The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt. 27: Lesley Hall

 

The Pleasures of Reading in 2023

by Lesley A Hall

 

 

 

In 2023 I found myself returning to fiction written in the 1920s by what might be considered ‘middlebrow’ British women writers, for a chapter I’d been asked rather out of the blue to contribute to a volume on the literature of that decade. British middlebrow women writers of the interwar period have long been a side-interest of mine, and I was slanting my approach by way of my historian’s interest in the social upheavals in women’s lives in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and the partial grant of suffrage.

So, it was, hello again, E. M. Delafield, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, E. Arnot Robertson, Winifred Holtby, Margaret Kennedy, G. B. Stern, Sarah Salt, Dorothy L. Sayers, Storm Jameson, ‘Marie Carmichael’ (Marie Stopes), for depictions of The Way Things Are (title of Delafield’s funny and sad 1927 novel), and Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Jaeger, and Charlotte Haldane for frankly rather depressing visions of potential futures. Even Vera Brittain’s fairly upbeat Halcyon, or the future of monogamy snuck in some dark period eugenicist notes.

 

This was, overall (in some cases their best work didn’t really come until the 30s), fun. Finding common themes and complaints and predicaments and things like people name-checking Freud to show how modern they were without, you know, really talking much about Freudianism?

Also, I made one exciting discovery of a writer I’d never previously come across, even if I am now very frustrated that the complete corpus of her work is at present practically unobtainable in its entirety. I was brought up short while reading Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, when Wimsey scans Ann Dorland's bookshelves: "Dorothy Richardson—Virginia Woolf—E. B. C. Jones—May Sinclair—Katherine Mansfield—the modern female writers are well represented, aren’t they?" E. B. C. Jones??? Emily Beatrix Coursolles ("Topsy") Jones (1893-1966) was a critically respected novelist and reviewer of the interwar period, on the fringes of ‘Bloomsbury’, of sufficient renown to merit an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her novels Quiet Interior (1920), The Singing Captives (1922), and The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), have been digitized and are available online, but there are three more that remain elusive.

Apart from that, reading pleasures this year included that gratifying sensation of finally completing series where the final volume had been a long while coming.

During the 1990s I read the first four volumes of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, taking an English upper-middle-class family and their various connections from just before the outbreak of the Second World War to just after, more or less as they came out. It’s by no means cozy, though without being totally grim. A fifth and final volume came out in 2013 and I must have missed it, but my attention was drawn to the sequence again this year and I acquired the whole lot as ebooks and read the whole thing straight through. 

 

Roz Kaveney’s brilliant, sweeping, Rhapsody of Blood fantasy sequence began in 2012 as a planned tetralogy with Rituals. When Realities (a fourth volume) came out in 2018 and ended on a rather indeterminate note, it was rather worrying, but word was that a final fifth volume was in the pipeline, and this year Revelations brought the sequence to what can, in the conventional clichéd phrase, be designated a triumphant conclusion. This is a useful overview for the series.

 

I’m not sure if this counts as series over, or just, series picked up again: two of Barbara Wilson’s mysteries featuring lesbian translator Cassandra Reilly were published in the UK by Virago during the 1990s, but they don’t seem to have picked up the volume of short stories or the third novel that appeared in 2000, so I had missed those already. I’m a little surprised that I didn’t come across imported US editions in Silver Moon feminist bookshop (I don’t think I’d have anticipated finding them in the more mainstream imported crime bookshops!), but poking about to see if Silver Moon was  even still around by that time, I find that there is a memoir/history forthcoming – exciting! And then two more novels were added to Cassandra’s adventures in 2022 and 2023, and all of these were available as ebooks, and so I indulged in a binge. 

 

 

Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone, Kent, and now lives in north London. She has retired from a career as an archivist of over 40 years, though she's still active in her field of specialization. essay "Send in the Clones?: Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood," was published in Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time Edited by James Purdon, Edinburgh University Press https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-naomi-mitchison.html. She has published several books and numerous articles on issues of gender and sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, and is currently researching British interwar progressive movements and individuals. She has also published a volume in the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces series, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of her Life and Work (2007). She has been reading science fiction and fantasy since childhood and cannot remember a time when she was not a feminist. Her reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons, Vector, and Foundation, and she has been a judge for the Tiptree and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. She has had short stories published in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1996) and The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women (1995) and, most recently, is the author of the series The Comfortable Courtesan: being memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart and Clorinda Cathcart's Circle: https://www.clorinda.org. Visit Lesley's website.