lunabee34

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Kate Douglas Wiggin. I think I started reading this book as a kid, but didn't get very far into it -- I certainly knew it existed, but what I didn't realize until osprey_archer reviewed a biography of Kate Douglas Wiggin was that it was by the same person who wrote "The Birds' Christmas Carol", a story that did make a big impression on kid-me. So I thought I'd give Rebecca another try. It's very readable, and clearly was a major influence on L. M. Montgomery (it predates Anne of Green Gables). But because of that I keep comparing it to other books of its genre that I read younger and have more emotional attachment to. And while maybe I might have loved it if I'd gotten into it as a kid, as an adult it just feels like "another one of those".

Memories and Adventures, Louise Héritte-Viardot, translated by Emma-Sophia Buchheim. Louise Héritte-Viardot is my newest discover of a forgotten woman composer, thanks to the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective having just released a recording of her Piano Quartet No. 1. I'd already heard of her mother Pauline Viardot-Garcia, also a composer as well as a charismatic opera star and friend of George Sand, who used her as the model for her protagonist Consuelo. (I've previously written here about my reading of Consuelo and its sequel, which are absolutely wild books to read, especially knowing almost nothing about them.) Sand convinced young Pauline that marrying the older writer and theatre director Louis Viardot was a good career move, and their marriage was generally happy even though Pauline was not in love with Louis.

As a result, Louise grew up in a household frequented by major literary, artistic, and musical figures, many of whom were in love with her mother, and also got to accompany her mother on visits to perform for aristocrats and royals. Louise played hide-and-seek with Prince Friedrich of Prussia, the future (briefly reigning) Kaiser Friedich III. The early part of her memoirs is full of charming childhood memories of famous people who befriended her, and also includes a section defending her family against rumors about their involvement with Turgenev, who lived with or near them for many years.

The memoirs give a good sense of Louise as a strong-willed, intellectually ambitious woman constantly pushing against the limitations of the role of women in her time -- she mentions learning the Greek alphabet as a child as part of a desire to read the classics in the original, never fulfilled. As a composer she was mostly self-taught, and the main feedback she got from the older composers she knew was to keep on doing her own thing. She expresses confidence that she was a good and successful composer, though her career was held back by bad luck and prejudice against women: "I have composed over 300 works, and I supppose they will all be published in good time, though I care very little about it". I wish she'd cared more, since as it happens only a handful of these survive!

Like her mother, Louise married young a much older man; her memoirs are unclear as to how she chose her husband, but unlike her mother, she was not happy in her marriage : she followed him to a diplomatic appointment in South Africa, but returned to Europe a few years later and lived apart from him, financially self-supporting with her own career, for the rest of her life, during which she traveled around Europe. As a result, Louise's husband barely appears in the memoirs. The later part of the book is in the genre of peroid travel memoir that inspired Marie Brennan's The Memoirs of Lady Trent, though unlike Lady Trent Louise is smugly superior to everyone she encounters who is not a Western European. Of the travel adventures my favorite was the section where a teenage Louise accompanies her mother on an operatic tour of the British Isles, acting as a backstage factotum and dealing with all sorts of theatrical mishaps in front of a humorless English audience that takes Opera Very Seriously. Also I was struck by this quote from the chapter on "Russian Illogic", which seems apt to our times.

"The Russian Government has built new universities at a great expense. No sooner are they opened than they are closed again for fear they should be frequented by young people with revolutionary ideas. That is Russian logic."