The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 16: Lesley Hall

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, 2025

by Lesley Hall

 

 

During the past year I spent a fair amount of time immersed in two older lengthy romans fleuve. I signed up to an online reading group re-reading and discussing Anthony Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) which is very English of a certain class and generation. Of my own accord I embarked (actually, I see I read the first volume back in 2024, but it was this year that the sequence really got its hooks into me) on the very different Lanny Budd series by left-wing US novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair had not really been on my horizon before, although I had some apprehension that his earlier works had had significant social impact and gained him a reputation as an important muckraker. This series consists of eleven long volumes (published 1940-1953), covering a period from before the First World War to the Cold War era.

The novels are a vast panoramic mixture of very assorted elements with a global perspective on the political currents of the time: the significance of the rise of fascism to the trajectory of the narrative struck considerable contemporary resonances. Lanny Budd is American but born and brought up in France within a cosmopolitan and artistic milieu: he is introduced doing Dalcroze exercises in company with his English and German friends (who go on to play significant continuing roles). 

While a good deal of his adventures are straight-up thriller material, there are also observations of the differing social mores of the places he visits and the very diverse groups he mingles with, the social and technological changes going on, and a whole lot else, including the importance of art and music, his experiments with psychic phenomena, his “New Thought” guru stepfather, the new modern theories of child-rearing. I was also struck by the extent to which Lanny was by no means a two-fisted macho hero, but a mild-mannered art expert with useful family and social connections (excellent cover for his exploits), and his behavior toward women is exemplarily gentlemanly. Plus, there is a wide range of vivid women characters, if perhaps the occasional touch of “man of his day” authorial gender essentialism. One might cavil just a little at the way in which Lanny manages to find himself at the hot spots of history and in the presence of major players – some of these are plausible, given his convictions and missions, but others seem a bit too coincidental. But, really, the whole story just keeps moving along and took me with it, leaving me at the end of the final volume quite worrying that Lanny and his wife Laurel being strongly anti-Communist democratic socialists and anti-Stalinist activists was not going to save them, a short while down the line, from the adverse attentions of McCarthyism.

Of more recent works read in the past year, the ones that impressed me particularly (a very miscellaneous range!): 

Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (2025): brilliant and intense account by an Anglican priest and long-time humanitarian activist about the homeless community outside her church in Toronto.

Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives (2025): I am always up for reading Lucy Mangan writing about books and reading.

Susan Sontag, On Women (collected 2023 but mostly written in 1970s).

Two romances that had what I like in romances, which is a good deal of hinterland in both the character’s own lives and in the world around them: Cat Sebastian, After Hours at Dooryard Books (2025) set in 1968 in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village and not the image of the liberated late ‘60s people envision, partly because the main characters are gay men at a time of continuing prejudice but also because that time was actually pretty dark. (I saw someone somewhere suggesting this was actually a historical novel incorporating a romance plot. Fair.) It also avoided what I find an annoying twist common in romance. Zen Cho, Behind Frenemy Lines (2025): contemporary-set romance, that had elements that made me wonder is Zen Cho going to add political thrillers to the several genres she has written in for the next act??

Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward #2) (2025): I mentioned her previous A Case of Mice and Murder as among my pleasures last year. This met the high bar already set and I am already in eager anticipation of the next volume in this series.

 

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 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.