lunabee34

And Always a Detective: Chapters on the History of Detective Fiction by R.F. Stewart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I must give this book a qualified review.

First the good: I don't care a whit about detective novels. I've never read a single Sherlock Holmes mystery, and I don't read modern thrillers or crime novels. I am completely disinterested in the subject matter, and yet Stewart's history of the genre thoroughly captivates me for two reasons. One, the history of detective fiction is indivisible from the history of the sensation novel, and like any proper Victorianist, I am mad about the sensation novel. I'd venture at least half of the book is about tracking trends in sensation novels and so is very relevant to my area of research. Two, Stewart has such a delightful authorial voice; he is funny, always making a joke or a clever allusion. He clearly loves detective fiction and is having fun writing about the genre which makes reading his work a pleasure for me.

Now for the bad: This was published in 1980, and the academy has come a long way, baby. The blatant sexism is over the top at times. Stewart takes potshots at Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Margaret Oliphant and Elaine Showalter (!), for example. He even derisively refers to his female colleagues as "academic ladies" at one point. *shudders* We've also come a long way in the past forty years in terms of the way we discuss literature that once fell (and sometimes still falls) outside the canon. Stewart is always eager to let the reader know that sensation literature is not good literature; it's second-rate, just like its writers (Braddon et al). I am so grateful that never once in my graduate work was I called on to justify why I think a critical discussion of one of the most widely read authors of the 19th century is important even though Ouida was "just" a sensation writer (okay, she wrote in more genres, but you get what I'm going for here).

So, if you're into detective fiction and can stomach a bit of sexism in your literary criticism, I think you'll have a mostly good time reading this book.



View all my reviews

Fallen Angel by Sally Mitchell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The major theme of this work is the fallen woman, how she's represented in early Victorian fiction, and how that representation differs from the fallen woman in actuality. Naturally this entails a discussion of how the Victorians defined chastity and the consequences of that definition.

In addition, Mitchell focuses on reading habits of the time period. This is a good examination of the kinds of novels being written by and for women from the 1830s-1880s. Mitchell discusses sensation novels as well as the novels and stories being published in penny periodicals.

I read this book for her criticism of Ouida's novels, which is pretty spare. She only discusses Moths and Folle-Farine very briefly and Ouida's canon as a whole very generally, but her comments are important to note. Her research did point me to a couple primary sources, including contemporaneous reviews, of which I was unaware. I also appreciated the little bit of information Mitchell includes about Geraldine Jewsbury; she was a critic who reviewed several of Ouida's novels, but I didn't know anything about her personally.



View all my reviews

The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E Thomason

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I think this book is a really interesting look at the way genteel, primarily English, 18th-century women viewed marriage. While Thomason does examine several novels, most of her source material is drawn from personal correspondence. I hadn't realized that letters at this point in history were simultaneously public and private documents. People had every expectation that their letters might be circulated beyond the intended recipients, even published without their permission. In addition, European governments had begun surveillance of correspondence, often opening and examining letters. Very fascinating the way women took advantage of that dual nature of letters to do some really neat stuff with argument and with authorial voice.

Very informative read.





View all my reviews

Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Oh, man. I have been on such a Wilkie Collins high, and I was looking forward to reading this one, but it just didn't do it for me. It was a slog, and reading it felt tedious. One of Collins's gifts is dialogue, and this novel is almost entirely descriptive exposition--lots of what everything looks like and what everyone is thinking and very little of it accomplished through dialogue. I also think that the solution to the mystery of the story isn't telegraphed at all so that it just comes out of nowhere. My edition has some notes at the end which suggest that originally Collins did include more clues but edited them out later; I wish he'd left them in because the conclusion of the story was pretty convoluted even for me, an inveterate lover of sensation novels.



View all my reviews

The Clever Woman of the Family by Charlotte Mary Yonge

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So, Yonge is not progressive for her time. The central thesis of this book is that women need the firm intellectual guidance of wise men so that they don't become ridiculous and dangerously foolish. A woman left to mull things over on her own is a time bomb waiting to explode.

But don't let that stop you from reading this fantastic novel. Rachel, the "clever" woman of the family, is constantly making silly blunders and providing comic relief until suddenly she isn't. This is an emotional roller coaster of a read; it begins firmly in the humorous vein (almost Wildean in wit and tone) and then becomes very serious in ways that I didn't expect.

I really don't want to spoil the story, but it's full of romance, mystery, peril and genuine pathos. Also, in spite of Yonge's conservative world view, the novel is pretty feminist in ways she may not have intended--female authors, women lamenting the lack of useful occupation available to them, and women taking decisive/heroic action.

Highly recommended.



View all my reviews

The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I absolutely loved this book. Many of Collins's novels are predicated on a secret, and this is clearly no exception. What I really liked about this book (in comparison to, say, Man and Wife where the audience is in on the secret the whole time) is that the secret is kept from the audience until almost the very end. For a good half of the book, I had no clue what the secret might be, and then I started to suspect what the secret was but not the why of it. The mystery aspect of the novel is really well done. Collins misdirects multiple times, leaving little clues that end up going nowhere or suggesting something about someone's personality that ends up not playing out the way the reader might think.

The characters are very well drawn and interesting. One of the main characters is blind, and his wife serves as his eyes, giving Collins ample opportunity for beautiful prose and sparkling dialogue.

I don't want to spoil what the secret is, but I will say that it's heartbreaking, and I found myself moved to tears by the novel's end.

So, if you like a good mystery, a heaping helping of gothic trappings, irascible old misanthropes, and beautiful young women who can describe the contents of a room as if they're reciting poetry, this is the novel for you!



View all my reviews

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this novel, and I love it even better on this reread. One of my favorite novels is Wuthering Heights, and both times I've read Jane Eyre I've been struck by the similarities I see between the sisters' writing (which isn't surprising since they spent so much time writing collaboratively about their imaginary world). Jane Eyre is so modern to me--the first person narrator, the focus on the psychology and motivation of characters, the lack of superfluous description. Dickens writes about orphans and poor people and the disadvantaged, and although I love Dickens, I never once forget that I'm reading a novel written more than a hundred years ago when I read, say, Oliver Twist. When Bronte writes about the same topics in Jane Eyre, they are biting and harrowing and feel contemporary to me in a way that many Victorian novels do not. Wuthering Heights has this modern quality about it as well. The way Jane and Rochester speak to each other--prickly and teasing and sarcastic, one zinger after another--also strikes me as a particularly modern way of writing dialogue. Love this book, love that Jane gets a happy ending, love that she finds a home and a family.



View all my reviews

Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this although not so well as No Name or Woman in White. Man and Wife is very humorous and satirical. Collins is constantly poking fun at the conventions of the time, and he consistently hits the mark when he makes fun of Lady Lundie--the affected, bossy, and manipulative social butterfly. His book was intended to shed light on Scottish marriage laws (which really do sound utterly ridiculous and not at all a good idea), and the story does a good job of revealing their potential for harm. Collins's other thesis is one that amuses me a bit. The main antagonist of the story is an athlete who essentially ruins his body and his mind through exercise. Now, I'm totally on Collins's side when he asserts that national obsession with sports to the exclusion of the arts and the cultivation of the intellect is A Bad Thing, Indeed. I also agree with his implicit thesis that excellent male athletes are forgiven many faults that they shouldn't be because of their athletic prowess and that something is wrong when masculinity is defined solely as a product of physical ability. But to the modern reader, his idea that most people who strenuously exercise are risking paralytic stroke is a bit silly. I have to admit that I found the storyline for the most part predictable (girl is ruined; ruiner declines to marry her; her best friend's fiance is put into a contrived situation in which he appears to be married to her; this problem comprises the bulk of the novel; at the end, the situation is resolved and the best friend's fiance is off the hook) until I got to the last fourth of the book. Then it takes a really unexpected and gripping turn that belies the humor of the beginning. The athlete who ruins our virtuous heroine decides to kill her after he finds a written confession of murder, and the method he employs is really ingenious. The confession is incredibly dark and detailed, and the athlete's mental journey from Asshole to Murderer is fascinating to read. I also loved the very end in which Lady Lundie gets her final comeuppance. I really didn't see that coming.



View all my reviews

1. I've been thinking about writing an essay about why I think evangelical Christians are so willing to vote for Trump. I was raised in that tradition (Southern Baptist), and it makes no sense on the surface why people who not only say they are Christian but who claim to make every decision in their lives based on that Christianity would support Trump, but having been a part of that culture for the first 18 years of my life, I have some ideas about why they're doing so. But I've also been thinking that plenty of other people have written about this, and I don't know that I have anything new to say or offer about the subject, so. IDK

2. We finished our rewatch of Treme. One half of the couple we watched it with used to live in Louisiana and is an accomplished musician who often played gigs in NOLA. So that added an extra layer of fun to the rewatch; they'd often comment about places featured, or he'd have stories about the musicians in the episodes. ( SPOILERS )

3. We are almost done with Downton Abbey season two. We finished all the regular episodes and only have the Christmas Special left to watch.

( SPOILERS )

I can't wait to see where the story goes. I am actually sad that Walking Dead is resuming because it means no more Downton Abbey for awhile.

4. executrix sent me a biography of Jane Austen (Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin) which was really interesting. I knew nothing about her life, so everything was pretty much new to me. This is a very thorough, heavily researched book which I would recommend to anyone interested in her. I have to admit that from time to time I got a little confused because the cast of characters, so to speak, is so large and so many people in her family and life shared names; I just wanted to read it for entertainment and not take notes or anything, but reading it that way did mean that I was a little bit lost from time to time.

I have two main takeaways from the book. First, how horrible that so many of her letters and documents were destroyed. I wonder if they were truly scandalous (I doubt it), or if that notion of privacy (that regardless of their content, the public at large shouldn't be able to read her letters and that wanting to do so was born of prurient interest) which was beginning already to erode with the explosion of celebrity culture and mass media was largely responsible.

Second, I wonder if she was happy to stay single or if she considered her life tragic. The book posits that her first, truncated romance with Tom Lefroy was very dear to her and that she was very hung up on him and hurt when he was essentially forbidden to see her. Tomalin offers some evidence that Austen was thinking about him three years after that romance had ended. It also mentions that she initially accepted and then turned down a proposal from a man she was friends with but had no romantic feelings for. My take on it is that she'd watched all the women around her have ungodly amounts of children and a number of them die in childbirth and maybe she was grateful to escape that horror. IDK I mean, it can certainly be both. What do y'all think (about anything relating to her life)?

1. I finished To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol Wallace which is about the rush of American heiresses who married into English aristocracy in the late Victorian through Edwardian period. Excellent read. I especially loved the copious photographs of the glitterati of the time, their gowns by Worth, and their homes. What constitutes beauty in any given era is always so interesting to me; more than half the women pictured in this book would probably not be considered beautiful by modern standards (and I'm not talking about weight or figure; I'm talking more facial features although to be fair, those horrific Edwardian hairdos flatter no one's facial features).

That leads me to another question. How did Victorian, aristocratic women keep their figures? Exercise in the way we understand it now was not appropriate for women to engage in, and the aristocratic life was one ball, dinner, and banquet after another. I suspect a fair amount of just not eating was responsible as well as corsets, and women could walk and ride horses. IDK I am just imagining women secretly doing push-ups in their bedrooms at night to work off the breakfast of ortolans and champagne.

2. Lucifer continues to be enjoyable. ( SPOILERS )

3. Emma and I went to go see Hail Caesar. I was surprised she wanted to see it in the first place, and doubly surprised when she ended up enjoying it rather than being bored. The movie was hit or miss for me. ( SPOILERS )

4. We started watching Daredevil which I enjoy. ( SPOILERS )

5. In the past couple years, I've gone for long stretches where I don't read books and only read stuff online, and then binge read like 10 books in two weeks. This has been one of those stretches where I've not been reading much, so I'm resolved to start reading books again. Here's my To Read list:

The Mechanical
Ancillary Justice
Goblin Emperor
Ragnarok
Sugar
The Game
Parasite
Irving book
3 Body Problem
Martian
the final Mortal Instruments book
Stephen King books on Kindle

1. I'm reading a fantastic book that Executrix sent me about the way that American heiresses started invading Victorian England because they couldn't achieve social recognition or make good marriages in an American society ruled by stuffy old birds like Mrs. Astor. Anyway, fun factoid: kid gloves were worn by both men and women at society functions so that flesh never touched flesh while dancing; the gloves were thin and tight enough that the outline of the fingernails was visible through them, and they only lasted for a single use. Talk about disposable income.

2. ( cut for discussion of exercise, weight, and mental health )

3. ( cut for discussion of dieting )

4. ( cut for discussion of sartorial woes with a side of self-loathing )

5. Getting to Know You Meme: Ask me a question, and I'll ask you one in return.