Cruising the Nile

    The drive ended up at a bookshop, where they were to lay in a sufficient store of literature to last, at any rate, as far as Luxor.
    "We want really serious books about Egypt," declared Eve.
    "Then you must begin with Breasted's History," said Jeremy, "and go on to Moret's 'Nile and Egyptian Civilsation.'"
    "Of course we must," agreed Eve, but Serena sighed a little when she saw the size of the volumes. While Jeremy added Weigall, Flinders Petrie, and several more to the growing pile, she wandered away to the other side of the shop, and came back with a couple of novels in her hand.
    "Let's have these, too," she pleaded. "I've always heard Robert Hichens writes so wonderfully about the desert."
    "He does," agreed Jeremy, "but the two you've chosen happen to be about Algeria."
    "Oh, well," said Serena placidly, "I expect the desert is much the same everywhere."

I love traveling with fellow readers! Eve is visiting Egypt for the first time, with her sister Serena and brother-in-law Hugh, and their friend Jeremy. They are in Cairo, preparing to set sail on a luxury houseboat, the dahabeyahs of so many stories. Cook's has it fully stocked with most of the necessities, but they can't set off without books. A walk through the city with Jeremy earlier that day left Eve eager to learn more about Egypt.

    By now Jeremy had forgotten all about Eve as an individuality, and was fairly launched on a subject near to his heart. Eve listened entranced, and it seemed to her that she was beginning, very incompletely and faintly, to grasp what Egypt had meant to the world by seeing what it meant to Jeremy. Touch by touch, as they strolled back to the hotel in the the freshness of the pearly morning, he built up for her the wonder of the most ancient of civilisations, its unsurpassed art and its strange religion, forerunner of all others. She had known in a vague sort of way that Egypt was called the "cradle of civilisation," but what before had been only a phrase to her, now became a real and intelligible fact.
    Back once more at the hotel, they stopped for a moment at the foot of the steps. Jeremy noticed what a glowing pink the keen air had brought to Eve's cheeks.
    "I say, I've talked an awful lot," he said apologetically.
    "Oh, I loved it!" Eve was enthusiastic. "I've always longed to come to Egypt, and now I'm actually here I'm going to learn all about it that I possibly can. There are lots of things I've always wanted to see, and I ought to find some of them here."

I couldn't help wondering though if the bookstore carried the monumental history of Egypt authored by the greatest Egyptologist of the modern era, Professor Radcliffe Emerson. Serena would more than sigh at the size of it.

 I can't remember whose blog first featured this book, and sent me rushing off to order my own copy, but I'm thankful she did. I do wish though that the photographs illustrating the book, taken by Stella Tennyson Jesse during her own voyage up the Nile in 1926-1927, were just a little clearer!

Three volumes of Emily Eden's letters

Miss Eden's Letters, Violet Dickinson, editor  (1919)
Letters from India, Vols. 1-2, Emily Eden (Eleanor Eden, editor)  (1872)

Reading Emily Eden's Up the Country made me curious about her other books. I had already read her novels, The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House, which always make me wish she had written more fiction. I found that an edition of her letters was published in 1919. Copies are rare, even in libraries, so I downloaded an e-version from Google Books (and read about half the letters). I was very pleased when ABE Books finally found me a copy two years later. It was withdrawn at some point from the Manchester Public Libraries - at least I hope it was, and not stolen. The "NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM THIS ROOM" notice pasted on the front cover, with its threat of prosecution, still makes me a bit nervous.

The letters in this book date from 1814 to 1863 (Emily Eden died in 1869). They consist primarily of letters from Emily to family and friends. Born in 1797, she was one of twelve children. Her father George Eden was a diplomat, raised to a barony for his service in various embassies in Europe. His second son George, who became his heir, went into Parliament as a Whig and then into government service. Their family moved in the highest social and political circles, and Emily's sisters married into prominent families. She and another sister Fanny never married, living with George and acting as his political hostesses. When their old friend Lord Melbourne appointed George Governor-General of India in 1835, Fanny and Emily went with him. He was recalled after the disastrous First Afghan War, settling again in England with them.

The first half of Miss Eden's Letters covers her life before India. The early letters remind me very much of Jane Austen's, full of family jokes and gossip. There are constant references to the birth of nieces and nephews, and to their marriages (Emily's oldest sister was twenty years older, so there was an overlap of generations in the family). Like Austen, Emily paid frequent visits to friends and family, but she moved in much higher circles. She stayed at Chatsworth and Hatfield House, and made long visits to Lord and Lady Landsdowne at Bowood. The first letter in the collection mentions that family friend Anne Milbanke has written to announce her marriage to Lord Byron. There are also frequent references to politics, in which Emily took a keen interest. I was a little out of my depth there, despite the footnotes.

The letters in this section include several from two of Emily's closest friends. Pamela FitzGerald was the daughter of Lord Edward FitzGerald, a leader of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. After his death in prison, his estate and his children were put under attainder. It isn't clear from the letters how Pamela and Emily met, but they developed a lasting friendship, sustained by long letters in between rare visits. I wonder if Emily was as surprised as I was when Pamela announced her marriage to Sir Guy Campbell, a widower with children whom she married shortly after meeting him in Scotland. He had to go back into the army to support their constantly-growing family, and they ended up stationed in Ireland. I felt her letters highlighted the limited opportunities for women of their class (even those not under attainder), and I wondered if Emily ever felt that she herself had chosen the better part (like one of her own sisters, Pamela bore eleven children). Another close friend and correspondent, Theresa Lewis, offered a different option. A wife and mother, she also wrote novels with her husband Thomas. It was Theresa who would later edit Emily's novels for publication.

Almost exactly half-way through this book comes the announcement of Lord Auckland's appointment to India. I had already realized that there are another two volumes of Emily's letters, covering her years in India. I decided to read those, before returning with her to England. The India volumes were published after her death. Her niece Eleanor Eden wrote in a preface that Emily had begun collecting the letters, after the success of Up the Country, but died before the project could be completed. The first letters in the first volume of Letters from India describe the preparations for the trip, and the six months' voyage. I enjoyed reading those, with their account of the passage via Rio and Cape Town. I am always in awe of people traveling such immense distances in small wooden sailing ships. It was a miserable trip, partly because Emily was a poor sailor, and partly because she didn't want to be there in the first place. She hated leaving England and her extended family, she did not want to spend five years in India, but she also couldn't bear to be parted from her brother. She disliked India from the start, particularly the heat and humidity of Calcutta (Kolkata). With Fanny, she acted as the "Governor's lady," hosting receptions and balls and theater performances, and joining Lord Auckland on formal occasions. But she lived for letters, and for books. She noted that pirated American editions were easy to find in the shops. ("The Americans are valuable creatures at this distance. They send us novels, ice, and apples - three things that, as you may guess, are not indigenous to the soil." Letter, April 24, 1836)

I found the first volume of these India letters interesting, with the journey out and the first accounts of their lives in Calcutta. Emily could find the fun in almost anything, I think, and she wrote comically about their European neighbors and the various social activities. She also liked to tease her brother, and to share jokes. There are more troubling elements, such as her attitude toward the Indian people. She frequently used the term "savages" in discussing them, though she also protested against their abuse by Europeans. She saw nothing to admire in their history or art, and she had no respect for Hinduism (Islam on the other hand was simply an incomplete religion). I know these attitudes were common. I just found them a bit wearing in letter after letter. I also would have appreciated some context on the political situation in India, which was presumably fresh in the minds of readers in the 1870s. I had to keep checking for more information, to understand how Lord Auckland got England involved in war with Afghanistan and what went wrong. At the same time, he was sending British troops to the First Opium War with China. Emily wrote about these events, of course fully supporting her brother's administration. There is no hint in her letters that he was actually recalled to England, under a cloud, because of the debacle of the Afghan war.

I finished the second volume of India letters with some relief, prepared to return to England with Emily. I was taken aback to find that Miss Eden's Letters continued with yet more Indian letters. I was also surprised to find myself enjoying those letters more. I think it's partly that they were written to people that I knew from the earlier correspondence. Though they included many of the same complaints, they felt more alive, and Emily's sense of fun came through more clearly. These India letters take up most of the second half of the book. The letters that date from her return to England deal mainly with her declining health, though she continued to follow politics carefully. Her brother George's death in 1849 was a terrible blow, as were the deaths of her sisters in the 1850s. It was in those years that she was writing The Semi-Detached House, and revising The Semi-Attached Couple. Like Jane Austen, she carefully collected reviews, both private and published. The letters don't mention the publication of Up the Country, however, which also did very well.

All of these books are available in e-versions, through Google Books. The two volumes of India letters have been reprinted in modern editions, and they are available in print-on-demand editions. I think Miss Eden's Letters is the best. Anyone interested in women's lives in the early 19th century, or in Emily Eden, will find much to enjoy. She really is good company, and I think this is a book I will return to. The India letters are interesting to a point, but I struggled to finish them. I would only recommend them to someone who wanted to delve deeply into the British women's experience in India in the 1830s.

Reading these letters did remind me how long it has been since I read The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House. I think I'll be taking my combined Virago edition off the shelf again before too long. It is clear particularly from The Semi-Attached Couple how much Jane Austen influenced Emily Eden's novels. There are frequent mentions of Austen's characters in her letters, which show how familiar she was with the books. She also enjoyed Charles Dickens' books, but I was tickled to find in the later letters that she had lost her taste for Charlotte M. Yonge's books.

I have been fairly beat by Miss Yonge's new book, The Daisy Chain, which distresses me, as I generally delight in her stories; but if she means this Daisy Chain to be amusing, it is is, unhappily, intensely tedious, and if she meant it to be good, it strikes me that one of Eugène Sue's novels would do less harm to the cause of religion . . . [I think] Ethel, the heroine, the most disagreeable, stormy, conceited girl I ever met with. . . I read on till I came to a point where she thought her father was going to shake her because she was ill-natured about her sister's marriage; and finding that he did not perform that operation, which he ought to have done every day of her life, I gave it up. (Letter, March 1856)

N.B. I have already filled the 1872 slot in my Mid-Century of Books, but I can still fill 1919 with Miss Eden's Letters.

Bibliotherapy at the end of a tough week

This was a full-moon week, for sure. Too many things to do, too many deadlines and appointments. I felt off-balance all week, like the Red Queen running as fast as I could just to stay in place. And to cap the week off, I had a meeting with my tax adviser this afternoon. (At least it looks like I'll owe less money this year.) Heading home afterwards, I felt I deserved a treat - or a prize for getting through the week. I started with a chai latte at Starbucks and then plotted a course for Kaboom Books. Though I had Willa Cather and Margery Sharp in mind, I wasn't looking for anything in particular. As usual, I found some irresistible books there.

I had not come across this 1935 novel before. The back cover has a quote from the Times Literary Supplement that sold me on it: "In Lucy Gayheart, Willa Cather seems to be writing the lightest and slightest of records of a short life: the obscure life of a young girl in an American village who goes to Chicago to study music . . . but the impression left on the reader is not slight . . . The unity of Miss Cather's design, the clarity and distinction of this book should put it beside her first great success, My Antonia."

Another book I knew nothing of, despite my years of collecting P.G. Wodehouse's books. The back-cover blurb says that this is "the nearest Wodehouse ever came to a serious story," but it also mentions "a series of of comic mishaps in a book which features a galaxy of vintage Wodehouse characters." I see it was published in the U.S. as Their Mutual Child. I just mentioned in a post on Indiscretions of Archie that I've never read a Wodehouse book with a pregnant character - and here apparently is another. Though if the woman on the cover is pregnant, she is carrying that child in a very odd place.

This book sold itself on the title and cover alone. I see that Isabella Bird and Amelia Edwards are included, and I'm looking forward to meeting more of their intrepid sisterhood. I also see many lovely illustrations  - and maps! Lots of maps, for the geographically-challenged!

I instantly thought of Jane of Beyond Eden Rock when I saw this book. I enjoyed reading the three volumes of Rev. Francis Kilvert's diaries from the 1870s, but I was frustrated by the editing, which (as often happens) cut out things that I wanted to read about in favor of things the editor wanted to talk about. (See also: the diaries of George Templeton Strong.) This small volume covers a holiday that Kilvert spent in Cornwall in 1870. "This is the first complete edition of Kilvert's Journal No. 4..." I love the words "complete edition," as well as "Copiously illustrated with contemporary photographs and engravings - some of which are published here for the first time..."

Some time ago, I came across Vol. II of Anthony Trollope's 1862 travelogue North America, in the edition above. Having already read an extremely condensed one-volume edition, I bought it, even though Vol. I was not on the shelf, because complete editions of these books are hard to find (in print). I felt sure that someday I would come across the first volume, and today I did. But it was on sale with the second volume, as a set. I can understand that the proprietor didn't want to be left with an odd Vol. II that was unlikely to sell (except to a hopeful reader like me). So I bought the set, which at least wasn't expensive. If anyone would like the orphaned Vol. II, I'd be happy to send it along. I think it may be the more interesting of the two anyway, since it covers Trollope's visit to Washington and to the western theatre of the Civil War and its armies.

More for the TBR stacks, but at least I think I can resist them for the remainder of the TBR Dare (I've resisted Vol. II of North America for quite a while now).

Dispatches from the chaise-longue - some quick reviews

I've had bronchitis for over a week now, and it has really knocked me out. I can't remember the last time I felt this enervated and exhausted. Though I managed to stagger back to work at the end of the week, I generally feel like an overcooked strand of spaghetti. I do have quite an impressive cough, which causes some germ-conscious co-workers to back out of the room. On the positive side, I have had lots of time for reading, though I haven't been able to focus on anything really challenging. I've built up a little stack of books to talk about, so I thought I'd write a quick post before I need to go lie down and watch more "N.C.I.S." episodes (Netflix isn't quite as good as cable for mindless sick-bed TV, I've found).

Keeping the Feast, Paula Butturini

I found this on the library sale shelves and was intrigued by the back cover blurb:

When Paula Butturini's husband was shot and nearly killed twenty-three days after their wedding, it marked the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned. John would recover from his injuries, but the psychological toll lingered long after his physical wounds had healed. . . [This book] is a gorgeously crafted portrait of a marriage and partnership touched by depression, but even more, it is a testament to the extraordinary sustaining power of food and love, to the healing that can come from simple rituals of life, and to the stubborn belief that there is always an afterward, always hope.

The author met her husband John Tagliabue in Rome, where both were working as journalists (she for UPI, he for the New York Times). Two years later, in 1987, he was named the bureau chief in Warsaw, and Ms. Butturini went with him, working then for the Chicago Tribune. Both were injured covering the 1989 uprisings in eastern Europe. Ms. Butturini was savagely beaten by police in Czechoslovakia, while Mr. Tagliabue was shot while traveling in a car with other journalists in Romania. His injuries brought him into a deep depression that left him unable to work for many months. The couple, only recently married, returned to Rome to live, hoping the familiar place would help.  I expected this book to be a memoir of coping through cooking, with recipes, like Adrienne Kane's Cooking and Screaming. Though it is very much about food, it is not a cookbook, a choice the author deliberately made. It is a family memoir, of growing up in Italian immigrant families, of carrying food traditions forward, and of coping with depression (the author's mother also suffered from it). I found it a moving story.  I also found the couple's work and travels interesting, particularly the adjustment of transferring from Rome to Warsaw.


The Blotting Book, E.F. Benson

The author's name caught my eye one day at Murder by the Book. I've never read any of E.F. Benson's work beyond the Mapp and Lucia series, apart from some of his ghost stories. This short book from 1908 is a mystery, set in Brighton. Morris Assheton, just turned twenty-two, has fallen in love. Under his father's will, his marriage will end the trust that has tied up his inheritance. His trustee, old family friend Edward Taynton, has been making some rash investments, and he needs time to set things right. He gets his partner Godfrey Mills to tell the young lady's father some lies about Morris, hoping to break off the match. In return, Mills demands a very substantial amount of money, to cover his own gambling habit. Learning of Mills's lies, Morris sets out to confront him. When Mills disappears, Morris becomes the prime suspect.

This was an interesting little story. It isn't a mystery in the "who-done-it" sense, because the villains are clear from the start. I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen, but the fun was in watching it unfold, and in the Brighton setting. I also enjoyed the smiling villain at the center. However, this doesn't have the fun of the Mapp and Lucia stories. It reminded me more of Benson's ghost stories, without the macabre.


Time Enough, Emily Kimbrough

This book from 1974 is an account of a cruise the author took with several friends along the Shannon River in Ireland. By this point, she was in her 70s, so she was content to leave the work of the trip to the crew of the boat. As in her other travel accounts, she and her friends spent their time squabbling a bit, watching the scenery, touring local sights of interest, and buying souvenirs. I've found that I enjoy her books more when they focus on the places she is visiting, and less on the "wacky" adventures or quirks of her fellow travelers. This was a pleasant-enough read, and I learned something about the geography of Ireland, particularly the Shannon, which stretches through the center of the country. Kimbrough took particular note of the small town of Banagher.

I found that [single wide main street] very poorly lit, but even in the darkness, interspersed among the shops, I saw several houses that seemed to me to have both substance and style. I doubt he lived in one of those, the young man of twenty-six who came in 1841 to fill the post of clerk to the district surveyor. His name was Anthony Trollope. He lived ten years in Banagher and began his writing there.

If I ever get to Ireland, I want to visit Banagher as well.


Greenery Street, Denis Mackail

Lyn at I prefer reading recently mentioned the acronym "HIU," or "Have it unread." Many of my TBR books are "RTO," or "rushed to order" - usually after reading a blog review. I'm not sure where I first read about this 1925 novel, but I remember the excitement of learning that Angela Thirkell's brother was also a writer. I knew from reading reviews that this book was about the first year of a young couple's marriage. Unlike his sister's Barsetshire books, it is set in London, in an idyllic street "of thirty-six narrow little houses." Ian and Felicity Hamilton move into No. 23 Greenery Street after their marriage. Ian goes off to his work at an insurance office, while Felicity tries to cope with servants and a budget. It is a domestic story, based according to the editor of my Persephone edition on Denis Mackail's own early married life. There are some dramatic elements involving Felicity's older sister Daphne, and a venial trustee, as well as a plot twist that echoes "The Gifts of the Magi." And speaking of echoes, Greenery Street has "little gods" who lurk in rooms and sometimes provide commentary on the action. I wondered if Angela Thirkell borrowed that idea for her angels that do the same, particularly around Mrs. Brandon. (The editor says that Mackail was bullied by his older sister, their parents' favorite!)  I see there are two sequels to this book, which are long out of print and apparently impossible to find. I will have to try inter-library loan, I'd like to read more about the adventures of Ian and Felicity. I also learned from the introduction that Denis Mackail was a close friend of P.G. Wodehouse's, and I found a picture of them in a biography of PGW that is still "HIU" on my shelves.

River Town, by Peter Hessler

The subtitle of this book is "Two Years on the Yangtze." It is an account of the years that Peter Hessler spent in China teaching for the Peace Corps. He was stationed in Fuling, a small city in the Sichuan province. I have been reading Mr. Hessler's pieces for years in The New Yorker, where he used to write the "Letter from China" feature. He often referred to his time in Fuling in the articles, which is probably why I bought this. It's a little hard to remember, though, since this has been on the TBR shelves for so long (thirteen years, to be exact).

Mr. Hessler and his colleague Adam Meier were the first Peace Corps volunteers to come to Fuling. They taught at the Fuling Teachers College, where most of the students were from farming families (peasants, in the local term) who were expected to return home to teach in the rural schools they themselves had attended. He wrote about his teaching duties, in a school rigidly bounded by the government's many rules and under the constant eye of the Communist Party members. He took a great interest in his students, in their stories and their futures. He was equally interested in Fuling itself, spending his free time exploring the city and trying to talk to the people there. On school breaks, he traveled around the middle part of China, sometimes with friends but often on his own. He studied Chinese (Mandarin) on his own and with tutors, to the surprise of many Chinese people that he met, who assumed that no foreigner could learn their language.

I found this book very absorbing. I know little about the middle part of China (which apparently isn't called "the midwest," as I kept picturing it). Obviously, a lot has changed in the country since this book was first published in 2001. And things had changed between Mr. Hessler's time there in 1996-1998, and the publication of the book. At the time he was writing, the Three Gorges Dam was under construction, and he wrote about the effects it would have on both the people and the land itself.  But despite the lapse of time, I could see connections to the China that I read about today - a stock market crash in 1998, industrial pollution, the slow rise in the standards of living in rural areas, tensions with the Muslim Uigher population in western China. I learned something of the middle region's history, such as the Great Taiping Rebellion of the 1840s, when "a poor man from Guangxi province . . . decided that he was the Son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. After that, things happened very quickly." Within a few years, "Hong Xiuquan was leading twenty thousand armed followers..." In more recent history, Mr. Hessler talked with the people he met about their experiences in the "Great Leap Forward" and the Cultural Revolution, and about their parents' and grandparents', which often made for grim reading.

It was interesting to compare Mr. Hessler's account with those of Jen Lin-Liu, particularly in her memoir Serve the People. Though ethnically Chinese, and speaking Mandarin, Ms. Lin-Liu still felt like a foreigner, even in Beijing. It sounds like it was a thousand times worse in Fuling, where the two Americans instantly stood out as waiguoren, and crowds gathered just to stare whenever they went into the town. It seems like Beijing was marginally healthier than Fuling, blanketed in coal dust and smoke. Mr. Hessler managed to contract tuberculosis, among other health problems. But the friends he made there allowed him to experience something of daily life there. And many people he met were very hospitable and welcoming, eager to talk to a foreigner who spoke their language. He was equally eager to talk to anyone he met, and that openness reminded me of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Eric Newby.

The author returned to China after his Peace Corps stint ended, and he wrote two other books about the country, Oracle Bones and Country Driving. I am looking forward to reading them. I may as well confess that I have copies of them already, though this book languished on my TBR shelves for so long (a triumph of hope over experience, and/or book greed over good intentions). I also have my eye on Evan Osnos' Age of Ambition, which won the National Book Award for non-fiction last year. Mr. Osnos took over the "Letter from China" from Mr. Hessler, and I've found his articles equally interesting and informative.

Three quick reviews, and a book I didn't finish

I have fallen behind in writing (because I've been reading), so I'm posting these quick reviewlets.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson

I bought a copy of this off the library sale shelves because it is a classic, the Puffin paperback was only $1, and it would fill a year in my Mid-Century of Books (1886).  I thought I had read this before, and the opening was familiar enough.  But when I started this however many years ago, I must have given up on it pretty quickly.  I had a clear memory of David climbing up the stair-tower to fetch the chest of papers (in the fourth chapter, "I Run a Great Danger in the House of Shaws").  But I must have read no further, because I had no memory of the kidnapping of the title, and I know that I never met Alan Breck - I couldn't have forgotten him.  This turned out to be the third book I've read this summer that involves traveling around the Hebrides and the Western Isles by boat (the other two being Alastair Dunnett's The Canoe Boys and Dorothy Dunnett's Dolly and the Singing Bird).  In fact, my atlas was still open to the right pages, to track the Covenant's voyage.  And I only had to turn the page to follow David and Alan Breck in their flight across the Highlands.  I was a little surprised at the abrupt end of the story, which felt very unsatisfying.  I was happy to find there is a sequel, Catriona, but I'm wondering if it's worth reading?


Airs Above the Ground, by Mary Stewart

I don't like circuses, or stories about circuses, so I was a little hesitant to read this book.  But I liked the narrator, Vanessa, from the first page.  I was a little concerned about her setting off on a trip to Vienna with her friend's son, seventeen-year-old Timothy Lacy.  It didn't feel quite right - he was either too old or too young for that.  But he is another of the neglected children that often end up in the heroines' care, in Mary Stewart's books.  Vanessa is on her way to Vienna to look for her husband, who is supposed to be on a business trip to Stockholm, but apparently isn't.  Timothy is going to see his father, and also the famous Lipizzaner stallions.  They end up instead in eastern Austria, with a small traveling circus.  But the story is more about the horses than the circus itself, and the recent death of their keeper in a fire.  Vanessa is a vet, as it turns out, with a lot experience working with horses.  I think it's a shame she had to give up working when she married, though she does keep her hand in with volunteer work.  I enjoyed this book a lot, though I found the hero a bit too autocratic for my tastes.  And as Hayley recently mentioned, it's nice to read a mystery without a lot of gore or a high body count.


Beggars on Horseback, E.O. Somerville & Martin Ross

This, the third of Somerville and Ross's travel accounts that I have read, is subtitled "A Ride Through Wales in 1894."  I thought I had read somewhere that this, like In the Vine Country and Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, was originally published as a serial in The Ladies' Pictorial.  I can't find that reference now.   If not, maybe that explains why it feels so different from the other two.  For one thing, the narrator isn't traveling with "my second cousin."  Her companion is called Miss O'Flannigan.  We never learn her first name, or the narrator's.  But more importantly, the two don't seem to enjoy their trip at all.  They seem to dislike Wales and the Welsh.  Granted, the weather was terrible, often pouring rain, and their horses were even worse than the jennet drawing the governess cart.  But there was none of the sense of discovery, the funny situations, the back-and-forth between the travelers.  And there wasn't even that much about Wales itself.  The edition I read is a modern reprint by The Long Riders' Guild Press (I just saw a first edition of this for sale at €395).  Someone made the unfortunate editorial decision to put their website URL at the bottom of every single page, which I found distracting and then annoying.  The book also includes seven pages listing the other titles they have published.  Some do sound interesting, such as Lady Florence Dixie's Riding Across Patagonia:

When asked in 1879 why she wanted to travel to such an outlandish place as Patagonia, the author replied without hesitation that she was taking to the saddle in order to flee from the strict confines of polite Victorian society.  This is the story of how the aristocrat successfully traded the perils of a London parlor for the wind-borne freedom of a wild Patagonian bronco.

The book I did not finish is The Rosary, by Florence L. Barclay.  I looked for a copy of this after reading that it was a best-seller at its publication in 1910 (hoping to fill another year in my Mid-Century).  There will be spoilers to follow.  The story starts off well, with a dowager Duchess who has lost her cranky husband and discovered how happy she can be as a widow.  She gives lively house-parties in her stately home, which she characterizes as "freak parties," "mere people parties," and "best parties."  One of the guests at her current "best party" is her niece, the Hon. Jane Champion.  A big red flag went up when I met Jane:

[She] was now in her thirtieth year. She had once been described, by one who saw below the surface, as a perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely plain shell; and no man had as yet looked beneath the shell, and seen the woman in her perfection.  She would have made earth heaven for a blind lover who, not having eyes for the plainness of her face or the massiveness of her figure, might have drawn nearer, and apprehended the wonder of her as a woman. . .But as yet, no blind man with far-seeing vision had come her way...

I was seized with foreboding.  I recently read a book, Ada Cambridge's Fidelis, where a man chose to fall in love with a blind woman, because she wouldn't mind his ugly exterior.  I was not prepared to read another story where Love was literally blind, nor one where a physical handicap was exploited even for love.  So I started skipping ahead.  Gareth Dalmain, an artist and society painter, falls in love with Jane after he hears her sing, which reveals to him her subcutaneous beauty.  But Jane refuses his proposal, because she is three years older than he is, but even more because he is an artist, and he shouldn't have to look at her across the table every day.  She goes off to travel the world, to forget him.  Three years later, she learns that he was shot in a hunting accident and is now blind.  So she goes home and nurses him, under a false name.  Eventually all is revealed and forgiven, and they get married.  So points to the author for making Gareth love her as she is (not just plain, but older and plus-sized), and points for letting Jane finally accept that love, even if it's only because he's blind.  Gareth loves Jane for who she is.  Maybe it's too much to expect from a 1910 novel that she could love herself too. I feel that I got more than enough of this story skimming through it, and I'm sending it off to the library sale.

I'm going to start buying lottery tickets again

Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, E.O. Somerville & Martin Ross

I didn't intend to pick up another book by Somerville and Ross so soon, but the two books I tried after finishing The Real Charlotte were completely unsatisfactory and went quickly into the library donation bag.  I've had this book in mind for a while, because several people have mentioned finding copies, and because I felt I didn't do it justice the first time I read it.  I didn't even write about it then, because I found it a bit flat.

I think I must have been having a bad reading day at the time, because reading it now was a delight.  I laughed out loud more than once, at the adventures of the cousins and also at the narrator's sly asides.

We crossed Cork on an outside-car; and here, no doubt, we should enter on a description of its perils which would convulse and alarm English readers in the old, old way; but we may as well own at once that we know all about outside-cars; we believe we went to be christened on an outside-car, and we did not hold on even then - we certainly have not done so since.

Like their book In the Vine Country, this began as a series of articles for The Ladies' Pictorial.  (It was published in book form in 1893.)  This time, rather than traveling to France, they would explore Violet Martin's home county of Connemara in the west of Ireland.  With some difficulty, they hired a governess cart (like the ones you can see here) and a contrary jennet called Sibbie to pull it.  Loaded up with Bath Oliver biscuits, cheese, and Borvil, they set off.

They spent their nights at small hotels, crowded with fishermen drawn to the many lakes and rivers running through Connemara.  One of their last stops was on the Renvyle Peninsula on the Atlantic coast, where they stayed at the Renvyle House.  Once part of a large estate, it was turned into a hotel by its owner, Caroline Blake, after the upheavals of the Land League movement (something I've just begun to learn about).  Mrs. Blake was still running the hotel when Somerville and Ross stayed there, and she joined them for an afternoon of tea and conversation.  I was following the cousins' trip via Google, looking at the different places where they stopped, and I couldn't help gasping when I found that Renvyle House is still open.  Some of the photos that I found on-line look like the sketches in this book (which are based on Somerville's artwork).  I am now going to start buying lottery tickets again, because I am determined that I too will drive through Connemara to stay at Renvyle House - just not in a governess cart.

Revisiting America with the Provincial Lady

The Provincial Lady in America, E.M. Delafield

When I finished Charlotte M. Yonge's Heartsease the other day, I wanted to leave the Victorian era far behind.  I needed something light, bright and sparkling, and above all modern, where women didn't have to be pressed down into proper passivity.  A chance comment I saw on a blog reminded that I have been meaning to re-read the adventures of the Provincial Lady, particularly this 1934 book.  I first learned about E.M. Delafield from an essay in The New Yorker, but I had trouble finding her books.  I finally ordered the modern Virago omnibus edition, only to come across a complete set of the Cassandra Editions at Half Price Books. I bought them hoping to cancel the online order, but it was too late.  I decided to keep the omnibus edition and share the individual volumes with a friend (though I kept The Provincial Lady in Russia).  I wish now I had kept the single volumes instead.  With omnibus editions, I tend to binge-read straight through the volume.  As a result, I don't remember much now about any of the four PL adventures. I wish I had heeded the words of Nicola Beauman in her introduction: "it would be doing E.M. Delafield a disservice to sit down and read the four Provincial Lady volumes straight through," in part "Because they were written as weekly installments..."

I first read this book in 2005.  All I really remembered about it was how much EMD wanted to visit Louisa May Alcott's house in Concord, Massachusetts.  Reading it again ten years later, I was struck by all kinds of things that I didn't know the first time around.  I enjoyed the set-up, with the PL at home, preparing for her trip, dealing with her version of The Man of Wrath (or at least of Grunts), and all the humor of her adventures. But even more I was enjoying all the connections I was finding.  Most importantly, this time I had a much better understanding of who EMD was, from reading Vera Brittain's Testaments.  That first time, I noted that the PL columns were originally published in Time and Tide but didn't give it much thought.  Now I know something of the journal, Lady Rhondda its publisher, and the other contributors.  I'd like to learn more, so suggestions for further reading would be appreciated!  I also noted the discussion at one point of how well Testament of Youth was selling in the United States.  I just checked my copy to see that it was published in 1933.

In New York, EMD met the critic Alexander Woollcott, who seems to have taken quite a fancy to her.  He was instrumental in finally getting her access to the Alcott house:

     He has, it appears, read in a paper (Boston Transcript?) that my whole object in coming to America was to visit the Alcott House, and of this he approves to such an extent that he is prepared to Mention It in a Radio Talk, if I will immediately inform him of my reactions to the expedition.
     Immediate volte-face now takes place in attitude of Pete, Fanny and everybody else. If Alexander Woollcott thinks I ought to visit Alcott House, it apparently becomes essential that I should do so. . . Am much impressed by the remarkable difference between enterprise that I merely want to undertake for my own satisfaction, and the same thing when it is advocated by Mr. A.W.

I had no idea who Alexander Woollcott was then - now I know better.  From what I've read, it's lucky that the mercurial Woollcott did take a liking to her.  But I can't help thinking of the version of him in Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's "The Man Who Came to Dinner," now one of my favorite Christmas movies.  I keep picturing Monty Woolley getting ready to Mention It in a Radio Talk.

I've read that Woollcott loved the character of Sheridan Whiteside, and even wanted to play him on Broadway!

I also know a little bit more about Louisa May Alcott now, from reading her letters, so this time I knew that the "Mrs. Pratt" who showed the PL all around the Concord site is connected to "Meg," aka Anna Alcott Pratt.  Louisa adopted her two sons later in life (not the twins Daisy and Demi).  I was envious of her personal tour, with guides "prepared to show me everything there is to see."  But knowing that the guides were Alcott connections makes that envy so much worse.  I enjoyed the Alcott references sprinkled through the book, particularly her immediate association of the Boston Common with Polly of An Old-Fashioned Girl.  I'm happy that she enjoyed seeing the 1933 film of Little Women.  I can't cope with Katharine Hepburn as Jo myself.

The schedule arranged for her took EMD to Chicago, where the 1933 World's Fair was in full swing.  There she was to speak and sign books in the book section of a department store.  When I read, "Department store is the most impressive thing I have ever seen in my life, and the largest," I sat straight up and said, "Marshall Field's!"  The reference to Marcella, the head of the book department, with her office "entirely plastered with photographs, mostly inscribed, of celebrities," confirmed it.  Emily Kimbrough, in her memoir of working there, described Marcella as one of the most powerful women in the store, a loyal friend once you got to know her.  The PL was less impressed.  I couldn't help picturing her, like Emily, coming in through Charley's door.  Kimbrough was no longer working at the store at the time, unfortunately.  If EMD met her during her visit to Philadelphia, she didn't mention it.  Her descriptions of traveling by train and meeting groups to speak reminded me of Kimbrough's later book, ...It Gives Me Great Pleasure.

To top off all her other excellencies, I will love E.M. Delafield forever for her description of the Lincoln Memorial as "the most beautiful thing, without exception, that I have seen in America."

I had such fun touring the eastern U.S. and Canada with the Provincial Lady.  I wish that she had made another tour, of the west.  And I look forward to revisiting the other books in this series - one at a time, this time!

N.B.  This is the only the second book that I have re-read for my Century of Books.  I may fill in a few of the Victorian years with Louisa May Alcott.

N.N.B.  My escape into more recent literature means that I will miss the Trollope bicentennial event this month, drat it.  I hope to get back on track with Doctor Thorne next month, for #6Barsets.

Questions of identity and community, in the aftermath of genocide

There Was and There Was Not, Meline Toumani

A few weeks ago I read an article in The New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Century of Silence."  The subtitle is "A family survives the Armenian genocide and its long aftermath."  I knew of the Armenian genocide, but I knew little beyond that, and I found this an excellent introduction, and a very moving personal story (unfortunately now behind a paywall).  I had not known that the genocide began 100 years ago this month, on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of 200 prominent Armenian men in Istanbul, most of whom were later killed.  Mr. Khatchadourian wrote about traveling to Turkey, to the town of Diyarbakir where his father was born.  There city officials have rebuilt an Armenian church, left in ruins in 1915, where the Easter services were held last year for the first time in almost a century.

Shortly after reading the article, I saw a blurb about this book and added it immediately to my library list.  I can't find the blurb now, but here is the cover synopsis:

     Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey where Turkish restaurants were shunned and anything made in Turkey boycotted.  Diaspora life revolved around commemorating the 1915 genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government, a history Turkey still works hard to cover up and minimize.
     Frustrated by the all-consuming nature of her community's quest for genocide recognition, Toumani decided to do the unthinkable: pick up and move to Istanbul.  Instead of demonizing Turks, she set out to understand them, finding her way over four years into a series of extraordinary conversations that were taboo and sometimes illegal.  There Was and There Was Not offers a vivid picture of Turkish society in the throes of change, and an intimate portrait of a writer coming to terms with the issues that drove her halfway across the world.
     Told with eloquence and power, Toumani's far-reaching quest probes universal questions: how to belong to a community without conforming to it, how to acknowledge a tragedy without exploiting it, and, most important, how to remember a genocide without perpetuating the kind of hatred that gave rise to it in the first place.

This turned out to be very timely reading indeed, since on Sunday Pope Francis celebrated a Mass commemorating the genocide, with Armenian church leaders.  He used the word "genocide," and the Turkish government responded by immediately recalling its ambassador to the Vatican.  Commentators have suggested that the Pope's actions may cause problems for the Vatican's relations with the Arab world.

Meline Toumani's book is not about the genocide itself.  In fact, I was glad to have read The New Yorker article first, for the background information it gave me.  Nor does it focus on her family's experiences in it, because her immediate family, living in Iran, had no direct connection with it.  She came with her parents and two sisters to the United States in 1979, just before the Islamic Revolution.  Her parents quickly sought out the local Armenian community, which Ms. Toumani describes as divided on many points, such as Armenia's relations with Russia and a confusing theological split over the murder of an Armenian archbishop in Chicago in 1933 (assassinated in church on Christmas Eve by fellow Armenians).  However, they unite in hatred of Turkey, and insistence on the recognition of the genocide.

Over the years, Ms. Toumani came to question that single-minded focus: "I began to wonder whether our obsession with genocide recognition was worth its emotional and psychological price."  She "could no longer stand to attend any Armenian gathering, because it seemed that whether it was a poetry reading, a concert, or even a sporting match, it was always, ultimately, about the genocide."  That feeling led to her first visit to Turkey, in 2005:

I could no longer live with the idea that I was supposed to hate, fear, and fight against an entire nation and people . . . I came because being Armenian had come to feel like a choke hold, a call to conformity, and I could find no greater way to act against this and to claim a sense of myself as an individual than to come here, the last and most forbidden place.

But it wasn't until she came to Turkey, both on that first visit and later to stay, researching this book, that she began to understand just how deep the denial of the genocide runs in Turkey, not just as its official policy but among its citizens.  In Istanbul, and in her travels around Turkey, she met a wide range of people from the country's three main ethnic groups, Turks, Armenians and Kurds.  She also traveled into Armenia, a country about which I knew absolutely nothing before reading this book.  In Turkey, she tried to start conversations about Armenians and the genocide, but as she admits, soon "I was doing the very opposite of what I set out to do: not listening but trying to persuade."  Eventually, facing that denial, as well as the negative portrayals of Armenians in the media, the constant unthinking prejudice that she encountered every day, became too much for her, and she returned to the United States.  She came back still wrestling with questions of identity and of the place of the genocide in the Armenian consciousness.

I found this book fascinating, on so many levels: as an introduction to the Armenian diaspora, as a window into Turkey and Armenia, as a meditation on identity (both individual and collective). It feels like a brave book, when writing or speaking about the genocide can bring the wrath of Turkish officials, or even murder by extremists.  On her first visit to Istanbul, Ms. Toumani met Hrant Dink, the editor of an Armenian newspaper in the city, whose murder two years later on the street outside his office led to "Je Suis Charlie"- style protests.  But Ms. Toumani also risked alienating friends and family by moving to Istanbul, associating with Turks, and questioning the focus on the genocide.  And there are extremists among the Armenian community as well, which led to bombing campaigns against Turkish targets in the 1980s.

A trio of travel books

So Near and Yet So Far
And a Right Good Crew
Pleasure by the Busload
  -  Emily Kimbrough

Emily Kimbrough's account of a trip to Greece, Water, Water Everywhere, was one of my favorite discoveries last year, and it inspired me to collect more of her books.  I have definitely found them a mixed bag, and the three I'm going to talk about here are no exception.  Book Riot has a feature with book recommendations called "Buy Borrow Bypass."  I am borrowing that, except that my version is more "Buy Borrow Throw Across the Room."

The "throw across the room" book for me is So Near and Yet So Far, published in 1955.  It describes a tour of south Louisiana, with several of the friends from the 1954 book Forty Plus and Fancy Free, some of whom would also join the trip to Greece the next year.  Chief among them was Sophy (Sophia Yarnell Jacobs), a friend of Emily Kimbrough's from their days at Bryn Mawr.  Sophy was usually the navigator, the driver, and the voice of reason on their trips.  She was also the head of the Greater New York Chapter of the Urban League at the time of this trip, fighting for the desegregation of schools and an end to discriminatory housing practices.  Emily Kimbrough joined her in this work.  She was well aware of the racism in American society.  She wrote about its presence in Hollywood and in her hometown of Chicago.  So I don't quite see how she could write a book about Louisiana that includes just three African Americans, two maids and a shoeshine boy.  Or how she could mention in passing, with apparently no irony, that the unnamed shoeshine boy "was longing to come North and get an education there," in a book written the year after the Brown vs. Board of Education case ended segregation in schools (in law though not in practice).  The last straw for me was when she wrote about the romance of staying in a guest house converted from the slave quarters of a plantation.  All she apparently saw were the pretty rose-colored bricks, not the reality of the lives lived there in suffering.  I understand that this was not an investigative report about life in the South, or about its history.  Maybe she didn't want to upset her Southern friends or fans, including her hosts in Louisiana.  But I wish she had skipped writing about this trip, or I had skipped reading about it.

And a Right Good Crew, published in 1958, isn't a great book, but it came as something of relief after the previous one.  It recounts two trips by canal boat through Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire.  Emily and Sophy were on their own for the first.  For the second, they were joined by three friends, a married couple (the wife a Broadway actress) and a single man (a well-known playwright).  This book felt a bit repetitive to me, because it describes two similar trips, and I had already read about a boating trip Emily and Sophy took, in Water, Water Everywhere.  It also seemed more about Emily and her friends than their travels.  Wacky incidents like almost falling into the canals get full play, but the humor felt a bit stretched at times. There were a few too many visits to villages along the banks, where Emily would try in vain to buy some familiar item like potholders, or a thermos to hold the ice for their cocktails, to the confusion of the local shopkeepers (some of whom must have thought she was bonkers). At least she didn't play the Ugly American, except for lecturing one poor visitor to the boat about how "British housewives . . . waste time and energy in daily shopping" because of "poor or no refrigeration."  She assured her readers that the visitor "was not offended."  I found this a pleasant enough read for an afternoon, but it would definitely be in the "borrow" category.

The best of the books was the last I read, Pleasure by the Busload, which was recommended to me in a comment on my post about the Greece book.  Published in 1961, it is an account of a month-long tour of Portugal in a VW microbus, with Sophy at the wheel.  Joining them this time were Gina Bachauer, a Greek classical pianist; her husband, the English conductor Alec Sherman; and Alec's brother Theodore.  Looking these people up reminded me how well-connected Emily was to the world of theater and music, as well as to writing and publishing.  Reading this book made me aware of how little I know of Portugal.  I couldn't have named any of its cities, beyond Lisbon and Fatima, and I couldn't have found either of those on a map.  Though I knew a little of Portugal's Age of Exploration, I know nothing of its ancient or more modern history.  Emily wasn't much better off, and it felt like I was exploring this new country with her.   She was excited and interested by what she saw, which gives this book a different kind of energy.  Though she included the usual wacky incidents among her companions, her focus was more on the sights and sounds around her, and that made the book more interesting to me.  I did note though that the tour (and her narrative) really picked up after Alec and Gina Sherman left the group.  I am sure that Portugal has changed greatly in that last fifty years, but if I am ever lucky enough to visit, I might take this book with me.  It's definitely a keeper.

I still have four more of Emily Kimbrough's books on the TBR stacks.  I am most curious about Floating Island, which covers another canal boat tour, this time through France.  I only realized last week that the crew for this trip includes Cornelia Otis Skinner, as well as Emily's brother and his wife.  I don't expect it will live up to Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, but I don't think anything could.

Down the Nile, through Egypt's past and present

The Nile, Toby Wilkinson

Last week was a demanding (sometimes frustrating) one at work, the weather was cold and gloomy, and I had a constant low-level headache (I think from weather fronts moving through).  But to balance all that out, I had this book, the subtitle of which is "A Journey Downriver through Egypt's Past and Present."  I spent every minute I could immersed in it.  It was a lucky find in the "new books" bins at the library; I now have my own copy.  As soon as the TBR Dare is over, I will be looking for the other books on ancient Egypt that Toby Wilkinson has written.

The author lays out his premise in a Preface:

     Egypt is the most populous country in the world's most unstable region. It is the key to Middle East peace, the voice of the Arab world, and the crossroads between Europe and Africa.  Its historical and strategic importance is unparalleled.  In short, Egypt matters.  Understanding the country and its people is as vital today as it has ever been.
     The key to Egypt - its colourful past, chaotic present and uncertain future - is the Nile. . . Egypt is the Nile, the Nile Egypt.  The river is the unifying thread that runs throughout Egyptian history, culture and politics.  It has shaped Egypt's geography, controlled its economy, moulded its civilisation, and determined its destiny. . . Travelling down the Nile, past villages, towns and cities, dazzling ancient monuments and ambitious modern developments, is the best way to feel the pulse and understand the unique character of this chaotic, vital, conservative and rapidly changing land.

Traveling down the Nile has been a dream of mine for many years now.  Mr. Wilkinson begins his book with a general introduction to the Nile and its place in Egypt.  He then moves to Aswan, far to the south, which many ancient Egyptians considered the source of the Nile.  His journey begins there and ends in Cairo.  He writes in the present tense about his own travels, at least in part on those romantic Nile vessels the dahabiya. Though he doesn't say so, it seems that he combined several of his own visits to Egypt over the years, weaving them into his south-to-north narrative.

Along the way, he stops at different sites, some active towns or villages, others abandoned and disappearing into the sands.  At each place, he explains its importance in Egypt's history, moving back and forth through the millennia.  As he says more than once, the Nile - and Egyptian history itself - is a palimpsest, as succeeding generations, including  foreign invaders, incorporated and built upon what came before.  His writing is colloquial and easy to follow, his enthusiasm is infectious, and he knows how to make history come alive.  He also sees clearly the challenges that Egypt faces today.  While his book was written in December of 2012, it includes a postscript discussing more recent political events, up to the book's publication last year.  His observations on current conditions mirror what I have read particularly in The New Yorker, which has regular articles written from Cairo.

I soon realized though how very little I know of Egypt's history, beyond the Valley of the Kings.  I was surprised to read of the civil wars that broke out, between south and north, and how frequently coups put new pharaohs on the throne.  And I thought I knew something of Egypt's ancient religion, but I don't remember ever hearing of Hapy, the god of the annual inundation, nor of the many cults centered in the towns along the river.  It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that I learned something from each page of this book.

One of the things I learned is that the indomitable Amelia Edwards was a journalist before becoming an Egyptologist, and that she wrote an account of traveling the Nile (by dahabiya) in the 1870s: A Thousand Miles Up the Nile.  A classic of travel writing, according to Mr. Wilkinson, a copy is now on its way to me (to be squirreled away until April 1st).  Needless to say, I felt her literary heir Amelia Peabody Emerson reading over my shoulder the whole time.  (If it weren't for the Dare, I would have immediately set off on a re-read at least of Crocodile on the Sandbank.)  Sadly, Mr. Wilkinson makes no mention of Amelia or Radcliffe Emerson among the scholars, though I recognized some of their colleagues/competitors, including Flinders Petrie.  I had no idea that Amelia Edwards helped fund Petrie's work, nor that he was the first to hold the chair of Egyptology that she established at University College London.  I was also happy to read about a protegée of Petrie's, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, whose work at the prehistoric sites around Lake Fayum in the north revolutionized scholars' understanding of early Egyptian history.

There are several references to Agatha Christie through this book, including her mystery set in ancient Egypt, Death Comes As the End (which I read many years ago but don't really remember).  And of course Mr. Wilkinson includes Death on the Nile, in the section on Aswan.  As many times I have read that particular book, it was a real shock to realize that I had paid no attention to the Egyptian setting.  I never understood that the steamer heads south from Aswan, going up the Nile, nor that Wadi Halfa is in the Sudan. That was a rather humbling experience.

A pilgrimage to Greece

Water, Water Everywhere, Emily Kimbrough

I don't know about you, but sometimes when I fall in love with a book I'm reading, I gobble it up, turning the pages as fast as I can, resenting interruptions like work.  But with other literary love affairs, I read more slowly, savoring, unwilling to rush, not wanting the book to end.  This was one of those books.  As I was coming to the last chapters yesterday, I was reading only a page or two at a time.

It is an account of a tour of Greece that Emily Kimbrough took with three friends in 1955.  When I came across a battered paperback copy at Half Price Books last month, I hesitated a moment about buying it, actually.  I knew that she had written a series of travel books, but I wasn't impressed with the first I read, Forty Plus and Fancy Free (published in 1954).  The cover proclaims it "The gay excursion of youthful grandmothers romping through Paris and Italy and 'doing' the Coronation."  The trip culminated in London, where Kimbrough covered the Coronation by radio broadcast for CBS, and I did enjoy that part of the book. In general though I thought she tried too hard to be funny, maybe hoping to re-create the magic of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.  She did the same thing at the start of her book We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood, stretching out the minor mishaps of a train journey (it improved once they arrived in Hollywood).

This book is very different, however, and infinitely better.  It is dedicated to her mother, Charlotte Wiles Kimbrough.

If a love that was really passionate, and a devotion that was certainly lifelong, together with a not inconsiderable knowledge of the subject are qualifications, then Mother was a scholar of Greek.  She taught me the Greek alphabet before I learned English letters  . . .  Her bedtime stories to me were of "Jason," "Hercules," and other heroes.  By the time I got around to reading for myself "The Sleeping Beauty," I classified Prince Charming as one of the most sickening sissies I had ever encountered  . . .  [H]er favorite make-believe had always begun, "One day, when you and I are in Greece. . ."  In 1955, Mother had been gone for thirty-one years, without ever having been to Greece  . . .   Nevertheless, to see Greece was an obligation I felt had been laid upon me.

This really sets the stage for the trip she would take: a literary and historical pilgrimage.  At times she was brought to tears by the reality of places she had read about and studied, and with memories of her mother.  But this wasn't a deadly serious trip.  There was always time for shopping, particularly for shoes, and delicious meals.  One of her companions carried an assortment of bottles nestled among her shoes, and the four met together each afternoon for the "shoe-bag hour" of cocktails.  Sometimes there were disagreements, and funny things happened along the way, which Kimbrough treated lightly.  Her real focus was always the sights they were seeing and the people they were meeting. 

Based in Athens, where they stayed a month, they traveled around by car and ship, seeing the big tourist sites but also smaller out-of-way places they had learned about.  I in turn learned a lot about Greece from this book, and it made me want to read more.  (I've already checked out one book she recommended, The Bull of Minos, about excavations in Mycenae.)  If I am ever lucky enough to travel to Greece, I think I'll take this book with me, even if it's 60 years out of date.  Kimbrough was writing a real travel guide, because at the time the Greek tourism industry was still developing.  For readers who might be inspired to follow her, she included information about hotels and restaurants and guides, as well as helpful hints about comfortable clothing.  The four women apparently traveled in dresses with those big 1950s skirts (not to mention gloves and hats), but at least three of them brought "topsiders" for comfort in tramping around.

Kimbrough's three friends were as well-read as she was, and as interested in Greek history and culture.  Even better, they all had the same philosophy of travel.  "We are not by our respective natures group minded  . . .  We like to explore for ourselves."  They didn't try to see everything, they weren't tied down to strict schedules, and they liked to wander.  I would sign on for a tour with them in a heartbeat.

After their time in Greece, they traveled north through Yugoslavia and from there to Italy.  Then Kimbrough with one of the friends went on to England.  There they stayed in London at the Indian Embassy with the High Commissioner, "Mme. Pandit."  Maybe everyone reading this book in 1956 knew who that was.  It was only later, googling something, that I discovered her to be Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit, the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru.  I knew that Emily Kimbrough had been a noted hostess in Philadelphia and New York, as well as the long-time editor of Good Housekeeping, but I hadn't realized the kind of connections she had (Mme. Pandit had previously been her guest in New York).

In England, she and her friend Sophy set off on further pilgrimages, including trips to Winchester and Canterbury, as well as Jane Austen's house at Chawton.  On the spur of the moment, she decided to hire a houseboat for a trip up the Thames.  She thought the hire included someone to operate the boat, but when she learned otherwise, she volunteered Sophy for the job.  I immediately thought of Three Men in a Boat, which Kimbrough doesn't mention.  She does however cite Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors on the last page, which put the seal on my love for this book.

All week long, as I was reading, I had the urge to buttonhole people and share that love.  The only thing that stopped me was knowing the looks of incomprehension and pity that I would get in return. I nearly broke my rule about not reviewing books I haven't finished, just to tell someone about it.  Somewhere around the third chapter, I checked on Emily Kimbrough's other travel books.  I discovered she wrote about boat trips with friends through the canals of France and Ireland, as well as return voyages in England and Greece.  She also wrote a memoir about working in advertising at Marshall Field's, straight out of college.  I will not attempt to conceal from you that there is a new Emily Kimbrough section of the TBR stacks, which will be increasing (the fruits of an early-morning binge on the ABE site).  I am trusting that they will fall more in line with this book than with Forty Plus, but either way I expect to be amused and entertained, and probably to learn something.

In the footsteps of Kipling and his Kim

Quest for Kim, Peter Hopkirk

I am blessed with bookish friends who read deeply, immersing themselves in books like I do, so that the characters come alive for us.  When a new member of one of my book clubs complained, "You talk about these characters like they are real people," I thought, umm, yes, and what's wrong with that?  We can spend hours discussing them, comparing theirs to other stories we have read, projecting their lives into the future.  I've had friends join me on literary pilgrimages, visiting scenes from favorite books or their authors' lives.  I've also found these kinds of readers on-line, first through listservs and now with blogging.  I don't often come across them within books, though.  I had never heard of Peter Hopkirk before I found this at Half Price Books, but after only a few pages I recognized a kindred spirit.

The subtitle of his book is "In Search of Kipling's Great Game."  What he set out to do was "[retrace] Kim's footsteps across Kipling's India to see how much of it remains."  Unlike Mr. Hopkirk, I did not grow up with Kim, or with Kipling's books at all.  I must have seen the Disney version of "The Jungle Book," from 1967.  I remember a 33 rpm record for our little children's player, with "The Bare Necessities" on one side  (Just typing that starts the words running through my head - [pause to watch a YouTube video] - and my day just got noticeably brighter.)  But it was years before I picked up any of Kipling's books, and even longer before I realized I had only read a selection of The Jungle Books, and none of The Just So Stories.  And typing that made me think it's been too long, Best Beloved, since I read The Just So Stories.  But I digress.  While I read Kim somewhere along the way, it was Laurie R. King who really made me appreciate it with her book The Game, a Sherlock Holmes & Mary Russell story set in 1920s India.  In an afterword, she says that her book "may be read as a humble and profoundly felt homage to Rudyard Kipling's Kim, one of the great novels of the English language . . . a book for any age."  It was only just now, in checking for that quote, that I saw her acknowledgement that her book owes much to -- Peter Hopkirk.  It's the Circle of Books.

Reading Kim at a young age, Mr. Hopkirk became fascinated with India and with the "Great Game," "the century-long Anglo-Russian struggle for the mastery of Asia which, to the British at least, ultimately meant India."  This fascination led him into the Army, hoping to serve in India (he was sent to Somalia instead).  It also led him to research and write about different facets of the Game, published in five books over the years (some of which I will probably be reading).  After the last, he decided to go back to the source of it all, Kipling and Kim, at first purely for his own interest and curiosity.

He begins his journey in Lahore, where Kim opens, with the title character "in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum."  From there, he traces Kim's journey with the old Tibetan lama down to Lucknow and Benares (today Varansai), and eventually into the Great Game.  He lightly sketches in the main events of the story, just enough to provide context, while constantly encouraging his readers to pick up the original and read for themselves.  Along the way, he looks for the originals of the story's characters, beginning with Kim himself.  I knew so little of Kipling's life that I did not even realize that his own father was the keeper of the Wonder House, written almost unchanged into his son's story.  Mr. Hopkirk also looks for the sites where the events of the story take place, such as La Martinière College in Lucknow, which Kipling transformed into St Xavier in Partibus, the school (also in Lucknow) to which Kim is sent.  As he discovers, he is far from the first to try and match fact with fiction.  Sometimes, as when he tries to locate the extraordinary Lurgan Sahib's shop in Simla, he finally has to admit defeat (while still hoping that a lead will turn up eventually).

Kim and his lama can move easily between Lahore and Lucknow.  Today, those two cities are in different countries, and Mr. Hopkirk finds it impossible to follow their exact route, even by train.  Many of the places he visits, at least in the first half of his book, were the scenes of terrible violence and devastation during the Partition of India and Pakistan, in 1947.  At times it seemed like I was seeing three images of Pakistan and India super-imposed: Kim's fictional world, the one Mr. Hopkirk was travelling through in the early 1990s, and hanging over it all, the events of 1947.

This is a true literary pilgrimage, and a historical one, and I enjoyed it immensely.  Mr. Hopkirk's deep affection for Kim suffuses his book, though he acknowledges that it is of its time, with elements that trouble today's readers.  Nevertheless, his enthusiasm is catching.  I have made myself a little stack, of Kim, as well as Laurie King's The Game, and some of Kipling's books that I have had on the TBR shelves for far too long.  I might start with his posthumous autobiography, Something of Myself.

A Jane Austen tour in 1901

Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends, Constance Hill and Ellen G. Hill

When I came across references to this book in G.E. Mitton's 1905 biography of Jane Austen, I immediately added it to my reading list.  Published in 1902, it is an account of a literary pilgrimage by two sisters, Constance Hill, who wrote the text; and Ellen Hill, who illustrated it with her drawings.  The two were major fans of Austen's books.  As Constance Hill wrote in a preface,

[Her] undefinable charm . . . has exercised a sway of ever-increasing power over the writer and illustrator of these pages; constraining them to follow the author to all of the places where she dwelt and inspiring them with a determination to find out all that could be known of her life and its surroundings.

I have made Austen pilgrimages myself, first to her grave in Winchester Cathedral, to Bath and Lyme Regis, and finally a few years ago to her last home, at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire.  I was very intrigued by the idea of such a trip in 1901, less than a century after her death, and before she became the global icon that she is today.  I had to remind myself that in 1901, there were only a handful of books written about Jane Austen, including family memoirs, and an early edition of her letters. The Hills weren't the first Austen pilgrims, but they may have been the first to write about it.

Their account opens with their arrival by pony-chaise in Austen's native Hampshire, or as they prefer to call it, "Austen-Land."  They follow her life chronologically, moving from Steventon, where she was born, to Bath and Southampton, then to Chawton.  They include chapters on her time in London, usually staying with her brother Henry; and at Godmersham, the Kent estate of another brother, Edward Austen Knight.  Along the way, they seek out the exact spots where Austen lived, or visited, or some cases, danced.  They are quite bold in knocking on doors and inviting themselves in for a tour.  Constance Hill quotes constantly from Austen's letters (in the 1884 Brabourne edition), as well as the memoir written by her nephew J.E. Austen-Leigh in 1870.  There are also frequent quotations from the novels, as the sisters look for sites of the events in the books.  Like them, I have walked along the Cobb in Lyme Regis, looking for the spot where Louisa Musgrove fell.  In addition, Constance Hill often cites a near-contemporary of Jane Austen, Mary Russell Mitford, whose family knew the Austens (I already have an e-version of her 1824 book Our Village - reading always begets more books).

In addition to these sources, the Hills must also have had the cooperation of some members of the Austen family.  They were given access to Austen's letters in manuscript, as well as unpublished family memoirs.  In addition, Constance Hill read one of the three notebooks in Austen's handwriting, which contain what are now called the "Minor Works," then unpublished. They were also allowed to handle Austen artifacts at Chawton, including her writing desk with the manuscript of The Watsons in a drawer.

I enjoyed - and envied - the sisters' travels in Austen-land.  More than a century later, I could relate to their enthusiasm for Austen's books, and their excitement at visiting the places associated with her life and her stories.  I was a little surprised to see her books described more than once as "racy," which made me wonder if the Hills had ever read Henry Fielding's Tom Jones or other books of that era.  For me their book works best as an appreciation of Austen, and a travelogue, rather than as biography.  I will take this book with me if I am lucky enough to make another Austen trip, particularly for the information they give on Bath in Austen's time.

I started off with an e-version of this book, but I was lucky enough to find a reprint by Kessinger Publishing.  It includes Ellen Hill's charming drawings, as well as other illustrations.  For the book's readers in 1902, this may have been their first look at Austen family portraits, or at Chawton Cottage itself.  We 21st-century Janeites are lucky to have so many photos available, in books and on-line - such a wealth of information, so easily accessible, unknown to earlier readers.

N.B. I have sadly neglected my Mid-Century of Books project, so I am glad that I can fill another year with this entertaining book.

The adventures of Mamie Wick

An American Girl in London, Sara Jeannette Duncan

I was first introduced to Sara Jeannette Duncan by Barb of Leaves & Pages.  Reading her review of An American Girl in London, I had a familiar feeling of "I want this book - right now."  I was frustrated to find no copies available, even through inter-library loan.  As I mentioned before, I downloaded an e-version, but on my Nook it was too garbled to read.  When I discovered last week that the text was unscrambled and easily readable on my new phone and tablet, I moved this book to the top of my reading list.

I had forgotten the details of Barb's post, but from the title alone I was expecting a story about an American girl discovering London, perhaps a late-Victorian take on 84, Charing Cross Road, or Amy's travels in Little Women. Knowing that Sara Jeannette Duncan was Canadian, I was half-expecting a Canadian heroine, so I was a little surprised when the narrator introduced herself as Mamie Wick, of Chicago, writing in 1890 (the book was published a year later).  Mamie explains her reasons for writing in the first chapter, addressing her potential British readers:

     I have noticed that you are pleased, over here, to bestow rather more attention upon the American Girl than upon any other kind of American that we produce. You have taken the trouble to form opinions about her - I have heard quantities of them.  Her behaviour and her bringing-up, her idioms and her 'accent' - above all her 'accent' - have made themes for you, and you have been good enough to discuss them - Mr. James, in your midst, correcting and modifying your impressions - with a good deal of animation, for you. I observe that she is almost the only frivolous subject that ever gets into your newspapers . . .
     Privately, I should think that the number of us that come over here every summer to see the Tower of London and the National Gallery, and visit Stratford-upon-Avon, to say nothing of those who marry and stay in England, would have made you familiar with the kind of young women we are long ago; and to me it is very curious that you should go on talking about us . . . But it has occurred to me that, since so much is to be said about the American Girl, it might be permissible for her to say some it herself.

I liked Mamie from the start, and I looked forward to her adventures, and to seeing London through her eyes.  Initially she was to travel with her parents, but her father (a United States Congressman with an eye on a Senate seat) was detained on business.  Instead, her parents agreed that she should go on alone, which also surprised me a little.  I don't know how usual that would really have been in 1890.  But then her author set off on a round-the-world trip herself as a young woman, traveling with a friend.  And at least the Wicks had relatives in London, her father's aunt Mrs. Portheris, on whom Mamie could call.

Sailing from New York, Mamie at first found herself somewhat isolated among the ship's company, with even her dinner companions ignoring her.  But finally the English lady sitting next to her at meals began to talk to her, eventually drawing in the gentleman on the other side, and a shipboard friendship developed.  Mamie would meet both of them again in London, and she would come to share a flat with the lady when her aunt proved less than welcoming.  Her two new friends took her on outings around the city, to see the sights and to attend the parties and the theatre.  With them and others that she met, she traveled outside London, to the Boat Races, Ascot, and a military review.

Along the way, Mamie was quick to correct what she saw as the misconceptions about American girls, and she was equally quick to note the foibles that she saw in British society - perhaps her Canadian author seeing both sides from the middle.  Mamie was never rude about it, keeping many of her observations for her book.  At the same time she recognized that as a young woman from the midwestern United States, she had much to learn from the history and culture of Great Britain.  She did not have the chip on her shoulder, the need to trumpet American superiority, which Louisa May Alcott's heroines for example often have (I wonder again if this is because her author was Canadian).  But she wasn't just a country mouse or a rube, lost in the big city, either.  She knew that she didn't know everything, and she was open to learning and guidance.  I liked her mix of confidence and inexperience.  I think she could actually have coped perfectly well on her own, though she wouldn't have had the entrée into society that her new friends gave her.

In one area, though, Mamie was more than a little naive.  In the first chapter, we learn that her father made his fortune in Chicago, manufacturing baking powder.  It was obviously a substantial fortune, funding his political career and even a Senate race.  Mamie was sent off apparently with a blank check, or at least permission to draw on her father's bankers in London as needed.  She spent freely, though not extravagantly.  So while she might not be a "dollar princess" like Consuelo Vanderbilt, she was clearly a well-off, unmarried young American woman.  And judging by the charming period illustrations, she was a Gibson-girl type - though she seems to be a blonde in some of them, and a brunette in others (but that may be from her hats).  Her money and her appearance created expectations in the people that she met.  Mamie took the attentions of the young men for granted, seeing them simply as friends, when it is clear to the reader that they had other intentions.  Had she been traveling with her mother or a chaperone, things would have gone differently.

This book was great fun, and I did enjoy Mamie's adventures and her descriptions of late-Victorian London. As I was reading, I kept thinking how much I'd like to have a copy of this, so much that I finally resigned myself to the idea of a print-on-demand version (I generally loathe their format and sometimes careless editing).  Instead, I was surprised and delighted to find a reasonably-priced copy on ABE - the 1891 edition, no less.  I'll be very happy to have this on my real as well as digital shelves.

Finding a place in Italy

A Small Place in Italy, Eric Newby

Eric Newby's books were one of my favorite discoveries in 2012 (and from my own TBR shelves to boot).  That year I read several accounts of his adventures, usually with his wife and long-suffering travel partner Wanda.  And then last year I completely neglected them, though I still had some of his books unread.  I was hunting around the TBR shelves the other day, unable at first to settle on anything, when I chose this one pretty much at random.  I'm glad I did, it did felt like meeting old friends again.

The opening chapter gives a quick overview of Eric Newby's experiences in Italy in World War II, where he was first a prisoner of war and then, after escaping, on the run for four months (a story told in greater detail in his book Love and War in the Apennines). His future wife Wanda was among those who helped him, as did the country people in the hills of the Parma region.  He and Wanda returned often to Italy, to visit his rescuers as well as her family in Slovenia (in a region annexed to Italy in the early 20th century).  They had always hoped to buy a house in Italy.  In 1967, they finally decided to do it, spurred in part by rising real estate prices.  They wanted to live in the north, along the Apennines, and the house they finally found was in northern Tuscany, near the Ligurian Coast (the handy map in the front of this book was helpful and instructive).  At the time, Newby was the travel editor of the Observer, so they could only visit during his holidays, generally in the spring and autumn.

Writing almost thirty years later, in 1994, Newby details the complicated process of buying a small two-story farmhouse, I Castagni (The Chestnuts), near a small village called Fosdinovo.  The house needed major repairs and upgrades, including adding a bathroom.  I thought that this was going to be the story of the house, and in fact I kept thinking that the title was "A Small House in Italy."  Though Newby devotes several chapters to the work done on the house, he is as always more interested in people, starting with their new neighbors, and in exploring their corner of Italy.  The Newbys are the first foreigners to settle in the area (Wanda likes to remind people that she grew up in Italy), and they are warmly welcomed.  They go everywhere they are invited, from the first day.  Arriving on Good Friday, they join the traditional procession through the village streets, ending with services in the parish church.  Each year they also join neighbors in the vendemmia, the harvesting of grapes for wine, in days of hard work in the autumn heat.

Newby makes frequent references to his war-time adventures, comparing and contrasting the lives of the local residents with what he experienced living among them in 1943-1944.  He finds some surprising overlaps, but over the twenty-five years that the Newbys own their house, they see more and more changes in the traditional ways.  The country-side becomes increasingly urbanized, with people moving out from the cities and with more outsiders like the Newbys themselves setting in Italy.

As usual Newby describes the food of the region in some detail.  He seems to have thought his readers would be unfamiliar with the basic dishes (though he cites Elizabeth David's Italian Food, published in 1963).  He takes care to explain what pesto is, as well as bruschetta and pecorino cheese (reading this did make me hungry).  He also discourses at some length on mushrooms, which grow wild in the forests around the area, the collecting of them and the cooking of them.  Local residents had to move quickly to stay ahead of professional funghi seekers from the cities, who often raided the best spots.

This was a quieter book than some of his others that I have read, though it does include an account of a tramp along the crinale, the main ridge of the Apennines, which sounded absolutely miserable (cold buffeting winds and rain blowing along alpine heights).  I enjoyed learning about the region as well as the neighborhood of I Castagni, and watching Eric and Wanda Newby find their place in it.  Like them, I was sorry to say good-bye, when they finally decided they had to sell the house.  I hope the people who live there now enjoy it as much as the Newbys did.