Wednesday attended a webinar
What I read
Finished Grumpy Fake Boyfriend - a bit on the slight side.
Somehow found myself diverted into a re-read of Tony Fennelly's Matt Sinclair mysteries (he was the gay proprietor of a posh furniture store in New Orleans, scion of a family with deep roots in the region, and also at one time legally qualified): The Glory Hole Murders (1985), The Closet Hanging (1987), and Kiss Youself Goodbye (1989). Apart from being Of The Period and including some elements that would very likely now be considered somewhat problematic, don't hold up all that well: okay, readable, but not as good as I recollected. I also read the first Margo Fortier mystery (former stripper married to gay scion of posh New Orleans family), The Hippie in the Wall (1994) which again had rather faded and I didn't feel and urge to continue the series.
Read Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson's Imre: A Memorandum (1906), in which our narrator is traveling in Hungary, meets the alluring and manly Imre, they develop a strong friendship, our narrator (Oswald) expatiates on Uranism/similisexism/homosexuality etc and that it can be a fine and exalted passion (even if there are also, alas, horrid effeminate degenerates) and after a certain amount of yearning and mutual misunderstanding all is happiness between Oswald and Imre. Yay. But possibly gives one a somewhat higher regard for Forster's Maurice as an actual novel, even if he wimped out on publishing it, even privately as a limited edition.
Simon R Green, Buried Memories (Ishmael Jones #10) (2021): one of the stronger ones in this series I thought.
Antonia Fraser, The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women (2021) - I thought this was a rather better read than the other bio of her I recently read and maybe a rather more three-dimensional picture - that she believed that man should be the protector of woman e.g. - and also brought in more of her wider reform interests and her writing (actually one is not moved to seek out her novels). A few slightly annoying tangential bloopers - good grief, one thing that Eliza Lynn Linton, famed anti-suffragist and general anti-her-own-sex writer was not, was a feminist, Antonia, really not.
On the go
Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women (2019). Only part-way into this, and quite enjoying it, although, in the realm of bloopers, okay, I know this is a personal essay and not a piece of historical research, but really, 'Alcott was rare enough among women of her time for being a professional writer'? See above, Caroline Norton for one.* Okay, will concede that Alcott was fortunate in having a household of women around her who would respect her time and space, but I do think perpeturating these generalisations about the scarcity of women of the pen in the past should require a pilgrimage, if not with stones in one's footwear, under inconvenient conditions, to the tomb of Aphra Behn to drop flowers upon it (hat-tip to V Woolf). Also, when writing of the Alcott family background, 'all these enterprises failed for one reason or another': there was one reason, the elephant in the room, Bronson Alcott. /(snark off)
Up next
I still have a pile of birthday books at my disposal, also Victoria Janssen's novella from Kalikoi, Finding Refuge
*ETA And Alcott actually name-checks in text works by other women writers - just off the top of my head Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Wetherell, and I'm pretty sure Maria Edgeworth.
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