What I read
Finished Friday's Child, which, actually, held up pretty well as frothy fluff, providing you don't think too hard about the actual prospects of the two marriages posited as wonderful loe matches with which it concludes. Possibly Sherry is on the path to growing up, but the other pair have shown themselves utter drama llamas throughout.
Then read Cotillion (1953) and honestly, is this a dawn of a more democratic era or what? There are sympathetic secondary characters who are given a story who are not To The Manor Born - the middle-class young woman with the nasty controlling brother (mostly off-screen) who marries the dim Irish Earl with the horrible mother, and the French cousin who is Not-A-Marquis and the young woman whom her horrible mother is trying either to sell in marriage to some horrible old roue or pimp her to a younger roue. Plus-points for a hero who may not be macho but is really socially-sussed.
Whereas The Convenient Marriage is earlier - 1934 - and also in setting - Georgian rather than Regency - and quite apart from the massive age difference, there is something a bit off, no? about Rule's failures to communicate with Horrie (why not explain why she should shun a certain person? and not leave it until well onto into the narrative when his sister fesses up the back-story to her) and the eventual manipulative games-playing set-up.
Antonia Fraser, The Wild Island (1978) - wow, Jemima goes on what she hopes will be a restful Highland holiday and ends up stumbling over bodies and into beds and finally over the solution to the crime, and there is a cringey 'Red Rose Society' and family legends of some ancestress who bonked Bonnie Prince Charles.
Finished Caroline Rusterholz, Women's Medicine: Sex, Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspective, 1920-70, and while perhaps one who is graciously thanked in the acknowledgements and the occasional footnote is saying it as shouldn't, this is really very good. Okay, there is still more to be done on the family planning movement and the women who were involved in it, but this opened up a lot of things that have not yet been really properly looked at.
Also - discussed in detail yesterday - Anne Wellman,
Angry Young Women: six writers of the sixties (2020)
On the go
Antonia Fraser, A Splash of Red (Jemima Shore #3) (1981). In this one 'Jemima Shore, Investigator' - a title she gets from her TV programme investigating various social problems - actually does put a bit of effort into investigating (though honestly, we are beginning to think that her production team must be doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as the programme is concerned) but still showing fairly dire taste and lack of caution re men.
Up next
No idea, really.
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