The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 20: Lesley Hall

 

 

Pleasures of Reading, 2024

by Lesley Hall

 

 

 

I did a re-read of Middlemarch very early in the year, as part of a group reading project, and that set the bar rather high. Not sure how many times that makes it since the first I time I read it aged 16-going-on-17. It still offers more, new lights, and fresh insights. And in the noise and fume and fret of the modern world, that conclusion still resonates:

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

However, there were other reading pleasures during the year if not quite on the same elevated pinnacle, but we cannot always live in that atmosphere.

A very different writer I discovered – in fact one currently in a general process of rediscovery – was Eve Babitz, whose work leant heavily on her own experiences, even if fictionalized, as an artist and writer hanging out with rock musicians in California in those days when it was all happening there. I read Sex and Rage and L. A. Woman as well as the biography by Lili Anolik, Hollywood’s Eve, and look forward to reading more. I wonder if there is a certain nostalgia involved, not so much for my actual own youth, but the sort of things I was reading in the 1970s and 80s about lifestyles and places very different from the way and places in which I was living myself.

A similar trip down memory lane was Lee Tulloch’s Fabulous Nobodies (1989), which I put in somewhat the same category except it is about clubbing in the East Village in New York when that was a happening scene. I must have read it around the time it came out, and it stuck in my mind, though I never heard it mentioned by anyone else at all until somebody namechecked it recently in a ‘Books in My Life’ article. So I got hold of a copy and re-read it and it was still really, really enjoyable even if it is one of those books that it is really hard to describe exactly why that is so and even what it resembles.

Another trip down the corridors of remembrance of reading past, and the recovery of writers apparently lost was the very welcome reissue of the idiosyncratic novels of Rosemary Tonks.

There was a small cluster of books published this year which, though quite different in themselves, all had resonating elements about the power of narrative. One of them, The Watermark by Sam Mills, I was alerted to by a rather snotty review – sometimes an adverse review can be a better pointer than a kind one in directing the reader to something to their taste, at least I have found it so. I can see that it’s the sort of conceit that might not work – the two main characters find themselves plunged into having to navigate the action of a series of very different novels – but Mills entirely pulls it off.

Sally Smith’s A Case of Mice and Murder is predominantly a brilliant historical murder mystery, set in the legal precincts of the Inner Temple, London, in 1901, as the Victorian era has just turned Edwardian. However, an important subplot deals with the disputed authorship of the sensationally best-selling children’s book Millie the Temple Church Mouse and this apparently twee tale turns out to have deeper resonance.

Furrowed Middlebrow, an imprint of Dean Street Press, has been doing sterling service bringing back into print works by ‘middlebrow’ women writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. Their latest, Eleanor Farjeon’s Miss Granby’s Secret, or the Bastard of Pinsk (first published in 1941), is an absolute delight. The prolific author of many successful melodramatic romances, Adelaide Granby, has died: her niece discovers in her papers the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, the eponymous Bastard of Pinsk, as well as her contemporaneous diaries. The various strands – the novel, and the events in Addie’s life it reflected, accounts by various other characters whose evidence is sought, the ‘modern’ niece rather aghast at the Victorian limitations on her aunt’s knowledge and her youthful misapprehensions – are all woven together to make a very satisfying and entertaining read.

So, while I felt sometimes during the year I was in a bit of a reading slump, looking back, there were some considerable high spots.

 

 

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. Her recent 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.

 

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.

 

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 29: Lesley A. Hall

 

Pleasures of Reading, etc 2022

by Lesley A Hall

 

The motif of this year, looking back, would appear to have been ‘rediscovery,’ as I returned to certain authors for the first time in, well, several decades.

I went, the word is perhaps not whooshing, but in a more dedicated and engrossed fashion than I had anticipated when starting on the project, through the volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence, 1915-1935, incomplete last ‘chapter’ published in the collected edition, 1967. I had initially read these in the Virago editions when these were issued in the late 1970s, and always intended to return to them – someday.

 

The day finally came early this year, and I was mesmerized by the combination of Richardson’s pioneering use of ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative combined with the vivid social history insights into a particular marginal way of life at the turn of the twentieth century. Life in a boarding house – the failed attempt at co-residence with another woman – her working life in a dental practice – the various lives that impinge on hers – Plus (to another Londoner) the unexpected poetry of unlikely corners of that city.

 

It was even longer since I had read most of the novels of Jane Austen – early 70s, I think – except for Mansfield Park for an online reading group sometime during the 1990s and Lady Susan, probably because of the movie (oddly and confusingly re-entitled Love and Friendship). But seeing the adverse comments about the recent movie version of Persuasion, I picked that up, and fell down the Austen rabbit-hole.

I fancy that I appreciated these works more now, though perhaps it is because I found myself reading them with more cynicism, and a recognition that they are not pretty charming fluffy romances, in fact I am not sure how the acerbic Ms Jane gets that reputation. I was murmuring to myself, ‘The horror!’ of those societies of ‘3 or 4  families in a country village’ (or kinship network in a country house) from whom one could not get away. Who might be uncongenial (if not thoroughly toxic), even when they were not constantly talking about some topic one found exquisitely personally sensitive, asking tactless questions, or going on about themselves with Too Much Information. No wonder an incoming stranger was viewed with excitement. The awful men. Even the eligible ones are the best of a bad bunch rather than dreamboats.

 

Austen is considered a precursor figure in the romance genre (!!!) – after this re-read I feel that she is an unappreciated ancestor to quietly menacing domestic horror, not to mention, murder mysteries set with some enclosed community….

(On ‘subtle delineation of tensions within community in which people cannot really get away from one another,’ has anyone done Jane Austen In Space – A Spaceship Crew of Sufficient Size would be the very thing to work with, would it not?)

And all that before the constant presence of the precariousness of women’s lives as they cling on to respectable genteel status.

 

I also read (slightly before this) Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) in which the same precariousness manifests in the single ladies of Cranford, although they have managed to come to some accommodation with their condition through ‘elegant economy’. But how delicate the balance was even with all that careful negotiation appears when Miss Matty finds that the bank her money is in has failed.

All these things were, nevertheless, an absolute delight to read.

Another unexpected pleasure, in the realm of ‘it’s an ill wind’, has been the rise of online lectures and seminars in fields of my academic interests. While these still tend to be beset with technical issues and problems with sound quality, it helps me to feel I’m not entirely out of the loop.

 

 

Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone, Kent, and now lives in north London. She recently retired from a career as an archivist of over 40 years. 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.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, part 27: Lesley A. Hall

 

 

Pleasures of Reading, etc 2021

by Lesley A Hall

Another year when there were many things I would have liked to read, but did not find myself in the right mood for, alas.

Much of my reading was retrospective. I was delighted to see that Kennedy and Boyd are republishing Naomi Mitchison’s long unavailable wonderful work of Arthuriana, To the Chapel Perilous (1955). This led me to dig out my copy of the 1999 Green Knight paperback and re-read it: such a wonderful layered work about narrative, and the very varied strands that got woven into the Arthurian mythos, and who tells and controls the story. I was hopeful that by this time of year I would be able to announce the publication of an edited volume of essays on Mitchison from Edinburgh University Press, who is at last receiving some of the attention which is her due, but this is, like so many other projects, subject to the delays of the present circumstances.

 

Given my interest in early-to-mid-twentieth century British women’s fiction, I have been particularly grateful for the endeavors of the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Press. My own particular gratitude was for the publication of previously very hard to obtain early works by Margery Sharp, a writer who, like so many of her contemporaries, had a surprising sly subversiveness. I am also pleased to see that they are putting into circulation some of the under-appreciated non-Cold Comfort Farm novels of Stella Gibbons (which I aforetimes spent a good deal of time and effort acquiring secondhand). The Bello imprint of Pan Macmillan, while not exclusively focusing on neglected women writers, has very welcomely brought back into print, at least digitally, the early works of Noel Streatfeild, before she became a prolific writer for children, which were formerly pretty much impossible to get hold of.

 

The recuperation of women’s literary traditions by the rise of feminist publishers in the 1970s is beginning to be documented: the most notable and enduring, Virago, has been receiving particular attention – Catherine Riley, The Virago Story: Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon (2018), D-M Withers, Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing (2021) and Lennie Goodings, A Bite of the Apple: Behind the Scenes at Virago Press (2020). While of interest, these somehow felt liked materials toward the full story yet to be told. There was also very much the sense of an unexplored wider ecology of feminist publishing and bookselling still awaiting historians. (I was going to mention Persephone’s handsome reprint of Amber Reeves’ 1914 A Lady and Her Husband as one of a number of women newly affronting their destinies in mid or late life narratives that I enjoyed this year, but checking up, discover I read it late in 2020.) 

 

I was also excited to encounter a couple of studies of women writers of the early 1960s who were part of the background of my coming of age: Celia Brayfield, Rebel Writers: Seven Women Who Changed Their World (2019) and Anne Wellman, Angry Young Women: six writers of the sixties (2020). There was a good deal of overlap between the two, and some writers omitted whom I might have included. Though I may be influenced there by having twice in the course of the year been a ‘living archive’ giving oral history interviews and alluding to the impression made on me by certain works read in adolescence/young womanhood, which had very much impressed upon me the importance of reliable and readily available contraception.

In other reading, in a year in which hopes and plans for archival research were once again largely thwarted, I indulged myself by taking out an annual subscription to the British Newspaper Archive, rather than just ante-ing up on such occasions as I had specific need to look something up. This has been an entire boon and I have gone swirling down several research rabbit-holes, which I hope will result, if not in polished scholarly articles, at least in an occasional entertaining blog-post or two.

 

 

Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone, Kent, and now lives in north London. She recently retired from a career as an archivist of over 40 years. 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.