Hotel Du Lac

All I learned I learned from Father. Think again Edith. You have made a false equation.

I tried to read an Anita Brookner novel in my twenties and found it too ponderous and slow. Oh the foolishness of youth! Now I'm well into my forties I've finally got around to reading Hotel du Lac and can appreciate Brookner for the superb writer she is.

Edith, a romantic novelist, is sent by her friends to stay at the Hotel du Lac on the shores of Lake Geneva after she disgraces herself in polite London society (can't give anything away). She is intrigued by the summer inhabitants of the Hotel du Lac and finds unexpectedly that their lives encroach upon hers.

A beautifully written short novel, a hotel setting, a dedication to Rosamond Lehmann and a subtle and clever ending. Perfect!

Re-reading Persuasion

To my mind Persuasion is the most perfect novel. At just over 250 pages it can be read over a weekend but the haunting melancholy feel haunts you for days afterwards. It is a happy novel, too. It is about second chances and mistakes rectified.

Austen described Anne Elliot as 'almost too good for me' and Anne is indeed good, but without the annoying passivity of Fanny Price from Mansfield Park. Anne is older, wiser and damaged by the error of judgement she made eight years before in refusing to marry Captain Wentworth. My favourite scene from Persuasion is when Anne is walking on the Cobb at Lyme and a stranger turns to admire her regained beauty (the stranger, of course, turns out to be Mr Elliot).

Can you imagine any of Austen's heroes wearing a hooped petticoat for a joke?! Clarence Hervey does in Belinda in order to settle a bet with the gloriously bitchy Lady Delacour and it is the interplay between these two which make the novel so enjoyable.

Belinda Portman, beautiful, young, kind-hearted and naive is sent by her Aunt Stanhope (nicknamed 'catchmaker matchmaker') to stay with Lady Delacour in London with a view to landing a wealthy husband. Lady Delacour 'one of the most dissipated women in London' is vain, spendthrift, dazzling and witty in public and languid, petulant and weary in private. She is also hiding a breast wound she received in a duel which she believes will kill her.

One would think that under the guidance of Lady Delacour, Belinda would become hopelessly lost, but in fact the opposite is true. Though naive, Belinda is not short of common sense and she is attracted to a peaceable domesticity rather than the unhinged life of Lady Delacour. The two women eventually become close and loyal friends and Belinda falls in love with the charming Clarence Hervey.

I really want to re-read another Austen novel, now - so much for making plans! Sense and Sensibility I think.

Plan

Spent an enjoyable afternoon in a coffee shop finalising the list of novelists and poets for my What Jane Read reading project. It may change because I don't know who is still in print but it's good to have a plan!

Maria Edgeworth

Elizabeth Inchbald

Charlotte Smith

William Cowper

Fanny Burney

Further recommendations, thoughts or advice are always welcome. The best thing about blogging (for me) is the communication with other readers.

Belinda

Well I'm supposed to be reading Wolf Hall but every time I pick it up and look at that great long list of characters and all those family trees at the front of the book my heart sinks. I couldn't resist putting it aside to start Belinda and I think I'm going to have to blag my way through book group next week.

Desperate Reader posted a great review of Belinda a few months ago which inspired me to read it. I'm only a few chapters in but already there is cross-dressing, female duels, masked balls and secret rooms!

The cover illustration features a taffeta gown made of gold coloured silk in the Polonaise style of 1774 from V&A Images. Isn't it fabulous?

Helen

I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own. Jane Austen, letter to Anna Austen, Wednesday 28th September 1814

Helen Stanley is a gentle heroine. Not as passive as Fanny in Mansfield Park, more like a younger version of Anne in Persuasion. Orphaned as a child and educated beyond her fortune, she is bought up by her kindly but extravagant uncle. After his sudden death she is adopted by Lady Davenant the mother of her best friend, Cecilia.

Cecilia provides a lively contrast to Helen. Spirited, confident and an incurable liar, she charms the reader and exploits Helen's naivety. Helen believes Cecilia's blatant lie that the man she loves is engaged and when Cecilia suggests that, as best friends, they always dress alike she orders jewellery way beyond her income. Of course, Cecilia's lies lead to her downfall and the plot races along to a most satisfying end which I'm not going to spoil.

Maria Edgeworth is an astute writer, politically engaged and some of her waspish lines could be lifted straight from an Austen novel:

Helen was too pretty to be invited to stay at a house where there are marriageable daughters.

She is different to Austen, too. About half way through I realised that Helen is not a love story but an exploration of female relationships. I've ordered Edgeworth's Belinda and I'm tempted to re-read Persuasion that most autumnal of Austen's novels.

What Jane Read

At last, I've embarked upon a reading project I've been planning for a long time. I want to read the women writers who inspired Jane Austen and I'm starting off with Maria Edgeworth's Helen after it caught my eye in a bookshop recently.

I should say that Austen couldn't possibly have read Helen because it was published after her death, but she certainly read Edgeworth and Belinda is one of the novels Austen refers to in her famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey.

Helen is a 500 page novel and it has taken me a while to settle into the rhythm and pace of it but Edgeworth is a very fine writer with an acute observation of human nature and I just can't put it down.

Women in Africa

I sat beside my mother, only a little less fortified in a pith helmet and a starched cotton dress.

Out of Africa has been haunting me since I read it and LizF's comment about The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley inspired me to seek it out. Happily this coincided with a visit to the lovely big Waterstones in Brighton which had a copy on the shelves.

Elspeth Huxley's account of a childhood in Kenya is lively and extremely well-written. I loved the dry wit of her father Robin and her fearless mother, Tilly. There was also the aristocratic Lettice, completely out of place in Africa with her two spoilt Pekingese dogs Chang and Zena who sit on silk cushions all day until poor Chang meets his demise when a hungry leopard snatches him from the veranda.

Published in 1959 The Flame Trees of Thika documents Elspeth's experiences as a British child growing up in Africa and the hardships her parents faced as settlers as well as their remarkable resilience and optimism.