Books do furnish a room

Impassioned Clay by Stevie Davies Stevie Davies has rapidly become one of my favourite authors. She writes beautifully and this novel is no exception. Earlier in the year I read Davies’s work on reclaiming women’s voices and writing from the Civil War period of English History. This novel revisits the women of the Civil War period. Olivia comes from a Quaker background in modern Cheshire. When her mother dies she is buried in the garden of the family home. A skeleton is discovered of a seventeenth century woman; her neck is broken and she has a scold’s bridle on her head. This is a secured metal cap with a metal flange which fixes in the mouth and on the tongue. This scold had metal spikes on it. Olivia becomes increasingly fascinated by the woman and as years go by she begins to try to establish her identity. This is interspersed with Olivia’s growing up, her difficult relationship with her father and his new wife, and Olivia’s struggles with herself and her sexuality. Olivia follows the historical trail as would any scholar and the work becomes part detective story as the woman is gradually brought to light. Hannah Williams/Jones/Emanuel is the woman in question and Olivia follows contemporary writings, some by Hannah herself to tell her story. Davies skilfully weaves fact and fiction in the historical side of the tale and does so with great empathy. Hannah is a rebel and through her research Olivia sheds light on her own situation. Hannah, through ill-treatment, disillusionment and contact with the radicalism of the Civil War, develops her own interpretation of religion. Hannah rejects the notion of a male God and an established church and is persecuted and tortured, but refuses to be quiet. Hannah has a “yoke-fellow” (wife and religious helpmate) Isabel and her anarchistic notions and challenge to the establishment means her fate is sealed. Davies says that many of her characters are transients, displaced or wayfarers (Hannah is Welsh and crosses the border) and often “mouthy and anomalous”. There is a connection of personal identity between the two women which transcends time and makes the novel work well. Davies gives a voice to characters usually confined to academic books and offering a critique of conventional historical fictions with conventional meanings. A moving novel with an interesting and feisty protagonist; I really do now want to read the rest of Davies’s work. 9 out of 10 Starting Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair

Elders and Betters by Quentin Bell Another book of Bloomsbury recollections, this time by Quentin Bell, son of Vanessa and Clive Bell. It takes the form of a series of chapters on major figures in and around Bloomsbury. It apparently began as an attempt at an autobiography, but turned into this. There are chapters about the usual suspects (but not Virginia Woolf, because Bell has written a biography of her), but also some less expected, like Anthony Blunt, Mary Butts, Claude Rogers, Lawrence Gowring, Ethel Smyth and Robert Medley. Bell is observant and tells some good tales; thankfully he isn’t reverential and this is a warts and all portrayal; particularly about his parents. As he says “I loved my parents, and I had more than the usual number to love”. He is candid about his father’s political leanings and about the conduct of both his parents, especially in relation to his sister Angelica. Bell revisits the sexual abuse of Virginia and Vanessa by their step brothers and its long term effects. He is able to be candid, but is forgiving of human frailty. He is less forgiving of David Garnett and his marriage to Angelica; “Old men have no right to prey upon the young”. This is an interesting set of recollections and Bell is aware he has a good tale to tell; “I was born at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The doors of No. 45, No. 47, and indeed of all the other houses in the square were black, or if not black, dark grey or a funereal blue. The door of No. 46 was a startling bright vermilion. The colour had been chosen by my mother, Vanessa; she also decorated the interior of the house, making use of equally startling colours. My father, Clive Bell, was in those days a left-wing radical. From an early age I knew that we were odd.” There are extra chapters at the end; one on the way Maynard Keynes’s political views changed over time and the other on Virginia Woolf’s works A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. He examines attitudes to pacifism in Bloomsbury, especially in relation to the rise of fascism. He does not always manage to contain his own radicalism, asserting that his aunt Virginia would have been horrified at the legacy of Thatcherism and at a pointless war with Argentina. The chapter on Anthony Blunt contains some interesting reflections on espionage, treachery and treason. Bell is never dull and there is always something to contend with. 7 out of 10 Starting Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

Berlin Mosaic by Eva Tucker I have thoroughly enjoyed this brief (too brief for my liking) autobiographical novel based on the history of a family. It reminded me strongly of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Reading it was made more poignant by the discovery that Eva Tucker died this month. This is really the story of Eva Tucker’s (mostly Jewish) family from 1891 to 1939 with a 1990 update. It is well written and the characterisation is good and I think there is a three volume work trying to get out! For a work ostensibly about the holocaust, the actual event is absent apart from a few brief paragraphs near the end. Tucker was born in Berlin and was evacuated to Britain in 1939 with her mother as a result of Quaker sponsorship. Tucker wrote a couple of experimental novels in the 1960s, but Berlin Mosaic only came along in 2005. She has also been a journalist and short story writer and worked for English PEN, an organisation promoting the freedom of writers worldwide and fighting against censorship. She also worked for interfaith dialogue; being both Jewish and a Quaker, this seems rather apt. The family history reflects the changes, twists and tensions in German society and the changing attitudes to Jews; the sense of disbelief in the motives of the Nazis, the thought that they would “soon settle down”. Most of all the novel is about the choices and compromises made by ordinary people. The loves and losses of daily life are captured well. It is very matter of fact and not at all melodramatic with a touch of irony and well-rounded characters with human flaws and frailty. There is a character early in the novel who is committed to an asylum; she is a presence throughout who begins to appear saner as madness descends on society. This is an excellent novel; my only quibble is that it should have been longer. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Thanks Brida; there are 28 essays; most are not too long. The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair This is a brief novella; readable in one or two sittings and was written by May Sinclair in 1922. It was Sinclair who coined the term “stream of consciousness” when reviewing Dorothy Richardson. Sinclair was a suffragist and modernist who also was influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. Sinclair is an accomplished novelist, but most of her work is rather puzzlingly out of print. This is a study of the Victorian notion of women and their role. The story of Harriet Frean’s life from birth to death, and a look at self-sacrifice and self-denial. She is brought up in a particular way and to behave properly; here is her father speaking to her; “His arm tightened, drawing her closer. And the kind, secret voice went on. “Forget ugly things. Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden. We don’t forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave beautifully…” All this helps to create her identity. There are also some passages which may have deeper meaning; “Mamma would come in carrying the lighted candle. Her face shone white between her long, hanging curls. She would stoop over the cot and lift Harriett up, and her face would be hidden in curls. That was the kiss-me-to-sleep kiss. And when she had gone Harriett lay still again, waiting. Presently Papa would come in, large and dark in the firelight. He stooped and she leapt up into his arms. That was the kiss-me-awake kiss; it was their secret. Then they played. Papa was the Pussycat and she was the little mouse in her hole under the bed-clothes. They played till Papa said, “No more!” and tucked the blankets tight in. “Now you’re kissing like Mamma—”” Harriet idealises her parents; as most children do; but most children grow out of that idealisation, Harriet doesn’t. In many ways she doesn’t need to enter the adult world and tends to approach it very tentatively; “She wasn't sure that she liked dancing. There was something obscurely dangerous about it. She was afraid of being lifted off her feet and swung on and on, away from her safe, happy life. She was stiff and abrupt with her partners, convinced that none of those men who liked Connie Hancock could like her, and anxious to show them that she didn't expect them to. She was afraid of what they were thinking. And she would slip away early, running down the garden to the gate at the bottom where her father waited for her. She loved the still coldness of the night under the elms, and the strong, tight feel of her father's arm when she hung on it leaning towards him, and his "There we are!" as he drew her closer. Her mother would look up from the sofa and ask always the same question, "Well, did anything nice happen?" We also have to remember all we see as readers is filtered by Harriet; there is no omniscient narrator. It does, however enable the reader to see how Harriet supresses her own feelings and desires. When she does fall in love (a love that is reciprocated) it is with the fiancé of her best friend. Needless to say, Harriet behaves beautifully and retains her view of herself. Consequently all three parts of the triangle are made miserable. Harriet shrivels as she grows older and overall the whole is rather bleak; Harriet never really becomes a person in her own right. Her parents remain with her as does the expectations she feels society has of her. It is a modernist treatment of Victorian repression as well as an examination of the role of women in Victorian society. 8 out of 10 Starting Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope

Woolf; it can be seen as more pedestrian than her sisters' novels; not as driven by passion. Anne was more practical possibly. Granite and Rainbow by Virginia Woolf This is a posthumous collection of essays by Woolf ranging from about 1908 to the late 1930s, but mostly in the 1920s. As the blurb says the essays are on the art of fiction and the art of biography. Leonard Woolf collected together many essays and reportage in three volumes published in the years after Woolf’s death. This one came along in the late 1950s as a result of extensive research by two Woolf scholars in the US. Woolf usually did not keep copies of the articles she wrote and they were often published anonymously. The title “Granite and Rainbow” comes from an essay entitled The New Biography. Woolf talks about the tension between the “granite-like solidity” of historical facts and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of the human personality and the weaving of these two things into a whole. She uses the necessity of doing this to illustrate the tedious and boring nature of Victorian biography and neatly dissects the book she is reviewing; a biography of Edward VII by Sidney Lee (one rating on GR) comparing it with Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Woolf comes back to this approach to biography a number of times in this collection. I suppose the best known essay in this book concerns Hemmingway and is eminently quotable. She reviews his collection of short stories Men Without Women and also analyses The Sun Also Rises. The comment she makes about the short stories is classic Woolf; “There are in Men Without Women many stories which, if life were longer, one would wish to read again” (she doesn’t say how much longer). She thought Hemmingway’s characters talked too much; but her real criticism is that Hemmingway “lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter's cloak, get between him and the fact …. But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the horns - call them life, truth, reality, whatever you like - pass him close each time”. As to the characterisation, comparing him to Chekov the characters are “flat as cardboard”. The whole is a delight to read. All the essays are well written as you would expect; this is a different Woolf to her fiction, this is her bread and butter and how she survived for many years. Some of the books reviewed are not well known now, some still known. The longest piece in the book is “Phases of Fiction” and covers novelists and poets like Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Austen, the Brontes, Stephenson, assorted poets and goes as far as Proust; to name but a few. It is an interesting run through mostly English fiction and Woolf’s judgements are always pertinent and sometimes unexpected. This collection takes its place alongside The Common Reader and the other collections published after Woolf’s death; it contains some interesting reflections on the art of writing and reviewing. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Berlin Mosaic by Eva Tucker

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte I’ve been conscious for a while of not having read anything by Anne Bronte and decided it was time to remedy that. This is Anne Bronte’s first novel and has the reputation of being not as good as the second; however I certainly felt that it had its strengths. The story is straightforward; Agnes Grey is the daughter of a clergyman whose family finds itself is straightened circumstances. Agnes decides she must contribute to the family finances and takes a post of a governess. There is an account of her time as a governess in two families. The account paints a fairly bleak picture of life as a governess and of the role of women of a certain class. This is certainly based on Anne’s own experience, apart from the romance at the end. Anne Bronte has always been seen as a lesser writer than her two sisters; this isn’t my impression. Agnes Grey is a strong minded woman, who very much has a sense of independence, “to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance”. At the end of the novel when she marries Weston the usual Victorian formula would be that he is rescuing her and providing her with hearth and home. The more perceptive reader will realise that he is not rescuing her, but she is rescuing him. Agnes can be very self-effacing at times and her piety I found somewhat irritating, but she is a much stronger character than many Victorian heroines. . The nature of work that women of Agnes’s type have to do is portrayed as thankless and degrading with cruel employers and children whom are ungovernable and with no respect to someone they treat as a servant. I think Anne’s portrayal of men is very much different to her sisters. There are no smouldering Byronic heroes like Rochester and Heathcliffe. Most of the men are shallow and self-absorbed. Her idea of a leading man is also different; Weston is not heroic or good-looking. He is serious, bookish, kind with obvious faults and vulnerabilities; very unlike the men her sisters created. This makes her books less easy to film; producers like strong male leads! I was surprised to find that Anne Bronte is much more radical than her sisters. She is concerned about the rights and working conditions of women who work in virtual slavery in domestic service and portrays the upper and moneyed classes who employ them as cruel and unscrupulous. Shades of a socialist and feminist approach to life and no swooning over emotionally stunted heroes. Agnes Grey does not need Weston at the end of the book; she is running a school with her mother and they are independent. It is a positive choice. I would urge those of you who have not read Anne Bronte yet to do so. 8 out of 10 Starting The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair

Charlotte Mew and her friends by Penelope Fitzgerald Having read and reviewed Mew’s poetry recently I felt I had to read this biography by Penelope Fitzgerald whilst her poetry was still fresh in my mind. Fitzgerald is a good, if idiosyncratic biographer and because she wrote this in the early 1980s she was able to speak to a few people who knew Charlotte Mew. She is not as well-known as a poet as she should be but is gradually being read more as a result of works like this and a recent edition of her poems. Thomas Hardy was an admirer and she visited him a number of times towards the end of his life. He felt that she was a poet “who will be read when others are forgotten”. Woolf called her “the greatest living poetess” and Sassoon thought she was the equal of Emily Bronte. Mew’s life was tragic in many ways, there was a history of mental illness and that was one of the reasons she and her sister Anne decided not to marry. She took her own life a few months after the death of Anne by drinking Lysol (a form of bleach). Mew was almost certainly a lesbian and she fell in love with three women, she was rejected by all three. Her poetry is informed by the fear of mental illness and a sense of rejection and isolation; “the poignancy of thwarted self-fulfilment” as one critic says. Mew’s poetry is deceptively fragile; as Louis Untermeyer puts it, “a cameo cut in steel”. Mew’s poetry is not traditionally structured and was often a publisher’s nightmare because of the way her poems had to be set. In the original chapbook “The Farmers Bride” was set lengthwise (you had to turn the page sideways to read it). Mew felt it read better that way. Fitzgerald’s biography is not an academic tone and it has the touch of a novelist; it reads easily and is fairly concise and understated. She is a sympathetic biographer who looks at human frailty with an amused benevolence. The introduction to the book sums up Mew’s legacy; “To have written, as Charlotte Mew did, a handful of poems of unique beauty and finish represents an inspiring beating of the odds. They ought to entitle her to a small share of enduring renown. The longings in her poems remain passionately undiminished by time, as do her cries for a world more just and forthcoming. And yet sixty years after her death, as her miseries recede into the gentling past, increasingly her poems themselves become the other world, that 'over there' where longings and love together lie beneath a reconciling sun. Bitter loss becomes lovely loss - bitter yearnings, sweet yearnings”. It is now almost a ninety years since her death and hopefully readers will continue to discover Mew and to read and appreciate her. 8 out of 10 Starting Elders and Betters by Quentin Bell

Clear Horizon by Dorothy Richardson Number eleven in the pilgrimage series. The end is almost in sight! Miriam makes a decision at the end of this novel to leave London and move to the country; cutting many ties and leaving her job. As ever the plot is not the main thing and drifts along as usual. Amabel plays an important role. It is easy to place the novel historically as it is the height of the suffragette protests and Amabel gets herself arrested and jailed. The relationship between Amabel and Miriam is close. Interestingly Miriam acts as matchmaker between Michael Shatov and Amabel; two people she is very close to and the bringing together is planned and deliberate. Comparisons have been made between Clear Horizon and The Well of Loneliness where a similar solution to a problem occurs. As always Miriam’s motives are complex; “Something far below any single, particular motive she could search out, had made the decision, was refusing to attend to this conscious conflict and was already regarding the event as current, even as past and accomplished. This complete, independent response, whose motives were either undiscoverable or non-existent, might be good or bad, but was irrevocable.” Richardson does expect her readers to work and sometimes throwaway remarks conceal a good deal. Throughout the books the reader will be aware of Richardson’s dislike of Platonic philosophy. There is a neat remark by Miriam; “Look after the being and the becoming will look after itself”. This was also the reason that Richardson disliked the term “stream of consciousness” because it implied a source and preferred something like “a continuous state of being”. The series continues to fascinate and the final two volumes relate to Richardson’s experience of Quakerism. 9 out of 10 Starting Dimple Hill by Dorothy Richardson

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain This book has been on my to be read list for over thirty years and I really should not have left it this long to read it. It is much better known these days following the recent film and a TV adaptation some years ago. It is the account of Vera Brittain’s wartime experiences, from a sheltered middle class upbringing to starting at Somerville College Oxford and then to volunteer work as a VAD nurse in Britain, France and Malta. It shows the horrors of war through the eyes of a woman suffering the losses of loved ones and nursing some of the seriously wounded and dying. Brittain takes her story to 1925 covering her time at Oxford, the post-traumatic stress resulting from her wartime service, her growth as a journalist and writer, her friendship with Winifred Holtby, her work for the League of Nations and ending with her marriage. Any reading in the area of WW1 should include this book. Brittain takes the reader through the loss of innocence and the changes in society wrought by the war. Most of all it charts the loss of a generation. We are introduced to Vera’s brother Edward and his friends Roland, Geoffrey and Victor who all went to Uppingham School. Brittain falls in love with Roland and they become engaged to be married. There are brief meetings during leave and painful partings at railway stations. Inevitably death intervenes and one by one Brittain loses them all. It is heart-rending and being so well written adds to the impact as does Brittain’s poetry, which is included throughout. Brittain does do much more than tell a tale of sadness and loss. She doesn’t portray herself as a victim because her feminism and determination to make a difference shine through. It is interesting to chart the development of Brittain’s thinking from her conservative middle class background to her espousing of pacifism and socialism after the war. She weaves together the personal and political very well and concludes that she doesn’t have to put up with the outrage of society sending its sons to their death and spends the rest of her life fighting for peace. Brittain’s writing has intellectual force and clarity. She is not afraid of feelings and that combination of intellectual vigour and emotion works very well. I think I will probably read the two follow ups, Testament of Friendship and Testament of Experience. Particularly Friendship which relates to Brittain’s friendship with Winifred Holtby. There is nothing I can say about this which has not already been said; one of the best literary works about the First World War. 9 and a half out of 10 Starting Impassioned Clay by Stevie Davies

Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards Dorothy Edwards was a Welsh author who is very little read or known these days. Rhapsody is a collection of her short stories. Edwards remained little known and out of print after her death in 1934, until Virago (bless them) published her only novel and this collection of her short stories in the 1980s. The edition I have in the recent Library of Wales edition has three extra stories. Dorothy Edwards committed suicide leaving a heart-rending note; “I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship, and even love, without gratitude and given nothing in return." She was born in 1903 and her father was a socialist and Independent Labour Party activist; a political tradition she followed. She read Greek and Philosophy at Cardiff University. I found out about her work when reading David Garnett’s book on his friends. The chapter on T E Lawrence mentions her. Garnett was a fan of her writing (as was Lawrence) and she stayed with him and his wife rent free for a time. Lawrence thought that her story A Country House was one of the best written in the English Language. Garnett also thought she was a brilliant writer. Christopher Meredith sums up well in his introduction to this edition; "Fashion for re-readings according to various theories have helped critics to rediscover her from time to time, but I believe that Dorothy Edwards is a great deal more than an interesting literary case. She's an important, utterly original modernist. Whichever way you read her, she's the extraordinarily accomplished author of powerful and suggestive fictions." Here’s the rub, where should this type of writer sit in the canon, if at all. Having just finished reading Rhapsody I can say that these stories stand up against any others I have read; Woolf, Mansfield, Chekov, Maupassant. I am astonished that Dorothy Edwards is so little known. The stories are fairly minimalist and usually written with a male narrator. There is a control and a holding back, desire is constrained and relationships incomplete, loneliness often a given. Edwards was interested in music and music is a recurrent motif and theme, often representing an undercurrent of passion. Meredith points out that a number of the stories refer to fairy tales, but in themselves they resemble fairy tales that are ironic with a menacing edge, covered by what seems to be a conventional English backdrop. Often outsiders or visitors arrive to disturb marriages and well established relationships. The emotional tensions between the characters is palpable’ the prose is stylised and often deliberately awkward. The movement and development of the stories often seems logical, but on reflection there is an underlying disturbance and all is not as it seems. The opening of A Country House illustrates this; “From the day when I first met my wife she has been my first consideration always. It is only fair that I should treat her so, because she is young. When I first met her she was a mere child with black ringlets down her back and big blue eyes. She put her hair up to get married. Not that I danced attendance on her. That is nonsense.” There is an odd construction here, although it may seem straightforward. There is nuance and almost menace and the narrator almost seems to be arguing with himself. On reflection I found that opening quite chilling. Edwards herself says; “you must be realist or you must invent a personal isolated odd universe composed exclusively of your own experience” I now feel the need to get hold of Claire Flay’s recent biography. She argues that Edwards uses the male narrators in the way she does in order to deconstruct their authority. David Garnett has had a good deal of say in how we have seen Edwards until recently as her biography has been written. He indicates that Edwards was not always comfortable with people and indeed her stories are more ice sculpture than ardent passion. There is a picture of her in the back of Rhapsody and it is haunting. Given her upbringing, it is not surprising that class is important element for Edwards, but not in the way you would expect. Her women are often marginalised, but Edwards examines and critiques their position and treatment in a highly original way. These stories deconstruct and explore; the endings are unusual and I was often left thinking “Did that just end?” The stories just stop, often it feels like mid-sentence. However they make you think and they stay with you. These short stories rank with the best I have ever read; they are haunting and are much more than they seem on the surface. These are a must read. 9 and a half out of 10 Starting Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

Harriet Hume by Rebecca West This is my first Rebecca West and Harriet Hume is one of West’s lesser known novels. It has mixed reviews, possibly I think because it is not easy to see what West is doing. It is also an unusual modernist novel because it involves a fantasy element. It is a London novel and there are some good descriptions of London streets in the 1920s. The story is a double hander between two protagonists; Harriet Hume and Arnold Condorex. Harriet is a pianist with intuition and sensitivity, Arnold is a worldly aspiring politician. The book opens with them having a romantic tryst. Harriet discovers she can read her lovers thoughts and intentions and sees that his career and power is what motivates him and she is secondary. They part and meet again six years later by chance when again Harriet can see Arnold’s hidden motives and baser thoughts. The nest meeting is over a decade later when Arnold has real political power and again Harriet can see through him; by this time her hates her as his political plotting is beginning to unravel and he has financial problems. The book draws to a close with a final meeting as Arnold’s career is in ruins. The whole novel revolves entirely around the two main characters and sometimes they tend to talk in speeches which can be a trial. The ending is the fantasy part and to attempt to explain would give it away. I suspect most readers will guess by the end; but that’s not the point. The two characters are opposites; possibly the male and female principles. Victoria Glendinning (in the virago introduction) argues that the two are opposites. The female principle is artistic, unaggressive, unconventional, moral and subjective. The male principle being objective, conventional, aggressive and amoral. It is also suggested that Condorex is based on H G Wells (he gets everyone; I’m reading about him as Hypo Wilson in Pilgrimage!); West had an affair with him. Glendinning’s conclusion is that West is making the point that neither can survive nor thrive in isolation. However, West is doing more than this in her construction of opposites. Condorex represents power, the establishment and a masculine type of capitalism and so there is an element of political satire. Condorex’s values are pretty much those of the political class with a sense of hierarchy and entitlement which Hume finds repulsive: Condorex judging that revulsion to be because of her gender. Condorex has a drive for power and makes his name with an issue of Empire; West as part of her satire looks at Imperialism too. Condorex, although he seems to understand Hume’s point of view feels he cannot be other than he is: “ “But a man must rise in the world!” ….(this) intention was unalterably a part of himself. He could not more remove it than he could uproot his own breath. … It dominated him, he was its instrument.” Condorex abandons his lover to court other women who can assist with his career. Although Condorex comes across as reprehensible; West does give the impression that he is both perpetrator and victim. Arnold and Harriet become more distant over time and Arnold realises she is his opposite and wishes to destroy her. West rejects this type of dualism as too simplistic and the world is more complex; as she says herself at a later date; “This refusal leaves man to indulge in some of his characteristically false logic. His mind, which is inadequate for the purpose of mastering his environment and therefore always oversimplifies, sees the universe in antitheses, in dichotomies. He says, foolishly enough, for one cannot cut into clean halves two substances that pass into each other by insensible gradation, that there is light and darkness, life and death, pleasure and pain.” West is critiquing dualism whilst admitting we fall into the habit of accepting it. Condorex has rejected the imagination and the artistic sense that Hume has which leads to the sterile nature of his life and his lack of morals. However Hume as a musician has partially entered the masculine domain as a performer and owner of her own talents. It is also clear that Condorex has a choice whether to follow his heart and stay with Hume, when life would be very different, the question really is; does he have that choice or is he destined to follow the path he does because he is unable to follow his heart. West makes it clear there is a different path for Condorex to follow, it is less clear that he has the ability to follow it. Although the novel is clearly a political satire, its subtitle is still A London Fantasy. West, through Harriet weaves fairy tales through the book and Harriet has the ability to transform her garden in some way which becomes clearer towards the end of the book as the novel enters more fully into the fantasy area. West uses fantasy to suggest an alternative reality using fantasy and fairy tales as a mirror to highlight faults in society. Harriet’s powers are celebratory and life-affirming. Many of the critics of this novel miss the point that West is not creating a linear and logical plot. More interesting analyses of the plot use Derridean ideas like jouissance and a celebration of heterogeneity, fecundity and excess; dealing with dualism by synthesis. Other interesting analyses of the novel follow ideas related to Foucault’s narrative of sovereignty and its relation to the modernist novel. There is a lot going on here; it’s an interesting and underrated novel. 8 out of 10 Starting The Black Jacobins by C L R James

Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett Another Bloomsbury influenced read; but this time from the mid-1980s. Henrietta Garnett is the daughter of David Garnett and Angelica Bell, great niece of Virginia Woolf. Before reading this I should have taken note of Dorothy Parker’s remark about Bloomsbury: “Bloomsbury paints in circles, lives in squares and loves in triangles”. The relationships in this novel are very tangled as you would expect. One of the first things that prods your consciousness when you read this is that the author is having a few games with names. The name of the house in Ireland in the first part of the book is Malabay (redolent of Mandalay). One of the main male characters is called Tara (Gone with the Wind; a plantation). The main female character is Catherine and yes she is somewhat dreamy and tempestuous. Those are the obvious ones, but there are others. Catherine is brought up by her uncle Pake at Malabay and the whole of her life revolves around the house and its surrounds. There is a nearby lake which is part of the estate and where Catherine’s mother and father drowned when she was very young. Tara is her cousin and they marry quite suddenly when Catherine is 17 (Tara is ten years older). This event seems to trigger a series of events of a tragic nature. The novel moves from Malabay to a clinic in a mountainous region and then to a remote island owned by Gerald, the other main male character. It is a novel about family secrets which come back to haunt and there is incest, betrayal, rape and estrangement. The most interesting character is Poppy, Pake’s ex-wife who turns up on a regular basis and seems to hold the whole thing together. Some of the events of the novel seemed to stretch credulity a little and the characterisation seemed to me to be a little thin at times. Charming, beautiful and eccentric are all very well, but I need a little more than that. Garnett has created a very enclosed world with charming but fated characters. It just seemed very disconnected and I found it difficult to relate to the characters; they were ethereal and somehow unreal. I think the whole thing might also have being a retelling of part of the Bloomsbury story. There is a lyricism in the writing and some beautiful descriptions and those who love everything Bloomsbury may wish to read it. For me it was interesting, but ultimately didn’t work. 6 out of 10 Starting Charlotte Mew and her friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

Woolf woolf; that's a big question and I think there is a danger of generalisation; the interesting question is how do men portray women and women portray men. Not sure I have the answer. Shadow Box by Antonia Logue This is an epistolary novel which focuses on three real-life characters whose lives intersected. Mina Loy; poet artist, modernist, bohemian, futurist and much neglected thinker is one of the two main protagonists. The other is Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion. The link between them is the enigmatic Arthur Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd). Cravan was Oscar Wilde’s nephew. He was known as a poet, boxer (he once fought Johnson), art critic, inventor of conceptual art (taken up by Duchamp), publisher (briefly) of a critical magazine and a lecturer (whose lectures were notoriously anarchistic and designed to shock). Loy and Cravan met in New York, both having left Europe because of the war. They fell in love and moved to Mexico as Cravan was avoiding the army. They planned to travel to South America. They married and the plan was for Loy to travel on a conventional liner whilst Cravan sailed himself. Unfortunately Craven set sail and was never heard of again, presumed lost in a heavy storm. The premise of the novel is that thirty years later Cravan turns up and contacts Johnson. Johnson corresponds with Loy by letter and they go over their lives thirty years before. The letters are fairly long and of course, being epistolary there is no dialogue. This is the weakest part of the novel and can make it seem a little ponderous. Its strength is the contrast between Loy and Johnson as they tell their stories. Loy tells of her unhappy marriage and life in Bohemia and some of the characters she met; futurism and her subsequent disenchantment with it. Her poetry was considered shocking in New York; “I was denounced in Christian journals, in all the right-wing newspapers, slated as a harlot, without morals, shame, dignity or sense. It was magnificent […] Journalists came to interview me, to take pictures. I, they decided, was the personification of the daring Modern Woman. Mina Loy the Modernist. “ Loy charts her discarding of societal mores and her friendships with people like Marinetti (the futurist), Duchamp, William Carlos Williams and others. Johnson describes the brutality of his world, as a professional boxer when there were less rules, up to 45 rounds and where a black boxer as the world champion caused shock, anger and resentment. There are some brutal descriptions of prizefights, but also accounts of Johnson’s celebrity lifestyle. Critics have been divided over Logue’s novel, but she is presenting two interesting and contrasting lifestyles told thirty years on and Conover has summed up the novel well; “This novel, then, circles around the symbolic power of the body and the mechanics of grief. It demonstrates, then, that the modernist preoccupation with the narration of the individual’s experience of the sensual has resonance in contemporary fiction. Logue links childbirth, grief, love and the politics of race with her understanding of modernist aesthetics and the power of this novel lies in its visceral connection with the subject and the careful imagining of the desiring female subject.” The contrasting lives works well. The focus on narrative rather than dialogue will not suit everyone. The elusive Arthur Cravan still seems an enigma. It is an interesting way of looking at a snapshot of the earlier twentieth century and at some of its fascinating characters. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards

Dawn's Left Hand by Dorothy Richardson Tenth in the Pilgrimage series. Miriam moves back to her old lodgings. However the bulk of the novel focuses on Miriam’s relationship with two people. Hypo Wilson (based on H G Wells) with whom she has an affair and a young woman called Amabel who falls in love with Miriam and with whom she has an intense relationship. Wilson is a rationalist who believes in free love and in socialism. Miriam finds him stimulating intellectually; attractive at a cerebral level, but not physically attractive. Amabel and Miriam’s relationship with her is much freer and more fluid. Richardson was writing this at about the time of Radclyffe Hall’s trial for obscenity. Miriam begins to view herself on a different way as a result of these relationships; “With the eyes of Amabel, and with her own eyes opened by Amabel, she saw the long honey-coloured ropes of hair framing the face […] falling across her shoulders and along her body where the last foot of their length, red-gold, gleamed marvellously against the rose-tinted velvety gleaming of her flesh. Saw the lines and curves of her limbs, their balance and harmony. Impersonally beautiful and inspiring.” She also resists Wilson’s attempts to turn her into his type of female novelist and he also imagines her with a child, which she also resists. She even argues with Hypo about the nature of the novel; “The torment of all novels is what is left out. The moment you are aware of it, there is torment in them. Bang, bang, bang, on they go, these men’s books, like an LCC tram, yet unable to make you forget them, the authors, for a moment.” Richardson is reimagining the novel in Pilgrimage and now she is channelling her ideas through Miriam. It is as Richardson said herself “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (Richardson was referring to Wells, Conrad and Bennett). As with the previous novels, there is very little going on; we are following Miriam in her thoughts and feelings. Unlike Oberland this one is very much grounded in the previous books. The novels seem to be getting shorter now; almost snapshots of a brief period; but the standard still remains high. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting the next in the series Clear Horizon

The Tunnel by William Gass It feels like I have been reading this for as long as Gass spent writing it; it’s a hefty tome and not easy to read. The primary character around whom all this revolves is William Frederick Kohler (I am reliably informed that in the US the word Kohler has plumbing connotations). He is a middle-aged history professor at a mid-western university who has just completed writing his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. He is struggling to write the introduction and reflecting on his life and marriage. Kohler is trying to escape from his life and a symptom of this is the fact that he is digging a tunnel from his cellar, under the yard. As one reviewer says, the whole is a plotless stream of notes which covers his awful childhood, his deteriorating relationship with his wife, his infidelities with his students, politics with other lecturers, and his general loneliness. Embedded in it all is an undertone of vitriol and bigotry. Kohler, however is an equal opportunities bigot; he hates everyone and adeptly insults and abuses all who are not him. He doesn’t like himself either. It is driven by language and in some ways has a Dickensian feel; only child raised in a bleak town with an alcoholic mother and a bullying father. Gass could have painted the childhood he does paint at the beginning of the book to get the reader onside with Kohler and to create a sense of journey and understanding. He doesn’t do this; he starts with the middle-aged Kohler who is sex-obsessed, repulsive, sharing some of the fascist views of those he writes about and seducing students. And Gass lays it on, making Kohler deliberately cartoonish in his repulsiveness. There are plenty of cultural references which non-Americans will probably struggle with (and perhaps those who are younger). A whole section on the sweets and candies of childhood would probably be a delight to readers of a certain age. What there is not (certainly near the beginning of the novel) is interaction with other characters. We spend most of the time with Kohler, in his head. Kohler’s views on Hitler and the Nazis are also challenging. Kohler believes he would have followed Hitler; Kohler puts in a plea for the abuser because it’s easy to be a victim. He is accustomed to making off the cuff remarks that are staggering offensive, such as “I’ve been in bedrooms as bad as Belsen”. Clearly untrue and just adds to the reader’s picture of Kohler. Kohler is an awful character, routinely racist, sexist and offensive. A number of questions arise. Obviously one asks how much Gass identifies with his creation. Gass has answered that himself; “To write of such a man, you have to know loneliness, of course, but only of the kind that everyone has experienced at one time or another. It's like the terrible blizzards I once put in a short story. I had never experienced blizzards like that, but I had experienced snow. You just turn up the volume.” One rather clever reviewer made a comment about Gass sitting in a chair for thirty years writing a novel about a man sitting in a chair for thirty years writing a book! Another question that occurred relates to a British sitcom of the 1960s, Till Death Us Do Part; written by Johnny Speight. It was about an East End Londoner called Alf Garnett and his family (played by Warren Mitchell). Garnett was racist, sexist, obnoxious and anti-Semitic and was meant to be so outrageous that it would be obvious that it was a satire. Speight was working out his issues with his own father (as Kohler was doing). He was shocked when Garnett was treated as a hero who represented the feelings of many ordinary people (in the US the series was redone with the main character being Archie Bunker). Does Kohler feed into that sort of feeling? There are certainly people around like Kohler. He’s not a criminal, murderer or the sort of monster who populates popular fiction. He is an ordinary university lecturer in an ordinary town. Gass has argued that history is about values and their weighing up. Gass very effectively sums up his creation and why he is as he is; "Kohler is a master of sophist reasoning. He certainly knows right from wrong, but that does not guarantee that one will make the right choices. Plato said that no one would knowingly do evil. I think people knowingly do evil all the time -- for selfishness or revenge or all sorts of reasons. Evil has always given more pleasure than virtue, and we don't really like virtuous people…. there's contradiction and confusion and deliberate darkness”. In terms of the writing; Gass produces verbal pyrotechnics on every page and it is certainly the work of a great writer. There is also a good deal of truly awful poetry, crude and offensive limericks (particularly those about concentration camps). Kohler seems to loathe women (most of them), but his base and inner feelings probably reflect a strain in men which insists on pursuing the illusion of youth. The font changes, and there are drawings and sketches and a whole variety of other stuff. Given all the above; what do I feel. It is a great book, a great literary novel. I didn’t love it in the same way I did Omensetter’s Luck; but I don’t think it is a book to be loved. It’s not comfortable or easy. The scholarship on The Tunnel makes that clear. For me Gass is saying that whatever caused the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism; it’s still there; alive in people like Kohler who just need to be led and captivated. The Tunnel captures the ordinariness of human evil. 9 out of 10

Great Friends by David Garnett David Garnett was very much part of Bloomsbury; having a relationship with Duncan Grant and eventually marrying Anjelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). He was brought up in a household which moved in literary circles. His father was a literary agent and his mother a translator who translated from Russian to English; all the major nineteenth century Russian works. David therefore met many literary figure through his parents and later on his own account through Bloomsbury. This a collection of personal reminiscences about some of the people he met and was friends with. These are not potted biographies and the collection is very variable. There are Chapters on Conrad, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence (DH), Keynes, Strachey and Carrington, Wells, Lawrence (TE) and McCullers to name a few. There are some interesting insights. Conrad was a friend through Garnett’s father who was his literary agent. Garnett tells the story of when he was a young boy being left in Conrad’s charge for a while; they played ships with a laundry basket and a sheet! Their friendship stalled during the war. Garnett was a conscientious objector and Conrad felt he had failed in his duty. The article on Keynes is interesting because Garnett throws some light on the alleged rejection of Keynes’s wife, Lydia Lopokova by Bloomsbury. He recalls that it was Vanessa Bell who objected to Lopokova; partly because she objected to the marriages of all her friends and partly because she saw Keynes as part of her household; all the rest were welcoming. The Chapter on D H Lawrence confirmed my own feelings about him. Garnett’s relationship with Lawrence and his wife was good at first and they were kind to him. Garnett was present at the occasion when Lawrence was shown some of Duncan Grant’s paintings (by Grant) and he proceeded to attack Grant and his paintings for being misconceived and wrong. In fact Grant is portrayed as the artist Duncan Forbes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence wrote to Garnett advising him to cease mixing with homosexuals, especially Grant, Birrell and Keynes. The letter is reproduced in the book and it is truly awful with phrases like “deep inward dirt”, “a sort of sewer”, “something like carrion” and much more in that vein. Lawrence exhorts Garnett to marry a woman and give up men! Garnett was (not unnaturally) very angry about the letter. It also scared him as he felt that Lawrence might even report his friends to the law. Virginia Woolf comes across as very warm and deeply interested in people. Garnett reports that Woolf found the Second World War very distressing. Living in Sussex, she often saw fighting planes in the skies above. Garnett goes into literary mode with an interesting analysis of Mrs Dalloway. The chapter at the end of the book on Carson McCullers is very interesting and she comes across as a fascinating personality. This is an easy read, not at all taxing and there are some interesting insights into the literary world of the time. Garnett is a good raconteur who isn’t afraid to tell stories which reflect badly on himself and because he can be a bit of a name-dropper there were references to some more obscure writers and works which look worth following up. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Granite and Rainbow by Virginia Woolf

Fifty Shades of Feminism edited by Susie Orbach, Rachel Holmes and Lisa Appignanesi This is an interesting collection of brief vignettes by fifty women commissioned in the wake of the fuss over Fifty Shades of Grey. They examine in very different ways the state of feminism and the progress of justice and equality. Inevitably there are gaps; as the editors say, they could have come up with a list of five hundred, never mind fifty. As it originates from Britain (published by virago) there is a something of a bias towards British writers; but there are writers from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. I think that most people will think of ways the list could be broadened or improved. That is a minor point though. The books shows that feminism is a broad church and some of the articles are brilliant. There is humour, tragedy and some perceptive reflections on the current state of things. Tahmima Anam kicks things off with; "Things Your Mama Never Told You (for fear you would demand a sex change)", explaining that however difficult things are for western women, there are those who are worse off. Naomi Alderman, a novelist and computer game designer, concludes that she finds more sexism in the literary world than in the gaming world. Laurie Penny’s poetic offering is brilliant. Juliet Stevenson and Meera Syal make some perceptive comments about women in film and theatre. Jeanette Winterson’s analysis of porn is all the more scary because of the way she includes adverts and language found on the net in her arguments. Xinran examines five Chinese characters and how they impact on the way women are treated in Chinese culture (this is one of the best essays in the book). There is a heartfelt and well-reasoned statement by the members of Pussy Riot at the very end of the book. Barrister Martha Spurrier talks with great feeling about her work with rape and abuse victims; juxtaposing it with her first day as a lawyer and an awful joke told in a lift. All of the contributions are worth reading and sometimes, because of their brevity there can be a sense of frustration that arguments are not developed, but that is a small caveat and it is easy to dip in and out of it as a result. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Great Friends by David Garnett

A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg by Sally Campbell If you consider the classical theorists of Marxism you will find they are almost all men; Marx, Engels, Lenin, Plekhanov, Bakunin and so on. There is a single significant female voice; that of Rosa Luxemburg. She was a Polish Jew who played a central part in the revolutionary left in Germany in the early twentieth century. This is a straightforward and brief account of her life and thought; a taster really. It outlines the main fracture lines in Marxist theory and where Luxemburg placed herself. The author isn’t unbiased, but it is a good account of Luxemburg’s thought placed in the historical context which makes it more easily understandable. Luxemburg was a polemicist and apparently a very fine orator; not afraid to challenge anyone (including Lenin at one point). She provided an analysis of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, nationalism and had strong views on how change should come about. She argued for the importance of the mass strike; for those in the UK, she wouldn’t have been a Corbyn fan as she did not believe the left should compromise with social democracy. During the First World War she tried to organise strikes against the war in Germany and as a result spent most of the war in jail. She died just after the war during an attempted revolution in Berlin. This is a good starting point for anyone interested in Luxemburg’s thought. 7 out of 10

Woolf woolf, I think Oberland can be read as a stand alone. Reading the previous novels helps as one has watched the development of the Miriam character. However she is the only character from the previous novels, all the others are new. A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam This is a debut novel set against the Bangladesh War of Independence; it’s not a historical novel, but the story is told through the medium of one family and those in their immediate circle. The plot has a personal inspiration and is the story of Rehana Haque. She is a single mother; her children are in their late teens and are part of the struggle for independence. There is the brutality of war, mostly at a distance, sometimes present and political events intrude; but there is a continuum of family life, food, neighbours, love and loss. Sadly, I don’t know enough about the historical events to comment on the historical accuracy, but Anam tells an engaging story. Whilst there is warmth and empathy for those struggling for independence, the characterisation is very polarised and the Pakistan based characters tend to be generally evil. The violence and atrocities are there, but they are not overdone, nor too vividly drawn. The novel is well written and easy to read; the main strength is the family drama and there is a good bit of tension as well. I enjoyed it and it covered an area that I know too little about. 7 out of 10 Starting The Ice-Shirt by William T Vollmann

Oberland by Dorothy Richardson This ninth outing of Richardson’s Pilgrimage series is an oddity; a description of a two week holiday Miriam has in Switzerland, in the Alps. It has been titled a “modernist travel narrative”, so if you ever wondered what one of those looks like; here’s your chance. Viewed as a travelogue, the reader gets a sense of the wonder of new places and new people. This is less about Miriam’s interior life and more about experience of a new place. At the time critics felt that Oberland felt like an interlude and a change in direction, a light interlude, especially as the descriptions of the scenery and snow gives the whole a very “light” feel. The concept of an interlude means there is a before and after. The after involves Hypo Wilson, with whom Miriam is considering whether to have an affair. The holiday is based on a couple of trips Richardson made to Switzerland herself in the early 1900s and it was about this time that this sort of holiday ceased to be the preserve of the very rich and became more accessible to the middles classes and the adventurous. The holiday is something of a rest cure for Miriam. It was written in 1926 and at that time there was something of a vogue for literature in mountain resorts/ sanatoria. The Magic Mountain was published in 1924 and the climax of Women in Love (Richardson met Lawrence about this time) was set in a mountain resort. In terms of characterisation Richardson sets up, there are the typical English stereotypes who interact with continental stereotypes with Miriam in the middle. The interactions are interesting and Miriam is as perceptive as ever. There are some set piece winter sports events. The whole setting up of Oberland reminded me a little of the way Proust uses the French seaside resorts in his novels. An interesting interlude which could stand alone as a satire on the English abroad. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Dawn's Left Hand by Dorothy Richardson.

The Alice B Toklas Cookbook by Alice B Toklas Yes this really is primarily a cookbook with some reminiscences thrown in. It was written after her partner, Gertrude Stein’s, death. Food was clearly very important in their lives and it is written with great passion. Contributory to that may be that Toklas had jaundice when she wrote it and was on a strict diet. Most of the recipes are French because that I where Toklas and Stein spent most of their time. But there are some thrown in from the US and a sprinkling from most other European countries and a few from further afield. Toklas collected recipes all her life and this was her passion. The arrangement of the recipes is idiosyncratic to say the least, with the order being more of when they were tried and cooked as Toklas takes the reader through the years. There are lots of asides about the various people they knew and places they visited; bit of a restaurant tour of France in the first forty years of the twentieth century. The tone can be waspish and rather dismissive and French cuisine is always the benchmark; “The French never add Tabasco, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce, nor do they eat any of the innumerable kinds of pickles, nor do they accompany a meat course with radishes, olives or salted nuts” The recipes are often complex and time consuming requiring oceans of cream and acres of butter. There is a recipe for a leg of lamb which requires the cook to inject the meat with orange juice twice a day for a week whilst it is being marinaded. It seems that most things that moved were eaten. There is even a recipe for Larks which begins, “Place 2 dozen plucked larks in an oven with 6 rashers of Parma smoked ham …”! Of course, the most famous recipe in the book is in the chapter which is recipes contributed by friends; Hashish Fudge, with the recommendation that two pieces are enough and a batch will cause great hilarity at any party. Incidentally, the fudge (more accurately a brownie), has its own facebook page! The chapter on servants illustrates why the cooking could be so extravagant, as for most of their time together Stein and Toklas employed a cook/housekeeper. There are interesting recollections throughout the book of their friends (famous and less famous). The chapter on the Nazi occupation is interesting. Being both Jewish and lesbian, Stein and Toklas cannot have been very comfortable in Nazi occupied France. It is an interesting read; the range of recipes is broad. There are plenty of vegetable recipes and a wide range of puddings, some good wit and a fascinating account of Toklas’s life with Stein. It won’t be to everyone’s taste and for me parts of it grated (maintaining the culinary theme), but it’s great fun as well. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Fifty Shades of Feminism edited by Susie Orbach, Rachel Holmes and Lisa Appignanesi

Phoenix Fled by Attia Hosain This is a good set of short stories which often focus on the mundane and the day to day. They also examine the tensions brought to bear by Partition. There are other recurring themes; the struggle between tradition and modernity, the role of women in the household. Attia Hosain was born in Lucknow and was well educated; she moved to Britain in 1947 and worked as a writer and broadcaster. She is better known for her novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column. The title story relates to an old Muslim woman who will not leave her village when her family flees during Partition. Her confused mind makes her think back to the Mutiny of 1857. Two other stories (Time is Unredeemable and The First Party) examine how modernity affects Muslim women when their menfolk become more westernised. Many of the stories combine tragedy with stoicism. The problem of westernisation is addressed in Anita Desai’s perceptive introduction; “”Westernisation” is seen as destructive of the old, traditional culture. The latter may be full of cruelties and injustices, but it is a pattern of life known and understood, therefor more acceptable and more fitting than an alien culture that has been neither fully understood, nor assimilated. Attia Hosain’s work is by no means an unreserved paean of praise for the old culture but is certainly full of an inherited, instinctive love for it.” The stories are well written and structured, unsentimental with a few sharp twists and it’s well worth looking out for the virago edition. 8 out of 10 Starting Harriet Hume by Rebecca West

The Collected poems and selected prose of Charlotte Mew I don’t read enough poetry, so every now and then I try to make amends. I’ve been reading a good deal from the late nineteenth century up to the 1930s recently. Charlotte Mew is a much neglected poet who spans the late Victorian and Modernist periods who attracted praise from people such as Woolf, Hardy and Sassoon. I intend to read Penelope Fitzgerald’s autobiography of her in the near future and her life is rather sad. The poems reflect many of her struggles; her struggles with faith and religion, with mental health, alienation, those outcast from society and especially with death. There was a history of mental illness in Mew’s family and two of her siblings (a brother and a sister) were schizophrenic; an illness known at the time as dementia praecox. Mew and her sister Alice decided not to marry because of the history of mental illness in the family. They lived together until Alice’s death of cancer in 1927. Following her death Mew sank into depression and took her own life the next year. Mew had always been concerned that her own mental health may be fragile as she illustrates in this stanza where the speaker in the poem answer the doorbell only to find no one there; Tonight I heard a bell again – Outside it was the same mist of fine rain, The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street, No one for me – I think it is myself I go to meet. The poem On the Asylum Road follows the theme from a different angle and also shows Mew’s claim to be a nature poet in the tradition of Clare; Theirs is the house whose windows—every pane— Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass: Sometimes you come upon them in the lane, The saddest crowd that you will ever pass. But still we merry town or village folk Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin, And think no shame to stop and crack a joke With the incarnate wages of man’s sin. None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet, The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet, The hare-bell bowing on his stem, Dance not with us; their pulses beat To fainter music; nor do we to them Make their life sweet. The gayest crowd that they will ever pass Are we to brother-shadows in the lane: Our windows, too, are clouded glass To them, yes, every pane! Mew is something of an enigma; she was first published in the 1890s when she had a short story published in the first yellow book; her poems came along twenty years later. She fell in love over the years with two women, Ella D’Arcy and May Sinclair, with no reciprocation. There is evidence of inner turmoil on many issues and Mew expresses her feelings brilliantly in her poetry. She often takes on a male voice as she does In Nunhead Cemetery, where she also ponders death and madness, considering the processes of a split mind; It is the clay what makes the earth stick to his spade; He fills in holes like this year after year; The others have gone; they were tired, and half afraid But I would rather be standing here; There is nowhere else to go. I have seen this place From the windows of the train that's going past Against the sky. This is rain on my face - It was raining here when I saw it last. There is something horrible about a flower; This, broken in my hand, is one of those He threw it in just now; it will not live another hour; There are thousands more; you do not miss a rose. One of the children hanging about Pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled This morning after THAT was carried out; There is something terrible about a child. We were like children last week, in the Strand; That was the day you laughed at me Because I tried to make you understand The cheap, stale chap I used to be Before I saw the things you made me see. This is not a real place; perhaps by-and-by I shall wake - I am getting drenched with all this rain: To-morrow I will tell you about the eyes of the Chrystal Palace train Looking down on us, and you will laugh and I shall see what you see again. Not here, not now. We said "Not yet Across our low stone parapet Will the quick shadows of the sparrows fall. But still it was a lovely thing Through the grey months to wait for Spring With the birds that go a-gypsying In the parks till the blue seas call. And next to these, you used to care For the Lions in Trafalgar Square, Who'll stand and speak for London when her bell of Judgement tolls - And the gulls at Westminster that were The old sea-captains souls. To-day again the brown tide splashes step by step, the river stair, And the gulls are there! By a month we have missed our Day: The children would have hung about Round the carriage and over the way As you and I came out. We should have stood on the gulls' black cliffs and heard the sea And seen the moon's white track, I would have called, you would have come to me And kissed me back. You have never done that: I do not know Why I stood staring at your bed And heard you, though you spoke so low, But could not reach your hands, your little head; There was nothing we could not do, you said, And you went, and I let you go! Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through, Though I am damned for it we two will lie And burn, here where the starlings fly To these white stones from the wet sky - ; Dear, you will say this is not I - It would not be you, it would not be you! If for only a little while You will think of it you will understand, If you will touch my sleeve and smile As you did that morning in the Strand I can wait quietly with you Or go away if you want me to - God! What is God? but your face has gone and your hand! Let me stay here too. When I was quite a little lad At Christmas time we went half mad For joy of all the toys we had, And then we used to sing about the sheep The shepherds watched by night; We used to pray to Christ to keep Our small souls safe till morning light - ; I am scared, I am staying with you to-night - Put me to sleep. I shall stay here: here you can see the sky; The houses in the street are much too high; There is no one left to speak to there; Here they are everywhere, And just above them fields and fields of roses lie - If he would dig it all up again they would not die. The poetry is striking and Mew herself is intriguing; she dressed as a dandy in male clothing and was most likely a lesbian, but her inner turmoil is writ large in her writings. The prose in this collection has a gothic edge, a story of two sisters living together during the Napoleonic Wars and a short play about the tensions between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law with a sharp twist at the end which is most surprising. Charlotte Mew doesn’t deserve to be neglected; give her a try 9 out of 10 Starting Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett

Meat Market; Female Flesh under Capitalism by Laurie Penny This is a sharp, tightly written and polemical book on feminism and modern capitalism’s effect on female bodies, which approaches the issues raised with feminist thought from a perspective which reflects writers like Shulamith Firestone. Penny is concerned with capitalist patriarchy and addresses debates within feminism. A personal note is needed here. I was brought up within a fundamentalist Christion context with very traditional ideas about gender roles. Men went out to work, women looked after the house and children. One significant theological aspect of my background had a lasting effect and that was the doctrine of original sin. Whilst this doctrine is rather negative and guilt inducing, there is an interesting aspect. With original sin everyone is absolutely equal in terms of sin. There is no gradation for race, gender, colour, class or creed. We are all the same. Once I lost the religious aspect and decided I was not religious, I still had the sense that all people were equal. I started addressing these ideas seriously when I was at university. I didn’t start by reading The Second Sex or The Female Eunuch. My way in was Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Age and life experience have had their effect, but I still fundamentally accept the ideas Penny articulates in this text. There are chapters on eating disorders, transgender, sexuality (including pornography and sex workers), and work within capitalism (including domestic work). Penny does not shy away from debates and disagreements within feminism and her stance is firmly within the left of politics seeing patriarchy and capitalism as being firmly intertwined. This is brief so there are inevitably areas not covered, but that is not the point, the arguments are set out clearly and are a good starting point for more detailed reading. The analysis is impressive and the synthesis of Marxist and feminist analysis is convincing. The Red Pepper review emphasizes the importance of the arguments about body image and the sections about body image and eating disorders are very strong. This isn’t just a theoretical wander around the subject, it is a call to action as well. This is well worth reading and is guaranteed to make you think. 9 out of 10 Starting The Alice B Toklas Cookbook

The Trap by Dorothy Richardson This is the eighth novel in the Pilgrimage series and when I start the ninth I will move onto final volume in the virago four volume edition. Miriam by now is in her late 20s and she moves into an apartment which she shares with a Miss Holland. The title refers to the fact that this is not a successful move on Miriam’s part. She doesn’t get on with Miss Holland and the tenants downstairs are noisy. The Taylors, Michael Shatov and Dr Densley are all still around and Dr Densley appears to have hopes in relation to Miriam. Miriam also attends meetings of the Lycurgans. The Lycurgans are Richardson’s portrayal of the Fabian Society, a group which promoted socialist ideas. The tensions within this section are really about Miriam realising that she is not really adapted to living with others; her attempt at a shared life with Miss Holland is a disaster. The end of the novel where Miriam says to herself “Away, Away” is an indicative of a change to come. The question at this point is what sort of a shift is to come. Will Miriam leave London or will it be a change of consciousness. We know at this point that Miriam is looking for a type of friendship; this is to find a female type of the male friendship outlined by Montaigne and Aristotle. Miriam reads James’s The Ambassadors and announces that James had “achieved the first completely satisfying way of writing a novel”. She becomes obsessed with the novel for a time. Although Richardson was a fan of James, she denied any stylistic link. I felt this was very much a preparatory and intermediate novel. Miriam is testing out various things; eliminating what she doesn’t want to find what she does want. 8 out of 10 Starting the ninth novel Oberland