Agnes Grey

Nipped down to London last week to catch the last few days of the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library which I first read about on Book Snob's blog (Thanks Rachel!)

I particularly wanted to see the Charlotte Bronte manuscript of Jane Eyre.  Her handwriting was exquisite and there was also a notebook with one of Emily's poems.  As usual poor old Anne didn't get a look in.  I don't understand why Anne Bronte is so often overlooked.  Agnes Grey is a little gem of a novel and Agnes has something of the wit of Austen and the spirit of Jane Eyre. 

The British Library has a very nice little bookshop.  Did the fact that I already own two editions of Agnes Grey in paperback stop me buying it again in hardback?  Nah.  When I retire I probably won't be able to afford hardbacks so I want a small collection of Austen and Bronte in the Everyman's Library editions on my bookshelf.

This edition has an introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett who is a perceptive Bronte critic and the cover is part of the portrait of the Bronte sisters painted by Branwell which can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery.  Doesn't Anne have soulful eyes?

'There was no possiblity of taking a walk that day'.

... for as to elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under the mushrooms and beneath the ground ivy mantling old wall nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad fact that they were all gone out of England ...

There is a nip of autumn in the air and my thoughts are turning toward classic Victorian novels. I'm re-reading Jane Eyre. I'd forgotten how powerfully Charlotte Bronte uses the colour red in the early chapters to symbolise the oppression of Jane's unhappy childhood.

There is of course the terrifying 'red room' with its deep-red damask curtains, red carpet, mahogany-red furniture and 'soft fawn walls with a blush of pink' to contrast with the dazzling white bed where ten-year-old Jane is locked as a punishment. Bronte uses the stark red and white contrast in the opening pages where Jane hides behind a red curtain as she sits on the window seat looking out over the winter landscape and tracing frost flowers on the glass and then again when Eliza and Georgiana wear white dresses with scarlet sashes to the winter festivities which Jane is excluded from.

It was good to pick up a powerfully written novel after enduring 50 Shades of Grey for book group. It wasn't the sex that shocked me - just the bad writing!

More summer reading

I sat up very late at the weekend to finish The Hunger Games which I couldn't put down. I've also finished three volumes of Helen Simpson's short stories and ordered another one.

From Hey Yeah Right Get a Life I particularly enjoyed Cheers where Lois goes into London to do some Christmas shopping and lunch with a friend, passing the afternoon in a flurry of 'packed shops and glitter and cash.' Despite her friend's near emotional breakdown over lunch and the abusive drunk on the train and the bus escapade on the way home which leaves her walking the frosty streets at midnight. Despite all that, she sees the Christmas trees lit up in the windows she passes and thinks of the rooms 'balmy with spice, evergreen and zest' and feels a surge of happiness.

Caput Apri is a magical story from the Dear George collection where an overbearing father relentlessly bullies his family one Christmas until his son slips a 'Discobiscuit' into his coffee. The hallucinogen seems to have the reverse effect and the father turns into a wild boar raging and hollering around the house until rescued by his long-suffering wife he is restored to humanity and becomes a loving father and husband. This is a clever tale within a tale told in the pub over mulled wine by three woman escaping a family Christmas.

There is a story in In-Flight Entertainment set in 2040 which is not so far from The Hunger Games. Diary of an Interesting Year is a nightmare vision of a dystopia where humans have to kill each other to survive. The story is relayed in diary form by a thirty year old female. In a post-capitalist world with the environment destroyed, sick of foraging and bartering for food, she dreams of soap and water, fresh air, condoms (there is a perpetual fear of pregnancy) and the days when she could order a pair of patent leather boots with a single click on the internet.

Anyone read the second volume of The Hunger Games trilogy? Do I need to steal borrow it from my daughter?

Summer reading

Very much enjoying the summer sunshine and London 2012. Did you see the tribute to children's literature lead by J K Rowling at the opening ceremony? I'm reading Helen Simpson's collection of her best short stories A Bunch of Fives. Something immensely satisfying about reading a perfect short story in one sitting. I've managed to squeeze in two or three stories every day amidst the coverage of the women's artistic gymnastics which I've avidly followed since Nadia Comeneci won gold at Montreal in 1976.

I've followed Helen Simpson's career since she published Hey Yeah Right Get a Life in 2001. This collection includes my favourite story Burns and the Bankers about a career woman at the top of her game who is seething with irritation at having to attend a banking federation dinner on Burns Night which drags on forever when she would rather be spending time with the four children she rarely sees. Initially bored with all the toasts to Rabbie Burns as her male colleagues get steadily drunk she becomes interested when an academic makes a speech about the life and loves of Burns.

Heavy Weather is a highly amusing yet wretched account of the toll of bringing up small children:

In life before the children, she had read books on the bus, in the bathroom, while eating, through television, under radio noise, in cafes. Now, if she picked one up, Lorna shouted 'Stop reading, Mummy,' and pulled her by the nose until she was looking into her small cross face.

I loved this account of a family holiday in Dorset with Frances trying to cope with a baby, a deeply jealous two-year old and a husband who cannot understand why she can no longer be spontaneous. I'm hoping that the elegant Russian gymnast Kseniia Afanaseva will win a gold medal in the floor exercise next week and that I'll be squeezing in a few more of Helen Simpson's wonderful stories.

Old favourite

"I see hula-hula once on TV, hip go 'round like wash machine, wavy hands like flying bird ..." Amy Tan The Hundred Secret Senses

Olivia Yee is Chinese-American. Smart, amusing and prickly she is initially delighted to discover she has a half-sister in China who is coming to live with her family in America.  She is less than thrilled with the reality of Kwan who is short, unglamorous and so exuberant she virtually bounces off the walls. Kwan adores her little sister and insists on calling her 'Libby-ah' (the Chinese equivalent of  Hey Libby!) to Olivia's eternal annoyance.

I asked Kwan once how she'd like it if I introduced her to everyone as "Hey Kwan."  She slapped my arm, went breathless with laughter, then said hoarsely "I like, I like." Amy Tan The Hundred Secret Senses

The skewed dialogue between Libby and Kwan is so warm and funny that I've read this book many times just to spend time in their company.  Such is the power of good writing.

Caustic Cover Critic had an interesting post about cover art for novels with a Chinese theme.  Have fans, lanterns and cherry blossom become cliched?  What do you think?

What Matters in Jane Austen?

I've been getting a bit restless lately.  Keep looking at the MA in Eighteenth Century Studies on the Southampton University website even though it's too expensive, too far away, I work full-time and my daughters are about to enter sixth form.  I would like to study again though and the Unknown Jane Austen module sounds very tempting.  Daren't even mention it to my husband!

I very much enjoyed John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen - Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved.  The 'crucial puzzles' are answered in chapters on the significance of blushing, which characters speak and which remain silent, who dies in the course of the novels and the significance of the weather to name but a few.

Mullan is excellent on Austen's technical genius, her pioneering of the 'free indirect style' of modern novels where the authorial voice takes on the characteristics of a character.  He also provides lots of interesting facts that Austen fans will relish.  For example, we learn that the importance of the weather in Emma prompted an earth scientist to make a meteorological study of it.  In a chapter on blundering we learn that Mary Crawford, the self-styled psychologist of Mansfield Park, blunders again and again and ultimately loses the man she loves. 

In a perceptive chapter on death he notes that very few characters die in the course of the novels but they are all overshadowed by it.  I was particularly interested in the fact that Austen revealed to her family that the highly strung Jane Fairfax from Emma would enjoy 'nine or ten years marital felicity' with Frank Churchill before she died.  Fascinating to consider that Austen's plans for her characters extended beyond the end of the novels.

There's none like us ...

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller relays the story of her mother or 'Nicola Fuller of Central Africa' as she sometimes refers to herself.  Born on the Isle of Skye, Nicola Fuller moved to Kenya with her parents at the age of two.  Having lived in Africa pretty much all of her life she still considers herself 'one million per cent Scottish.'  She spends her Kenyan childhood show-jumping, attending convent school and playing with her pet chimpanzee.  She has unhappy stint at a secretarial college for young ladies in Kensington and then returns to the longed for equatorial light of Kenya.

Disembarking from the plane at Nairobi with newly blonde hair and wearing a blue linen suit she is spotted by the young Tim Fuller recently arrived in East Africa to work on a tree farm.  He falls in love with her and as a handsome couple 'there's none like us' they settle in Kenya and later manage a farm in Rhodesia. Alexandra Fuller intersperses the story of her parents with her own memories of a Rhodesian childhood, her mother driving her daughters to a fancy dress party in the land rover, checking her hair and lipstick in the rear-view mirror and positioning her gun out of the window.  Fuller writes beautifully of the 'sepia light' of Kenya and the wind 'red with dust' blowing from Uganda.

But this book is not just a story of Africa, it's the story of her mother who lived through the terrible violence of Rhodesia's struggle for independence and buried three babies on African soil.  Yet she retains a wonderful Nancy Mitford style humour.  When she sees predatory rich European women seeking sexual favours from young men she asks 'Why can't they just go to bed with a good book?'
This is no tale of the glamorous and foolish Happy Valley set.  Fuller's parents lived and worked on the land and still continue to run a fish and banana farm in the Zambezi valley today.

As a young woman Nicola Fuller hoped to inspire a classic African memoir such as West with the Night, The Flame Trees of Thikka or Out of Africa.  I'd say she has.