutching an excitingly new and informed foundation with which to read around the nineteenth century.
It's also a book full of those useful 'did you know' epithets.
Did you know that Fanny Longfellow, wife of poet Henry, was the first mother to use ether in childbirth in the USA?
Anyway, now that I've really got the medical history bit between my teeth I've moved onto Deadly Companions How Microbes Shaped Our History by Dorothy Crawford, so brace for an in-depth look at bubonic plague which I know you'll enjoy over breakfast, and just wait until you hear how many fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) there are on the average black rat (Rattus rattus as opposed to Rattus norvegicus)...go on guess.

Thanksgiving

I had planned to write a post about Thanksgiving today and the search for pictures revealed an oddly similar theme to this one, people looking fondly and adoringly at turkeys. So I hope all U.S. visitors have got the feathers off them and have them roasting nicely in the oven this minute and a Happy and Peaceful Thanksgiving to you all, have a wonderful day.
Then I'm sorry but I'm going to be shallow and give thanks for a book which has arrived this week.
That might be against the rules. However it's such a covetously wonderful book, one that I have been yearning for so I'm hoping you can see it in your hearts to forgive my fickle nature. I doubt this day is about giving thanks for material possessions but a book like this is hardly so easily categorized.
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield  Volume 5 1922-1923 edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott and published by Oxford University Press.
I go a bit woozy round the edges just looking at them.
I bought Volumes I & 2 in this series at a book sale several years ago, 3 & 4 are on their way to me but meanwhile 5 has arrived.
There is of course a Janet Frame connection to Katherine Mansfield too, apart from the obvious New Zealander one. Janet's mother Lottie worked as a maid servant for Mrs Mary Beauchamp, Katherine's grandmother in New Zealand and Janet also benefited from a year-long bursary from the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship which enabled her to travel abroad for the first time.
Then there's the Elizabeth von Arnim connection to Katherine as cousins, and so there are some obvious watering holes ahead for this particular reading journey.
I've been dipping into Katherine Mansfield's short stories again with a certain amount of awe and wonder, and reading the volumes of letters is a perfect route into reading the stories almost contemporaneously as she mentions their progress in letters to friends,

' Im deadly tired tonight. I wrote & finished a story for The Sketch. The day after that happens is always a day when one feels like a leaf on the ground - one can't even flutter. At the same time there is a feeling of joy that another story is finished. I put it in such a lovely place, too, the grounds of a Convent in spring with pigeons flying up in the blue and big bees climbing in and out of the freezias below.'

The story was Taking the Veil.

'A big bee, a golden furry fellow, crept into a freesia, and the delicate flower leaned over, swung, shook; and when the bee flew away it fluttered still as though it were laughing. Happy, careless flower! '

Unsurprisingly, being terminally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis seems to have offered an extraordinary focus to Katherine Mansfield's writing. This letter to Elizabeth von Arnim, written in January 1922, in what would prove to be the final year of her life, reveals the depths of her incapacity,

' And the idea of being well - haunts me. Ever since I have realised this possibility I dream of it at night - dream I am alone - crossing streams or climbing hills or just walking. To be alone again. That is what health means to me; that is freedom. To be invisible, not to be offered chairs or given arms! '

In her quest for health Katherine Mansfield is about to embark on what will prove to be a futile and expensive year of dubious and very uncomfortable treatments. First stop from Chalet des Sapins at Montana Crans in Switzerland to Paris, where Katherine will live an invalid's life in a hotel whilst placing her faith in seances. It will all culminate in her tragic and horrific death a year later and much of it likely to be conveyed in this final volume of letters. I think I have a truly memorable reading experience ahead.
And finally, on reflection, I think there's a great deal of genuine Counting Blessings and Thanksgiving to extract from all that.

It's George and Van time

Looking for someone to blame around the blogosphere as usual, this time I point the finger at Kirsty 'Other Stories' McHugh and hold her partly responsible.
I always turn to dear old George Eliot once the autumn leaves do fall, alongside Van (Morrison) of course singing The Leaves Come Falling Down, it'll be logs in from the woodshed any day now, the Aga hasn't been off all year bar about two days when we foolishly thought summer was upon us, and so another year wends its way.It's a funny farming year in the fields around us though, no combines up and down the lane in August, harvests have been ruined, wheat grain mashing up like porridge and impossible to dry out and silaging or haylaging (I can't tell the difference) going on frantically all night should it stop raining long enough.
So I ponder the George Eliot shelves and suddenly remember Ms Other Stories tripping the literary light fantastic over a recent read of The Mill on the Floss. Well I've never read it so it seemed like a good idea.
In view of the McHugh/OUP connection I probably shouldn't in that case knock the Oxford World's Classics edition or more specifically the cover. I just don't cope at all well with that rubicund girl with the eyes swivelled right looking at heaven knows what, in fact it's quite disturbing having her watching me turn every page in the book. I'm wanting to do an orthoptist's referral because the poor child seems stuck like it, go on try it for more than twenty seconds and tell me it doesn't hurt? I think the newer edition may have a slightly less florid version of the same picture on the cover, I know it's supposed to be Maggie Tulliver looking like a shetland pony but it's the eyes, they bother me still.
I don't have The Mill on the Floss on the e-reader either ( full e-reader update tomorrow) but decided to overcome prejudices and just start reading.
Remarkable because it was late at night, so late that three pages would probably have done the trick and sent me off to sleep, but sixty-four pages later I had to force an exit or I was going to struggle to get up for work the next morning.Then of course I couldn't sleep for thinking about it all.
What an amazingly good book? How have I not read it before?
Already I'm impressed with some surprisingly astute George Eliot observations on childhood which I tend not to associate with her even given my love of Silas Marner and little Eppie, and what a lovely objection Maggie has to patchwork,
'It's foolish work,' said Maggie, with a toss of her mane, - ' tearing things to pieces to sew 'em together again.'
Then that fine way George Eliot has of stepping into the narrative to admonish her reader for making hasty assumptions which she in fact has caused us to make in the first place. Don't you just love dear old George? Thanks Other Stories!

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte

The critic who described Anne Bronte as 'the Bronte without genius' got it very wrong indeed. That's how strongly I feel because now that I've finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, my first thought is that the book is riven and shot through with great big lightning bolts of genius.
Sorry, is that a bit excessive?
I wonder if it's because I can see so many contemporary parallels with Anne Bronte's subject matter?
Or is it because, for me this has proved to be the most readable of Bronte novels?
Whatever it is I'm kicking myself for leaving this book unread for so long and will urge this on all and sundry the minute the Bronte name is mentioned with the words "which one shall I read?" and all in the same sentence.
Admittedly I've focused on my sphere of interest which didn't include the religious themes this time round and many may find these slightly overbearing, but the issues of alcoholism and gambling addiction coupled with women and children trapped in abusive and violent marriages remain of the moment and contemporary. Anne Bronte's perceptive insights stand up to close scrutiny in the light of today's dilemmas as much as they must have done in 1848 when the novel was first published.
The mysterious tenant, Helen Graham arrives with her young child Arthur at Wildfell Hall amidst much neighbourly speculation regarding her past, and local suitor Gilbert Markham makes a beeline. Helen displays an acute fear and sensitivity to his amorous advances and at this stage I really wanted to book young Gilbert in for some anger management classes. He little realises that this approach will not cut the mustard with Helen who remains remarkably uncowed by the pressures and increasingly protective of her young son.
As the narrative voice changes from that of Gilbert, remarkably delineated by Anne Bronte, to the voice of Helen via the pages of her diary, both Gilbert and reader learn exactly what has forced Helen into this seemingly extreme position.Through her trials Helen transforms from fearful and down-trodden wife of Arthur Senior to an empowered and assertive woman in her own right and a loving and caring mother who knows exactly what is right for her child, taking steps to protect him from the abuse accordingly.
Social Services would have applauded Helen, Women's Aid would have employed her as a counsellor.
You can but imagine how much this all reflects Anne Bronte's own heartfelt concerns over the plight of women in the nineteenth century.
The moments of perception are many and some of the scenes of emotional abuse are quite breathtaking in their intensity, the mental cruelty abhorrent, yet in truth it still happens to women today. The entrapment is the same, the control as stifling, the means of escape as difficult and the effects of the abuse just as profound on all who experience it whether it be 1848 or 2008.
Anne Bronte doubtless had brother Branwell in her sights as an alcohol-fuelled living breathing example of all that she attempts to expose, and her method for ensuring that Helen's young son Arthur aquires an aversion to alcohol could well do with making a successful comeback.The social pressures to drink alcohol as great then as now.
Yet Helen harbours more common sense than ill-feeling and by the same token you sense Anne Bronte did too. There are some moments of genuine pathos as Helen effectively becomes the counsellor to her estranged husband's cronies as they too attempt to escape his controlling grasp and Helen exposes the most besotted of her suitors in their true colours.Emerging with a real understanding of what makes the chaps tick and which aspects could do with a little improving, there's little doubt that Helen Graham will make a new man of the one she eventually chooses.

Dreaming spears

My ongoing bout of contagious Fadimanosis persists and now I'm  enthused yet again about the essay form since the arrival of Anne's latest book which I ordered in hardback, At Large and At Small, Confessions of a Literary Hedonist. After the joys of Ex Libris and Rereadings in recent days I couldn't possibly wait for the paperback. But I have a small complaint.
No book of essays should EVER be published without a ribbon bookmark, this little book is weeping for lack of a ribbon bookmark.
Pending Oxford and all things literary I have been writing my offering having first doused myself in the essays of Virginia Woolf, I mean you just can't go wrong can you?
Is there anything Virginia Woolf didn't write about that isn't always pertinent to the moment the minute you open the book?
It's my second impression The Moment and Other Essays with original Vanessa Bell dust-jacket (have I mentioned that before in passing?) which has been off the shelf this last few days, as well as The Common Reader, second impression also Vanessa Bell dust jacket (hope I've told you about that one too). I have all these essays in run-of-the-mill paperbacks but for value-added inspiration there is nothing like holding the real thing (almost) in your hands. The paper is worn to a shine and with that delicious this-is-a-special-old-book smell about it, no ribbon there was a war on, but I feel sure Virginia and Vanessa would be delighted to think the books are still giving such pleasure into the next century.
OK, I've got over the bookmark thing now, Anne Fadiman could well achieve such pleasurable literary longevity too (this would have been absolutely assured with a ribbon bookmark) and could just as easily write a book of prefaces and I'd read it, in fact I'll bet she makes a shopping list interesting, and she has set out the stall for the essay form, all capably decorated with pleas for the rebirth of the familiar essay, and all with perfect clarity,

'The familiar essayist didn't speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire...and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous and his laughter usually at his own expense.'

So focusing my thinking on blogs and blogging this week  it suddenly occurred to me that in many ways that definition loosely but succinctly (can you be loose and succinct? ) exemplifies the blog form. It's necessarily briefer but a blog does have the ability to convey something in a direct voice as if addressing one person only, and to be honest I never expected this one to get into double figures in a day let alone three figures and then four. I still write it as if I am speaking to one person in my mind and of course that person is you.
Virginia Woolf has the art down to its finest denominator and more than fulfills Anne Fadiman's requirements for the familiar essayist,

'Today's readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal - very personal - essays (more heart than brain) but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).'

But Virginia also has something very pertinent to say on the art of amateur criticism in relation to the author in her piece entitled "How Should One Read a Book?"

'If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.'

Seventy years on I'm not sure whether that outcome still holds good, perhaps the authors will tell us, but it has all provided me with plenty to think about and ample to offer the forthcoming Episode of the Dreaming Spears Spires.

The Oxford Literary Festival...be there or be square.

It's probably high time I let this cat out of the bag. Sandwiched neatly as I am between the two esteemed Johns and the inimitable Mark, I am really looking forward to this.

JOHN CAREY, LYNNE HATWELL, JOHN MULLAN AND MARK THWAITE
Blogging the Classics
Monday 31st March, 8.00pm Marquee, Christ Church £7.50
Whose judgements are more trustworthy when it comes to books? Do amateur bloggers online do a better job than established literary critics in the press? Hear two highly regarded literary bloggers – Mark Thwaite, founder of ReadySteadyBook.com, and Lynne Hatwell, founder of dovegreyreader.typepad.com – battle it out with two professional critics – Sunday Times chief reviewer John Carey and broadcaster and journalist John Mullan. Sponsored by Oxford World's Classics

Under the Greenwood Tree

My list of Thomas Hardy's read to date is woefully sparse and it was all holding so much promise when I picked up Thomas Hardy The Time Torn Man by Claire Tomalin last year (or was it the year before?)
The trouble was I started this in the wake of finishing England's Mistress by Kate Williams thinking I was into a biography phase and should go with the flow, only to find that Thomas didn't quite carry the allure and fascination of Emma Hamilton.Then I picked up A Pair of Blue Eyes for some good local Thomas Hardy reading and made even less progress, so project temporarily abandoned pending more auspicious alignment of the reading planets.
Nothing more auspicious than going off to hear Claire Tomalin speak at Peninsular Arts this evening after work. That's if I remember to turn left towards Plymouth and not right towards home at the roundabout, I will be wearing post-it notes saying THOMAS HARDY all day.
Under the Greenwood Tree has been a great re-entry and I now feel quietly steeped in Thomas Hardy. I have revelled in the bucolic hilarity of the disbanding of Mellstock Village Church Quire to make way for a new-fangled harmonium, and bemoaned along with everyone else that Thomas Hardy chose not to follow this plot line through. Preferring instead to place village schoolmistress Fancy Day and her romantic involvements centre stage, Hardy had me laughing like a gawkhammer to begin with, whilst I finished the book having mumbudgetedly enjoyed a good read. There's a really helpful dialect glossary at the end of the book which has added some good new words to my daily conversation, and now I know what a dumbledore really is I can tell you that we've got loads in the garden at the moment, and they don't have white beards or wear wizard hats.
Claire Tomalin makes interesting observations about Under the Greenwood Tree.

'You are charmed on condition that you accept Hardy's condescension towards his characters. His villagers are drawn sympathetically but as simpletons. He is tender towards them and gives them beautifully turned rustic dialogue, but he invites us to smile with him at their simplicity. They are comical without knowing they are.'

True indeed but nothing can detract from the joy of this book. I'm going to be adding it to my list of books to read extracts from at Christmas because it has one of the best, funniest, most atmospheric descriptions of a nineteenth century village celebration of the festival that you could ever wish to read.
It's books like this that also remind me it will soon be the day that I head off for that first spring 'traypse and wamble' along the lanes and over the way to the village of Sydenham Dameral. Here are last year's pictures of the tiniest church but one which always feels so like those described by George Eliot in Adam Bede and Thomas Hardy here.
I am also reliably informed by them as know that I absolutely must but MUST read The Mayor of Casterbridge next, so I have made a start and they are right.

The Mark on the Wall

My short story progress towards The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald has been rudely interrupted by none other than Virginia Woolf.
Just butted her way in and insisted I listened to what she had to say.
Having mentioned the short story "Kew Gardens" and found my copy of Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction I  had little choice. I re-read "Kew Gardens" and was immediately connected to the very essence of Virginia Woolf's writing and I wanted more.
The short story providing the perfect form within which Virginia Woolf could explore that literary equivalent of the painterly, colourful artistic style favoured by the women artists. In "Kew Gardens" fusing it with nature in her descriptions of the minutiae of the flowerbeds.

'The light fell either upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red,blue and yellow...'

The sentences adapted to take the natural shape of thought processes without distorting or crushing them and what results is beautifully vivid and descriptive writing.No requirement to provide an outcome or give meaning to an experience, no dependence on causality or a need for effect, quite literally nothing happens, yet everything happens. Characters brought to life by detail not by incident and formidably brave writing for a woman in the face of the male-dominated world of traditional storytelling. Resisting and rewriting the rules.
Through an intensity of focused thought, Virginia Woolf continues to open new doors to new territory for this reader that may just never have been traversed before. I don't think I'd ever considered a piece of furniture in quite such a detailed way until I read "The Mark on the Wall", taking its source back to its origins as wood (someone needs to update and write the Ikea version)

'Wood is a pleasant thing to think about...I like to think about the tree itself, first the close dry sensation of being wood...on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long.'

Then once the tree is felled by a storm,

'Even so life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.'

This book is a little feast of such moments and in the short story you don't miss them, impossible to gloss over. "An Unwritten Novel" offers the Woolfian detailed eye on a train journey, likewise "The Shooting Party" imagines the significant events that may have led to the opening gambit of the story

'She got in and put her suitcase on the rack, and the brace of pheasants on top of it.'

A story just one page long entitled "Monday or Tuesday" and here's the first line

'Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself...'

Perfectly describes the flight of a heron, I shall never look on one again without watching him shake the space from his wings.
Virginia Woolf herself knew she had indeed hit the mother-lode with these and was mining a rich writing seam,

'I shall never forget the day I wrote "The Mark on the Wall" - all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. "The Unwritten Novel" was the great discovery, however. That - again in one second - showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it...I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway etc - How I trembled with excitement.'

This is a tiny book, barely 100 pages, easy to overlook it on the shelves as I have for years, now it's deservedly had its moment and I feel fortified yet again by my short story a day.

Judith goes to the cinema

For those of us who move in humbler circles take a look at the OUP blog here where the very lucky Judith Luna, Commissioning Editor for Oxford World's Classics recounts her experience at yesterday's London film premiere of Sweeney Todd.
If you listen as I do to Classic FM their studio is next door to the Odeon and they gave a running commentary through the day as Leicester Square was being decked out accordingly.
After talk of fountain pens and such like this week perhaps I'm in the right mood for the book? Lots of blood and gore in the film apparently, meat pies on the menu afterwards, but no news yet about whether or not Alan Rickman can sing.

Did you know George Gissing lived at...

I had found nothing to dislike about George Gissing first time round, New Grub Street about five years ago, and was suddenly moved to pick up The Nether World when I found myself stuck in the nineteenth century of late, waddling round in my bombazine gown.I'm still reading Bleak House in daily instalments and, once I reach the end of that and this one perhaps that will be my current addiction satisfied for a while or at least until it snows and I feel all nineteenth-century again.
George Gissing writes unrelenting gritty, tell-it-like-it-is fiction, it could be argued that he does for London what Emile Zola does for Paris and if I can cope with the despair of the lives he portrays I am gleaning a huge amount 200 pages into this latest read. If ever you want to read a fine readable fictional account of day to day life in nineteenth-century London look no further, you can almost see, hear and smell it on every page of The Nether World. The desperate ends that poverty-stricken people would go to for money, the struggle for survival both physical and emotional all keenly wrought.

The Oxford World's Classics cover picture declares this book with perfect accuracy and it intrigued me enough to track down the complete painting.
Behind the Bar 1882 by John Henry Henshall, and in The Museum of London.
Look at that little face proffering a bottle over the counter and the moribund looking babe in arms, probably being quietly slipped a top-up dose of Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, fondly known as 'Quietness' according to my 1879 edition of Hints to Mothers. Dr Bull issues dire warnings about the use of Syrup of Poppies, but at half-a-crown the cost of this book doubtless prohibitive to the very people who could have done with reading it, if they could read that is.
George Gissing knew and wrote about all this and much more.
By chance I discovered that George Gissing had lived for some time up the road in Exeter and, proudly claiming Exeter as my place of birth, I was suddenly interested and had to know exactly where George had kicked off his boots and plonked his feet on the grate to toast his toes through the holes in his socks...I'm making a few assumptions there.
Does this happen to anyone else?
It's going to be a nigh on useless piece of information when I find it, just an address, nothing more, but in the finding of I had such a good time scouring the online 1891 census returns and eventually find it I did.
24 Prospect Park and George Gissing (spelt Gessing to fool me) had lived there with his wife Edith and, in the house at the same time, an editor, Charles Rockett.
In the end just 500 yards as the crow flies from the Priory Road house I was born in...er sixty two years later, as long as the crow survives crossing the main Exeter to London railway line that is.The stork made it OK.
So you see, nothing gained from that whatsoever but it all somehow fulfills the need to know.
Now finally I've found the John Halperin biography Gissing, a Life in Books which had been elusively mis-shelved here under Women's Diaries.
Halperin dishes the dirt and reveals that Gissing's marriage to Edith,

'a respectable girl of humble origin...she was no beauty'

was one made in hell, the woman who was

' to bear his children, to torture him for years, to drive him almost mad, and once more to make a financial slave of him'.

Except apparently in the ten weeks after first meeting Edith, George wrote New Grub Street so something must have inspired him.
I expect all she wanted was a new kitchen or the bathroom painted or something but according to H.G.Wells

'never did a man need mothering more'

and there's a man who must have known what he was talking about.

Gissing entered a form of literary exile in Exeter by all accounts and was thinking up ways to

'keep my mind active without the help of congenial minds.'

which doesn't say a lot for life in the West Country in 1891.Now of course it's increasingly chock-full of congenial minds and wait until I tell you about the forthcoming Peninsular Arts programme any day soon; some highly respected literary figures trekking down to Plymouth to speak in the coming year.We're all very excited.
Suddenly The Nether World, New Grub Street and all the other Gissing's waiting to be read seem like a worthwhile reason to hang around in the nineteenth century just a bit longer, especially as snow is forecast any day and there is a new biography of the man being published and now I can't wait to read it,  George Gissing, A Life by Paul Delany due from Orion in February.
So I will refrain from mothballing my bombazine away in the trunk just yet because there will be renewed interest in all things Gissing for sure and we can all say, yes we've always liked him, did you know he lived at 24 Prospect Park, Exeter, Devon?
While everyone else says either 'George who?' or ' You really should get out more.'

Washington Square

Having announced I'm firmly back in with Henry James on the principle that why should a few extra words per sentence scare me off, I was relieved to find that I did get to the end of Washington Square with the book unscathed. I hadn't thrown it across the room in despair, in fact I couldn't wait to pick it up each time I had a spare reading moment, but I did shout at it once or twice.
Published in 1880 and considered a short, witty masterpiece by many but possibly disliked by Henry James himself. According to Mark Le Fanu's introduction to the Oxford edition, when Henry James attempted to reread Washington Square he failed miserably and considered it poor.
How on earth did that happen? He clearly needs a blogger's assistance.
Set in New York society Catherine, motherless but most certainly not fatherless, struggles against the insidious emotional tyranny of the two men in her life, her father Doctor Sloper and her first and only suitor, Morris Townsend. Morris seeks her hand in marriage rather suspiciously after a couple of meetings and a glimpse of the £20,000 fortune.
You and I would have known better than to court any nonsense from a man who suggests,

"that books are tiresome things; only...you had to read a good many before you found it out"

From the off, every time Morris appeared I was shouting 'don't listen to him' and whenever the strangely cruel doctor entered stage left, I'd happily have beckoned a carriage and instructed it to run him over. So the male role models in Catherine's life hardly life-affirming and you can almost predict the future you want her to choose for herself, sad though it will ultimately be.
Catherine's self esteem negligible after a lifetime's exposure to insult and humiliation at the hands of her father, a man described by others as 'shockingly cold-blooded', so how on earth was she supposed to make a wise decision about marriage? Yet in spite of everything I appalled myself by storing up just one tiny gram of understanding for the ghastly Dr Sloper.
As Dr Sloper constantly and arrogantly reminds everyone, because he's a doctor he's a fine judge of character and in many ways you have to admit that he has judged Morris with great accuracy.Even so the denouement remains heartbreaking and you somehow know that, given a better range of emotional tools to work with, he could have achieved his outcomes differently if he had truly loved his daughter.
Does he have his daughter's happiness at heart or is he just being sadistic as he seeks to prevent the marriage?
He must have had a heart because, **spoiler**, in the end it does stop beating, but heaven alone knows where it was.
So many useful insights provided by Mark Le Fanu that have added something extra to the book for me.
Henry James careful use of crying in his female characters for one.
I had never thought about it quite so carefully but indeed there is a skill in knowing when to make a woman cry in the narrative, because lets face it, we hardly know ourselves when it might happen.It takes a good deal of insight to get it right and the unbearable moment in the doctor's study when Catherine pleads for her suitor's cause has the tears timed to perfection.
Mark Le Fanu tactfully refers to Henry James's

'total richness of detail that deepens the portrayal of individual character...strictly in excess of the necessary ...and yet not in excess at all, because it is through such detail that the characters are embodied as living'

and I'm with him on that. I emerged the other side of Washington Square fully satisfied that I had just read a very good book indeed.
Now Henry come along, if I can read it so can you.You have another go.

OUP, a tree and some books for free.

Do you ever wonder where a book starts its life?
Well no, I don't often either.
So it's quite surreal when you receive books from a publisher and you imagine them to be coming from a flat-roofed building down a side street somewhere, to then pitch up for lunch at their HQ and find it's a bit like a stately home.
I'm sure anyone who lives in or near Oxford knows the Oxford University Press building well, but I didn't. Expecting sandwiches at a prefab unit on an industrial estate was quite erroneous, what on earth was I thinking? This is Oxford and so it was most pleasurable to be nicely surprised by the grandeur of the building and the private dining rooms at the OUP.
It was excellent to finally meet Guy Pringle of newbooksmag at the same lunch along with good friends at OUP who kindly keep a steady flow of books heading this way for me to share on here. Guy bravely published the very first book review piece I ever submitted anywhere, and long before dgr scribbles was born.It was an article on one of my favourite books, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke and that acceptance gave me the courage to give it all a go.
It could be a tricky balance to maintain but as I make clear everywhere I go, the integrity of the blog is never knowingly compromised even by deliciously warm and spicy pumpkin soup and braised pheasant. It's all to no avail if the books are no good but thankfully I have loved Oxford World's Classics for years.
There are a few exciting events in the pipeline for 2008 and you will certainly all benefit as OUP have agreed to  some wonderful book giveaways here when the Oxford World Classics are re-launched in new jackets in Spring 2008.
I'm not particularly bees-knees on trees but I expect someone recognises the variety of this one from its winter outline. It resides majestically in the OUP quadrangle and is quite a breathtaking sight even without its summer clothes.I had a wander around the OUP library and museum too and also caught sight of some of the historic correspondence from their archives, letters from Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, George Bernard Shaw et al.
Oxford was freezing cold and I could have used a bonnet, but it is a vibrant and exciting city and anyone who lives in or near is very fortunate. For us it's like walking around University Challenge which Bookhound and I both grew up on, so the names of the Universities imprinted on our minds from childhood along with  Bamber Gascoigne (fondly nicknamed 'Ban-the-gas-gun' chez my family) as we wandered past.Why did Brasenose always make us giggle as children?
It was my ambition to

• be on University Challenge
• to be in the team that sat upstairs

Going to university would have improved my chances of success I suppose and I can't tell you how disappointed I was to discover the truth, there is no upstairs.
But love city-mooching as we do and initially admit that we do miss city life, after a few hours we're mad keen to get back to the West Country which we finally did at about midnight.
I did gather some early booty for you so have four copies of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne to give away.It's the South West Reading Adventure Special Edition, with the lovely Wallace and Grommet cover, so if anyone would like one please e mail your address to me here and we will get them in the post to you once the Christmas dust settles...or possibly before if you're quick.

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot by Janis McLarren Caldwell took some concentration and much marginalia but it's paid dividends, because I don't have a thesis up my sleeve and so I have been able to dive into it  purely for pleasure.
'The similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth century doctors and imaginative writers...the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine'.
I haven't quite knitted all my thinking together yet but I think I've grasped, very simplistically, that we're talking about the way that writers mixed the natural and the super-natural and doctors had started taking a medical history that relied both on the patient's narrative, their own detailed story of their illness, and the actual physical signs evident on examination.
In hospital it used to be quaintly called clerking, but probably has a big long fancy name now. Patient Information Gathering Specification or something, PIGS for short, would be much more NHS 2007.I tell you it's all abbreviations these days, COAD, SNAF,CAMHS and worse. I'm a great one for halting meetings to ask for a decipheration ( nb grammar police, new word) and I don't believe I'm always the only person in the room who doesn't know.
RIDDOR is my latest addition after being mandatorily trained last week.
But I didn't really need to get my head round any of that to enjoy the chapter entitled  'Wuthering Heights and domestic medicine'.In fact so much so that I dashed to the shelf and opened my copy forthwith at very great speed.
There have been countless readings of  a novel like this and Janis (sorry I don't do the academic surname thing) flags up quite a few obvious readings of Wuthering Heights that make you feel a bit daft for not noticing them before. Then there are the others you may have suffered in a past life, feminist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, deconstructionalisticism  the mystical romance.There's some good down to earth stuff from Arnold Kettle as you'd expect from Open University old school,

'The story of Wuthering Heights is concerned not with love in the abstract but with the passions of living people, with property ownerships, the attraction of social comforts, the arrangement of marriages, the importance of education, the validity of religion, the rich and the poor.
There is nothing vague about this novel; the mists in it are the mists of the Yorkshire Moors.'

You can almost hear Arnold saying 'we'll be having none of that modern rubbish talked here'
But Janis advances something very interesting. A reading focused on the cult of the child, the idea of prolonged childhood,the characters who

'grow physically larger, they marry, but they remain emotionally pre-adolescent, unwise, demanding and unswervingly loyal.'

Then some more elaboration,

'Reading Wuthering Heights as a novel fundamentally about childhood does explain many of the so-called mysteries...Bronte signals through incessant references to childhood and childishness and that, in this enclosed little corner of Yorkshire, nearly all the players remain children'

So a sort of paediatric reading, well I should be able to do that.
There are some excellent references to Stevie Davies' invaluable thinking on Wuthering Heights as the novel whose 'power lies in its ability to awaken the reader's own experience of childhood' and suddenly I'm fired with enthusiasm and now quite desperate to read the book again in a new light after all these years.
Of course others may think, huh, forget it, it's a gurt great big tragic read and leave it at that, but if we're talking getting your moneysworth out of a well-known novel yet again, then for me this all adds a bit of spice, excitement and interest to a book I thought I knew quite well.
More on my paediatric reading of Wuthering Heights soon.
Other chapters in Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain on Frankenstein, Thomas Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin and of course no book combining the words nineteenth-century-literature-medicine in its title could possibly dare to leave out Middlemarch.
This chapter, 'Middlemarch and the medical case report' deserves a post of its own because there are some brilliant observations on the need for a more dynamic model for doctor/patient relationships, you'd like to see that chapter, and a study of Middlemarch, on the training syllabus for all would-be doctors.It covers just about every base.
More on that soon too.
The only tragedy here is the prohibitive price of this book, at £45 I assume you're paying for the scholarly research but it should be available from a library somewhere near you and well worth the 90p reservation fee.

Henry James

I'm mining a rich seam of higher brow reading right now which shows no sign of abating and I'm enjoying it while it lasts so make no apology.
Suddenly contemporary fiction won't do.It happens.
Who decides by the way which brow each book comes under ? It's the old literary canon chestnut.
I've been brow-sing one of those old 1970's Thames & Hudson 'Writers and Their World' series on Henry James, full of pictures and interesting anecdotes as well as a biography and I read that he met George Eliot and wrote home.

' she is magnificently ugly - deliciously hideous..a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouthful of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en finissent pas...'

I'm right off the man now and starting to feel less sympathy for Henry's debilitating bouts of constipation (and will hold back on telling him about the prunes,) so it was a good thing he quickly redeemed himself in the next sentence,

'No in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes, behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking'

Henry James gets quite a bad press around, for want of a better description, the ordinary reader.
Wordy in the extreme, convuluted and long-winded. Why use ten words when a hundred will do.So much so that one Endsleigh Salon stalwart you may recall begged us not to include him in our classics reading project.
So it was with some trepidation that I embarked on Washington Square.I'm not sure why I was trepidated (nb grammar police, new word usage) because I'd read The Portrait of a Lady and loved every word.
Anyway Susan Hill had bigged up Washington Square, given it good press as a readable Henry but I bet I wasn't the only one to order a copy, find I already had one on the shelf, send off the duplicate to a friend and then leave mine sitting unread until now.
Embarking on a Henry James is indeed like setting full sail into the teeth of a force eight gale of words.I'd be gasping for breath after the first pages of great long sentences, pulling on my life-jacket to avoid drowning in the prose style and thinking, what was all that about. Then suddenly that Henry James thing happened and I started to sail along quite calmly, in fact with the wind now behind my sails I proceeded to fair clip along at a fine rate of knots.
I'll stop the sailing thing now because, in case it doesn't show, I've not the first clue about it.
Previous Henry James experience beginning with The Turn of the Screw, ending with The Portrait of a Lady and with nothing inbetween, so I'm quite pleased with myself over finishing Washington Square and I'm really going to try more.Honestly I really am because once I forget that Henry is supposed to be wordy and convuluted I'm into the swing of the reading and I quickly warm to his perfectly formed characterisations, his eye for the finer nuances of the social scene and his delicious use of irony.
The man is wicked and before you know it I'm hooked.
More on Washington Square soon and yes Henry, I like the cut of your jib, so should I risk The Wings of the Dove or is it more likely to be an albatross?

National Cranford Day

I think the BBC could have done away with trailers for this series because I'm aware I've hardly shut up about it but I make no apology.
A series like this which take us nicely up to Christmas feels like a variation on a weekly Advent calender.By the end of Episode One I'll suffer a brief pang of regret, yet again, that I didn't make the Christmas cake in October and by Episode Three I'll know I really should have thought about our Christmas cards.
By Episode Four I'll be wondering whether anyone would notice if we didn't send any and by Five the decision will have been made. As evidence, I submit the year I wrote great long epistles to all foreign friends, had the cards ready to post long before last posting date and then found them gathering dust in the glove box of the car in February.
We'll also have decided which bit of the house gets the most decorations, this year I'm voting for the kitchen to get the bling.I'm up for the Christmas bough in the corner which I haven't done at least since last year, more of that soon if I win the vote.
In preparation Cranford proved to be pure reading manna from heaven and one of the loveliest of books I've read in ages.
Loveliest doesn't really do my delight at the read any justice at all, but if you are planning to watch the up-coming series then it's really worth indulging in this little ounce of perfection beforehand, you've got a few hours left.
My recollections of forty years ago a little hazy so it was like a new read and one that I indulged with an eye on the cast and the roles they will play and, not being much of a film-going person, this was quite a treat for me. Suddenly I picked up all the little nuances and character traits so exquisitely placed by Elizabeth Gaskell and found myself marking up in my mind what I hope to see in the production.
Cranford is in places an almost laugh-out-loud funny book and in complete contrast to the melodrama of both Ruth and Mary Barton which rest half read on the shelf here. They both felt much to overwrought for comfort reading over last Christmas and in the end I gave up.That said the content of both books is still in my mind and I know I could pick up and carry on where I left off with ease and will do soon.
As I turned over the final page of Cranford my eyes settled on an unread copy of Sylvia's Lovers and I almost, nearly but not quite, opened it to make an immediate start, so full of the joys of Elizabeth was I. That's my trouble, off I go on a gorge and feast on everything there is, then I dilute down that original brilliant read and get hyper-gaskellitis or hyper-eliotitis or worse.
I needed to let the Cranford experience stand alone because it was truly a very special read and one to be cherished.
So with a gargantuan dose of willpower I stopped myself.
All that aside I can't wait for the moment when Matty Jenkins explains her method for dealing with her fear
of being

"caught by her last leg, just as she was getting into bed, by someone concealed under it."

Over to you Dame Judi and the BBC.