Two books about women's literature, of a very different kind: Rosemary Auchmuty's A world of women was an interesting follow-up to her book A world of girls, but ultimately either unconvincing or repetitive. A world of girls dealt with the school stories of Elinor Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elsie Oxenham, and A world of women revisits these, looking at adulthood and the process of growing up in the school story. While I liked Auchmuty's suggestion that one of the important reasons for the popularity of the school story was that it presented a purely female world as as supportive and fulfilling atmosphere in which girls and young women could achieve on their own terms, what she mostly does in the later book is reiterate this. However, her suggestion that the unreality of the heterosexual romantic relationships in all these school novels is a deliberate ploy on the part of the authors in order to subvert the conventional future envisaged for young women at this time seems to be to be completely far-fetched: the cursory way that the romances are sometimes described may be down to the writers' lack of interest in the romance genre. but to posity this as a deliberate subversion seems to me to be an exaggeration of the conscious feminism of the writers as well as an overestimation of their writing talents. [67]
Elaine Showalter's A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing was a wonderful book, looking at women's writing in terms of Showalter's proposed periods of feminist consciousness: first feminine consciousness, in which women internalise patriarchal views of their own abilities and attributes and strive to be as good as men, then feminist consciousness, in which women protest against the prevailing patriarchal attitudes, and finally female consciousness, in which women turn to female experience as a method of self-discovery and self-expression. I really thought this was wonderful: half cultural history and half literary criticism. It makes me need to reread all the Brontës and Eliot and read some more Virginia Woolf. Luckily, I currently have plenty of reading time... [68]
28 October, 2007
Three French novels and others
All very different, but all brilliant.
Nana was brilliant in atmosphere: Zola describes the hot, odorous backstage of the Variétés in such a physical way that you can almost feel the sickly stuffiness. I also loved the way he contrasts the two worlds in Parisian society: the contrast between the Comtesse Muffat's icily respectable reception and the dinner organised by Nana is wonderful - the men are the same group of aristocrats, but the women are different, and the way that Nana tries to bring an air of elegance to her evening but only succeeds in producing a rather incongruously bourgeois atmosphere is wonderfully described. The last scene, in which Nana is dying in a hotel, surrounded not by the men she has lived off but the actresses and prostitutes she has competed against, is unforgettable: outside the crowds are calling 'To Berlin! To Berlin!' as the Franco-Prussian war begins and upstairs Nana is lying with her beauty destroyed, dying in the most disgusting and painful way.
L'éducation sentimentale also shows a French society which is divided between the respectable women and the underworld of prostitution, with men moving freely between the two, and is also a reflection of the perceived corrupt French society at the time, but more bitterly ironic and less tortured than Zola. It's a sort of Bildungsroman, but describing the way in which Frédéric Moreau loses all of his youthful ideals and becomes ever more jaded: with his security assured by an inheritance, his life becomes more and more aimless as he rejects or fails at each of the possibilities which present themselves to him. I like the way that money is written about so exactly in French novels of this period: as Frédéric's fortunes diminish, the amount he has to live on per year are given in precise amounts, and in all three novels money is dealt with very openly and precisely.
Le rouge et le noir also deals with a young man starting out in life, but a completely different man: Julien Sorel is driven and proud, a secret Bonapartist, the opposite of diffident Frédéric. This is a marvellously strange novel: partly a sort of satire of Romantic novels of young men setting out in the world - in Le rouge et le noir everything is so measured and calculated, every step Julien takes is because he feels he can move up the social ladder in some way - partly a cold denunciation of the France of 1830, with its hypocritical municipal officials, small-mindedness and the rule of the Catholic Church. Stendhal looks so coldly upon his characters and their motives for everything, but can't help every so often making a sly, amused remark about their behaviour which stands oddly with what feels like his disgust with the state of the world. [64]
Doris Lessing has written that "the ideal lover of Stendhal comes, as he did, from a family of conventional people in a provincial town... which is snug, complacent and reactionary, both politically and socially". In her Martha Quest novels, she describes the society she comes from: the white colonial world of Rhodesia. I read, or rather re-read, Martha Quest in the spring, and have now got round to the next two books, A proper marriage and A ripple from the storm. These are fantastic evocations of the time and place: the colonies in a period when liberation of the native populations was not viewed as a possibility, but also when the coming of the second world war gave the impression that everything had to change, and radically. A proper marriage is about Martha's stifling marriage to a conventional man and contains one of the most eye-wateringly horrific descriptions of institutionalised childbirth I have ever read, as well as evoking the bizarre provincialism and claustrophobia of the white world in Rhodesia in a very clever and dark way. In A ripple in the storm Martha has left her husband and become involved with a nascent, tiny Communist group, and bizarrely Lessing manages to make a book which consists of a series of political meetings very funny - as well as bitter. [65] [66]
Nana was brilliant in atmosphere: Zola describes the hot, odorous backstage of the Variétés in such a physical way that you can almost feel the sickly stuffiness. I also loved the way he contrasts the two worlds in Parisian society: the contrast between the Comtesse Muffat's icily respectable reception and the dinner organised by Nana is wonderful - the men are the same group of aristocrats, but the women are different, and the way that Nana tries to bring an air of elegance to her evening but only succeeds in producing a rather incongruously bourgeois atmosphere is wonderfully described. The last scene, in which Nana is dying in a hotel, surrounded not by the men she has lived off but the actresses and prostitutes she has competed against, is unforgettable: outside the crowds are calling 'To Berlin! To Berlin!' as the Franco-Prussian war begins and upstairs Nana is lying with her beauty destroyed, dying in the most disgusting and painful way.
L'éducation sentimentale also shows a French society which is divided between the respectable women and the underworld of prostitution, with men moving freely between the two, and is also a reflection of the perceived corrupt French society at the time, but more bitterly ironic and less tortured than Zola. It's a sort of Bildungsroman, but describing the way in which Frédéric Moreau loses all of his youthful ideals and becomes ever more jaded: with his security assured by an inheritance, his life becomes more and more aimless as he rejects or fails at each of the possibilities which present themselves to him. I like the way that money is written about so exactly in French novels of this period: as Frédéric's fortunes diminish, the amount he has to live on per year are given in precise amounts, and in all three novels money is dealt with very openly and precisely.
Le rouge et le noir also deals with a young man starting out in life, but a completely different man: Julien Sorel is driven and proud, a secret Bonapartist, the opposite of diffident Frédéric. This is a marvellously strange novel: partly a sort of satire of Romantic novels of young men setting out in the world - in Le rouge et le noir everything is so measured and calculated, every step Julien takes is because he feels he can move up the social ladder in some way - partly a cold denunciation of the France of 1830, with its hypocritical municipal officials, small-mindedness and the rule of the Catholic Church. Stendhal looks so coldly upon his characters and their motives for everything, but can't help every so often making a sly, amused remark about their behaviour which stands oddly with what feels like his disgust with the state of the world. [64]
Doris Lessing has written that "the ideal lover of Stendhal comes, as he did, from a family of conventional people in a provincial town... which is snug, complacent and reactionary, both politically and socially". In her Martha Quest novels, she describes the society she comes from: the white colonial world of Rhodesia. I read, or rather re-read, Martha Quest in the spring, and have now got round to the next two books, A proper marriage and A ripple from the storm. These are fantastic evocations of the time and place: the colonies in a period when liberation of the native populations was not viewed as a possibility, but also when the coming of the second world war gave the impression that everything had to change, and radically. A proper marriage is about Martha's stifling marriage to a conventional man and contains one of the most eye-wateringly horrific descriptions of institutionalised childbirth I have ever read, as well as evoking the bizarre provincialism and claustrophobia of the white world in Rhodesia in a very clever and dark way. In A ripple in the storm Martha has left her husband and become involved with a nascent, tiny Communist group, and bizarrely Lessing manages to make a book which consists of a series of political meetings very funny - as well as bitter. [65] [66]
16 October, 2007
Catching up
I am currently very, very behind, so here is a list of what I've read recently and I'll try to do some longer posts on these books later.
Nana [51]
L'éducation sentimentale [52]
George Steiner's The death of tragedy [53]
Billy Collins's Questions about angels [54]
Michael Hamburger's Selected poems [55]
Another poetry book, the title and author of which I have completely forgotten, and which I can only check when I next go to the Poetry Library [56]
Sheila Rowbotham's Dreams and dilemmas, a lovely collection of articles [57]
The Spare Rib reader [58]
A study of the poetry of Keith Douglas, by William Scammell [59]
The night watch, by Sarah Waters [60]
Flight without end, by Joseph Roth [61]
The roaring nineties, by Joseph Stiglitz [62]
A collection of children's wartime and holocaust diaries, collected by Laurel Holliday [63]
I'm currently in the middle of Le rouge et le noir, The selfish gene, Elaine Showalter's A literature of their own and a history of Germany 1918-1990. More soon...
Edit: book number 56 is Jack Gilbert's Transgressions: selected poems.
Nana [51]
L'éducation sentimentale [52]
George Steiner's The death of tragedy [53]
Billy Collins's Questions about angels [54]
Michael Hamburger's Selected poems [55]
Another poetry book, the title and author of which I have completely forgotten, and which I can only check when I next go to the Poetry Library [56]
Sheila Rowbotham's Dreams and dilemmas, a lovely collection of articles [57]
The Spare Rib reader [58]
A study of the poetry of Keith Douglas, by William Scammell [59]
The night watch, by Sarah Waters [60]
Flight without end, by Joseph Roth [61]
The roaring nineties, by Joseph Stiglitz [62]
A collection of children's wartime and holocaust diaries, collected by Laurel Holliday [63]
I'm currently in the middle of Le rouge et le noir, The selfish gene, Elaine Showalter's A literature of their own and a history of Germany 1918-1990. More soon...
Edit: book number 56 is Jack Gilbert's Transgressions: selected poems.
11 October, 2007
Oh and also
I haven't posted in ages and I've read about fifteen books in that time. Will try and do a big catch-up post over the weekend.
Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel prize
Fantastic news. One of my favourite ever authors, and the Golden Notebook is for me one of the most important books I've ever read. I am so utterly delighted about this, it's ridiculous.
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