Recent reading
Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006). This was an excellent study of how the traditionally non-literary-culture classes engaged with being creative writers themselves. It's not just about the self-consciously 'proletarian literature' movement of the 1930s, though it has some solid work on that - and on the tendency of editors and mentors to want these writers to keep writing dispatches from areas of society not normally found in the novel/short story, rather than extend their range. It's also about writers' circles and the plethora of self-help mags and organisations aimed at helping people not just become writers but, if not make a living by it, at least get paid - so aiming at magazines with fiction, articles, etc. Interesting discussions of how emphasis is laid on true emotion and sincerity rather than style and technique. Though, given the apparent resistence to literary modernism, vs the increasing use of e.g. stream of consciousness in the 30s, wonder if we are seeing same phenomenon of generational drift of ideas that Jonathan Rose picked up on in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Hilliard works with a range of materials: publishers' records, private papers, records of local writers' circles, autobiographies, and a wide range of periodical publications. Recommended.
Robertson Davies, Discoveries: Letters 1938-1975 (2002) and For Your Eye Alone: Letters 1976-1995 (1999). Two volumes of what is (one gathers) a relatively small selection from Davies's correspondence, made by his biographer, Judith Skelton Grant. They have the characteristic addictive quality of RD's writing (if you like it all, my impression is that it's addictive) even when one's disagreeing with what he's actually saying. Lots of stuff about the authorial process, the annoyingness of critics who read stuff into novels, use narrow frameworks of interpretation, or assume that everything is autobiographical, the theatre, universities, education, and administration of same, social change, being Canadian, Jung, and life in general.
Delia Sherman, Changeling (2006). There may be common themes (I'd need to do some re-reading to see if this is the case) but Sherman is not a writer who is writing the same book over and over again. Changeling seems entirely different from Through a Brazen Mirror or The Porcelain Dove (according to Amazon there is also something called Freedom Maze which I had not heard of and have not ever seen, according to amazon.ca it is not published yet?). This was an intriguing meta-take on fairy-tale motifs set in present-day New York. Hard to say much about it without being spoilery, but recommended.
Kate Ross, The Broken Vessel (1994), Whom the Gods Love (1995), and The Devil in Music (1997). The Julian Kestrel mysteries, which (in spite of my qualms about historical mysteries) have had enough positive buzz hither and yon on my flist for me to take a flyer on them. Annoyingly, the one that still hasn't turned up is the first, so I don't know how much I'm missing that is set up there. I was a bit meh about The Broken Vessel, but really enjoyed Whom the Gods Love (even if I spotted one plot-twist coming a long way off - but one of my icons is James Miranda Barry, nudge-wink, know what I mean?) and The Devil in Music. In particular the latter seemed to be moving towards a deepening of Kestrel's character and motivations (if not quite Strong Poison, perhaps Dancers in Mourning, as a series turning point where the apparently flippant detective demonstrates unexpected emotional vulnerability). So it's a pity that there will be no more.
Mary Borden, Flamingo (1927). Annoying. I couldn't finish it. There was some excellent stuff in it, but I got the impression that Borden was a) striving for some ambitious effects and statements about modern city life and culture that didn't (for me) come off and b)was telegraphing rather than foreshadowing events to come (or that would not, in spite of all appearances, happen) with her characters. There was also a fair amount of what comes over now as rather gross ethnic stereotyping: sometimes works of this period have enough else going for them to carry one over this kind of thing, but Flamingo didn't.
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965) (re-read). Years since I read this, provoked by watching DVD of the David Lynch film with partner recently and remarking that it was both clunky and rushed: but couldn't recall exactly what had been left out. Still a fairly compelling read (though after the drama of the first section, we hit clunky expositionary bit), but notice perhaps even more than did at first, how in the distant future women are still powers-behind rather than wielding power themselves (why can't Irulan become Empress in her own right?). Plus, Chani is really a bit insipid, isn't she? (the vapid Anima - okay, I've lately been dipping into Robertson Davies's A Voice from the Attic, which has quite a lot to say on this topic). Also, though this is really par for the course in this kind of epic, total lack of humour, no-one ever cracks a joke except baddies making really black ones.