On The Shelf – Page 6 – Number One London

Madame Tussaud – The Novel

Kristine’s post about the Duke of Wellington visiting the wax museum has inspired me (Victoria) to write about a book I recently enjoyed: Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran. It is a fictional biography, well-researched but using the kind of emotional depth and intimacy of fiction. I found the book fascinating and very well-written. I admit I have never been to one of Madame Tussaud’s institutions; I would love to see the historical personages, but I have always assumed there was a lot more attention to current rock and film stars — and I wouldn’t recognize them much less care about them. I guess I have always classified wax museums as tourist traps. I know lots of people love them — but I’m not a fan of the institution.

However, reading the story of Marie Grosholtz and her family gave me a true appreciation of what they were trying to accomplish with their salon, including making a lot of money, and the lengths to which they went to conform to popular trends in a time of incredible turmoil.

Michelle Moran is the author of several historical novels. Click here for her website. The picture left shows Ms. Moran (r) with the figure of her subject, Madame Tussaud, at the Hollywood Museum. I have read reports of a film of the book in the works. And why not? Madame lived a long, event-filled life. Marie Grosholtz was born in 1761 in Strasbourg. Her widowed mother took her to Bern, Switzerland, where they lived in the household of Dr. Curtius, a physician who specialized in creating wax models, first for teaching purposes, eventually for exhibition. They moved to Paris in 1765 and Dr. Curtius began to exhibit his figures in lifelike settings. Marie was an eager student and by the time she was a teen, she began to mold and scuplt the heads of famous persons for their exhibit. She also spent time with the royal family at Versailles, teaching the king’s sister to scuplt saints. While she split her time between the sumptuous royal palace and Dr. Curtius’s house, associates of her family were involved in the tumult leading up to the Revolution.

The events of these days are well chronicled by Moran as seeen through the eyes of Marie, a young woman in her late twenties, searching for love, yet obsessed with perfecting her art and making money. During the Reign of Terror, she accommodated the mob by creating death masks from heads fresh from the guillotine. At right, one of the displays from the wax museum. Ugh. However, she felt some loyalty to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, deploring the chaos when they fell.

Marie spent time in the prison that held the future Empress Josephine and Grace Elliot, mistress of the Duc d’Orleans. Though both Josephine’s first husband and the Duc lost their heads, the three women were among the survivors. While in prison, Marie met Francois Tussaud, and they married after the Terror came to an end. It was not a happy marriage; he succumbed to drink and gambling, and was a constant drag on her accomlishments. In 1802, Madame Tussaud and her elder son took some of their figures on tour to England, where they stayed and established the wax museum that still bears her name.

At left, wax figures of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Eventually, after her husband’s death, she was reunited with her mother and her second son. She ran her business with her sons until her death in 1850.

Going back to the proposed movie of Madame Tussaud, the costumes are already available, and they even won an oscar for the designers who worked on Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. I remember my very ambiguous reaction to this movie. The youthful queen was such a Valley Girl, so frivolous and, frankly, stupid, I could hardly bear it. Yet I realize she might very well have been such a little fool. Certainly as portrayed by Michelle Moran, she made some very poor decisions. But the costumes and settings and the composition of the shots — all were brilliant.

I think I will get the DVD and watch it with the sound off. I not only
despised the dialogue and how it was delivered, but I seem to recall a quite jarring musical track. Please send in your views of this movie.

Anyway, I’d love to see those brilliant costumes again. Haven’t we learned that in all the Jane Austen films and tv series, the British reuse the costumes over and over? I seem to recall a fun blog post by someone listing which dress was worn where. Did I mention the sets? And the gardens. Much of the movie was actually filmed in Versailles and in its gardens.

One of the books Michelle Moran used as a resource for her novel
Madame Tussaud is Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette. As a long-time admirer of Fraser’s books, both her historical works and the detective series, I think I will briefly turn my back on British bios and try this one.

And just to prove that everything on this blog really can be traced back to the Duke of Welllington, Lady Antonia was born into the family Pakenham, one and the same with the 1st Duchess of Wellington. Fraser is the daughter of Elizabeth Longford, biographer of the Duke, whose two-volume work has never been surpassed for insight into the life of the great man.

On The Shelf – Discovering New Authors – Part Five

Prolific author Dame Catherine Cookson died in 1998, just nine days short of her 92nd birthday. She had rarely been out of the top ten most-borrowed books in British public libraries, and in 1997, for the second year running, nine out of ten out of the most popular library books borrowed were written by Dame Catherine. Accroding to a February 2010 article in The Guardian: “She dominated the library charts for years – but there is no trace of her among the 100 most borrowed books of 2008-9. She is still, however, the 10th most borrowed author of the decade.”

Cookson was born illegitimate in 1906 to an alcoholic mother and grew up in poverty around the towns of Shields and Jarrow in County Durham, now Tyne and Wear, the setting for most of her books. She would use the people, places and experiences of her childhood to draw sypmathetic characters and compelling plotlines that touched many a reader’s heart. A few weeks before her 84th birthday, a Sunday newspaper named her as Britain’s 17th richest woman with an estimated fortune of £14 million. And in her kindness, Cookson has left each of us a legacy – her impressive backlist of over 100 books, many of which are sagas that follow a single family through darkness and into the light.

Oh, how I love Cookson’s books. To describe them, and their effect upon the reader, is to dredge up every trite and hackneyed reviewer’s phrase: like curing up wth an old friend, the perfect book for a cold winter’s day, a compelling and moving story, etc., etc., etc. However, in Cookson’s case, these platitudes are quite true. No matter how dire consequences become for Cookson’s characters, we know that all will come right in the end and the journey is pure entertainment.

The following cover blurbs will give you the flavour of Cookson’s novels –

The Fifteen Streets – Life in the Fifteen Streets was a continual struggle for survival. Some families gave up hope and descended into a state of perpetual despair. Others, like the O’Briens, maintained a fierce determination to transcend the bitter poverty into which they had been born. For Mary Ellen O’Brien, hope lay in the wisdom and strength of her children. There was gentle Katie, whose bright beauty and quick mind led her to a new world of learning; Dominic, fast-tempered and strong-willed; and there was John–the most determined to escape the cruel poverty of the Fifteen Streets, the most passionate, courageous and loving of all the O’Briens.

Kate Hannigan – Dr Rodney Prince has never seen a girl who looked more out of place in the grime and squalor of the Fifteen Streets than did Kate Hannigan. He knew she had suffered at the hands of men: Tim Hannigan, her ‘father’, was a vicious bully; John Herrington, a smooth-talking seducer, had left her with his child. But Rodney Prince’s desire for a family had been frozen out by a wife who’d wanted Harley Street, not a Tyneside slum. By contrast, Kate glowed with a warmth that far outshone the hard, brittle beauty of Stella and exposed the emptiness in his heart. And so, between Rodney Prince, a wealthy man locked in an unhappy marriage, and Kate Hannigan, a bastard child of the slums, grew a love that opposed all the concepts of an Edwardian society.

The Tide of Life – Sep McGilby said Emily Kennedy has a glad face. And at 16, Emily had a lot to be glad about. She loved her job as a maid-of-all-work to the McGilby’s, and the only cloud of her horizon was her anxiety about her delicate, younger sister Lucy. But when the invalid Mrs McGilby died, and Sep was killed in an accident soon after, Emily and Lucy were forced to leave South Shields to look for work. The household of Croft Dene house, where Lawrence Birch ruled as master, was a strange one, and as Emily became more deeply involved with the family’s affairs, she grew rapidly from girl to woman, needing all her strength of will and character to get her through. And whatever happened, she clung grimly to a scrap of philosophy that had become her motto: ‘Never say die!’

You’ll find a complete bibliography of Cookson’s books at Fantastic Fiction.

Many of Cookson’s novels have been made into films, the first being The Fifteen Streets staring Sean Bean and Owen Teale, which was nominated for an Emmy in 1990. Having seen a few of these productions, I can tell you that something is definitely lost in the translation and that Cookson was simply meant to be read. And felt.

Cookson left the North East for Hastings in 1929 where she worked in a laundry. She spent forty six years in Hastings, where she met and married schoolmaster Thomas Cookson. You can read an interesting story about her home in Hastings here.

To read more about the author and her life, we suggest

Sherlock Holmes Returns – Thrice

(1) Robert Downey Jr. will once again play the British detective in Sherlock Holmes 2, (2) a new, authorized Sherlock Holmes mystery novel will hit the stands in September of this year (3) Benedict Cumberbatch returns as Masterpiece Mystery’s 21st century incarnation of the detective.

Sherlock Holmes II (the film) is set in the year 1891, a year after the events in the first film, and will have Holmes chasing Moriarity and Dr. Watson pursuing his love life whilst assisting the detective. Downey says: “Unlike last time, where Holmes kept getting Watson into trouble, this time Watson is getting Holmes out of trouble, and they’re both in deeper trouble than I think the audience could have imagined we could go…. All manner of nastiness has just occurred.”

This time out, the duo are joined by the feisty Sim, played by actress Noomi Rapace. Also making an appearance is Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes, played by actor Stephen Fry, a character who producer Susan Downey (Robert’s wife) describes as “stranger and perhaps even more brilliant” than the English detective. Fry recently said, “I play Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes’ brother – the smarter brother, I hasten to add. He’s so lazy that he never gets the reputation that Sherlock does. Historically it’s a very interesting character, and as a lover of Sherlock Holmes since I was a boy I’ve always enjoyed that character myself. I hope that people enjoy it. It’s certainly been fun making the picture.” And how does Fry feel about a Yank playing the iconically British Holmes? “To some extent, but he’s such a charismatic and likeable screen presence, Robert, that you very soon forget it. More than most, he owns every second of screen time. He’s just wonderfully likeable. He’s the real thing.”

The film opens in October in the UK and in December in the US.

Meanwhile, author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz has been tapped by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate to write a brand new Sherlock Holmes mystery novel. Horowitz said he’s writing “a first-rate mystery for a modern audience while remaining absolutely true to the spirit of the original.” Orion publisher Jon Wood promised the author’s “passion for Holmes and his consummate narrative trickery will ensure that this new story will not only blow away Conan Doyle aficionados but also bring the sleuth to a whole new audience.”

This is the first time that the Estate has tapped anyone to continue the Holmes tradition and it’s no wonder they chose Horowitz, who has proven his story telling abilities by creating Foyle’s War and contributing to several other crime drama series, including Midsomer Murders and adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels.

And finally, we can all look forward to Benedict Cumberbatch’s return as Holmes in three new Masterpiece Mystery episodes this Autumn. The game is certainly afoot.

On The Shelf – Discovering New Authors – Part Four

Dornford Yates, real name Cecil William Mercer, born in 1885 at Walmer, Kent, is the author of the comic Berry books. The main characters of the Berry Books are the Pleydell family who reside at ‘White Ladies’ in Hampshire, made up of Berry Pleydell, Daphne Pleydell, his wife (and cousin), Boy Pleydell (Daphne’s brother and narrator of the books), Jonathan (Jonah) Mansel (cousin to all the above), Jill Mansel (Jonah’s sister) and with occasional appearances by Boy’s American fiancée (and later wife), Adèle. This is a group of privileged and pretty young things who excell at verbal barbs, comedic situations and much good humoured malice. Berry refers to Boy as “my brother-in-law, carefully kept from me before my marriage and by me ever since.”

The stories are anecdotal, and involve some sort of privileged problem – their Rolls-Royce is stolen, a hat is blown away in the wind, an offensive neighbour is rude about Nobby, their dog. The resolution often involves outrageous coincidence. No one works, although the male members of the family occasionally do “go up to Town” on some vague business related matters which are never fully explained, and pithy conversations abounds.

Created by author George MacDonald Fraser, Sir Harry Paget Flashman (VC, KCB and KCIE) (1822–1915) is the fictional hero of the Flashman series, first begun in 1969. As Wikipedia tells us: “Presented within the frame of the supposedly discovered historical Flashman Papers, the book begins with an explanatory note saying that the Flashman Papers were discovered in 1965 during a sale of household furniture Leicestershire. Flashman is a well known Victorian military hero (in Fraser’s fictional England). The papers were supposedly written between 1900 and 1905. The subsequent publishing of these papers, of which Flashman is the first, contrasts the previously believed exploits of a (fictional) hero with his own more scandalous account, which shows the life of a cowardly bully. Flashman begins with his own account of expulsion from Rugby and ends with his fame as the “Hector of Afghanistan”, detailing his life from 1839 to 1842 and his travels. It also contains a number of notes by the author, in the guise of a fictional editor, giving additional historical information on the events described. The history in these books is quite accurate; most of the people Flashman meets are real people.” Flashman is in turn charming, brave, cowardly, a liar and a legend in his own mind, but you can’t help but be amused by him.

I’ve never cared for Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies Detective Agency books, but I love the 44 Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series. The Corduroy Mansions books are set in a four-storey mansion that’s been divided into flats in London’s Pimlico section. The flats are occupied by an ensemble of cheerfully eccentric characters who are all too human and with whom the reader can readily relate. Smith handles the multi-faceted plots deftly and gives us readers to both love and loathe. Plot devices come in the form of situations with which most can identify. The third floor tenant, William French, a widower and wine merchant, is trying to get rid of his free-loading son Eddie, a young man who simply cannot take a hint. Playing on Eddie’s dread of dogs, William gets one, in the form of Freddie de la Hay, who manages to dislodge Eddie, but who also sets the stage for further problems for William.

Set in Edinburgh, the 44 Scotland Street series focuses on yet another set of residents. As Publisher’s Weekly said, the book, “drolly chronicles the lives of residents in an Edinburgh boarding house— it’s episodic, amusing and peopled with characters both endearing and benignly problematic. Pat, 21, is on her second “gap year” (her first yearlong break from her studies was such a flop she refuses to discuss it), employed at a minor art gallery and newly settled at the eponymous address, where she admires vain flatmate Bruce and befriends neighbor Domenica. A low-level mystery develops about a possibly valuable painting that Pat discovers, proceeds to lose and then finds in the unlikely possession of Ian Rankin, whose bestselling mysteries celebrate the dark side of Edinburgh just as Smith’s explore the (mostly) sunny side. The possibility of romance, the ongoing ups and downs of the large, well-drawn cast of characters, the intricate plot and the way Smith nimbly jumps from situation to situation and POV to POVworks beautifully in book form. No doubt Smith’s fans will clamor for more about 44 Scotland Street, and given the author’s celebrated productivity, he’ll probably give them what they want.”

Really, the only problem with these books is deciding which dog is more delicious, Cyril with the gold tooth (44 Scotland Street) or Freddie de la Hay (Corduroy Mansions). You can visit the author’s website here.

Part Five Coming Soon!

On The Shelf – Discovering New Authors – Part Three

Part Three of our series focuses on Comic Reads and, really, one can’t help but opening with P.G. Wodehouse . . . . can one?

P.(Pelham) G.(Grenville) Wodehouse is best known (and loved) for his comic novels, which include the Jeeves and Wooster series and the Blandings Castle series. If you think of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie when you hear “Jeeves & Wooster,” I’m here to tell you that the unlikely pair began life as characters in Wodehouse’s books, including What Ho, Jeeves, Carry On, Jeeves and Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, to name but a scant few. Wodehouse’s books, characters and plots are just plain silly and, boy, do we love them. Prepare to stretch the limits of belief, to suspend reality and to chuckle aloud. Bertie Wooster invariably gets himself into a bind (money, girls, relatives, etc.) and Jeeves gets him out – whether Bertie ever learns about Jeeves’s involvement or not. One thing Bertie is not clueless about is his dependence upon Jeeves, which this passage from Jeeves and the Hard Boiled Egg clearly illustrates:

Sometimes of a morning, as I’ve sat in bed sucking down the early cup of tea and watched my man Jeeves flitting about the room and putting out the raiment for the day, I’ve wondered what the deuce I should do if the fellow ever took it into his head to leave me. It’s not so bad now I’m in New York, but in London the anxiety was frightful. There used to be all sorts of attempts on the part of low blighters to sneak him away from me. Young Reggie Foljambe to my certain knowledge offered him double what I was giving him, and Alistair Bingham-Reeves, who’s got a valet who had been known to press his trousers sideways, used to look at him, when he came to see me, with a kind of glittering hungry eye which disturbed me deucedly. Bally pirates!

The thing, you see, is that Jeeves is so dashed competent. You can spot it even in the way he shoves studs into a shirt.

I rely on him absolutely in every crisis, and he never lets me down. And, what’s more, he can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon. Take the rather rummy case, for instance, of dear old Bicky and his uncle, the hard-boiled egg.

Read more here and once you’ve finished, you can visit The World of P.G. Wodehouse here and the P.G. Wodehouse Society here. And what a backlist! For Sebastian Faulks’ take on Jeeves’s place in popular fiction, click here.

If Wodehouse is literary slapstick, E.F. Benson’s humour is subtle – his characters don’t realize that they’ve received a proverbial pie in the face until several pages on. Social one-upsmanship is rampant, and Mrs. Emmeline Lucas, known to her friends as Lucia, has artistic pretensions and exchanges Italian phrases with her consort, the perennial bachelor Georgey Pilson, alongside whom she can often be found practising the piano. Lucia’s adversary is Miss Elizabeth Mapp, who once ruled as the town of Tilling’s social queen until Lucia moved in and displaced her. Let the games begin. For a taste of just how far Lucia will go where pretension is concerned, here’s a passage from Queen Lucia, in which Lucia returns to her new home in Tilling: “Something of the consciousness of her sovereignty was in her mind, as she turned the last hot corner of the road and came in sight of the village street that constituted her kingdom. Indeed it belonged to her, as treasure trove belongs to the Crown, for it was she who had been the first to begin the transformation of this remote Elizabethan village into the palace of culture that was now reared on the spot where ten years ago an agricultural population had led bovine and unilluminated lives in their cottages of grey stone or brick and timber. Before that, while her husband was amassing a fortune, comfortable in amount and respectable in origin, at the Bar, she had merely held up a small dim lamp of culture in Onslow Gardens. But both her ambition and his had been to bask and be busy in artistic realms of their own when the materialistic needs were provided for by sound investments, and so when there were the requisite thousands of pounds in secure securities she had easily persuaded him to buy three of these cottages that stood together in a low two-storied block. Then, by judicious removal of partition-walls, she had, with the aid of a sympathetic architect, transmuted them into a most comfortable dwelling, subsequently building on to them a new wing, that ran at right angles at the back, which was, if anything, a shade more inexorably Elizabethan than the stem onto which it was grafted, for here was situated the famous smoking-parlour, with rushes on the floor, and a dresser ranged with pewter tankards, and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it was practically impossible to see out of them. It had a huge open fireplace framed in oak-beams with a seat on each side of the iron-backed hearth within the chimney, and a genuine spit hung over the middle of the fire. Here, though in the rest of the house she had for the sake of convenience allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the fumes of the wood-fire as with streaming eyes she deciphered an Elzevir Horace rather late for inclusion under the rule, but an undoubted bargain.”

For an in-depth article on these characters and the series, read the Philip Hensher article here. You’ll find the E.F. Benson Society’s website here.

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Sue Townsend set Victoria’s sense of humor zinging with her hilarious book The Queen and I. Somehow, the characters of Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Queen Mother rang completely true when I first read it back in 1992. After they became non-royal in the fictional republic, they seemed quite natural. I completely bought the idea that Liz would turn into an excellent cook with the cheapest cuts of meat and that the Duke of E. would be very upset that Liz wanted to be known as Mrs. Windsor rather than Mrs. Mountbatten from now on.

Sue Townsend has written a sequel called Queen Camilla, published in 2006, which I have not found, But it’s now high on my list. She is well-known for her wonderful series of books about Adrian Mole.

Another book featuring royalty is Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, a novella by the writer of the Tony-winning play The History Boys and The Madness of King George, this story has the Queen discovering the joys of reading through a palace kitchen worker named Norman. Soon, Her Majesty’s preoccupation with literature leads to fears of senility amongst royal insiders. If they thought the Queen’s reading a book was bad, just wait till they learn she means to write one . . . . .

Part Four Coming Soon!