“All of the romance, none of the bullshit”

Came across this blog recently via Twitter. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Good stuff.

Happy endings occasionally dance right over the reality line into Happy Ever After On the Back of a Sparkly Pony Who Farts Rainbows and Craps Precious Moments Figurines.

The ending to this book was utterly, completely, and unrealistically laden with nuclear family dynamics. Didja know that if you have a really surly adolescent with terrible emotional wounds and a deep and painful history of neglect and abuse, it can all be made well with bath oil and your current guardian hooking up with – in appropriate fashion – the town doctor? Got Surly Teenz? You can haz nuclear family! WIN!

107 things that people on the internet have learnt in the last year

I was aiming for a hundred, but overshot.

alot
to direct
so much
to speak and write Vietnamese
to Salsa, Bollywood and Pole dance
a great deal more that I could have imagined
To cherish my family && friends
more than i learnt in my entire time at school
Who My True Friends Are
so much more about people and friends
the golden rule
a lot about racing and tactics
that there was a time Ballard used to drink all day as he wrote
that it’s useless to push yourself beyond limits
to understand what the job entailed
quite a bit
something big
several valuable lessons and principles from blogging
a lot
how to do side arm and under hand
to ride a bicycle
that the bee had been spreading northwards in Europe in recent years
so much
so much
that Nokia’s cooperation with China has played an important role for its growth
that home is not a physical place
about LaTeX
to march
ashtanga
more about unconditional love
a lot of things that have made me a better driver
Grammer school girls really ARE snotty
about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
to ride a bicycle
that it was cheaper to buy than to rent
the full range of French expressions relating to (gaseous) pets
off two esays for paper one
that Max became the EPICA representative in the CIS countries
to sail
so much about something that was never on my agenda
so much
how to rein in one’s creativity
to ski, snowboard and surf
so much about myself
some Japonese
that, not many people get the first person they love, but! they could get another person and could love that person more than you loved your first love!
round off flip
how to play tag rugby
a good lesson
so much
about caffine free cola
how to be Frenchie in Grease
from experience that chilli plants do much better in the warm shelter of the back patio than on the breezy lottie
so much about the way of working on a farm
the truth when I met Professor Ben Fletcher and Dr Karen Pine, two scientists researching the psychology of obesity
to fly aeroplanes
that there are as many girls who want to be Guides or Brownies as there are girls already enrolled
my husband was having an affair
that everything in life changes
Java
to DJ in Marbella
the way to properly serve a good bottle of aged red wine
a lot
what this interesting term means from an unexpected source. It’s the Victorian profession of gathering up “dog chocolate” for use in tanneries
not to chair workshops on my own birthday
little Japanese
*a heap*about sales
having a job is not necessarily a sign of sanity
to swim
that I am ‘dyslexic’
that The Tikva is not the official anthem of the State
html and a bit of CSS
my lesson
the sickening truth about Stella
the simplest and most deliciuos pizza sauce recipe – just blend up tomatoes and garlic
how to make charcoal paintings
a good lesson. It’s useless to push yourself beyond your limits
how to play sudoku
German
to skateboard
that more important than having an achievement, is the way u PRESENT that achievement
a lot
more about SUVs than I knew about it all my life
the basics of both German and Spanish
a valuable lesson, unless they believe in your work forget it
a technique using Brasso/Neverdull to blur/remove the background of magazine and newsprint images
a useless phrase in Arabic that had the owner of the riad in stitches for days
several of the things I should have learnt in 2005
loads
backflips
to identify my stress catalyst
that in my neighbourhood is a “Masonic Temple”
to ice-skate
some hard lessons
to type
drupal for a website I was building
that you can bounce back from one race to the next
how to make that stuff
front sumi’s on trampolien
not to bury myself early in the season
to always ask for a room on the top floor
true meaning of breaking fast
more about myself and which areas I need to focus on
hozv to feed a young dove
that they are migraine auras
how much I miss the rainy season
what could have taken me or others centuries to learn

I categorise that as follows:

A lot – 18
Computing – 4
Creative – 3
Emotional – 20
Factual – 18
Health – 3
Language – 7
Physical / sport / transport – 21
Practical – 2
Skill – 6
Work-related – 5

The Serendipity Shop (book #62)

Dorita Fairlie Bruce, 1947. Illus by Margaret Horder.

Girls Gone By Publishers has just reprinted this, but I found an original copy.

As usual (I think Rosemary Auchmuchty mentions this), Bruce gives her heroines unusual occupations. Merran is a jewellery designer and maker, polishing and setting semi-precious stones. There is a working-class man who seems to do some of the rougher work, but Bruce is clear that Merran could do it all herself.

The plot meanders a bit. Some things that one thinks are going to be significant, such as the toys Merran’s sister and her friend sell in the shop (proceeds to “the Cripples’ Home [which] will put it all on a proper footing”) don’t go anywhere, and the dénouement is oddly rushed and muffled, happening by letter with no commentary afterwards. The gallows-mound is underplayed.

They have eggs for breakfast “as a treat … From now on it must be porridge or puffed wheat”.

Bruce has a middle-class girl use the Scottishism “kenspeckle” (conspicuous) without glossing it.

Like Elsie J Oxenham (in Margery Meets the Roses, for instance) Bruce makes much of a cat:

William of Orange; never a man’s cat at any time, he had lately developed an active dislike to his own sex … “He can’t help it, poor darling! It’s nerves … He has never been the same cat since his long journey up from London; but we hope, with sea-air and good strengthening food, to overcome it in time. Meanwhile, he prefers to sit in my bedroom if there’s a man about downstairs … “

There is a mention of “accredited cows” which supply the schools. I’m not sure if this would have been TB-free cows as suggested in this American local paper of 1934 (PDF). They reminded me of Michael Innes’s “special cows for invalids” in Hare Sitting Up (PDF extract).

Merran states Bruce’s philosophy: “I happen to believe in something higher than luck – something far better, that doesn’t get lost or broken”. This made me think, never a wise move. I don’t believe in luck either but I suppose I believe each of us holds the roots of her own destruction, the laziness or selfishness or muddled thinking that will be with us on our deathbeds. Or the good qualities of course, but they are rare. That’s why I find seeing the M or the H depressing – their characters already show what their lives will be like and what their failures and disappointments will be.

The illustrator is Margaret Horder. I can’t scan the images tonight but will do so tomorrow. I don’t care for them myself, but am prepared to be put right. Horder was evidently well-known and respected. In the same year that this book was published two Abbey books were also published with her illustrations, and she illustrated ten books by Oxenham altogether (see this page). Looks like Horder stopped illustrating Oxenham, and presumably other British writers, when she returned to Australia in 1950. I think she’s probably the Margaret Horder mentioned on the New South Wales women’s honour roll, 2006, for establishing a children’s centre. She also seems to have written to Lydia Lopokova in 1933. And this link suggests she may have been a printmaker. A comment on this blog entry attributes the bookplate in the blogger’s copy of a Warwick Deeping novel to Horder – that seems a stretch to me, but I haven’t seen that much of Horder’s work, and the date’s right.

The pictures:

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Solicitor Sandy as an angel:

Bartle looking out of the window at the gallows-mound:

Julia at Bartle’s meeting:

There are several more at chapter ends. There are things I do like about them – the detail, mostly. The shadows of the ‘planes (remembering that this is set in the war) in the picture of the interior of the shop are a clever detail, and not something in the text as far as I remember. Just the people are so soft focus.

Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse (book #61)

Helen Wells, 1947 (this edition 1957, UK).

The Wikipedia article describes this series as mysteries, but it looks as if this is not the case with this and the earlier books – this is 8 of 27. The list in this book is incomplete, listing books 1, 2, 5, 9, 4, 17, 8 and 7 by Helen Wells and then 12, 13, 10 and 11 by Julie Tatham.

It’s interesting to compare the book with Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse (1938). Like Sue Barton, Cherry Ames is told that when she visits families she should ask them to put newspaper on the table, and then put her bag on that, to avoid contamination. The service Cherry works in is fictional whilst Sue’s is Henry Street.

Cherry doesn’t have Sue’s relative complexity and self-doubt.

I like Evelyn Stanley, the social worker: “a pleasant young woman in a gay, red sports dress”. Some sports dresses: 1940s McCall pattern, 1940s Habitmaker picture, discussion of the shortwaist dress / sports dress from the 1920s to 1940s. Evelyn says she “wakes up at night sometimes, wondering who’s all alone, only a few blocks away”. She also describes herself as a “dangerous ideas woman”. Later she identifies a “romance” between two of her clients. Helen Wells was herself a social worker before she started writing.

There were two phrases I was surprised to see so early. Firstly, “a mysterious shut-in,” meaning a recluse. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the first recorded use to 1904, however. Secondly, the sentence with which Cherry ends the book: “Now my work here is done”. This must be a quotation or near-quotation from something (the Bible?).

Need to scan images.

One Night of Scandal and The Rake’s Mistress (books #59 and #60)

Nicola Cornick, 2004, two books in one.

Lost some of my notes on these (bother Twitter), but from what I have left … Cornick’s romances are fairly well-done if you like that sort of thing. They passed the time a bit when I found them in a youth hostel, up in the night coughing.

In One Night of Scandal, Lord Richard Kestrel offers to show Deborah his collection of naval memorabilia. She declines: “I suspect that that is an invitation on a par with inspecting your art collection – or your set of etchings!” I’m not sure the etchings trope existed by then (Regency period), though there’s an earlier reference to prints in a similar context.

I got a bit over-excited about the occupation of the heroine in The Rake’s Mistress:

Rebecca “made her living as an engraver and as such she had an eye for a striking image. Lucas Kestrel had a face an engraver could lose herself in, all hard lines and angles”. When Lord Lucas won’t get out of her carriage she finds “the cold, reassuring shape of her engraving scribe. She whipped it out and levelled it at him … ‘Allow me to encourage your departure, my lord’”. Lord Lucas “recognises that she was living within her work at the moment; that it was the thing she used to blot out her grief”. It turns out, however, that she’s an engraver on glass, not a wood engraver. Boring.

Sue Barton: Neighbourhood Nurse (book #58)

Helen Dore Boylston, 1949.

Oddly, in the picture on the front Sue doesn’t have her trademark red hair.

As in “Sue Barton: Visiting Nurse,” this book is mainly about Sue’s uncertainty about whether she has done the right thing in giving up her career. “It was absurd to think of herself as wasted!” she thinks near the start of the book, and at the end she says she has been “‘wondering if I were wasting myself … all that wonderful training – all those years of study – it seemed to me that I was just throwing them away for my own personal happiness’”. She realises, however, that, as her husband tells her, “‘There are a lot of happy people in this house because you’re the kind of person you are, and lead exactly the life you do. … You’ve cured Cal of a serious neurosis into the bargain, and prevented an internationally famous artist from becoming a bewildered and embitted old woman’”. Unvisited tombs …

There’s also some discussion of motherhood. Apparently, “‘a man isn’t equipped by nature to spend all his energies out-thinking children twenty-four hours a day,’” Sue tells a local worthy, who, after seeing Sue’s children at their worst, agrees “‘you were correct. They need someone to out-think them. I have known many brilliant men – leaders in their field – but I cannot think of one who would be equal to a task of that proportion. A mother is necessary’”. Though preferably, it seems, a mother who is a “trained nurse” – “‘An intelligent, skilled nurse has a great deal to give motherhood’”.

I like the description of a woman who “was in no way intellectual, her education had been average and didn’t seem to have ‘taken’”, although she has common sense, “warmth, kindness, and a down-to-earth wisdom which Sue found very refreshing”. “The conversation, Sue reflected as they talked, was unquestionably of the type which is lampooned in novels and jeered at by the unthinking, yet it dealt with matters which had been fundamental and highly important since the beginning of time. Without children, Sue and Leila Murray would have had nothing in common. As it was, they shared a rich world of experiences, interests and hopes.”

Less plot-driven than the other books. Very desultory – very little really happens. The “real crisis” mentioned in the blurb is underwhelming – I’m not even sure which of two incidents involving Sue’s children it is.

Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (book #57)

Jenny Uglow, 2006.

As thoughtful, dense and reaching out as Uglow usually is.

Uglow quotes Bewick in his memoirs on how the artist ought to live:

Ought if possible to have his dwelling in the country where he could follow his business undisturbed, surrounded by pleasing rural scenery & the fresh air and as ‘all work & no play, makes Jack a dull Boy,’ he ought not to sit at it, too long at a time, but to unbend his mind with some variety of employment – for which purpose, it is desireable [sic], that Artists, with their little Cots, should also each have a Garden attached in which they might find both exercise & amusement – and only occasionally visit the City or the smokey Town & that chiefly for the purpose of meetings with their Brother Artists.

Here are two of the many prints with which the book is sprinkled.

The latter is copperplate by Bewick’s son Robert, c 1812, from Bewick’s drawing. Uglow doesn’t say, but I think this must have been an invitation card or ball-card – Bewick’s workshop did a great deal of commercial work of this kind. I like the chap on the right with his leg poised in air.

Everybody’s Friend; or, Hilda Danvers’ Influence (book #56)

Evelyn Everett-Green, 1893.

Everett-Green is interesting partly because of the huge number of books she wrote. This short biography from an abstract of an article by Hilary Skelding (scroll about a third of the way down the page) says she wrote “in excess of 200 novels”. There are 360 books by her listed in the Bodleian catalogue, though some may be different editions of the same books.

There’s also a less informative Wikipedia article.

I haven’t read her historical novels and not many of her books for younger children, which seem less well-written.

Here’s Hilda being her apparently irresistable self: ” … what I mean is, that work of some sort is so much more really interesting than play. Indoors, if you studied your music, read some foreign language regularly and perhaps got lessons in it too, you would find how interesting it was; and then, you know, out of doors there cannot be any lack of things to do – and for people who have time and money – oh, the things they can do are more than can be counted!”

There’s an interesting view – bearing in mind Everett-Green is of the servant-keeping class – of the advantages for women of domestic service over marriage:

“As for Patience, she grew such a pretty, bright-looking girl that she began to have lovers in the servant hall, and the offer of an independent home of her own; but she always shook her head and steadily refused to be tempted by such proposals …

‘I know what life as a poor man’s wife is,’ she said, ‘and now that I know what good service is, I don’t think I shall be tempted to exchange the one for the other. They talk about independence – I wonder what sort of independence a woman has who has a husband, a cottage, and perhaps half-a-dozen children to look after, and about eighteen shillings a week to do it on – even if her husband brings all of his wages home, which hardly any of them do. In service a girl has some hard work, and perhaps some dirty work to do; but she sets to in a morning and gets it out of hand, and by the afternoon she can put on a tidy dress and often sit down to a bit of needlework or a book, or get a walk if she wants to. A poor man’s wife is slaving from morning to night, always in a muddle – always in a mess. How can she help it, with a tribe of children at her heels, and the whole work of the house to do – washing, cooking, cleaning up – everything – and nobody to help her? And then in the future, what is there to look forward to? Do the children of working people make such comfortable homes for their old parets when they are past work? I don’t think so. I have seen old folks there, and I cannot think they are happy or comfortable in the same kind of muddling homes as they had themselves when they were in like case. A girl in service can, if she keeps her place and studies to improve herself, earn gradually increasing wages, so that if she makes a principle of saving steadily, by the time she is old she will have enough to keep herself in comfort, or buy the good will of a little business – to say nothing of what she may get from her employers if she has grown old in ther service. What can a poor man’s wife save? … If a poor home is neat and tidy and comfortable, it is one long battle to keep it so, whereas a gentleman’s house is orderly and properly regulated as a matter of course, and there is power to keep it so without taxing anybody. Of course there are plenty of bad places, and plenty where girls are over-worked, and where they learn bad, dirty ways; but now that there is a scarcity of good servants, I do think that any girl can make herself one by patience and thought, and so work her way up into a good house. … Think of the miserable wages given for work or lots of the things girls do now, and the comfortable home they might have as servants under good mistresses. I can’t understand why they are all so taking against service. I’m sure, now that I have tried both, I will never he anything but a servant again … ‘”

Patience’s mother agrees, especially as servants’ “evenings are spent at home in a comfortable house, instead of being passed at low places of amusement, or in the streets”.

I do like the “x; or, y” type of title. There are some good ones listed in the book catalogues at the back of this book: Without a Thought; or, Dora’s Discpline, by Jennie Chappell; Edith Oswald; or, Living for Others, by Jane M Kippen; Uncle Joshua’s Heiress; or, Which shall it be?, by Lillias Campbell Davidson.

I’d like to know why Everett-Green wrote so much -financial necessity, morality, obsession, or possibly some of all three of course. She had £6,000 at her death, which suggests at least that she could have stopped writing earlier if she were only doing so for money.

Dimsie Grows Up (book #55)

Dorita Fairlie Bruce, 1924.

A picture to keep Jo happy.

Caption is: “SHE SANG IN A HAPPY, CROONING VOICE.” I don’t know who the illustrator was – looks like the name says Collet. The scene illustrated is where Dimsie is sitting on a boulder at dawn, singing Pippa’s Song. The local misanthrope and recluse, Kenneth Orde, finds her there and objects to her song – “How can any one pretend that all’s right with the world, for instance, when they look around them and see the hateful dregs left by that still more hateful war?” Dimsie replies that “it must be [all right] … because God’s in His heaven”. Kenneth ‘threw back his head with a sardonic laugh … “I’m afraid I don’t believe very much in either God or heaven”‘. Dimsie says ’scornfully’ “How extremely silly of you!” and in a few paragraphs has him ‘rais[ing] his cap to the Unknown God who was enshrined in the girl’s deep eyes’.

And here’s something stuck inside the book:

Aunt Dimity: Snowbound (book #54)

Nancy Atherton, 2004.

Thought this was fairly crap. It’s a cosy where the detective is snowbound in an English stately home with a few other people and investigates a theft from the past. I didn’t care for the central conceit that the ghost of Aunt Dimity talks to the heroine through a notebook, and even apart from this the plot and characters seemed implausible. Just looked at the author’s website and found a terrible greengrocer’s: “There are dozen’s of Aunt Dimitys in my life”.

Atherton also says:

“I don’t, as a rule, “create” characters. More often than not, they simply show up and start talking (bless them). I get to know them as you do, bit by bit, as the story progresses.

By the same token, I rarely plan storylines. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen before it happens—where’s the fun in that?—so I let the story unfold as I go along.”

AAAAGH.