Virago Reading Week: It's a Wrap!

Although it's been snowing steadily, I've enjoyed a wonderfully green week as countless photos of beautiful Virago books have appeared in my reader. Obviously, Virago Reading Week is a huge success. Our tireless hostesses, Rachel and Carolyn, have compiled daily wrap-ups gathering links to our offerings: reviews, pictures, memories, contests, wishlists. My personal favorite, however, is this photo of Deacon the border collie. You must take a look... it made Zelda, our greyhound, more than a little nervous.

I managed to finish two Virago titles, Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (reviewed here) and The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty. Sadly, neither was an actual Virago edition.

Also this week, I reminisced about a favorite Virago opening from The Enchanted April and learned (via The Writer's Almanac) that  two Virago authors had birthdays this week. Their write-ups on the lives of Edith Wharton and Colette were too interesting not to share.

In other exciting news, our tickets to London have been purchased! Late next month, Mr. LM and I will be visiting our daughter who is studying abroad. There are so many things we want to see and do, but of course there will be time for book browsing. I would love the company of London-area bloggers. You can bet I'll return with one of two Viragos and Persephones!

Finally, a huge thank you to Rachel and Carolyn for a job well done! Many titles have been added to my wish list and a couple new blogs to my reader. There will be more of both, I'm sure, as I catch up on the daily wrap-up posts this afternoon.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym, 1952
published by Plume
256 pages

source: my shelves

motivation for reading: Virago Reading Week and The TBR Dare

In a nutshell:
Mildred Lathbury, clergyman's daughter, thirty-something spinster in 1950's England, and 'excellent woman' often taken for granted, finds herself in the middle of her new neighbors marital crisis, as well as a church upheaval.

My thoughts:
The front cover says "Written with the wit and style if a twentieth-century Jane Austen" and I can't help but agree.  Excellent Women, told in the first person by Mildred Lathbury, seems to suggest this comparison from the opening page:

"I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who loves alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people's business, and if she is also a clergyman's daughter then one might really say there is no hope for her."

Quartet in Autumn is my only previous experience with Pym, but I was again treated to a wonderfully English-feeling novel. The effects of the war are still visible - a badly bombed church is only half-usable, housing shortages remain and (hard for me to imagine from my 21st century comfort) total strangers are required to share bathrooms.  Meat supply seems scarce and tea-drinking occurs every few pages.

Mildred is an extremely perceptive woman, and much of her life is based on appropriateness, capability, and manners. It's a rather quiet life caring for 'gentlewomen' in the morning, attending various church services, and taking part in nearly all day-to-day church activities. Life takes an interesting turn as Mildred becomes involved in the lives, and marital crisis, of her glamorous new neighbors, the Napiers. Helena is a  beautiful anthropologist lacking domestic skills, while Rockingham, or 'Rocky',  is a handsome, engaging officer recently returned from Italy. Through the Napiers, Mildred is also introduced to the unmarried Everard Bone, Helen's research partner.

Church life is shaken up when Allegra Gray, a stylish clergyman's widow, takes a room at the vicarage where (single) Father Julian Malory presides while being looked after by his sister Winifred (also an 'excellent' woman). Mildred's character unfolds as she interacts with all these people.

Although there are some very funny moments, the poignant episodes seemed to stand out, leaving me with a overall bittersweet feeling.

A few examples:

'You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish' I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.  (page 44)

On the bus I began thinking that William had been right and I was annoyed to have to admit it. Mimosa did lose its freshness to quick to be worth buying and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's. (page 76)

It was not the excellent women who got married but people like Allegra Gray, who was no good at sewing, and Helena Napier, who left all the washing up. 'I can't change now. I'm afraid it's too late.' I felt it would not sound very convincing if I said that I hadn't really wanted to marry Julian Malory. I was obviously regarded in the parish as the chief of the rejected ones and I must fill the position with as much dignity as I could.  (page 170)

So did he remember me like that after all - a woman who was always making cups of tea. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now but to make one. (page 222)

After turning the last page, I wanted nothing more than to begin another Barbara Pym novel.

My rating:

Bottom line: A wonderfully perceptive English novel by an author I will be reading much more of... especially recommended to those who enjoy quiet, character-driven novels.

Virago Reading Week is hosted by Rachel and Carolyn.

Virago Reading Week: Colette's Birthday

Today marks the birth of another favorite Virago author - Colette.  Last year, I enjoyed Cheri and The Last of Cheri, and plan to read more of her novels following the TBR Dare.  Have you read Colette? Virago publishes one title, The Other Woman.

From today's Writer's Almanac:


It is the birthday of the writer who said, "Be happy. It's one way of being wise." That's Colette, (books by this author) born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, in the Burgundy Region of France (1873). She's the author of more than 70 books of fiction, memoir, and journalism, including the novel Gigi (1944), which has spawned a number of stage and film adaptations.

When she was 20, she married an older man, a writer and music critic who wrote under the pen name "Monsieur Willy." The young Colette wrote under his pen name, too — her husband locked her up in a room until she had produced a satisfactory amount of writing each day. She fled their marriage in her early 30s, danced half naked in music halls around Paris, and once incited a riot during a performance at the Moulin Rouge. She became lovers with several women, including a famous French actress named Marguerite Moreno, whom Colette wrote to one June evening in 1925, a few nights after the summer solstice:
"What am I doing? Heavens, I'm spinning. And I use this verb as a planet would. Yes, I'm spinning.
I've seen roses, honeysuckle, forty degrees Centigrade of dazzling heat, moonlight, ancient wisteria enlacing the door of my old home in Saint-Sauveur.
I've seen the night over Fontainebleau. And as I said, I'm spinning.
Beside me there a is a dark boy at the wheel. I'm on my way back to Paris, but shall I stay there? The dark boy beside me is still at the wheel, and how strange everything is! And how good I am, and how amazed I am, and what wise improvidence in my behaviour! Oh yes, I'm spinning! As you can see, you must not worry about me.
From time to time I am uneasy about myself, and I give a start, prick up my ears, and cry out, But what are you doing? and then I refuse to think any more about it ... Just now, on the telephone, an enlightened Chiwawa, enlightened by the dark, dark, dark boy, sang my praises. The era of frankness is back and the cards are on the table.
But, my Marguerite, how strange it all is! ... I have the fleeting confidence of people who fall out of a clock tower and for a moment sail through the air in a comfortable fairy-world, feeling no pain anywhere ..."
Colette married three times, gave birth to a child at the age of 40 whom she left to be raised by an English nanny, had an affair in her 50s with her 16-year-old stepson, and was forever scandalizing her French contemporaries. But she was also highly respected, the winner of all sorts of prestigious international literary awards. And when she died at the age of 81, she was the first woman in France to be honored with an official state funeral.

She once said, "What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."

And, "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

And Colette wrote: "By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet."

Virago Reading Week is hosted by Rachel and Carolyn.

Virago Reading Week: A Beautiful Beginning

"It began in a women's club in London on a February afternoon - an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon - when Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless eyes down the Agony Column saw this:

To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine.

      Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the

Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of

April.  Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times."

I don't know about you, but that ad would certainly catch my attention... especially during these cold, bleak winter days.  The beautiful images evoked open a door to endless possibilities.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim is a wonderful book. Why not escape to Italy today?  My complete review is here.

Virago Reading Week: Edith Wharton's Birthday

Today marks the beginning of Virago Reading Week hosted by Rachel and Carolyn.  It is also Edith Wharton's birthday. Do you suppose this is purely coincidence?  I think not, and give full credit to our gracious hostesses.  This article from today's Writer's Almanac seemed the perfect way to start the week.


It's the birthday of the writer who said, "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope." That's Edith Wharton, (books by this author) born in New York City (1862). She wrote about frustrated love in novels like The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.

She came from a rich and snobbish New York family who lived off the inheritance of their real estate and banking tycoon ancestors, and she spent several years of her early childhood traveling around Europe. When she was 10, her parents re-settled in New York, around 23rd and Park Avenue. She was a teenage bookworm, reading insatiably from her family's expansive library and feeling alienated and adrift in the New York high-society circles her family moved in. At 23, she married a family friend, a classy, good-looking sportsman named Edward "Teddy" Robbins Wharton, who wasn't particularly fond of books. He had a tendency for manic spells, extravagant spending sprees, and infidelity. It was a long and miserable marriage.

She met Henry James in Europe and became good friends with him. He encouraged her to write about the New York City she knew so well and disliked. He said, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours." And it was Henry James who introduced her to his friend Morton Fullerton, a dashing, promiscuous, intellectual American expat journalist who reported for the London Times from Paris. Edith Wharton fell hard for the man, filled her diary with passages about how their romance and conversation made her feel complete, wrote him pleading letters, and about a year into their affair, when she was in her late 40s, moved full-time to Paris, where he resided. The affair ended in 1911, the year she published Ethan Frome. She once wrote to him:

"Do you know what I was thinking last night, when you asked me, &; I couldn't tell you? — Only that the way you've spent your emotional life while I've ... hoarded mine, is what puts the great gulf between us, & sets us not only on opposite shores, but at hopelessly distant points of our respective shores. Do you see what I mean?

"And I'm so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar red calico & beads of the clever trader, who has had dealing with every latitude, & knows just what to carry in the hold to please the simple native — I'm so afraid of this, that often & often I stuff my shining treasures back into their box, lest I should see you smiling at them!

"Well! And what if you do? It's your loss, after all! And if you can't come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, & if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, & if, when you hold me, & I don't speak, it's because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses, & all my thoughts are a great golden blur — why should I be afraid of your smiling at me, when I can turn the beads & calico back into such beauty —?"

He left her in 1911, and she stayed married to Teddy for a couple more years, though the two lived apart from each other during the last part of their 28-year marriage. She loved living in Paris, and there she mingled with people like André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Theodore Roosevelt, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she once told: "To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers." But she wasn't prim or overly proper, and she famously enjoyed one of Fitzgerald's scandalous stories, about an American couple in a Paris brothel, which he drunkenly related the first time he met her.

Modernist writers were among her contemporaries, but she didn't use modernist techniques like stream-of-consciousness in her own writing, and she wasn't a fan of it in others'. She once said about James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."

She died in Paris at the age of 75. At the time of her death, she was working on a novel called The Buccaneers, about five rich American girls who set out to marry landed British men, so that they can have English feudal titles in their names, like "Duchess." In her last days, she lay in bed and worked on the novel, and each page that she completed she dropped onto the floor so that it could be collected later, when she was through.

Many of her novels have been made into movies. The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon, and The Age of Innocence were all adapted into silent films around the 1920s. John Madden directed a version of Ethan Frome in 1993, the same year Martin Scorsese directed a film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. In 2000, Gillian Anderson stared in The House of Mirth, directed by Terence Davies.

In her short story "The Fullness of Life" she famously wrote:
"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."
"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got beyond the family sitting-room?"
"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?'"

And Edith Wharton said, "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it."

TSS: Barbara Pym, Virago Reading Week, and The TBR Dare

Good morning, and welcome to another Sunday Salon. It's a bitterly cold morning with temperatures hovering around zero, and forecast to stay here all day. There's a fire in the fireplace and coffee in my mug, and I'm ready to talk about books.

Yesterday I finished Excellent Women by Barbara Pym - what a wonderful novel! Sad, yet funny, and so real.  That nearly ended the TBR Dare too, but I resisted the urge to run to the bookstore and start another Pym immediately. I am determined to succeed and will wait until April 1!  Quartet in Autumn was my first Pym, and I received recommendations on twitter yesterday for Jane and Prudence and An Unsuitable Attachment. Are there other titles you would suggest?  I can feel a Pym binge (hmm, that sounds like it should be an event) coming in April...

Speaking of the TBR Dare, I'm thinking of giving myself permission to acquire one new book for every two (or maybe three) read from my collection. I needed some extra motivation NOT to buy every Pym title in sight yesterday and this seemed to satisfy me.  In addition to Pym, the next book to purchase may be The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. Bloggers seem to love this, but Lynne's review convinced me that I NEED to read it. Amazon has also named it one January's best books.

There was a moment this week, however, when I was actually grateful for the TBR Dare.  You know I love a good readalong, right? Well, Jill is at it again. This time it's Jousting with Joyce, a Ulysses readalong, and I have an easy, automatic excuse. Thank God there's not a copy on my shelf!

Finally... Virago Reading Week, hosted by Rachel and Carolyn, begins tomorrow!  My review of Excellent Women will be posted during the week and today I will decide on another title to read. Carolyn has posted the complete list here. Possible choices for me include several books by Willa Cather, Elizabeth von Arnim's Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty, and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. We'll see which one strikes me this afternoon. Will you be reading Viragos this week, too?  Which titles have you chosen?

Literary Blog Hop: Most Despised

The Literary Blog Hop takes place every other week at The Blue Bookcase.

This week's question:
Discuss a work of literary merit that you hated when you were made to read it in school or university.  Why did you dislike it?


My answer:

It's been a long time since I've had to read a book for school, but The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane immediately comes to mind as one I particularly despised.  During high school, I was selected for a summer enrichment program at nearby university and Crane's book was assigned for the literature class.

War books have never really appealed to me and, I supposed it can be traced back to my experience with The Red Badge of Courage. The only thing I recall is the Civil War setting... no plot, characters, or themes.

A vague feeling of guilt has been nagging me for years. Should I give Mr. Crane another chance?  Should I stop saying I dislike 'war books'?  Have I ever really read any war books?  A new project may be in the making...

More answers to this question can be found here.