Some book reviews
The Spanish Queen, by Carolly Erickson
So I have to admit, I picked this one up knowing it would be fluff - this is the author of The Secret Life of Josephine, which I read the back of one time and rolled my eyes. It should also have been a warning sign that two of the quotes on the back were from People Magazine and Us Weekly. I didn't finish it. I was trying to explain to my dad the other day why it was bad, and I didn't do a great job because I brought up accuracy, but it's not really about the accuracy for the sake of accuracy.
The book is the story of Catherine of Aragon, starting from her youth and running until roughly her death. It achieves this vast timespan in a relatively small number of pages by consisting mostly of Catherine's voice describing the plot/history and snatches of dialogue, with very few actual scenes as such. So this is obviously bad as it's an uninteresting way to tell a story.
Where accuracy comes in is that one major way Erickson veers from it kills a lot of tension - Henry is a jerk from the moment he and Catherine actually get married. He resents her for taking any attention away from him and he blames her for the deaths of their infants; he's also a big coward and hardly does any work as king. This was all probably done to foreshadow what would later happen, but instead it goes so far as to suck out any suspense. If the only time there was any real love between them was the years between Arthur's death and their marriage, then it's completely unsurprising when he cheats. If he and Wolsey are talking about annulments and stuff after their first son dies, it's completely unsurprising when it actually happens ten years later. Telling a story where every reader knows the ending means that you have to play up how the characters don't know what's going to happen even more. Honestly, there's an entire novel to be made out of the pre-marriage section, by a good writer (although I think P-Gregs has done it as well), ending with the start of what appears to be a happy and loving marriage between C & H.
The other major inaccuracy was likewise done boringly. Erickson gave Catherine an illegitimate half-sister, Maria Juana. Her mother, Aldonza de Ivorra, was real, but the child they had together was a) male and b) born before Fernando married Isabela, where Maria Juana is about Catherine's age. Judging by the Wiki page, Fernando also managed his illegitimate daughters' marriages at home, too, where in the book he sends her to England with Catherine and demands that his daughter arrange a good marriage for her there. This actually could be a pretty cool thing to revolve a story around, but it's handled as boringly as possible. Aldonza is the stereotypical bitchy, entitled mistress à la common depictions of Barbara Castlemaine or Du Barry, and Maria Juana inherits the personality - and we're never really shown why either of them acts this way. This whole thing isn't a strong pillar of the book, Maria Juana goes off and does her own thing and pops up from time to time to be mean. About the time where I left off, she was the mistress of Charles V, who thought he could marry her, and she was telling Cath that if Cath helped that along MJ would testify that Arthur didn't have sex with her. Yes, the Holy Roman Emperor would totally do this. Maybe there was character development after that point, but I doubt it.
Overall, Catherine doesn't do anything and when she does do things, the action is dryly described from a distance.
I should write essays à la
limyaael but for historical fiction. (Because I need a sixth hobby on my plate.)
The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold
I don't know if I wrote reviews for The Scandalous Lady W and The Covent Garden Ladies ... looks like I didn't. Well, they are excellent, and this book is excellent, too.
The book's divided into five sections, each telling the life story of one of the canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. They're clearly the result of intense archival research, and Rubenhold pieced together census information, workhouse records, newspaper articles, inquests, and the like to uncover so many details. The idea that all five women were sex workers came from the prejudices of the middle-class Victorian world: in reality, most of them were involved with men they weren't married to in long-term monogamous relationships (a necessity for lower-working-class women, who rarely earned enough to support themselves) and were out at night because they were sleeping rough as they lacked the money for a bed in a doss house. Most of the sections show the way that one or two stumbles could force a family into the cycle of poverty, and the toll that alcoholism could take on a marriage or a life.
There are times when it feels like Rubenhold is stretching a tad in order to say what emotion a person would have been feeling, but overall it's both engaging and intellectually rigorous. The research is like what I did for an exhibition several years ago, but turned up to 11 (which is something, in fairness to me, you can only do for record-keeping institutions in urban environments and with the ability to travel around), so I really appreciate the incredible amount of time and effort put in.
The common thread with this, Lady W, and Covent Garden Ladies is Rubenhold's interest in women outside the norm/ideal of their time, in terms of sexual behavior. She always treats them sympathetically and as people with agency, yet at the same time without the insistence I sometimes see that this existence was necessarily freeing. It might be nice not to feel like you had to conform, but at the same time it was not nice to have "respectable" family members shun you, landlords force you out of your lodgings, and public officials treat you with scorn and disgust, not to mention to deal with any self-inflicted pain due to internalized misogyny/prejudice against sexually-active women.
Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945, by Melissa McEuen
I've used this as a reference for AH answers before, but I only looked at bits of it, so after a recent explanation of "performative femininity" and WWII, I decided to read through the whole thing. It's great, and by and large I think it's very readable for a lay audience as well as for researching specific points.
The only quibble I really had with it was the discussions of skin paleness/"purity" - McEuen kind of acts like this is a standard of beauty that existed largely as a response to the rise of scientific racism and the Anglo-Saxon identity in nineteenth-century America, but it's obviously much, much older than that. It's good and necessary to problematize how advertising and fiction of the period used and showed white skin in periods with anxiety among white people about the position of non-white people in society, but I just couldn't help but keep going, "are you sure?" whenever it was brought up.
Chapter 1. All-American Masks: Creaming and Coloring the Wartime Face - Focuses on cosmetics, how they were viewed by the public and how wartime propaganda used them to entice and instruct women.
Chapter 2. Tender Hands and Average Legs: Shaping Disparate Extremities - Discusses how women and ads aimed at them dealt with work-roughened hands, and how everyone was focusing on legs.
Chapter 3. Pleasant Aromas and Good Scents: Cleansing the Body Politic - Lots of stuff about how women flooded into lodging houses for war work, and stuff about body odor and laundry.
Chapter 4. Proper Attire and Streamlined Silhouettes: Clothing the Home Front Figure - what it says on the tin! Discussion of American wartime fashion and restrictions, and of female soldiers' uniforms.
Chapter 5. Sacrifice and Agreeability: Cultivating Right Minds - Issues about acceptable emotions, romantic relationships, women at work - and women dealing with changes after the war.
This is a good read on its own merits, but it'd be a great resource for anyone who does WWII reenacting.
Original post: https://chocolatepot.dreamwidth.org/1013362.html - please comment on Dreamwidth: https://chocolatepot.dreamwidth.org/1013362.html?mode=reply
So I have to admit, I picked this one up knowing it would be fluff - this is the author of The Secret Life of Josephine, which I read the back of one time and rolled my eyes. It should also have been a warning sign that two of the quotes on the back were from People Magazine and Us Weekly. I didn't finish it. I was trying to explain to my dad the other day why it was bad, and I didn't do a great job because I brought up accuracy, but it's not really about the accuracy for the sake of accuracy.
The book is the story of Catherine of Aragon, starting from her youth and running until roughly her death. It achieves this vast timespan in a relatively small number of pages by consisting mostly of Catherine's voice describing the plot/history and snatches of dialogue, with very few actual scenes as such. So this is obviously bad as it's an uninteresting way to tell a story.
Where accuracy comes in is that one major way Erickson veers from it kills a lot of tension - Henry is a jerk from the moment he and Catherine actually get married. He resents her for taking any attention away from him and he blames her for the deaths of their infants; he's also a big coward and hardly does any work as king. This was all probably done to foreshadow what would later happen, but instead it goes so far as to suck out any suspense. If the only time there was any real love between them was the years between Arthur's death and their marriage, then it's completely unsurprising when he cheats. If he and Wolsey are talking about annulments and stuff after their first son dies, it's completely unsurprising when it actually happens ten years later. Telling a story where every reader knows the ending means that you have to play up how the characters don't know what's going to happen even more. Honestly, there's an entire novel to be made out of the pre-marriage section, by a good writer (although I think P-Gregs has done it as well), ending with the start of what appears to be a happy and loving marriage between C & H.
The other major inaccuracy was likewise done boringly. Erickson gave Catherine an illegitimate half-sister, Maria Juana. Her mother, Aldonza de Ivorra, was real, but the child they had together was a) male and b) born before Fernando married Isabela, where Maria Juana is about Catherine's age. Judging by the Wiki page, Fernando also managed his illegitimate daughters' marriages at home, too, where in the book he sends her to England with Catherine and demands that his daughter arrange a good marriage for her there. This actually could be a pretty cool thing to revolve a story around, but it's handled as boringly as possible. Aldonza is the stereotypical bitchy, entitled mistress à la common depictions of Barbara Castlemaine or Du Barry, and Maria Juana inherits the personality - and we're never really shown why either of them acts this way. This whole thing isn't a strong pillar of the book, Maria Juana goes off and does her own thing and pops up from time to time to be mean. About the time where I left off, she was the mistress of Charles V, who thought he could marry her, and she was telling Cath that if Cath helped that along MJ would testify that Arthur didn't have sex with her. Yes, the Holy Roman Emperor would totally do this. Maybe there was character development after that point, but I doubt it.
Overall, Catherine doesn't do anything and when she does do things, the action is dryly described from a distance.
I should write essays à la
limyaael but for historical fiction. (Because I need a sixth hobby on my plate.)
The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold
I don't know if I wrote reviews for The Scandalous Lady W and The Covent Garden Ladies ... looks like I didn't. Well, they are excellent, and this book is excellent, too.
The book's divided into five sections, each telling the life story of one of the canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. They're clearly the result of intense archival research, and Rubenhold pieced together census information, workhouse records, newspaper articles, inquests, and the like to uncover so many details. The idea that all five women were sex workers came from the prejudices of the middle-class Victorian world: in reality, most of them were involved with men they weren't married to in long-term monogamous relationships (a necessity for lower-working-class women, who rarely earned enough to support themselves) and were out at night because they were sleeping rough as they lacked the money for a bed in a doss house. Most of the sections show the way that one or two stumbles could force a family into the cycle of poverty, and the toll that alcoholism could take on a marriage or a life.
There are times when it feels like Rubenhold is stretching a tad in order to say what emotion a person would have been feeling, but overall it's both engaging and intellectually rigorous. The research is like what I did for an exhibition several years ago, but turned up to 11 (which is something, in fairness to me, you can only do for record-keeping institutions in urban environments and with the ability to travel around), so I really appreciate the incredible amount of time and effort put in.
The common thread with this, Lady W, and Covent Garden Ladies is Rubenhold's interest in women outside the norm/ideal of their time, in terms of sexual behavior. She always treats them sympathetically and as people with agency, yet at the same time without the insistence I sometimes see that this existence was necessarily freeing. It might be nice not to feel like you had to conform, but at the same time it was not nice to have "respectable" family members shun you, landlords force you out of your lodgings, and public officials treat you with scorn and disgust, not to mention to deal with any self-inflicted pain due to internalized misogyny/prejudice against sexually-active women.
Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945, by Melissa McEuen
I've used this as a reference for AH answers before, but I only looked at bits of it, so after a recent explanation of "performative femininity" and WWII, I decided to read through the whole thing. It's great, and by and large I think it's very readable for a lay audience as well as for researching specific points.
The only quibble I really had with it was the discussions of skin paleness/"purity" - McEuen kind of acts like this is a standard of beauty that existed largely as a response to the rise of scientific racism and the Anglo-Saxon identity in nineteenth-century America, but it's obviously much, much older than that. It's good and necessary to problematize how advertising and fiction of the period used and showed white skin in periods with anxiety among white people about the position of non-white people in society, but I just couldn't help but keep going, "are you sure?" whenever it was brought up.
Chapter 1. All-American Masks: Creaming and Coloring the Wartime Face - Focuses on cosmetics, how they were viewed by the public and how wartime propaganda used them to entice and instruct women.
Chapter 2. Tender Hands and Average Legs: Shaping Disparate Extremities - Discusses how women and ads aimed at them dealt with work-roughened hands, and how everyone was focusing on legs.
Chapter 3. Pleasant Aromas and Good Scents: Cleansing the Body Politic - Lots of stuff about how women flooded into lodging houses for war work, and stuff about body odor and laundry.
Chapter 4. Proper Attire and Streamlined Silhouettes: Clothing the Home Front Figure - what it says on the tin! Discussion of American wartime fashion and restrictions, and of female soldiers' uniforms.
Chapter 5. Sacrifice and Agreeability: Cultivating Right Minds - Issues about acceptable emotions, romantic relationships, women at work - and women dealing with changes after the war.
This is a good read on its own merits, but it'd be a great resource for anyone who does WWII reenacting.
Original post: https://chocolatepot.dreamwidth.org/1013362.html - please comment on Dreamwidth: https://chocolatepot.dreamwidth.org/1013362.html?mode=reply