Wednesday thinks the Enlightenment would be a really good idea
What I read
Finally made my way through William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (2008) which is pretty much 'what you never thought about asking about Mrs Barbauld' and is all about the redemption from the condescension of history. Barbauld (nee Aikin) was a significant literary and cultural figure from the final decades of C18th to the first few of the C19th, but had the unfortunate experience of living into a time when her politics, ethics, and aesthetics became considered outmoded if not actually condemned. It also contains a gruesome case study of how younger thrusting male aspirants diss on older female exemplars in their field (in her case, her detractors are sufficiently well-known members of the Romantic movement that their nasty backbiting is recorded for posterity), including blaming her for things she didn't write or were surely part of wider cultural changes. She also did that thing that sometimes one would get the impression did not happen maybe until the so-called 'second wave' of feminism, of being 'woman-centred' and supportive of other women, rather than rivalrous and bitchy.
Also read: picked up in the local independent bookshop sale, the last Hazel Holt Mrs Mallory mystery, Death is a Word, which came out last year (I am somewhat pissed off that Amazon Recs, which routinely recommends to me the earlier volumes in the series, never mentioned that there was a new one out). Pretty much the mixture as before, pleasant enough.
And also from the sale, Rumer Godden, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (1979), which is that book which, if you loved In this House of Brede and return to it for comfort reading, do not go there. I read it more or less about the time it came out, and didn't much care for it then, and while I finished it (which has not always been the case with Godden re-reads) I was still not taken with it. Maybe it just piles on the melodrama a bit too much? Whereas In this House of Brede dials that down, or has it happen off-stage, but still has drama. Or maybe it was just that I could not engage with Lise the way I could with just about all the nuns at Brede?
On the go
Still the Naomi Royde-Smith biography: I am not quite sure whether I entirely go for that thing where biographers do thematic chapters rather than following chronology - a) you get a certain amount of repetition and b) it can be hard to get a sense of what's happening when and how the various strands related to one another. Lots of fascinating stuff though.
Up next
Well, I have another freebie forgotten Golden Age mystery loaded to my Kobo. I also have, another sale bargain, The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2408132.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.