DISCUSSION: Evelyn Finds Herself thoughts
Mar. 29th, 2009 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllI'm reading Girls Gone By's republishing of Evelyn Finds Herself - what an absorbing book, and I definitely join the readers who rate it highly. I'm partly writing this to defer reaching the ending, partly to get these thoughts down now. I read some of the introductory stuff - some I left to read after finishing the book and some for after I've read a non-fiction book that I have about girls' education (don't hold your breath about when that'll be).
I own the Farm School trilogy, which I loved, and I can see the similarity between Annis and Kitty and Evelyn and Elizabeth's friendships and development. The biographical infomation was interesting: it never occured to me that Josephine Elder was a nom de plume, and I'll have to check my copies, which are at my parents' house, to discover whether she was still alive when I first read any of her first books. Still, she was alive during my childhood (she died in 1988) which I find touching. Somehow, I had a strange, fixed idea of the writers of Girls Own books, not that they were all dead and buried, exactly, but that they existed Somewhere Else. Possibly elves helped bind their books. The way that the internet allows us to be in contact with and/or to discover more about authors - contemporary or not - makes me realise how I held on to that idea. Stupid really, and it didn't apply for every author. Perhaps though, as a child, I particularly liked thinking of girls' own authors as being like Mary-Dorothy's radio listeners.
One day, I want to write a post about the additional extras that come with many modern books (as if they were DVDs), specifically the Girls Gone By books, but not exclusively. Here, the setting in context of Girls Own books, summarising the educational system they represented and sketching out Dr Olive Potter/Josephine Elder's career has certainly fed into my reaction to the book itself. Apparently Potter was one of the first women to study to be a doctor (this made me think of a spot on scene in A Company of Swans in which a chauvinistic university lecturer has to contend with women dissecting male creatures, under his observation.)
The book is so good, and being set in a day school, that it's taking me back to my own school days - I'm overlaying my memories of our labs and class rooms on to the story. It's more a subjective thing, and I do it to lesser or greater degrees with other books, all the boarding schools I've read about are variants of places I've visited in my mind's eye. I know it's absurd, but it says something about how vivid and identifiable what Elder is writing about is. As my reading of the introductory pieces prepared me to reognise, there are differences between my aspirations and what I took out of school to what is true of these characters, the big difference is that these girls and their teachers were pioneers, among the first to think seriously and realistically of university education in the sciences and the career opportuniities that that would bring. (Evelyn obviously mainly inherits her abilities in this field from her doctor father. Her mother can pass on domestic skills and training, because that is all she has known. If her mother has abilities in this area, they are latent.) I came after generations of women (not in my family) who had taken that path. I never supposed that I couldn't or that I shouldn't. There are other differences, even as I recognise the similarities in the depiction of girlhood experiences, and I hope to get to them when I do a review.
Edited slightly on 11.2.10
I own the Farm School trilogy, which I loved, and I can see the similarity between Annis and Kitty and Evelyn and Elizabeth's friendships and development. The biographical infomation was interesting: it never occured to me that Josephine Elder was a nom de plume, and I'll have to check my copies, which are at my parents' house, to discover whether she was still alive when I first read any of her first books. Still, she was alive during my childhood (she died in 1988) which I find touching. Somehow, I had a strange, fixed idea of the writers of Girls Own books, not that they were all dead and buried, exactly, but that they existed Somewhere Else. Possibly elves helped bind their books. The way that the internet allows us to be in contact with and/or to discover more about authors - contemporary or not - makes me realise how I held on to that idea. Stupid really, and it didn't apply for every author. Perhaps though, as a child, I particularly liked thinking of girls' own authors as being like Mary-Dorothy's radio listeners.
One day, I want to write a post about the additional extras that come with many modern books (as if they were DVDs), specifically the Girls Gone By books, but not exclusively. Here, the setting in context of Girls Own books, summarising the educational system they represented and sketching out Dr Olive Potter/Josephine Elder's career has certainly fed into my reaction to the book itself. Apparently Potter was one of the first women to study to be a doctor (this made me think of a spot on scene in A Company of Swans in which a chauvinistic university lecturer has to contend with women dissecting male creatures, under his observation.)
The book is so good, and being set in a day school, that it's taking me back to my own school days - I'm overlaying my memories of our labs and class rooms on to the story. It's more a subjective thing, and I do it to lesser or greater degrees with other books, all the boarding schools I've read about are variants of places I've visited in my mind's eye. I know it's absurd, but it says something about how vivid and identifiable what Elder is writing about is. As my reading of the introductory pieces prepared me to reognise, there are differences between my aspirations and what I took out of school to what is true of these characters, the big difference is that these girls and their teachers were pioneers, among the first to think seriously and realistically of university education in the sciences and the career opportuniities that that would bring. (Evelyn obviously mainly inherits her abilities in this field from her doctor father. Her mother can pass on domestic skills and training, because that is all she has known. If her mother has abilities in this area, they are latent.) I came after generations of women (not in my family) who had taken that path. I never supposed that I couldn't or that I shouldn't. There are other differences, even as I recognise the similarities in the depiction of girlhood experiences, and I hope to get to them when I do a review.
Edited slightly on 11.2.10
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 03:09 pm (UTC)That's an interesting point about Girlsown authors overlapping with our own lives. When I read books as a child, I never thought about the authors at all, certainly wouldn't have thought of writing to one. It was only when I was grown up that I became aware of them as a real people and possibly still alive. I look forward to what you have to say about the extras with modern reprints. Why don't you write it up for Folly?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 05:37 pm (UTC)as it's based on my own old school!
How cool!
A further thought about distancing between us as modern day readers and Girls Own books is that my collection began with hand-me-downs from my mother (which may have included a Winifred Darch, or it would have been a really early purchase) and some of her friends, so that would have prejudged me a little, I think.
The ideas about extras haven't coalesced into something solid. I hope they do, although I don't think it'll be anything comprehensive. I think it'd be cheek to write ip up for Folly when I'm not a subscriber (it's on my 'to do...maybe' list. Subscribing, that is.)