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Catherine, Called Birdy: Karen Cushman (Macmillan Children’s Books, 1996)

I recently saw a trailer for a film (or it could be a TV series) called ‘Catherine, Called Birdy’ written and directed by Lena Dunham, which reminded me I owned and had read this book from which it’s adapted. The trailer made me laugh and promisingly suggested that the adaptation catches the spirit and the humour of the book. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see it as it’s an Amazon production, but I could and did reread the book.

( It's the funny, sometimes poignant diary of a spirited young noble lady in medieval England )

Singled Out – How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War: Virginia Nicholson

This book focuses on a section of society that I’d only been dimly aware of, namely the women who remained single after the men they might well have married had been killed during the first world war. The ‘lost generation’ are still remembered, even now, but not so much the women who lived on without them, even though their existence in such numbers changed society and women’s place in it, as this book details.

( Read more... )

The Governess: Peggy Chambers, Peacock 1964

This wasn’t the book that I thought it was when I put it on my ‘to reread’ pile. In and of itself, that says something about how memorable I found it, some 20 years on after buying it.

In a way, it reminded me of those 1950s career books for girls. It could have been called ‘Isabel Dennison – Governess’. But ( Read more... )

Number of books reread during February: four and a half.

[Lightly edited on 9 November 2019.#

Mistletoe and Murder: Robin Stevens (Puffin 2016)
A Murder Most Unladylike/Wells and Wong mystery

As alluded to at the end of the previous book in the series, ‘Jolly Foul Play’, Hazel and Daisy go to Cambridge for Christmas, meeting all the members of the Junior Pinkerton society. Inevitably, they come across a mystery or two and it’s no surprise that murder is committed soon thereafter.

This was my Christmas Day book – I’d pretty much decided to read it then when I bought my copy. I read it in three sittings, and I’m still trying to decide what I made of it. ( Read more... )

This has to be the most ill-timed review I've ever posted, but I also read and enjoyed this book over the weekend, before I knew that there was going to be a Storm Doris. I've overheard a conversation bemoaning the use of the name 'Doris' - it's associated with nice women, apparently!

Doris’s High School Days: Clarice March. Blackie

A few pages in, ( Read more... )

Death on the Cherwell: Mavis Doriel Hay, 2014, The British Library

Four female undergraduate students from Persephone College, Oxford University, are in the process of setting up a secret society. Its main purpose is ( Read more... )

Greetings! I've been away, yes on a beach, and here are a couple of the books that I read that I think you'd enjoy too.

Introducing Aunt Dimity, Paranormal Detective: Nancy Atherton. Penguin 2009.

This is an omnibus edition of the first two novels in the 'Aunt Dimity' series, which I think I came across in an Amazon 'if you like this book, why not this' way?. Well, I now have another series to collect. The blurb describes them as 'cosy' mysteries, and they very much are, with a slight paranormal element, romance and growing. self confidence for their heroines. They also fit in with a very American type of Anglophilia.

Aunt Dimity's Death ( Read more... )

The website for the series Aunt Dimity's world should give you some idea of the flavour of the books.

I also read Bluestockings: Jane Robinson Penguin 2010.

It was an impulse buy - I had underpacked and so visited the airport's WHSmiths in a flustered mood, but was high-minded enough to buy this. I'm glad I did, it was quite a few of the things that the similarly themed Willingly to School wasn't. ( Read more... )

Nicky of the Lower Fourth by Evelyn Smith (Blackie & Son.) is the first book by this authoress that I’ve ever read, but I’ll certainly keep an eye out for more from now on. ( Read more... )

Willingly to School: Mary Cathcart Borer Lutterworth Press 1976.

I have to admit to being underwhelmed. For one thing, surely it would have been more honest to subtitle it ‘A History of English Women’s Education’, ( Read more... )

Torley Grange: Gwendoline Courtney Girls Gone By Publishers, 2008.

The word that comes to me after having enjoyed reading this book on a train journey is ‘jolly’. ( Read more... )

I've referred to Lucy Mangan's series of features on how to build up 'a brilliant children's library' before. Here in No. 15, she reaches Dimsie goes to School and Angela Brazils. Apparently the only difference between Fairlie Bruce and Angela Brazil is that one wrote her books a little earlier, which is unfair. Though I do appreciate that this is a short piece and she's talking about Dimsie as a representative of a genre.

But no, I cn't help but be pedantic, Fairlie Bruce wrote about Scotland as well as England, and Jean is a rubbish example of stoicism. I type as one who has four Dimsies waiting to be read upstairs. There's also a reference to 'You're A Brick, Angela' in the article, which apparatently was 'the first substantial book of criticism-cum-championing of girls' school stories'. This leads to the inevitable thought that if that's championing, who needs undermining. (I discuss that book and line of thought here.

Mangan's argument for these books is mainly nostalgic, though she makes an interesting point about how these books are no longer being passed on. Is this true? The Chalet School, Mallory Towers, St Clare's and Trebizons were easily available in paperback as I grew up, and I found others from my mother and her friends', a haphazard collection, and became a haunter of charity shops and Christmas fairs, but I was a real bookworm. But what about young girls these days? Do they get their hands on copies to beguile, entertain and confuse them?