April books
Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen, Rory Muir
Superfluous Death, Hazel Holt
Death of a Dean, Hazel Holt
Devon Venture. Catherine Bell (Seagull)
Black Forest Summer, Mabel Esther Allan (CP)
The Fatal Legacy, Hazel Holt
Seeds of Murder, Rosie Sandler
Murder Takes Root Rosie Sandler
The Secret of Grange Farm, Frances Cowen (CP)
The Secret of the Loch, Frances Cowen. (CP)
Delay of Execution, Hazel Holt
Trailblazer, Jane Robinson.
The Picture House Murders, Fiona Veitch Smith
A Death in the Family, Hazel Holt
Chester House Wins Through, Irene Smith (CP)
The Pantomime Murders, Fiona Veitch Smith
A Matter of Clues, Monica Marsden (CP)
Currently reading: Mrs Malory and a Time to Die, Hazel Holt
I enjoyed Jane Robinson’s Bluestockings so grabbed Trailblazer when I saw it. It’s the story of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the influential feminist of the nineteenth century whom no one has heard of, according to Robinson. Barbara was born into a highly unconventional family. Her father, for reasons unknown, never married her mother. Yet he really loved his children, saw them all settled comfortably in a house and made sure they were looked after and educated. Best of all, especially from the girls’ point of view, as each child reached twenty-one, he settled enough money on them to enable them to be independent. So, compared with many Victorian women, Barbara was fortunate, apart from the stigma of her illegitimacy.
She studied mostly art, having pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy and selling them regularly. She moved in bohemian, free-thinking circles; knew the pre-Raphaelites well and was a close friend of George Eliot. One of her earliest campaigns was about married women’s property. In spite of her busy, happy life and hordes of relations (Florence Nightingale was a cousin), she wanted to be married and have ‘lots’ of children, if only she could find the right man. This is where everything about her goes wrong for me. She had a ‘nearly-affair’ with the publisher John Chapman. He was a notorious womaniser and both her father and brother thought he was after her money. The extraordinary thing is the huge number of letters he wrote her and their subject matter. He was obsessed by her menstrual cycle and wrote in detail about it, offering various quack cures for her problems. He told her that sex (with him, of course, the bastard), would cure her. Why a sane and rational woman, which we are told Barbara was, would even read this stuff, let alone keep the letters, is completely beyond me. I found the letters so nauseating that I skimmed the chapter in order to find out whether or not she gave in and slept with him. She didn’t, thank goodness.
All Barbara’s campaigns, for married women’s property rights, women’s education and female suffrage are wholly admirable but I found I couldn’t like her or the book and abandoned both.
Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen is thoroughly researched yet reads as easily as a novel. The author deals with arranged marriages, love matches, elopements and scandals, divorce (rare), good and bad marriages. Inevitably, he is dealing with people whose lives are on record, namely the aristocracy and upper/upper middle classes. What makes the book so interesting is the use of diaries and letters of the period, as well as references to contemporary novels and not just Jane Austen’s. You can’t tie emails up with a pink ribbon and keep them in a box, can you? How will future historians manage? The author’s conclusion is that the secret of a happy marriage is that the couple should be nice to each other. Well, duh but don’t let that put you off the book, which is so full of fascinating period detail.
I did well last month with books which were free to borrow for Amazon Prime members. Rosie Sandler’s books about a sleuthing gardener were two: Seeds of Murder and Murder Takes Root. Wherever professional gardener Steph goes, trouble follows as one unlikely event follows another. In the first, she’s working on a private estate where everyone is bonkers and every resident has a motive for the nasty murder. Throw in poison pen letters which Steph is accused of writing and the poor girl is in trouble. I felt this book included far too many Latin plant names; not because I don’t use them myself but because I felt the author was trying too hard to establish Steph’s credentials as a gardener. The second book is much better. She’s hired to restore an historic garden and as the big house is full of family and servants, it’s rather like a country house mystery. What really makes these books is Steph’s wonderful dog.
The other two were The Picture House Murders and The Pantomime Murders. It’s 1929. Clara Vale comes from a rich family and has a socially ambitious mother who wants her to make a good marriage, as her sister has done. Her brother is a wastrel. Clara managed to study chemistry at Oxford only because her ghastly mother thought she might meet a suitable husband there. On graduating, she declines an allowance from her father and works as a lowly librarian, which I found unlikely. Then her uncle dies, leaving her not only his entire estate but a detective agency, which she had no idea he owned. It turns out that there’s a lot about her uncle which Clara has never known. She shocks everyone by deciding to move into the big house in Newcastle *and* to continue Bob’s detective work. Naturally, there are many pitfalls in the way for a woman in such a position and she has to fight for acceptance. The mysteries are fun but I couldn’t quite believe in Clara and noticed a few anachronisms. A good feature of the books is a lot of attention to clothes.
I’m nearly at the end of my bedtime Mrs Malory re-read. I very much prefer the books where she stays at home in Taviscombe, relying on social networking to solve the mysteries. Each book marked CP or Seagull was read for the ongoing project and there’s no need to say anything about them.