Wednesday is irked at missing tracked delivery, redelivery not until next week, grump
What I read
Finished Lesser Lives and continued to be rather irked by her assumptions that Victorian women were largely existing in a state of silent passive suppression, and expressing startlement when they turned out to be Madeleine Smith and bonking a young man of inferior social class and then (putatively) serving him arsenic-laced cocoa when he would not genteelly take his conge so she could marry a more eligible suitor; and that Mary Ellen Meredith's own daughter did not spend her entire life being Spinster Keeper of the Biographical Flame of Grandpapa and Pa, but set up a cooking school, married rather late in life (but not too late for motherhood) and 'being remarkable and peculiar for a Victorian woman, continued her career'. Had the author ever heard of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson???!!!
Also, there is no mention whatsoever of Caroline Norton, whose story strongly influenced the narrative of George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, even if, as Diane Johnson alleges, he was constantly writing about his runaway dead first wife in his novels. Norton was not just a victim of Awful Marriage, she used the abuses she experienced (husband taking her children away, also her earnings as a writer) to plead for reform and is credited with having had significant influence on reforms of the laws relating to child custody, divorce, and married women's property. And in her social activism hung out with other Victorian women doing the same, e.g. Barbara Bodichon.
Taking a break from the perhaps rather heavier works in progress, I re-read a couple of Robert B. Parker's Spenser thrillers: School Days (#33) (2005) and Walking Shadow (#21) (1994). The latter had a certain amount of Orientalist essentialism. By coincidence (I think) they both had v similar plots where the Really Guilty Party had not pulled the trigger or committed actual violence but was A Dodgy Broad whose activities had led to these things happening. Hmmmm.
On the go
Sybil Oldfield, The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi Hitlist (2020), which is not really something to read straight through but a chapter or two or three at a time. It's very good stuff - some surprising names on the list, some because some pro-appeasers had finally changed their tune.
Still working on Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution, which is possibly a bit TMI for my purposes, but very good. Though am coming to conclusion that, pah, the Schleswig-Holstein question was nothing, a child of six could understand it, once one gets to the intricate problems in and around the Habsburg domains in Central and Eastern Europe.
There was an interim post the other week that seemed to indicate that Tales from Lindford may be coming to an end?
Up next
Maybe the Marilynne Robinson? On another paw, I discover that Dean Street Press has just issued several early Margery Sharps at a very eligible price.
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