Wednesday is horrified to discover that someone has named their eco-sanpro Moominz*
What I read
Angela Thirkell, O, These Men, These Men (1935) - non-Barsetshire, except at one point one of the characters goes to a dinner-party at which some of the recurrent Barsetshire characters are present... It's a slightly odd mix, in that a lot of it is a really rather poignant study of a woman leaving - or rather, being carried out by sympathetic in-laws as she has, pretty much, a total nervous breakdown - an absolutely disastrous marriage: her husband is an abusive and adulterous alcoholic but still one who can charm outsiders (and after their divorce goes around saying he chivalrously let her divorce him but the Other Man let her down). Her state after the divorce is what we would now, I think, define as PTSD, that she begins a gradual recovery from. Meanwhile, there is a fair amount of the more typical Thirkellesque social comedy strokes, e.g. with the brothers-in-law, one a blackshirt and the other a pinko balletomane.
Noel Streatfeild, Mothering Sunday (1950). Family strife and troubles in a small space of time, and I think we guess fairly early on why Mother has become so reclusive... I did get a little jolt when I had supposed the doctor daughter and her companion who is pretty much her admin assistant were a collar-and-tie pair, but ooops, no. It explodes little revelations about various relationships, but does eschew the pottering along - sudden MELODRAMA that some of her novels do.
Margery Sharp, Four Gardens (1935): had its moments, but is one of those - not exactly clash of generations, but changes of generation seen through eyes of the older one, saga of a rather quiet life.
CL Polk, The Midnight Bargain (2020). I had some hesitation over this on the basis of the blurb, because 'Woman who fights the edicts of her society that women cannot [x]' in a fantasy setting is a set-up I could bear never seeing again. It was quite well-done but I wouldn't rate it with the Kingston Cycle.
Courtney Milan, The Devil Comes Courting (Worth Saga #3) (2021) - this was lovely, I am so there for a romance where the troubles of the protags are not actually angst and misunderstandings between them but other things impinging upon them.
On the go
Realised it was some while since I had read the preceding volumes in the Worth saga, so have picked up Once Upon a Marquess (2015) again.
Have also dipped in to Novel on Yellow Paper and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.
Up next
Saw an intriguing review of Rachel Hope Cleves, Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality, on Norman Douglas, an early C20th English writer and expat living on the shores of the Mediterranean for those reasons for which gentlemen from Northern Europe had been doing so for some centuries, and the copy I ordered has arrived. (I think I knew of him mostly from the very affectionate chapter on him in Bryher's autobiography, The Heart to Artemis and vague references in other memoirs etc.)
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*Can the Jansson estate sue, we wonder?
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