A Work in Progress

The Third Miss Symons, F.M. Mayor

Nature vs. nurture was my first thought on finishing F.M. Mayor's The Third Miss Symons, which was first published in 1913 and reissued as a Virago Modern Classic in 1980.  Is Henrietta Symons, third daughter and fifth child of a proper Victorian family the way she is because of the oppressive environment in which she was raised or it is simply the nature of her personality and indeed she is as curmudgeonly and taciturn as she appears and therefore unlovable.  While reading I was by turns sympathetic towards her plight and wanting to give her a good shake and tell her: 'please, for your own sake . . . snap out of it!'.

It is comforting to know I am not alone in my response as I read Susan Hill's introduction, as she feels much the same (though she notes it is hard to be sympathetic towards her at all).  "The fault lies in Henrietta's personality as much as in her circumstances.  She knows it, at least in her heart of hearts, and loathes herself, and can do nothing to escape from the prison of herself," Hill writes.   Isn't that the worst--seeing those faults in yourself yet not having the desire or compunction to try and make a change.

So, it is both nature and nurture.  Her poor upbringing which does nothing to instill a sense of self-worth sets her up for an unhappy, unadventurous adulthood almost entirely devoid of meaningful interactions with others and no ability to simply either be content with her situation or find the skills in order to make it more fulfilling.  In a way this feels a little like a cautionary tale, though mostly it is a look at the circumstances some women found themselves in in that period just before WWI--just at the end of the Victorian era where women either married and took care of husbands and children or were maiden aunts, 'extras' who might be useful to elderly parents or siblings.  At least by the post-WWI modern era women finally began making strides and finding new roles as independent women--thank goodness!

Poor Henrietta was stuck somewhere in the middle of the family lineup.  Neither the eldest nor the youngest--each having some special role--happy novelties to be a first or last, and not a boy.  Not particularly pretty, though she does have her short moment.  She is more or less neglected and compared to her siblings not really all that useful to her parents.  Rather than finding her own happy place in the world she simply turns bitter and remains that way. 

Henrietta's eldest sister sabotages her one chance at marital happiness (whether it would have been a happy marriage is open to argument, but she would at least have filled a certain accepted role).  What is sad is that none of the daughters end up especially happy or successful all things considered.  But by then Henrietta's personality has been formed and is rigid and unwavering.  She becomes the sort of cranky, cantankerous old woman who would likely yell out her window--'hey you naughty kids get off my lawn' . . . grouch . . . grouch . . .  grouch.

One woman's life summed up in a mere 144 pages.  It is not a very happy life or a useful life.  In the original preface to the book, it's remarked that this is a woman whose life is not wasted, simply it is not used.  And there is something heartbreaking about that.  All through the story she wonders why she is here if she is not loved.  Over and over again she thinks that her only desire has been to love something and for something/somebody to love her.  And isn't that ultimately what we all want?  So I guess in the end this is a character study and a comment on the human condition.  Maybe it I shouldn't be sad that it takes only 144 pages to sum up one woman's life as to admire F.M. Mayor's ability lay bare Henrietta's shortcomings and situation so very precisely in so compact a manner.  And to appreciate that this utter boredom of Henrietta's, this lack of any useful  application of time and skills to contribute something meaningful to one's life and to Society is a choice these days rather than impossible situation. 

And just so you don't think Henrietta never found any happiness and fulfillment:

"On the whole during those latter years she improved, and in the general reformation of her character she raised the standard of her reading.  She confined herself in the mornings and afternoon to mildly scandalous memoirs of Frenchwomen and biographies of Church dignitaries, keeping her costume novels for the evening."

She had never been a very good reader, or learner in general (or traveler or helper . . .), but I had a good chuckle on the books that helped her find some useful distractions!  A somewhat maddening story (or a maddening woman), but in the end, as per Viragos in general, this is a story with more to it than meets the eye.  As for a companion read Persephone book #65 Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson offers another view on the spinster or superfluous woman.

I've not yet started reading, but I think my next Virago will be A Touch of Mistletoe by Barbara Comyns.

Teaser Tuesday: The Third Miss Symons

They say there is someone for everybody in this world.  I have my doubts about that one, or else my somebody is very inconveniently living in a yurt in the higher reaches of the Himalayas and our paths will never cross.  So it is with much curiosity that I am reading F.M. Mayor's The Third Miss Symons, my first of what I hope will be many Viragos this year.  What happens when someone comes into the world not much loved or even particularly wanted by her family? 

Henrietta is the third daughter of four.  Maybe it is thanks to her temper (so her siblings and friends say), and she is ever so cross at times.  Her mother is not fond of children and least of all of Henrietta.  Her father thinks the children are in general a burden, especially when it ends up that there are seven of them.  The Third Miss Symons was published in 1913, so really just on the very edge of the end of the Victorian era and maybe it's not so surprising really, since the cult of childhood has yet to take hold in the popular imagination.

What happens when you are overlooked, left on the shelf?  You have the bad luck to have an elder sister who is jealous that you have a suitor at all, no matter how bland, who ends up sabotaging your only chance at married life (happy or not as long as you are not alone . . .) and he ends up marrying someone else.  Well, that is as far as I have gotten in this short novel that follows one woman's life from birth to death.  Etta, a misfit who lacks the talent or looks to be loved.  According to the blurb this will ultimately be a story of empowerment, which gives me hope.  But there are few signs so far of that, so I shall keep my optimism neatly tucked away for the moment.

When Henrietta's beau dumps her for her older sister (who then dumps him), Henrietta hopes to commiserate with her older brother, who is somewhat sympathetic . . .  I found this passage very poignant?  'Sad' is more like it.

"It may seem strange that Henrietta should have spread broadcast a grief which most people would keep hidden in their own hearts.  But it is one of the saddest things about lonely people, that, having no proper confidant, they tell to all and sundry what ought never to be told to more than one.  When, however, the overmastering desire for sympathy had passed, words cannot express her regret that she had spoken.  For years and years afterwards it would suddenly come upon her, 'I told him and he despised me,' and she would beat her foot on the floor with all her might, in a useless transport of remorse."

I guess that not sharing is keeping a stiff upper lip maybe?   It's bad enough to feel unloved and alone but to not have a confidant is even more harsh to deal with.  I wonder how her life will be resolved and how and if she will still find some fulfillment and contentment.  I'll let you know how things work out for Henrietta.  Of if you care to read along you can download a copy of the book at Girlebooks!

Happy Holidays: Much Peace and Joy!

To everyone: I wish you much Peace and Joy in this Holiday Season--however you may celebrate.  My only real wish for the season is that we all share much kindness with our neighbors!

I have been spending time with my family and filling in any extra free time with as much reading as I can manage in all the nooks and crannies of those down-time moments.  I will be back in a few days to catch up on end of the year bookishness.

I do have to share these . . . a visit to my favorite used bookstore with my sister was in order for the afternoon of the 24th and look what treasures I was 'gifted' with.  Stacks of 'new' Viragos.  I have never had such luck in one bookstore visit.  I especially feel like the Rachel Ferguson novel on the top was a real coup of a find as I have long wanted this rare book!  Some booklover took very good care of these lovely Viragos and I promise to do the same.  One of these will certainly be vacation reading!

Happy Holidays everyone!  I hope that you also find, give or receive some special treasure, too.

Beyond the Glass by Antonia White

It started with Frost in May way back in the spring of 2014.  And then following quick on its heels that same year there was The Lost Traveller.  How did almost two years pass before I took the story up again with The Sugar House?  Poor Antonia White's most excellent quartet of Clara Batchelor novels (she started her journey as Nanda Grey by the way) has been dragged out and neglected a bit here online, but I did finally read the last of the books earlier this year finishing that long journey with Clara in Beyond the Glass.  I read it closer to the start of the year and here I am trying to write about it at the end of it.  Thankfully a very good introduction is in my edition of the book (any quotes I share come from that introduction by Virago founder Carmen Callil) which is helping me along, and as always thinking about it and writing about it after the fact helps set it more firmly in mind and allows me to revisit the story. 

It's easy to see why Frost in May was the very first Virago Modern Classic and easy to see, too, why VMC has published and kept in print all four volumes by Antonia White.  They are really brilliantly written and give a view upon a woman's life that VMC set out to do--tell women's stories.  If you think about 'women's fiction' in light of the books Virago has set out to publish there is no question that women write quality Literature just as well as men do (but we all already knew that, right?) and that, and here is the sticking point so often in literary novels, that their stories are just as important to tell and worthy to read about as men's. 

The books are based loosely on White's life, which was somewhat traumatic if Clara's story is anything to go by.  She wrote only the four novels as well as a collection of short stories (which I have and must get around to reading as well), a play, a couple of children's books and two volumes of memoirs.  Apparently she struggled for much of her life with writer's block, and perhaps that is why there is such a stretch of years between publication of the first volume in the quartet and the remaining three.  She spent much time writing advertising copy and journalism pieces though she long wanted to write a 'proper' novel.  She changed the character's name in the second volume of the quartet possibly to distance herself and her own story from that of Nanda/Clara's.  I think Nanda in particular was an evocation of herself.  When Nanda became Clara, White was writing less about her own life experiences than that 'proper' novel she so longed to write.

"Antonia White turned fact into fiction in a quartet of novels based on her life from the ages of nine to twenty-three.  'My life is the raw material for the novels, but writing an autobiography and writing fiction are very different things.'  This transformation of real life into an imagined work of art is perhaps her greatest skill as a novelist."

The four novels follow the story of Clara's life from her childhood, her conversion along with her father (that father figure was predominant in her life) to Catholicism and her Catholic education, to her first love affair and life as an actress (when she began questioning her Catholic faith), her marriage and then the failure of that marriage.  Finally in Beyond the Glass ("technically the most ambitious of the four novels") Clara grapples with mental illness.  This last novel was perhaps the hardest to read, hard emotionally.  Clara had struggled with her faith (though Antonia White makes a point, too, of saying that the influence of her Catholic faith "was profoundly enriching, in no way negative, part of an extraordinary life"--which just goes to show how little in life is ever black and white and that our lives are filled with many complexities).

"As a Catholic, her relationship with Catholic belief and practice has always been intense, a wrestling to live within its spiritual imperatives in a way which accorded with her own nature, clinging to her faith, as she says, 'by the skin of my teeth'.  The struggle is brilliantly felt in this quartet, permeating everything that happens to Clara, affecting her adolescence, sexuality, her relationships with men."

And really that quite sums up nicely what the books are about.  It is a coming of age of one young girl, into young woman and then adulthood but that passage marked along the way by so many challenges and roadblocks.  Life is messy and White really illuminates just how much.  She also brings to life the period--one girl's coming of age in the thirties and forties and just beyond the war years. 

Antonia White wanted to finish Clara's story and her reader's asked for yet another novel, but she never managed more than just a chapter more in Clara's life.  It is comforting to know (and I wish I could read that chapter) that Clara marries again (to the man she had an affair with in this book), has given up her religion and is living the "sort of life her father doesn't approve of . . . going out to work and having a wonderful time."  Clara, until her breakdown, had been writing stories as well as advertising copy, too, much like White.  And despite her struggles with her father, he had retired and was living with her mother in a Sussex cottage with a garden and full-size croquet lawn.  No matter the difficulties Clara (and her parents) faced along the way, it sounds like a happy ending was in store after all.

The books are well worth reading and I can happily recommend them to you.  I am not sure I could, the first time out, have read them all back to back, but I can imagine now reading them as a true quartet and seeing how Clara's life rolls out.  Even if there were only four novels, Antonia White was an amazing writer.

Recent Book Acquisitions!

I've been busy.  Can you tell?  It's not quite as "bad" as it looks.  This pile is from the Daedalus catalog, which is chock full of inexpensive and remaindered books.

A stack of new remaindered William Trevors!  Running from top to bottom I bought:

The Love Department
Other People's Worlds
The Boarding House
Elizabeth Alone
Miss Gomez and the Brethren
Nights at the Alexandra
The Children of Dynmouth

I had no idea he was so very very prolific or that these gorgeous Penguin editions existed.  I think there are actually more I might look for to round out my Trevor collection.  I do hope to see one or two of these very soon on my reading horizon/current reading pile.  Has anyone read any of these?  Any particular favorites?

I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket and I decided this is what I wanted to buy with it.

A Penguin cover illustration design book!  I love books showing jacket designs and Penguin always has very, very cool cover designs so:

Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover by Paul Buckley.  Yes, the inside is just as good as the outside hints.

Used books.  I could never have bought all these full price at a new bookstore.

A visit to my favorite used bookstore netted these treats!

Last Ferry to Manly by Jill Neville
The Leavetaking by John McGahern
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (short stories)
Love Unknown by A.N. Wilson
Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford
Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford
I am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore

More used bookstore finds.

And four almost pristine new Virago Modern Classics!  I am always pleased to find VMCs that I don't already own and look at the near perfect condition of them, too.

Cindie by Jean Devanny
The Golden Arrow by Mary Webb
Red Pottage by Mary Chalmondeley
Mrs. Humphrey Ward by Marcella

How  many weeks (or months or even years) of most excellent reading is this?!

Short Story 'Monday': Good-Bye, Good-Bye

Two stories by Elizabeth Taylor this weekend and two left for this coming week and that will be it for her wonderful story collection, The Blush.  I do have a number of new and interesting (and calling-out-to-me) collections that I am trying to decide between for my next choice, but I also feel very tempted to just grab another collection by Taylor (I think I have about three plus a hefty complete stories collection) and keep going with her work.

In "Good-Bye, Good-Bye" Taylor juxtaposes two 'love affairs'-one a new and burgeoning love and the other a melancholic look at an impossible love, an affair long past and assumed put to bed.

"On his last evening in England he broke two promises--one, that he would dine with his brother, and another, older promise he made to a woman whom he loved."

The more significant promise that Peter breaks is to call on Catherine, this woman he still loves and once had an affair with.  They parted and Catherine made him promise that it was over and he would not contact her again.  She is a married woman and with nearly grown children and is spending the summer holidays at the place where she and Peter had once saw their passion come alive.  Peter sees her husband, busily working in the City, as someone only worried about making money and babies. 

The seaside summer holiday is not just a holiday for her eldest daughter who had invited her first beau and now nurses a broken heart as his expected arrival has come and gone and the train brought only Peter.  For Catherine Peter is not a welcome guest however much she might still have feelings for him.  When Sarah's guest turns up after all Catherine reflects that his tardy arrival will only be worse for her daughter now--as it is worse for her, too.  ". . . all that carefully-tended hatred has vanished in a few seconds."

As is only expected with Elizabeth Taylor she creates a story that is pitch perfect.  Those emotions once so carefully contained and bottled up now well to the surface once again.  Catherine just barely keeps her anguish from the children and holds Peter, figuratively anyway, at arm's length.  It's so easy to imagine the love affair, perhaps the result of the war, the passion and then the parting.  But no matter how much she might still feel love she can think only now of the well-being of her children and then watches her daughter already falling into that trap of loving a man and perhaps being at the mercy of his whims.

I can't find where I must have written about it, but I am sure I read Taylor's brilliant nod to Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" some time in the past.  "Poor Girl" is a wonderful ghost story.  Is it a ghost?  Perhaps.  There is certainly something or a trace of someone in the schoolroom.  Or maybe it is the precocious little boy Hilary that awakens something.  Is he some strange conduit or past experiences coming to life once again in the here and now?  Florence Chasty is a respectable and modest young woman.  Miss Chasty, please, to Hilary who is only too quick to take the familiar with her.

The story begins innocuously enough at the start.  It's an earlier time, but not so very long ago.  She has come to act as governess to a little boy who seems the elder of the two. 

"Miss Chasty's first pupil was a flirtatious little boy.  At seven years, he was alarmingly precocious, and sometimes she thought he despised his childhood, regarding it as a waiting time which he used only as a rehearsal for adult life.  He was already more sophisticated than his young governess and disturbed her with his air of dalliance, the mockery with which he set about his lessons, the preposterous conversations he led her into, guiding him skillfully away from work . . ."

Hilary might push the boundaries of propriety, but Miss Chasty is reasonably good at getting him to settle into his work even if he flirts and messes about--calling her Florence, or Poor Girl, asking her to wait to marry him.  He is a seven year old dandy who when he is old enough to grow a moustache will surely look the spitting image of his papa.

Oh dear.  His papa.  Even Hilary's mother, while indulging her husband in his "little joke to make him feel youthful" by comparing son to father, inwardly thinks--please God let it be only in looks and not in action be like his father.  There's a warning there.  Because dear papa has a fondness for young maids and governesses.  And then another warning that not all is right in the household . . . the red lipstick smudges on poor Miss Chasty's teacup or the sweet scents that seem to hover in the schoolroom.  Surely Mrs. Wilson's first impressions of Florence were not wrong. But what is that rustling of skirts about Miss Chasty's person?  Surely not silken undergarments?! 

There is something not quite right in the schoolroom.  It's hinted at and there is an aura about the place.  What happened here so long ago?  What is happening now?  What is coming over poor dear Miss Chasty?  If you have a chance, do give this collection a go.  I've not yet read a story in it that I didn't like.

Next up "Hare Park" and "You'll Know It When You Get There".

Short Story (Monday): Summer Schools

Okay, so I won't gush this week about Elizabeth Taylor's short story collection, Blush, but it really is very good and I've read yet another amazing story.  I fully expect to love each weekly installment now.

This week's story, "Summer Schools" first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958.  It's quite revealing what a character does or does not say, isn't it?  Or, I'll pose the question, what does it say about a person that they embellish and embroider and share an encounter they've had while another person simply omits all mention of a quite momentous event in their life?  In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor, who in her usual understated way, it says a lot.

Melanie and Ursula are spinster sisters, both school teachers of a 'certain age'.  The two live in an unnamed seaside town and by all appearances lead quiet and very uneventful lives.  Somehow, middle age has crept up on the pair and the banality weighs more heavily on one more than the other.

"Ursula, two years younger, was plumper, brighter, more alert.  Neither was beautiful."

***

"Melanie's swearing was something new since their father had died--an act of desperation, such as a child might make."

An old school friend of both sisters invites Ursula to come stay, claiming lack of space for the single invite rather than asking both sisters.  In reality Pamela can't stand Melanie who is somewhat on the curmudgeonly side.

" . . .the two sisters always spent their holidays together; in fact, had never been separated.  To Melanie, the invitation seemed staggering insolent, and Ursula's decision to accept it could hardly be believed."

It's only the forboding of middle age that gives Ursula the courage (or the effrontery as Taylor notes) to accept the invitation.  She asks Melanie to look after her cat which only annoys her even more and provokes her into making up her own vacation plans.  She tells Ursula she had planned to go on a summer lecture course--the Victorian Novel.  Trollope, George Eliot.  Oh, Lord, thinks Ursula.

So the bulk of the story is made up of each sister's chosen holiday.  Ursula finds their friend Pamela much changed, quite the domestic goddess, yet the vacation visit is marked by the "motif of drinking". Think 1950s "Mad Men" I suspect.  As girls Ursula remembers only the stifling household Pamela was raised in and her new lifestyle seems quite the escape from her rigid upbringing.  Perhaps a little short of a swinging singles weekend, nonetheless Ursula has a romantic adventure with another guest--a younger man.  A not unwelcome encounter.  

Meanwhile Melanie's literature course is marked by lectures on Middlemarch attended by obnoxious posers, but the professor giving the talks is a writer of swoonworthy appearance.  Pity his wife is in attendance, sitting in the corner of the room forever knitting and so accustomed to her husband's lectures she could easily answer the questions herself.  And she's well aware of the effect he has on the female attendees but is comfortable in the knowledge that nothing inappropriate will occur.

Interesting what each encounter will do to each sister's self-esteem.  The younger man calls Ursula 'darling', and despite it being a meaningless endearment, how nice to be the focus of a young man's attention.  And Melanie can't seem to put from her mind the two frumpish maiden-ladies who live just up the lane.  They may be no more than just into their fifties but are eccentric and at war with each other.  And the warning signs are there that Melanie and Ursula will follow suit.

Holidays over, Melanie is determined to be the last one home, the sister with the most satisfying holiday stories, but even catching the later train and taking her time, Ursula only wanders in well after Melanie.  And not an ounce of artifice.  So, who do you think embellished and who omitted?  With Elizabeth Taylor it's always what she doesn't expressly say that makes the story.  Those devastating moments always come in such an understated way. 

Next weekend "Perhaps a Family Failing".  Only five stories left, so I will surely finish before the end of the month, and maybe even sooner.  I've already got several new contenders for my next short story read!

Short Story (Monday): The Rose, the Mauve, the White

Yesterday was a little too nice outside (and I guess I was a little too lazy) to sit in front of a computer and compose a post.  But I did read a short story and a few other books as well, so my posting schedule will be a little off this week, but I'll catch up eventually.  Many thanks for the 'coming of age, beachy-setting' reading suggestions that have been offered.  I have two books on hand already and I know I can find the others at the library so I will be exploring them this week (and will let you know what I come up with in time for next weekend) and seeing which other books I can come up with--perhaps a list to follow.  How fitting since I want a coming-of-age story that the Elizabeth Taylor short story I read was about three young women going to their first proper dance. 

Elizabeth Taylor is so talented at capturing those domestic scenes that ring entirely true.  She moves from character to character to tell her story, inside the minds of the Pollard family--Myra the mother who likes to be around the young people as "they keep one young oneself".  Charles is the eldest sibling who finds it impossible to find a quiet place to practice his calling for three cheers that he must undertake later at the dance, as his youngest twin sisters take great pleasure in following him about and teasing him mercilessly. 

It's sixteen-year-old Katie, however, the middle child whose best friends from school are soon arriving, whose moment as a blossoming young woman is the focus of the story.  The three share a bedroom where they go to school and Katie dreads how her family will appear to them.  Obnoxious younger sisters who are such nuisances and a bore of an elder brother.  (Though maybe not such a bore since one of the girls asks after him the moment they descend from the train.  Seeing ones family through the eyes of others is always most illuminating.

"It was now that she began to see her home through their eyes--the purple brick house looked heavy and ugly now that the sun had gone behind a cloud; the south wall was covered by a magnolia tree; there were one or two big, cream flowers among the dark leaves: doves were walking about on the slate roof; some of the windows reflected the blue sky and moving clouds.  To Katie, it was like being shown a photograph which she did not immediately recognize--unevocative, as were the photographs of their mothers in the dormitory at school--they seldom glanced at them from the beginning of term to the end."

There is nothing especially shocking about this story.  No earth shattering twist, just the essence of life, a slice of a slightly more than average day in a middle class family.  Each member contributing a little more color to the story, moving it along just a little bit, shedding a little light on some other family member, friend upon friend. 

It's this one somewhat more special moment than all the rest that Taylor paint so vividly yet so simply.

"But they were coming downstairs.  They had left the room with its beds covered with clothes, its floor strewn with tissue-paper.  They descended; the rose, the mauve, the white.  Like a bunch of sweet-peas they looked, George [the father] thought."

She gets all the details down just right, to the girl who ends up being a wallflower (you can tell by looking at her that she'll be left on the shelf), the one who is experiencing having her first beau and the one who catches her friend's brother's eye.  Down to that last blissful moment of knowing, being a little more aware of life and the world as she lays awake in bed after all is said and done.

Even the seemingly mundane is exciting in Elizabeth Taylor's hands.

Next week "Summer Schools".

Short Story Sunday: The True Primitive

I love reading short stories but sometimes I worry that when I am reading, especially with someone like Elizabeth Taylor, that I am not reading them carefully or slowly enough.  When reading something so short--less than twenty pages in most cases--it is almost like making sense of a bite size work of art.  It's easy to take stories for granted and sometimes they are fairly simple, but sometimes they are layered and there is more at play than what meets the eye.  Of course sometimes in the simple act of just writing about a story, telling someone what happened helps make it clearer.  I've actually got two stories to share today as last week's story fell by the wayside here.  So first the story I read this weekend and then a little catch up for last week's story.

In today's story, "The True Primitive", it's hard to say really just who is the real primitive.  Is it Lily, the young woman who never "considered culture" until she fell in love.  Or her the father of her young man, Mr. Ransome who seems to throw at her all the books he had read one after another--not literally, of course.  I think Taylor took a serious pleasure at skewing her subjects, particularly those who seem most self-absorbed.  Harry, Lily's boyfriend, and Harry's brother are willing participants in his high-brow cultural proclamations, but there is something honest and earnest about Lily that I like.  Painters names where often mentioned, too, but they seemed gentler somehow to Lily. 

"She felt a curiosity about someone called Leonardo when first she heard him mentioned about had wondered if he were Harry's cousin.  When she asked Harry he laughed and referred her to his father, which meant three-quarters of an hour wasted, sitting in the kitchen listening, and then it was too late for them to go for their walk.  Trembling with frustrated desire, she had learnt her lesson; she asked no more questions and sat sullenly quiet whenever the enemy names began again."

Curiously I am more keen on Lily than on Mr. Ransome despite his piles of books.  He's a self-taught painter as well as a great reader and his sons respect his opinions.  He just seems so stuffy.

"Mr. Ransome wondered how Harry and Lily could prefer the sodden lanes to a nice fire and a book to read beside it.  He read so much about great passions, of men and women crossing continents because of love, and enduring hardship and peril, not just the discomforts of a dark, wet night--but he could not see Harry and Lily go out without feeling utter exasperation at their fecklessness."

I admit I would like a book in hand sitting in front of a nice fire, but Mr. Ransome is such a "type".  I'll happily read Balzac, too, but I like a good mystery or comfort read and I imagine Mr. Ransome scoffing at my reading choices.  Maybe, though, I like Lily as she gets the best lines in the story.  When Harry tells her sadly that his father has been so good to them since their mother died.  He  no longer has anyone to read to in the evenings and he misses that.

"'She did the best thing, dying,' Lily thought."

Sorry, a little inward chuckle especially when later he is thinking of those evenings when he would read aloud and his wife would sit and sew and her look of "humble gratitude" when their eyes met across the room. 

". . . something, he thought, must have seeped into her, something of the lofty music of prose, as she listened, evening after evening of her married life."

Hmm.  I wonder.  Little hints at what might with time come if she dares to stick it out with Harry, but the best moment (inward cringe for the reader) is what comes at the end and what makes her literally turn around and run in the other direction!

****

Last weekend's story is a longish one and one of my favorites so far, "A Troubled State of Mind".  In this wonderful story, two friends, contemporaries must reassess and rework their friendship after one marries the widowed father of the other.  It took a number of paragraphs to work out what was happening between the two and what their relationship was.

Sophy has returned from school in Switzerland to meet her new step-mother Lalage.  Only the two are long standing friends, Lalla being an orphan, has spent so much time with Sophy on school breaks rather than travel to distant relatives.  An orphan and a widow might have much in common thanks to their loneliness only age does sometimes make a significant difference in the end.  The girls decide to try and live as more formal daughter and step-mother rather than try and simply continuing being schoolgirl friends. 

There is a comfort and security being with an older and established man who can take care of a young woman all on her own.  But it is brought home to her just what she is missing when Sophy returns from school for a vacation.  An invitation that Sophy might have brought her friend to all of a sudden becomes a minefield and a place not to bring her much older husband.  And how awkward, as an invitation is not forthcoming since to bring the older man would put everyone else in a difficult situation.

These new circumstances make everyone just slightly self-conscious and Sophy finds it exhausting to play this new role that everyone has been pushed into.  If only her mother had not died, she and her father would be downstairs together and Lalla would join her in her room as young friends ought to be. 

It's almost like a divorce and who will maintain friendships now that a pair has been split into two.  Only now one has left the group and moved into a new sphere where her own contemporaries can't easily join her.  It all comes into sharp focus when Sophy's father realizes that life will be so much easier when his daughter returns to Europe, the chasm is so great between those her age and his own life.  The saddest of all, however, is Lalla's realization that she no longer fits into either world comfortably.  And to see her old friend in a new romance, ah the envy poisons her blood and spills over into despair. 

Elizabeth Taylor's stories can be so very quietly devastating.  Next week I will be officially halfway through the book and will be reading "The Rose, the Mauve, the White".  The thrill of a new story and what it might be about . . .

Short Story Sunday: The Letter-Writers

If you have any inclination whatsoever to read Elizabeth Taylor (and I think she is one of the most marvelous writers I have ever encountered--yes, really, she is that good--and I bet I say that every time I read her and write about her), or if you like short stories (or want to like short stories if you could just find the right author), go find a copy of this book, The Blush.  Three stories in and I am hooked.  I am already ready to read the next story now rather than wait until next weekend. 

I've actually read two stories, but let me start first with "The Blush" which is the title taken also for the book.  Either Elizabeth Taylor herself or the editor who put together the collection thought this the best of the batch, but I think I have found another one to call my favorite (so far that is), but I'll tell you about that one in a moment.

"The Blush" is a story about two distinct women who are quite different in situation and temperament yet whose lives are intertwined.  Each envies the other just a little bit, one takes advantage of the other and the other discovers the deception in a most embarrassing manner.  Yes, that's what causes the Blush.

"They were the same age--Mrs. Allen and the woman who came every day to do the housework.  'I shall never have children now,' Mrs. Allen had begun to tell herself.  Something had not come true; the essential part of her life."

Mrs. Allen has everything--a nice middle class lifestyle, nice home with nice things and a trim figure and even someone to come in and take care of the cleaning.  But no children.  She wanted them so much she could imagine them and would even cry just a little bit thinking about her eldest son going away to school.  But slowly over time those dreams fade away.

Mrs. Lacey, however, is the lady to cleans up and when the two women are together Mrs. Allen listens to her grumbles about her children.  The children who mope and glower and are too lazy or too dainty to help out.  Mrs. Allen can't help but think her own children would never do anything like that.  Worse, village gossip has Mrs. Lacey as a regular visitor to the local pub, a place Mrs. Allen has never entered on her own or with anyone else, but then she thinks that with Mrs. Lacey's troubles she probably deserves a bit of a break.  The lives of the two women couldn't be more different--one with a life so full of tasks she is tired out and the other with nothing to fill her life but endless pacing waiting for something to happen, which never does.

And then one day Mrs. Lacey tells her she is expecting a baby, even with three nearly grown children another is on the way (and she craves pickled walnuts--and as an aside, I have never heard of such a thing and it sounds like something maybe only a pregnant woman might actually crave?!).  The twist is when Mrs. Lacey's husband comes knocking on the door to complain about Mrs. Allen's late hours keeping Mrs. Lacey from home at night as she looks after another woman's children while the couple is out on the town.  I'll let you read between the lines, or better yet, nudge you to go read the story.

***

I absolutely loved "The Letter-Writers".  This is one of my favorite stories I have read in a long time (and I have read some very good stories so far this year).  There is a certain melancholy to Elizabeth Taylor's stories, but there is a knowing, too, of our foibles and shortcomings, our desires and fears.  I sometimes feel like she has peeked inside my own windows or maybe even inside my mind.  I can so sympathize with Emily in this story who is so assured on paper and so interesting and forthcoming, but faced with meeting the recipient of her letters finds that knowing someone in person can be a little bit disastrous.

As she crosses the village on a warm, sunny day she takes in all the bustle and activity, mentally taking note so she can later put it all into a letter to Edmund.  The pair have been writing letters back and forth for a decade but not yet have met.  He is a writer living in Italy and she an admirer of her work.  It would never have occurred to her to write to him, but when she reads an article on Tennyson he had written where he made some conjectures on the poet's life, Emily knows that amongst her father's papers is a letter written by Tennyson that would clear the matter up.  Her kindness in sharing is followed by a happy correspondence. 

He rarely returns home to England and when Emily travels to Italy she cannot bear looking him up to meet him.  "In Rome, some instinct of self-preservation kept her from giving him her aunt's address there."

". . . her letters were a relaxation to him; to her, his were an excitement, and her fingers often trembled as she tore open their envelopes."

I love this quote and I have to share it just because, because I feel much the same way about someone else's writing.

"She was sensitive to what he wrote, that she felt her own reading half created it."

To meet now would be a frightening prospect--"he knows too much about me".  How could they start a conversation, or a relationship when she had shared so many personal things with him.  Her letters almost feel as though they are a sort of confessional and at a distance all is safe.  How would she feel if on first meeting her he might say she is so different than he imagined her.  

". . . or their eyes might meet and they would see in one another's nakedness and total loss."

But it is going to happen. Her walk across the village at the start of the story is to buy a fresh lobster for his visit.  He has come to England on business and wants to meet her.  Her careful preparations are all thrown to the wind when her cat, the moment when she leaves the room, makes a leap for their dinner.  She hears the crash and trying to save the last vestige of her careful planning ends up a wild mess when the doorbell rings and she opens it to Edmund!

This is such a wonderful story.  And this crushing failure of a visit is so perfectly described and brought to life. 

"She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he had gone."

Elizabeth Taylor lifts the lid off this fearful (frightful) situation and exposes it in all its pain and maybe even possibilities.  I won't tell you how it ends, but in Taylor's hands it is always perfectly and satisfyingly done.

***

This week's New Yorker story by Fiona McFarlane, "Buttony" (you can read it here-it's quite short) is about a children's game that plays on fears of being left out by your young contemporaries or being taken advantage of or tricked.  Buttony is a game where a group of children get in a circle and one stands in the middle with a button.  They close their eyes and the child drops the button into someone's hands.  Then it is a matter of the rest of the children trying to guess who has it.  Who will be picked, and who will be names first as the new possessor or the button--and who will be last.  And what happens if no one gets the button.  What makes this all the more intriguing is the child in the middle is a sort of golden boy so the story speaks to all sorts of interesting issues.  All the more impressive that it took so few pages to tell this story.  You can read her Q&A here.  McFarlane has a collection of stories coming out this spring, The High Places.

And a few other short story opportunities--you can read James D. McCabe's "Impostors" here thanks to Library of America.  If you want something with a technology slant, you can read a free short story by Michelle Richmond called "The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley" here.  And a new acquisition by me, Miss Grief and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.  She is new to me, but during her lifetime (1840-1894) she was "considered one of the finest writers of her generation".  Her "strong characters, indelible settings, and concerns with passion, creativity and the demands of society are timeless."  The description already had me hooked but the fact that Colm Toibin wrote the introduction reassures me just a little bit more.

Maybe I will dip into the Woolson collection for next weekend, but I have "A Troubled State of Mind" by Elizabeth Taylor to look forward to as well.