Authors – Page 5 – Number One London

Catching Up on 2011

Victoria, here. In the early days of 2012, I find myself sorting some books I acquired in the last year and some I still have to find, many of them concerned with Jane Austen. Gee, isn’t that a shock!

Two are short story collections.

I enjoyed many of the stories in these two collections and admired the creative ways in which Jane
Austen inspired these writers. I recommend both.

My friend and consummate author, Carrie Bebris, published Deception at Lyme, or The Peril of Persuasion, the sixth in her Mr and Mrs. Darcy mystery series. See her website here. Elizabeth and Darcy have solved a number of puzzles since their first outing in 2004’s Pride and Prescience (or, A Truth Universally Acknowledged). And more are in the works.

Here is a book I haven’t read yet, and have receive conflicting reports about: P.D. James version of Carrie’s idea of having the Darcys investigate murder: Death Comes to Pemberley.

Of course, Baroness James gets a great deal of attention from the media, and no one can say she has not had a distinguished career. I have had many hours of delight from her books. But this one? Somehow, it smacks of jumping on the Austen bandwagon unnecessarily, but that could be unfair. I would love to hear from readers who have tried it out. I have a copy waiting for me next month, I think, when I get to the sunny south of Florida. I’ll report back. (Note from Kristine: Yes, it’s here waiting for you. I love James and so gave it a shot when Jo sent it to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it past Chapter Two).

Another book I will read soon is The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen by Lindsay Ashford. I met Ms. Ashford at the JASNA-AGM in Fort Worth TX in October 2011, but I must have been extremely distracted since her authorship of this book, talked of widely at the AGM, escaped me when we met.

This book reportedly attributes the death of Jane Austen to arsenic poisoning. In one of those coincidences that seem to happen every so often, shortly after meeting Ms. Ashford, I attended a talk on poisons by Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning science reporter who teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, actually a catchy title for a history of forensic science in crime investigation.

Ms. Blum commented on reviews of the Ashford book and the report that a lock of Jane Austen’s hair showed evidence of arsenic when tested. Arsenic, in Austen’s day, was a common ingredient of many lotions and potions used to whiten complexion and for dozens of other uses. It did not surprise Blum to learn of the possibility of Austen having arsenic in her system as she probably used arsenic-laced skin products.

I have heard several people say they enjoyed Mysterious Death, so I will read it soon. (Note from Kristine – this, too, is here waiting for you. Haven’t read it yet – too distracted by Thirkell).

I haven’t kept track of all the Austen sequels and continuations that came out recently — and there are lots of them. I know some of the authors and they are all hard-working, devoted people — success to all of you! For more information, take a look at the website of Austen Authors.

Two quite different but related genres to the sequels are the modern restructures of the novels and the JA-experience novels. I read two of those this year, perhaps not quite on top of their publication dates.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport came out in paperback, and I found it an engaging read, based loosely on the plot of Sense & Sensibility. It is well done.

Beth Pattillo’s Jane Austen Ruined My Life is also worth your time and energy. I resisted, because JA has done ANYTHING but ruined my life! She has provided great pleasure and stimulation, great companionship and friends, and a lifetime of interesting research topics related to her life and times. But a very well-respected friend loved it, and so did I. (Note from Kristine – I loved it, too!)

Finally, Stella Tillyard, author of The Aristocrats, Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832, published a novel of the Peninsular War this year, another entry on my TBR list.

This is anything but an exhaustive list, but it looks like I’d better stop blogging and get reading if I am ever to catch up. Here’s to a 2012 filled with wonderful books!

Prepare for The Year of Dickens

2012 brings the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the man who shaped our perception of Victorian England in his thousands of pages of delicious stories — not to mention his reporting and essays.

Dickens in 1858

Charles Dickens was born in 1812. His somewhat feckless parents caused him to have an alternately comfortable and difficult life as a child, including a stint working in a London blacking factory, where he experienced first hand the travails of the poor working class he so vividly portrayed in his stories.

Santa favored me with a copy of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, a book that was on many “best” lists for 2011 and which received many glowing reviews. Tomalin had already done considerable work on Dickens and his secret life. Her book, Invisible Woman, was published in 1991, telling of his 13-year affair with Ellen Ternan at the end of his life. He had previously married the boss’s daughter (or one of his bosses), Catherine Hogarth, whose father was the editor of the Evening Chronicle, for which Dickens wrote. They had ten children, but grew apart.

Claire Tomalin is an excellent biographer. She has published the life stories of many famous writers, such as Katherine Mansfield (1989), Pepys (2003), and Thomas Hardy (2007). She has written about others, as well, particularly – from my bookshelf — Mrs. Jordan’s Profession (1994) — the story of London actress Dorothea Jordan (1761-1816) and her long affair with Prince William, Duke of Clarence (1765-1837), with whom Dora had ten children. He later succeeded his brother to become William IV, King of England 1830-1837.

Claire Tomalin

I suppose it will come as no surprise to occasional readers of this blog to learn that my favorite biography of Tomalin’s is her Jane Austen: A Life, an excellent study of the artist whose work is the source-point for all my interests in the long 18th Century, the Regency, the Georgians, the Victorians, and all things English/British.

But I digress… you will find no shortage of biographies and studies of the work of Charles Dickens in the upcoming months. Plays, movies, television programs — he will be everywhere. We have just had, in many US cities and elsewhere, the traditional holiday season performances of A Christmas Carol, which one cannot see too many times, or so it seems to me.

Ebenezer Scrooge is only one of the hundreds of characters Dickens create which stay in our memories forever. Who could ever forget the Artful Dodger? Or Miss Havisham? Or Mr. Micawber or Uriah Heep? You can name dozens more, no doubt.

David Copperfield illustration

David Copperfield is said to be somewhat biographical.

Dickens began publishing stories in 1833 when he was just 21 years old. He generally published his stories in magazines, in serial form, meaning that every few pages, there is a suspenseful moment, designed to bring the reader back next month to buy the next installment. This method enhances the page-turner quality of all of his novels. He was immensely popular in his day, engaging in many public readings around Britain as well as during two trips to the U.S.

Charles Dickens by Ary Scheffer, 1855; NPG, London

So in the next 12 months (and beyond), be self-indulgent, and read some of the long and enjoyable works of Charles Dickens. It is a pleasure you owe yourself!

The Trouble With Horses

From The Creevey Papers

October 23rd. (1837) —Since August 30th, nearly two months, I have written not a line, for I have had nothing to record of public or general interest, and have felt an invincible repugnance to write about myself or my own proceedings. Having nothing else to talk of, however, I shall write my own history of the last seven weeks, which is very interesting to me inasmuch as it has been very profitable. Having asked George Bentinck to try my horse ‘Mango’ before Doncaster, we went down together one night to Winchester race-course and saw him tried. He won the trial and we resolved to back him. This we accomplished more successfully than we expected, and ten days after he won the St. Leger, and I won about 9,000Z. upon it, the first great piece of good fortune that ever happened to me. Since Doncaster, I have continued (up to this time) to win at Newmarket, so that my affairs are in a flourishing condition, but, notwithstanding these successes, I am dissatisfied and disquieted in my mind, and my life is spent in the alternations of excitement from the amusement and speculation of the turf and of remorse and shame at the pursuit itself. One day I resolve to extricate myself entirely from the whole concern, to sell all my horses, and pursue other occupations and objects of interest, and then these resolutions wax faint, and I again find myself buying fresh animals, entering into fresh speculations, and just as deeply engaged as ever. It is the force of habit, a still unconquered propensity to the sport, and a nervous apprehension that if I do give it up, I may find no subject of equal interest.

From the Pen of Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole

To John Chute, Esquire.

Paris, Oct. 3, 1765.

I don’t know where you are, nor when I am likely to hear of you. I write at random, and, as I talk, the first thing that comes into my pen. I am, as you certainly conclude, much more amused than pleased. At a certain time of life, sights and new objects may entertain one, but new people cannot find any place in one’s affection. New faces with some name or other belonging to them, catch my attention for a minute—I cannot say many preserve it. Five or six of the women that I have seen already are very sensible. The men are in general much inferior, and not even agreeable. They sent us their best, I believe, at first, the Due de Nivernois. Their authors, who by the way are everywhere, are worse than their own writings, which I don’t mean as a compliment to either. In general, the style of conversation is solemn, pedantic, and seldom animated, but by a dispute. I was expressing my aversion to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, “Why, what do you like, if you hate both disputes and whisk?”

Palace of Versailles

What strikes me the most upon the whole is, the total difference of manners between them and us, from the greatest object to the least. There is not the smallest similitude in the twenty-four hours. It is obvious in every trifle. Servants carry their lady’s train, and put her into her coach with their hat on. They walk about the streets in the rain with umbrellas to avoid putting on their hats; driving themselves in open chaises in the country without hats, in the rain too, and yet often wear them in a chariot in Paris when it does not rain. The very footmen are powdered from the break of day, and yet wait behind their master, as I saw the Duc of Praslin’s do, with a red pocket-handkerchief about their necks. Versailles, like everything else, is a mixture of parade and poverty, and in every instance exhibits something most dissonant from our manners. In the colonnades, upon the staircases, nay in the antechambers of the royal family, there are people selling all sorts of wares. While we were waiting in the Dauphin’s sumptuous bedchamber, till his dressing-room door should be opened, two fellows were sweeping it, and dancing about in sabots to rub the floor.

Louis, Dauphin of France

You perceive that I have been presented. The Queen took great notice of me; none of the rest said a syllable. You are let into the King’s bedchamber just as he has put on his shirt; he dresses and talks good-humouredly to a few, glares at strangers, goes to mass, to dinner, and a-hunting. The good old Queen, who is like Lady Primrose in the face, and Queen Caroline in the immensity of her cap, is at her dressing-table, attended by two or three old ladies, who are languishing to be in Abraham’s bosom, as the only man’s bosom to whom they can hope for admittance. Thence you go to the Dauphin, for all is done in an hour. He scarce stays a minute; indeed, poor creature, he is a ghost, and cannot possibly last three months. The Dauphiness is in her bedchamber, but dressed and standing; looks cross, is not civil, and has the true Westphalian grace and accents. The four Mesdames, who are clumsy plump old wenches, with a bad likeness to their father, stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knotting-bags, looking goodhumoured, not knowing what to say, and wriggling as if they wanted to make water. This ceremony too is very short; then you are carried to the Dauphin’s three boys, who you may be sure only bow and stare. The Duke of Berry looks weak and weak-eyed: the Count de Provence is a fine boy; the Count d’Artois well enough. The whole concludes with seeing the Dauphin’s little girl dine, who is as round and as fat as a pudding.

In the Queen’s antechamber we foreigners and the foreign ministers were shown the famous beast of the Gevaudan, just arrived, and covered with a cloth, which two chasseurs lifted up. It is an absolute wolf, but uncommonly large, and the expression of agony and fierceness remains strongly imprinted on its dead jaws.*

I dined at the Due of Praslin’s with four-and-twenty ambassadors and envoys, who never go but on Tuesdays to court. He does the honours sadly, and I believe nothing else well, looking important and empty. The Due de Choiseul’s face, which is quite the reverse of gravity, does not promise much more. His wife is gentle, pretty, and very agreeable. The Duchess of Praslin, jolly, red-faced, looking very vulgar, and being very attentive and civil. I saw the Due de Richelieu in waiting, who is pale, except his nose, which is red, much wrinkled, and exactly a remnant of that age which produced General Churchill, Wilks the player, the Duke of Argyll, &c. Adieu!

* More from Walpole on the Beast in a letter to the Hon. H.S. Conway, October 6, 1765: Yes, the wild beast, he of the Gevaudan. He is killed, and actually in the Queen’s antechamber, where he was exhibited to us with as much parade as if it was Mr. Pitt. It is an exceedingly large wolf, and, the connoisseurs say, has twelve teeth more than any wolf ever had since the days of Romulus’s wet-nurse. The critics deny it to be the true beast; and I find most people think the beast’s name is legion, for there are many. He was covered with a sheet, which two chasseurs lifted up for the foreign ministers and strangers.

The Crying Duchess

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Mrs. Creevey to (her daughter) Miss Ord.

12 Sept., 1806.

“… I am going to Somerset House to enquire after poor Sheridan, who went from this house very ill at 12 o’clock last night. . . . He complained of sore throat and shivering, and his pulse was the most frightful one I ever felt; it was so tumultuous and so strong that when one touched it, it seemed not only to shake his arm, but his whole frame. … I lighted a fire and a great many candles, and Mr. Creevey, who was luckily just come home from Petty’s, began to tell him stories. . . . Then we sent for some wine, of which he was so frightened it required persuasion to make him drink six small glasses, of which the effect was immediate in making him not only happier, but composing his pulse. … In the midst of his dismals he said most clever, funny things, and at last got to describing Mr. Hare, and others of his old associates, with the hand of a real master, and made one lament that such extraordinary talents should have such numerous alloys. He received a note from Lady Elizabeth Forster, with a good account of Mr. Fox. It ended with—’try to drink less and speak the truth.’ He was very funny about it and said: ‘By G-d! I speak more truth than she does, however.’ Then he told us how she had cried to him the night before, ‘because she felt it her severe duty to be Duchess of Devonshire!’ *