Wednesday was irked into a blog post
What I read
Re-read of Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage (2017), not one of the top ones, but still good.
Re-read of Cold Comfort Farm. Realise my ambition is to say 'I AM the something nasty in the woodshed' cackling madly. (In fact is not Aunt Ada Doom, before Flora Poste sets about her, pretty much that herself???)
Elizabeth Hand, Hard Light: a novel (Cass Neary, 3) (2016): I read the first two of these and then the next one became incredibly difficult to get hold of. Weird and unsettling but a compelling read, though C Neary takes it to new levels of unsympsthetic and dubiously reliable narrator.
Anne Hall, Angela Thirkell: A Writer's Life (2021). Hmmm. Rather skimming the surface - not entirely evasive, does cop to her first husband being gay as well as alcoholic and abusive, and does an implication by quotation from one of her novels about what might have been the trouble in Marriage #2 - but on the other hand, I am not entirely sure we want to plumb those depths? Okay, I get that the earlier bio was probably slanted by depending very much on testimony of her estranged and cut out of the will son Colin (also gay) and that a lot of the reviewing of it at the time was spitefully misogynist. But. E.g. people had been noting Thirkell being sour and cantankerous in her postwar works from 1945 onwards, as contemporaries, and she had Form on putting people she knew into the books (I think I was right about Ann Bridge!) to their annoyance. There seem to have been a lot of intra-family hoohahs. And although she claimed herself 'not a man-hater' there's a distinct odour in her books of men, once in marriage, not being really worth the trouble (with a few exceptions), and widowhood a welcome release.
Benjamin J B Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (2021). I will admit I was hoping this was going to be more of another of those studies of a group of women that we have seen several of in the last few years, and less about Academic Philosophy in the post-war era. I mean, massive points for not being There Was Only One of Her and showing women influencing and supporting one another - but actually focussing perhaps a little too closely on this group and the masculine members of the philosophical tribe and omitting the penumbra of women as intellectual figures and making their way in academe at this time and kind of missing what I would consider important contextual stuff. Janet Vaughan, Mistress of Somerville! - who had actually been sent to undertake research into how to treat starvation in newly liberated Belsen, where she found the existing recommended treatment was not working - only just there in the background with very little to suggest her significance. Mention of Eric Gill which kind of omitted all the creepy stuff...
On the go
Began Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels (1917), which I saw recommended somewhere, but even though it's really short, bogging down a bit in the folksy-twee. Points for its showing up of the brother Thoreauing around the farm Being A Writer Celebrating Rural Life while his sister does the work, but I am less there for the developing plot complications on the road.
Still was bogged down in Mary Shelley
Have just started Frances Bingham, Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life (2021)
Also reading a book for review which is on a topic that I feel has already been well-explored - it brings a few new facts and insights to the table but I was really, really hoping it was going to take an entirely underexplored facet, sigh. This may be one of those subjects that gets written up every twenty years or so.
Have also been dipping into browsingwise Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson (2001).
Up next
That is probably enough to be going on with!
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