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feather_ghyll) wrote2023-08-05 10:28 am
feather_ghyll) wrote2023-08-05 10:28 am
OVERVIEW: Some books I read last month
I read these books in July, but they didn’t warrant a post of their own. I should also say I didn’t enjoy any of them much. ‘Two in a Tangle’ by Mary Gervaise starts with two orphaned girls with similar names meeting. One, Joyce, who the other nicknames Gipsy, is about to join the woman who adopted her, the other, Joy, is living a strange, restricted life. She suggests they change places, and despite herself, Gipsy agrees.
That they and several other people who are connected to them, whether they knew it before or not, all end up in neighbouring Cornish villages probably says it all about the plot. It’s fortunate that the book focuses more on Gipsy than Joy, whose selfishness and petulance was largely caused by her upbringing, but it makes her less fun to read about. I think that even if the book had been all about Gipsy, I’d be complaining about how unlikely the plot was, although the part I enjoyed most was her time at boarding school pretending to be someone else (and finding out who she really is as so many orphans in children’s books do.)
I think ‘The Heart of The Family’ is the first book by Elizabeth Goudge I’ve read. (I’ve watched adaptations of The Little White Horse or The Secret of Moonacre.) I was dismayed to see it’s the third book about the Elliots, who are something of a clan, but in it Sebastian Weber comes to Damerosehay for the first time to work as David Eliot’s secretary and I was introduced to the family alongside him, from matriarch Lucilla to toddler Robin. Goudge even dips into the mind of one of the family dogs.
The trouble is that I disagreed with Goudge’s unorthodox spiritual beliefs (no, that is not how I understand grace or substitution.) I was absorbed, but in an increasingly irritated way. For one thing, why do people who don’t always talk about their beliefs always end up using the same metaphors, ‘the freshness in the depths’ and ‘the pits’? That annoyed me stylistically.
The view that mental ill-health is a moral failing has dated. Given what Weber went through – without giving too many details away, it’s trauma (the book is set after the second world war) – suffering from psychosis in response seems understandable. The attitudes towards pregnancy and, indeed, gender are dated too – men are the doers in life, and women are maternal/housewives or at least hostesses, apparently, and if one doesn’t attract men, one is rather pathetic. And the way she writes about fathers and daughters and mothers and sons must have had Freudians commenting when it was first published.
I ought to be more appreciative of a domestic novel that’s also about the spiritual plane, but I so wasn’t.
L.T. Meade’s ‘A World of Girls’ is a very, very early girls own book (but features a midnight feast!) I found it quite sentimental – so many kisses! Girls are referred to as ‘love’ or ‘my love’ at Lavender House, although the younger girls refer to the girls of the first class and girls they’ve just met as ‘Miss Whoever!’ It’s improving fiction – I wondered if the parishioners were really delighted with how much time the vicar spent at the school, but to the writer’s way of thinking, they probably thought ‘the young ladies’ were more important than people of the lower orders.
Whatever the author intended, I was railing for most of the book at one of the main character’s fathers. Hester ‘Hetty’ Thornton is 12 and still grieving for her mother when she’s sent to school by her strict and undemonstrative father for being too tomboyish (behaviour that vanishes once she gets to school.) As there are younger girls at the school, and if Mrs Willis was such an important person in Hetty’s mother’s life that she made her the godmother of Hetty’s only sister Nan, why was Hetty not sent to the school earlier? Why hadn’t she met Mrs Willis before? I think the answers are really ‘plot contrivance’ but I like to think that Mrs Thornton wanted to have her affectionate eldest daughter around to counterbalance Sir Strict and Undemonstrative.
(I probably shouldn’t judge from 2023 standards. In one, almost casual line, Meade informs us that Hetty had many brothers and sisters between her and toddler Nan, but they all died in infancy. That might also be a reason why Hetty was kept at home.)
But then, Hetty’s father decides a few months after Hetty starts at school that he’s going to close his ‘establishment’ for seven years, and send his youngest, now THREE (two years younger than the youngest pupil) to Lavender House!!! Nan gets kidnapped by Gypsies, which is a means of Hetty getting over her hate for the school favourite, which wasn’t good for either her soul or Annie Forest’s. So what kind of parenting or in loco parenting is that in a world where the Dread Gypsies are written as thieves who like camping near Danish forts to hide their loot/kidnapped children?
That they and several other people who are connected to them, whether they knew it before or not, all end up in neighbouring Cornish villages probably says it all about the plot. It’s fortunate that the book focuses more on Gipsy than Joy, whose selfishness and petulance was largely caused by her upbringing, but it makes her less fun to read about. I think that even if the book had been all about Gipsy, I’d be complaining about how unlikely the plot was, although the part I enjoyed most was her time at boarding school pretending to be someone else (and finding out who she really is as so many orphans in children’s books do.)
I think ‘The Heart of The Family’ is the first book by Elizabeth Goudge I’ve read. (I’ve watched adaptations of The Little White Horse or The Secret of Moonacre.) I was dismayed to see it’s the third book about the Elliots, who are something of a clan, but in it Sebastian Weber comes to Damerosehay for the first time to work as David Eliot’s secretary and I was introduced to the family alongside him, from matriarch Lucilla to toddler Robin. Goudge even dips into the mind of one of the family dogs.
The trouble is that I disagreed with Goudge’s unorthodox spiritual beliefs (no, that is not how I understand grace or substitution.) I was absorbed, but in an increasingly irritated way. For one thing, why do people who don’t always talk about their beliefs always end up using the same metaphors, ‘the freshness in the depths’ and ‘the pits’? That annoyed me stylistically.
The view that mental ill-health is a moral failing has dated. Given what Weber went through – without giving too many details away, it’s trauma (the book is set after the second world war) – suffering from psychosis in response seems understandable. The attitudes towards pregnancy and, indeed, gender are dated too – men are the doers in life, and women are maternal/housewives or at least hostesses, apparently, and if one doesn’t attract men, one is rather pathetic. And the way she writes about fathers and daughters and mothers and sons must have had Freudians commenting when it was first published.
I ought to be more appreciative of a domestic novel that’s also about the spiritual plane, but I so wasn’t.
L.T. Meade’s ‘A World of Girls’ is a very, very early girls own book (but features a midnight feast!) I found it quite sentimental – so many kisses! Girls are referred to as ‘love’ or ‘my love’ at Lavender House, although the younger girls refer to the girls of the first class and girls they’ve just met as ‘Miss Whoever!’ It’s improving fiction – I wondered if the parishioners were really delighted with how much time the vicar spent at the school, but to the writer’s way of thinking, they probably thought ‘the young ladies’ were more important than people of the lower orders.
Whatever the author intended, I was railing for most of the book at one of the main character’s fathers. Hester ‘Hetty’ Thornton is 12 and still grieving for her mother when she’s sent to school by her strict and undemonstrative father for being too tomboyish (behaviour that vanishes once she gets to school.) As there are younger girls at the school, and if Mrs Willis was such an important person in Hetty’s mother’s life that she made her the godmother of Hetty’s only sister Nan, why was Hetty not sent to the school earlier? Why hadn’t she met Mrs Willis before? I think the answers are really ‘plot contrivance’ but I like to think that Mrs Thornton wanted to have her affectionate eldest daughter around to counterbalance Sir Strict and Undemonstrative.
(I probably shouldn’t judge from 2023 standards. In one, almost casual line, Meade informs us that Hetty had many brothers and sisters between her and toddler Nan, but they all died in infancy. That might also be a reason why Hetty was kept at home.)
But then, Hetty’s father decides a few months after Hetty starts at school that he’s going to close his ‘establishment’ for seven years, and send his youngest, now THREE (two years younger than the youngest pupil) to Lavender House!!! Nan gets kidnapped by Gypsies, which is a means of Hetty getting over her hate for the school favourite, which wasn’t good for either her soul or Annie Forest’s. So what kind of parenting or in loco parenting is that in a world where the Dread Gypsies are written as thieves who like camping near Danish forts to hide their loot/kidnapped children?