two hundred public words 18/30
Continuing with historical YAF novels...
Elizabeth Marie Pope
Elizabeth Speare
Cynthia Harnett
I should possibly have done Elizabeth Marie Pope as one of my one hit wonders, but I like her two novels so much... not that that's an excuse; I ADORE Indi Rana's Roller Birds of Rampur, but haven't ... well, whatever. Anyway. Pope is the author of two semi-historical, semi-fantasy YA novels from the 1960s or so. I think. Let's check. Well, The Sherwood Forest was published in 1958, and The Perilous Gard in 1974, so maybe by averaging those dates I am right. Anyway, both novels are excellent. The first is a story of the American Revolution... with a romance interwoven in a modern and historical setting. In the modern setting (well, the 1950s, anyway) a young woman whose father is an archaeologist is more or less abandoned by her father to her uncle's estate in... oh, I don't remember. Let's say it's Connecticut. It could be. He is a scholar of the American Revolutionary period, as well as the scion or a DAR type family, who zealously preserves family traditions, including throwing a grand Revolutionary Era fête and ball every Fourth of July. But he is guilty about something. The niece is lonely and bored, though she meets a young Brit history researcher who wants to talk to her guilty uncle. While she is wandering around the house and the grounds, she keeps running into engaging people from the past -- er, ghosts. These are her ancestors, and three or four of them tell her bits and pieces of a story of the Revolution, involving a young British spy courting an American patriot. It's very well done.
Her 1974 book is even better. Apparently, Pope's own area of specialty was Elizabethan England, Shakespeare, and Milton. She taught at Mills College here in Oakland for her entire career, in fact. I bet she was good. Anyway, The Perilous Gard is described by Wikipedia as a fictional reworking of the ballad of Tam Lin... which it is, sort of. But it also works in another ballad -- one my sister and I grew up with a few different versions of: the story of either two or three competitive sisters, one of whom murders the other for the love of a suitor, who doesn't want her anyway. Gruesome stuff! The story is set against the period just before Elizabeth I's accession, and it involves the New Learning, and a reconsideration of fairy tales as being legends of Pre-Roman Celts and Druidic folk. It's incredibly good, and I re-read it probably a few times a year, seriously. I wish that Pope had written more than just these two books, sigh.
Elizabeth Speare wrote in American history settings. Her most famous book is certainly The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which was adopted by tons and tons of state literature curricula. It's a very good examination of how witch hunts work, published in 1958 (and thus subject to the same sort of political scrutiny as Miller's The Crucible -- no treatment of witch hunts in the 1950s can be assumed innocent, in that sense.) It adds interesting details of the contrast between life in the Caribbean (well, the rich planter's life...) and in Puritan New England, and details about sailing and trade. It's almost a fictional foreshadowing of Boyer and Nissenbaum's historical standard analysis, Salem Possessed, although this is a one-off witch hunt, not part of the classic 1692 case. She has also written in the white/Indian subgenre, with Calico Captive, and The Sign of the Beaver, which isn't so much captive literature as let's-all-just-get-along Indian-European narrative. And finally, she wrote an interesting consideration of New Testament stuff in 1961, The Bronze Bow, which is sneered at in Wikipedia as being written "by a Sunday School teacher". Ha. It's not my favorite of hers, for sure, though the historical detail is good. She's another 50s-60s historical YAF writer from Connecticut. What is it about that state? Maybe I should move there to become a YAF writer.
Finally, Cynthia Harnett was an English historical YAF author, whose extremely detailed novels often deal with the emergence of knowledge and science in the beginnings of the English Renaissance. She looks at it from several different perspectives just before and then during Tudor times -- the beginnings of printing with Will Caxton, and the expansion of Oxford College and its libraries, with her most well known book, The Writing on the Hearth, which again deals with people who believed in witchcraft, alchemy, herb lore, etc. I am trying to get more of her books, though I have The Writing on the Hearth and The Cargo of the Magdalena, which is about the struggle to import paper for printing, from the Low Countries. But there are others, and I salivate for them.
And now I want to know more about this Naomi Mitchison! The Wikipedia article about her is intriguing... and a few of her books are available on Amazon...
Elizabeth Marie Pope
Elizabeth Speare
Cynthia Harnett
I should possibly have done Elizabeth Marie Pope as one of my one hit wonders, but I like her two novels so much... not that that's an excuse; I ADORE Indi Rana's Roller Birds of Rampur, but haven't ... well, whatever. Anyway. Pope is the author of two semi-historical, semi-fantasy YA novels from the 1960s or so. I think. Let's check. Well, The Sherwood Forest was published in 1958, and The Perilous Gard in 1974, so maybe by averaging those dates I am right. Anyway, both novels are excellent. The first is a story of the American Revolution... with a romance interwoven in a modern and historical setting. In the modern setting (well, the 1950s, anyway) a young woman whose father is an archaeologist is more or less abandoned by her father to her uncle's estate in... oh, I don't remember. Let's say it's Connecticut. It could be. He is a scholar of the American Revolutionary period, as well as the scion or a DAR type family, who zealously preserves family traditions, including throwing a grand Revolutionary Era fête and ball every Fourth of July. But he is guilty about something. The niece is lonely and bored, though she meets a young Brit history researcher who wants to talk to her guilty uncle. While she is wandering around the house and the grounds, she keeps running into engaging people from the past -- er, ghosts. These are her ancestors, and three or four of them tell her bits and pieces of a story of the Revolution, involving a young British spy courting an American patriot. It's very well done.
Her 1974 book is even better. Apparently, Pope's own area of specialty was Elizabethan England, Shakespeare, and Milton. She taught at Mills College here in Oakland for her entire career, in fact. I bet she was good. Anyway, The Perilous Gard is described by Wikipedia as a fictional reworking of the ballad of Tam Lin... which it is, sort of. But it also works in another ballad -- one my sister and I grew up with a few different versions of: the story of either two or three competitive sisters, one of whom murders the other for the love of a suitor, who doesn't want her anyway. Gruesome stuff! The story is set against the period just before Elizabeth I's accession, and it involves the New Learning, and a reconsideration of fairy tales as being legends of Pre-Roman Celts and Druidic folk. It's incredibly good, and I re-read it probably a few times a year, seriously. I wish that Pope had written more than just these two books, sigh.
Elizabeth Speare wrote in American history settings. Her most famous book is certainly The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which was adopted by tons and tons of state literature curricula. It's a very good examination of how witch hunts work, published in 1958 (and thus subject to the same sort of political scrutiny as Miller's The Crucible -- no treatment of witch hunts in the 1950s can be assumed innocent, in that sense.) It adds interesting details of the contrast between life in the Caribbean (well, the rich planter's life...) and in Puritan New England, and details about sailing and trade. It's almost a fictional foreshadowing of Boyer and Nissenbaum's historical standard analysis, Salem Possessed, although this is a one-off witch hunt, not part of the classic 1692 case. She has also written in the white/Indian subgenre, with Calico Captive, and The Sign of the Beaver, which isn't so much captive literature as let's-all-just-get-along Indian-European narrative. And finally, she wrote an interesting consideration of New Testament stuff in 1961, The Bronze Bow, which is sneered at in Wikipedia as being written "by a Sunday School teacher". Ha. It's not my favorite of hers, for sure, though the historical detail is good. She's another 50s-60s historical YAF writer from Connecticut. What is it about that state? Maybe I should move there to become a YAF writer.
Finally, Cynthia Harnett was an English historical YAF author, whose extremely detailed novels often deal with the emergence of knowledge and science in the beginnings of the English Renaissance. She looks at it from several different perspectives just before and then during Tudor times -- the beginnings of printing with Will Caxton, and the expansion of Oxford College and its libraries, with her most well known book, The Writing on the Hearth, which again deals with people who believed in witchcraft, alchemy, herb lore, etc. I am trying to get more of her books, though I have The Writing on the Hearth and The Cargo of the Magdalena, which is about the struggle to import paper for printing, from the Low Countries. But there are others, and I salivate for them.
And now I want to know more about this Naomi Mitchison! The Wikipedia article about her is intriguing... and a few of her books are available on Amazon...