On being a woman

I am nowhere near finished my latest read, Wilkie Collins' No Name, of which I am having the enormous pleasure of reading alongside the lovely Darlene, and so I can offer no book review as such today. Time to read seems to be a rarity these days; I seem to be out most evenings doing various things, and if I am at home, by the time I get in, make dinner, do the washing up, put on a load of washing, faff around doing boring responsible adult things like paying bills or going to Tesco, it's time to go to bed. Now the nights are drawing in the days just seem so much shorter and I can't seem to fit in all the things I mean to do with my days. Hence why it is taking me so long to read books.

However, I do read on the train to and from work, and one of my favourite new additions to my commute is Stylist magazine, which is distributed free in London midweek and is a very good quality read aimed at the intelligent, professional woman with a bit of disposable income. The clothes pages advertise lovely clothes that are a bit beyond my means but other than that I find it very relevant and thought provoking. Tonight in particular my attention was arrested by a very interesting article on women's attitudes towards careers and home. I'm going to go out on a limb tonight and use this article as a prompt to attempt to discuss my attitude towards feminism and how I feel about being a woman today. It might be a bit controversial; it might be a bit simplistic; it might annoy some of you; it might even anger some of you. I will warn you; I am no feminist. I am actually rather pro men; all they get is abuse these days and I think they are wonderful and should be celebrated more. Hopefully we can get quite a good discussion going. What I fear is that I will get no response at all and become a blogging pariah! So if you do have an opinion on this topic, do chime in. I'd love to hear what other women, and men, think of this modern issue of gender identity. 
 
So, according to this aformentioned article, apparently 19% of all women; not specifically mothers, but women in general, would rather not work at all, and only 12% of mothers would willingly work full time. According to a report entitled What Women Want by sociologist Cristina Odone, many modern women would happily opt out of careers altogether. They have been told that self realisation, fulfilment and success can only be achieved through work, and have succumbed to the guilt inducing belief that wanting anything else is a betrayal of the struggle for equality that their mothers, grandmothers and greatgrandmothers had to suffer through.

The article also discussed the 'Domestic Goddess' ideal and the fantasy version of the 1950s housewife made so popular by the likes of Cath Kidston. Many young women long for lives where they can potter about at home, making cakes and sewing quilts and generally creating a warm, beautiful and harmonious environment in which to live. Cath Kidston has made a fortune out of this, and sewing, knitting and baking classes are growing rapidly in popularity, especially amongst young women in their twenties. Are woman today regressing to a time before feminism, when success was about how many children you had and how good your canapes were? And if they are, where did this ideal of the wonderful life of the perfect fifties housewife come from? Has no one read the harrowing stories of thwarted dreams, crushing boredom and depression inducing frustration in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, I wonder? They were trapped in their houses, because they had no opportunity to get outside of them. In a time when most women were married straight out of school, education was minimal and jobs were limited to a very narrow amount of professions. They had no choice but to be wives and mothers. Our idyll of the fifties housewife appears to forget this fact; we are embracing a fantasy that never was, and at the same time, in all of our selfish 'I want it all' angst, forgetting just how lucky we are.

I am no feminist and neither am I a career woman; I am not ashamed to admit that I look forward to a day when I can be at home, bringing up my children and making my house pretty and having the time to bake cakes and do crafty things and plant flowers and so on. However, I also am fully aware that I will probably find this unbearably dull at times, and no matter how pretty my bedspreads are, or how springy my sponge cakes, I will still desire achievements of my own. I will still want to read, and to write, and to study, and to create. And this is the joy of womanhood today; we have the choice to do this. I can spend my twenties working, enjoying the challenges, opportunities, variety and personal growth that come with making my way up the career ladder and learning my craft in an environment that is dynamic and interesting and gives me a sense of achievement at the end of the day. When my time comes to be a mother, I can then choose to leave this life behind, stay at home, nest, indulge my feminine desire to make a beautiful home and create a nurturing and warm environment for my children and husband. And then, when that time is over, I can go back to work again, if I so desire, or I could go back into study, and so on and so forth. The world is my oyster. What a victory my predecessors have won for us! We, as women (albeit middle class ones), actually have more choice than men; consider the reaction a man would receive if he decided to chuck in his job, don a pinny and start making cushions from scratch. It's not really a socially acceptable option for a man. Their role is still very much that of provider; alpha male, working hard for the wife and kids at home. Life is no different for them now than it was for Lester in the wonderful The Home Maker; he had to pretend to be disabled to make his choice of being a house husband acceptable. You don't find many articles detailing how men are struggling to 'have it all'; they accepted a long time ago that they can't, and they just get on with it. However, I can't open a magazine or paper nowadays without reading one moan after another by women complaining that juggling life is so hard and they never get enough me time and they want to stay at home with their children but they also want to have a career and so on. What they seem to forget is that they have the luxury of choice to be all of these women in the first place. In fighting for equality and freedom, perhaps we've given ourselves too many choices; are our opportunities now so many and varied that we are doomed to never be content with what we have, always striving for more, and destroying ourselves in the process?

I believe in the feminism with a small 'f' that Persephone promotes. The feminism that says I can get a degree, have a job, then chuck it in to look after my children and not feel an ounce of guilt about it. The feminism that says looking after children can be mind numbingly dull, and that it's perfectly within the bounds of normality to find it so. The feminism that says I can come home after a demanding day at the office and enjoy making a quilt or baking a cake. The feminism that says I am a woman of many facets, and I won't be bullied into fitting an ideal. The feminism that says I have the right to do what I want with my life, regardless of what others may expect of me. This choice, this freedom to be the woman I want to be, no matter where that takes me, is the freedom I am thankful my predecessors fought for. I am not thankful for the man hating attitude and judgementalness towards women who choose to stay at home that militant feminism seems to have engendered.

I believe, perhaps, controversially, that women are equal to men; equal, but different. We want different things, we have different desires. Perhaps the reason why there aren't as many female CEOs as there are male is because women just don't want to spend their entire waking lives welded to a Blackberry. Maybe women are innately more drawn to being at home, to being nurturers, and men to the workplace and to provide. Is it nature or nurture? I just don't know. All I know is that the only people I have ever truly felt judged and criticised and discriminated against are other women; I think we are our own worst enemies. Being a woman is, for me, not about how I measure up to men, or about how I measure up to other women. It's about being free to be true to who I am. Whether that means I spend my life in a house, or in a boardroom, it doesn't matter; what matters is, I have the choice to decide. That's certainly something many of our favourite Persephone heroines never had.

ps. I am trying out using a slightly larger font - I am aware that the one I usually use is quite small and may be difficult to read. Please do let me know if you prefer it, and if so, I'll stick to this size in future.

Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple

One of the reasons why blogging is so amazing is that it connects you with people who share your interests, and who you most probably would never have otherwise met. The internet is considered by some to be a force of evil, encouraging us to stop communicating through normal channels and waste endless amounts of time looking up trivia on Wikipedia, but in my opinion, it is a wonderful resource to enable people from all over the world to enter into discussions that no one in their real life acquaintance can have with them. My friends are wonderfully indulgent of my book loving habits and they do listen to my witterings about Persephone and Virago and Dorothy Whipple and Wilkie Collins etc but none of them particularly wants to sit down and chat books for hours on end; therefore, my blog and the people I have met through it give me a much treasured outlet for all things book related. I can get ideas, inspiration, recommendations and real joy from reading other people's blogs, and from the comments and emails people are so kind to write to me too, so, to everyone who reads, comments, emails or writes a blog that I enjoy, thank you for providing me with such a fun way to spend my idle hours! It is much appreciated, and nothing beats the little buzz of delight I get when I see that someone has left a comment on my posts. It's lovely to know that people are interested in what I have to say!

Well now, what does all this preamble have to do with Greenbanks and Dorothy Whipple, I hear you cry? Well, I got a lovely email from a lady called Sandra a while ago, and she is a fellow Dorothy Whipple fan who had read my post on Young Anne and was interested in borrowing it. In return she said she would lend me a copy of Greenbanks, as it is ridiculously expensive to buy and I hadn't read it yet. So we happily swapped books and I have now had the pleasure of reading this wonderful novel, which I read whilst away in lovely Arundel for the weekend.

Dorothy Whipple is at the centre of what is, for me, one of life's greatest mysteries. How someone who wrote so brilliantly, with such perception, with such insight, with such feeling, with such sympathy, and with such truth, has fallen so completely by the wayside, I simply cannot fathom. She was immensely popular in her day; her books were Book Society Choices (incidentally, if there were so many produced, why are they now so hard to get hold of?!), and two were made into films. She would have been, I imagine, the 'housewife's choice', books women juggling the tasks of being the perfect wife, mother and housekeeper would have enjoyed borrowing from Boots' circulating library and reading during stolen moments when the children were at school and the dusting had been done, revelling in the stories of ordinary lives, nodding with enthusiasm and understanding at the descriptions of the fear, desperation, contradiction, disappointment, love, hope, dreams, and joys that make up suburban life. She is realistic about the often thankless task of having children; of the disappointment many of us face when our real lives don't live up to the dreams we had; of the pain of marriages that are held together by habit rather than love, peppered with bitterness and resentment. She is also marvellous at showing the rays of light, the moments of ecstasy, the passions and dreams and delights that life holds, making the world such a wonderful place to be. And these aren't sensational; they are not about having lots of money or being carried off to a desert island by a handsome knight in shining armour. They are as simple as watching children playing in a garden, of curling up by the fire with a good book and a cup of tea, of falling in love unexpectedly, of crunching amongst autumn leaves, of letting a snowflake melt on your tongue. Dorothy Whipple doesn't do melodrama, or fantasy; she deals in reality, in mundanity, and in the enduringly beautiful quality of the indomitable human spirit. No matter what life throws at her characters, they manage to still find the strength to face the day ahead. What could be a greater inspiration than that?

Greenbanks is about the extended Ashton clan; Louisa, the head of the family, much loved, but also much taken for granted, is the focus of events. She has five children and a plethora of grandchildren, as well as an embarrassingly adulterous husband who she can't help but love anyway. Her life is centred around the warm, cosy family home, Greenbanks, and Louisa's loving heart seeks to do good and care for the demands of her now grown children and her grandchildren, especially her granddaughter Rachel. Each of her children has very different personalities, and she struggles to understand them; she can only really fully relate to her son Charles, the one she loves best, but who is the least promising. As life goes on and her children choose partners and have their own children and make mistakes and leave her behind, Louisa has to learn how to cope with loss, and grief, and the emotional demands of children she will always love, but has to let go and allow to live their own lives. She clings on to little Rachel as a way to keep having someone to care for and to anchor her, and in this new generation Louisa finds the hope and purpose she feels is starting to slip from her grasp.

Not a huge amount happens; this is a quiet family saga, full of the private emotions, events and battles that go on in all of our lives. But even so, this is a profoundly beautiful novel that celebrates the generosity of parental love, that explores the pain and grief of thwarted dreams and disappointments, and that demonstrates the power of the human spirit to overcome, to love, to hope, even when there seems to be no reason to. I adored it, and I hope that it will be republished soon, as I think this may be my favourite Whipple yet. I wish I had my own copy, because this may have just entered the top ten list...

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

I am loving reading Sensation novels at the moment. I just can't get enough! I love the mystery, the suspense, and the fact that I feel really clever every time I finish them because I haven't failed to guess the guilty party yet!

I'll start by saying that I didn't find The Moonstone as good as The Woman in White. It lacked the compelling, all consuming central mystery of the latter; it also wasn't particularly menacing in the way that I found TWIW to be.It was a tad unconvincing too, and rather easy to guess who the guilty party was, but even with all these things considered, it was still a gripping and very entertaining read.

As with all novels of this type it's hard to give a proper synopsis without ruining the plot for those who haven't read it, but I shall try my best. The book opens with a transcript of a 'family paper' detailing the stealing of a famous Indian diamond, known as the Moonstone, from a ransacked temple during a battle between the English and the Indians in the late 18th century. Fast forward to the 'present' day (the mid 1800s) and we have Gabriel Betteredge, the faithful retainer of the good Lady Verinder and her beautiful teenage daughter Rachel, narrating the story of how the said Moonstone comes into the Verinder household.

It is important to know that the Moonstone was stolen from a Hindu temple; it is sacred and was always guarded by three Hindus who would fight to the death to protect it. They are supposed to follow it everywhere, and this duty is passed down the generations. Wherever the Moonstone goes, the guards follow. Now, Lady Verinder's brother was part of the group of officers ransacking the temple, and he brought the Moonstone back with him after stealing it. There is a vague fear of curses etc associated with the diamond and so it is kept locked away during Lady Verinder's brother's lifetime. When he dies it emerges he has left it to his niece Rachel to be given on her 18th birthday; is this as a revenge to his sister who refused to acknowledge him because of his dastardly ways or an atonement (the diamond is worth £20,000, a collossal amount at the time)? No one is sure. But, Franklin Blake, Rachel's cousin and Lady Verinder's nephew, is trusted by the family solicitor to deliver the Moonstone to Rachel on her 18th birthday, as instructed, and this is where the problems begin.

Rachel is duly given the Moonstone, but not without plenty of misgivings on Lady Verinder, Franklin Blake and Gabriel Betteredge's parts; three Indian conjurors have been hanging about the house since Franklin arrived, and knowing Lady Verinder's brother's hatred of her, everyone is concerned that the Moonstone is indeed cursed, and could bring harm to the lovely Rachel. On the morning after her birthday, Rachel wakes to find the diamond gone, but after preliminary investigations it emerges that the suspicious looking Indians have an alibi, and there is no sign of a break in; the theft had to be an inside job. Inside the house at the time were Rachel, Lady Verinder, Franklin, another cousin, Godfrey Ablewhite, an upstanding do gooder who longs for Rachel's hand in marriage (as does Franklin), plus a large crowd of servants, some of whom have plenty of secrets of their own. Who could have done it? And why? And if it has been stolen by a member of the household, where has it gone? A famous detective from London, Sergeant Cuff, is called up to give his assistance, but there is great resistance from Rachel, who doesn't seem to want the identity of the thief to be discovered, and is acting very strangely. As the mystery grows deeper, even the Sergeant is left baffled, and with various changes of narrator down the line, we are left hanging almost to the very end, a year later in the story, until all of the clues are unravelled to find out who stole the Moonstone, and why.

It's a gripping read, with plenty of twists and turns, and some very interesting characters. I liked the way the narrator kept changing; it was interesting to see how different a take the various story tellers had on the events and the people involved. The most exciting thing for me though was that Wilkie Collins took part of his inspiration from the murder described in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; Sergeant Cuff is based on Mr Whicher, and the idea of the perpetrator of the crime being within the household was taken from the same situation in the Road Hill House murder. This aspect is fascinating; the idea that you can have people you trust living under your roof without really knowing them at all is something that must have sent a chill down contemporary readers' spines, especially with the saga of the Road Hill House murder being all over the papers at the time, and with most households employing at least one servant, whose private life was usually an enigma to its employers.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed The Moonstone, but I did find in places it betrayed its serial origins; inconsistencies abound where Collins clearly changed his mind about people half way through, plot lines are tidied up too hastily and in places too much is given away too early. It certainly wasn't as slick as The Woman in White. Even so, this is still a brilliant, suspenseful and marvellously wintry read; perfect to curl up in front of the fire with on a dark and dreary November afternoon. It's left me with a longing for even MORE sensation novels, too; my next is going to be No Name.

p.s. The image I've used is by an artist called Alfred Stevens, who painted the picture OUP have used for their Oxford World's Classics edition. Personally I think the painting of his I have used is far more appropriate!

My Couldn't Live Without List

Susan Hill did a top forty of her favourite, can’t live without books at the end of Howard's End is on the Landing.

Some of them I had never heard of, some of them I had heard of but had never read, and some of them I had read but didn’t think much of. Susan Hill’s list made me realise just how very different people’s reading preferences and experiences can be, and made me wonder at the mystery of how a book can speak so powerfully to one person, and yet leave another completely cold. There is magic inside the pages of some books for me. Magic; gold dust, if you will, that settles upon me as soon as I start to read, enchanting me, entrancing me, pulling me into another world so completely that I become wholly absorbed in the story, immersed in the world the words have created, at one with the characters who have come alive on the pages, and totally oblivious to the real world around me. It is like I have fallen into the pages, and actually become a character myself, watching the events as they unfold, powerless to intervene, a silent, enthralled onlooker.

However, these books that have managed to cast a spell over me may most likely mean nothing to others. They may have never read them; or, worse, they may have read them, and hated every word. How can words that I treasure so much, stories that have become part of the fabric of my being, be boring or uninteresting or just not all that special to somebody else? I have absolutely no idea, but this is, for so many, the delight and the adventure of reading; everyone’s experience is such a personal endeavour, and everyone’s soul is made up of the memories, inspiration, encouragement and emotion of different stories that have combined to mould us into the people we are. The stories we love, and hate, are a window, I think, into the truest nature of our hearts. And that is why I am so fascinated by the books people read.

I have been thinking about my favourite books, the ones I truly couldn’t live without. I’ve decided to limit them to ten, or things could get ridiculous. Making the list as concise as possible has forced me to distil my reading experience down to the bare essentials, those few books that have formed me, that never cease to delight and move me, and that have inspired me to become the woman I am today. The books I could quite happily read exclusively for the rest of my life; the books I would save if all my other books had to be sold, or given away, or disposed of, for some awful reason; the books that would sustain me through all of life’s joys and trials. Quite an undertaking. But I have done it. And here they are, in no particular order. I wonder what they say about me:

1. The Bible (NLT translation is my preferred version - the link is to my exact copy!)
   
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
3. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. Persuasion by Jane Austen
6. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
7. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
8. The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield
9. Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge
10. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Of course this list can only contain the books I have read so far in my twenty three years, and is subject to change as I read more, and my life experiences widen, but as of today, if someone packed me off to foreign climes with no more than one suitcase to contain my belongings, and no opportunity to ever lay my hands on a book again, these would be the ten I’d be taking with me; my greatest treasures, all of them.

I wonder; what would yours be?

Howard's End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

Now I know everyone in the blogosphere has been talking about this ad yawneam so I'll start by saying I hope I have written a take on Howard's End is on the Landing that is different enough to other reviews to hold your interest. If I haven't, I apologise in advance.

What attracted me to this book? Why was I so keen to get my hands on it that I went as far as preordering it, paying full price for a new hardback – something I never do? I think it was partly because the subtitle was so intriguing – ‘a year of reading from home’. I have longed to do this for a while; to curb my habit of accumulating more and more and more books, of guiltily watching the piles of books I know I won’t have time to read this year, let alone this month, grow and grow and grow into unwieldy, dangerous, tottering piles that are slowly covering the floor of my bedroom. I was excited to read of how this process might be worked through…how the cravings for book buying, for browsing in book shops, for just seeing if they have that one book I’ve been looking for, no others, just that one, I’ll just pop in, honestly…might be tackled and overcome. I was hoping to find an inspirational and encouraging set of musings on the joys of being able to read, guilt free, not constantly watching the growing TBR pile and feeling paralysed with shame at the lack of willpower possessed to reduce it; of the pleasure of meandering one’s way through the accumulated volumes amassed throughout a lifetime, of the pressures one feels to read new books, and what it is like to immerse yourself in a library that is completely disconnected from the current literary scene.

In short, I wanted this book to be the proverbial kick up the backside I need to freeze my library for a year and actually read what I own. I have enough unread books to last me at least a year; probably even two or three. I work full time, have lots of commitments outside of work, and a diary that manages to fill up every day of a week before Monday has even started. In short, I have a busy life. I rarely have an hour ‘spare’ to sit and read these days, which means I simply can’t get through all the books I buy in any given month, let alone the ones I bought the previous month. Unless I stop accumulating, I will just never get around to reading them all. And that would be a great shame. So, a book that truly is about 'a year of reading from home' is what I need. Sadly, Howard's End is on the Landing is not that book. I wouldn't say the subtitle was deliberately misleading, as I obviously chose to read into it what I wanted it to be, but at the same time, I did feel that this was much more 'Susan Hill Gives Her Opinions on Book Related Topics' rather than an exploration of what it means to spend a year reading from home; the timescale is never mentioned, and neither is the process of avoiding books from outside the home.

Where to begin. This book is kind of like those essays you used to have to write at school or university, with impossible questions that don't make a lot of sense, so instead of actually answering the question, you just write down everything you know about, say, Jane Austen, and hope for the best. I feel that rather than discussing a year of reading from home, as the title of the book would surely command, Susan Hill has just written down everything she thinks about books and book publishing and famous people who wrote books that she may have met, or bumped into, or had things dropped on by, and bound it in hardcover and a pretty jacket with a catchy title and demanded £12.99 of people's hard earned money for it. I laughed when she said she was avoiding the internet for a year to get away from 'book-related gossip and chatter', for essentially, in Howard's End is on the Landing, she has written an entire book of book related gossip and chatter. Glamourising this book by calling it a 'memoir' is simply unfair on potential readers, as this is really just a physical version of Susan Hill's blog, and  is therefore one of the here today, gone tomorrow 'non books' she so derides.

Unlike other bloggers, I don't mind that Susan Hill has strong opinions; I actually quite liked her musings and admire her for her ability to make public sweeping, generalised, and totally biased statements without caring a jot for what other people will think. Canadian and Australian literature are dismissed as unreadable, Jane Austen she doesn't 'get', forgotten Renaissance drama must be rubbish in order to have become forgotten, and many other atrocious, non politically correct, opinionated comments that are just the sort I love reading. We're all entitled to our opinions, after all. If Susan Hill wants to ignore the richness of an entire nation's writing, that's her prerogative. If she can't see the genius in Jane Austen, that's alright with me. It won't lessen my enjoyment of either. And I think that was really what I had the most problem with about this book; at the end of the day; I don't care what Susan Hill thinks. Her 'top 40' books at the end of this scattered volume of bookish thoughts is just a list of what one woman deems worthy of reading. Susan Hill has suggested elsewhere that authority comes from being published - that bloggers don't have the authority to write negative reviews because no one has given them the right to do so. Their opinions are not worthy of note. As much as I disagree with this, the point of who gives people the authority to have an opinion is worth drawing out.

In books such as this, which are a collection of someone's opinions, those opinions have no authority unless someone chooses to give them authority. I give my mum's opinions authority because she's my mum and she knows me and I know her and I know she's always, annoyingly, right. I don't know Susan Hill as a person, she doesn't know me, I don't particularly rate her as a novelist, and just because she says W G Sebald is amazing, it doesn't necessarily make him so. Therefore, a book composed of what Susan Hill has told me I should and shouldn't read is actually rather useless to me, as I don't give her opinion any authority when it comes to influencing my reading choices. I'm not going to beat myself up and call myself ignorant for not having read most of Susan Hill's top 40; frankly, anyone who chooses Wuthering Heights over Jane Eyre or who doesn't 'get' Persuasion won't share the same tastes as me and their reading preferences are therefore of no interest or relevance to me whatsoever.

Books such as this, that attempt to tell people what they should read, and give lists of best most amazing life changing top 10 books ever, and what you need to read in order to be an interesting and intelligent human being, are always a pointless exercise, as what gives the author the right to impose these 'standards' of reading on anyone? What makes one person's 'top 10' more authoratitive than another's? I don't buy Susan Hill's belief that someone choosing to publish your list gives it authority - authority is subjective and is earned by respect, and as I don't have the knowledge of Susan Hill to give her the respect I would need to actually be bothered by the fact she says I should read books I haven't, Howard's End is on the Landing was a bit of a waste of my time.

I'm not saying it wasn't enjoyable or that it was badly written; for what it was, a subjective collection of thoughts from a woman who has had an interesting, and literary life, it was fine. I like to be exposed to other people's opinions, and to be introduced to new authors. Happily I don't normally have to pay for the privilege, because there are blogs that serve this purpose that I can read freely every day. The thing is, Howard's End is on the Landing isn't profound, it isn't lyrical, it isn't a wonderful, timeless and evocative exploration of what literature means to us. I wasn't nodding in agreement or thinking 'yes! that's so what I do!' in lots of places. It was a very personal, and exclusive, sort of book, not really inviting reader involvement. This is no Ex Libris. It isn't really a memoir, either, and even if it was, Susan Hill hasn't done anything particularly of note to make me want to read a memoir of hers anyway. So I was disappointed, overall, and am inclined to say that Susan Hill only got this published because she is Susan Hill. Reading this has been akin to having a conversation about books with a total stranger; it's been interesting, at times infuriating, at times illuminating, but mostly, forgettable, and will have no influence on my reading life. But, if you love Susan Hill, and rate her opinions, it just might be your cup of tea and open up new reading worlds for you. I hope, for some, that it does, but it certainly didn't for me.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

I have been reading a good amount of sensation novels lately; it is these ever darkening October nights that are attracting me to good old fashioned tales of melodrama and suspense, I think. I am thoroughly enjoying exploring this genre; from its very beginnings in the Victorian times to the present day, there are no end of wonderful books out there to keep you up into the wee small hours, hooked, desperate to unravel the mystery that is unfolding, and endlessly promising yourself  'just one more chapter'...or perhaps five...

So what better way to complement my recent love of all things sensation than by reading a real life version? The Suspicions of Mr Whicher has been on my wish list for a while; a lot of people have been talking about it, reading it on the train, and generally shoving it in my face, and it has intrigued me ever since it came out. However, I don't like to read what everyone else is reading, so I like to leave a decent interval between a book's initial hype before I deign to read it myself. I'm not called Book Snob for nothing! So, this weekend, while in Highgate with Bloomsbury Bell (more on this later in the week), when I spotted this book for just £1 in an amazing tat filled charity shop opposite Archway tube station, I couldn't resist picking it up and taking it home with me. I started it immediately and was absolutely riveted from page one; the murder this book depicts had Victorian England mesmerised in the 1860s, and happened just when sensation fiction was really taking off. Dickens and Wilkie Collins were two famous faces obsessed with it; plots in their novels can be traced back to this case.

The book is about the murder of three year old Francis Saville Kent, taken from his cot in the middle of the night and found the following morning, his little body shoved down the servant's privy, his throat savagely slit from ear to ear. It was a cruel and seemingly motiveless crime, and yet it soon emerges that it must have been committed by someone in the house. The inhabitants of the large Georgian villa, Road Hill House, deep in the Somerset countryside, in which the crime was committed, contained his parents, his three half sisters and half brother, the children of his father's previous marriage, his two sisters, his nursemaid, in whose room he slept, and two servant girls. Who, out of this group, could have wanted to kill Saville? And how could they have removed him from his cot without waking his nurse, or his baby sister, who was also in the room? 

After the local police force have failed to come up with any leads, they send for the celebrated London Detective, Inspector Whicher, one of the eight founding detectives of Scotland Yard, and who hasn't failed to solve a case yet. He soon thinks he's solved the case, but because of who he suspects the criminal to be, his findings are ridiculed, his reputation is ruined, and it is beginning to look like this is a mystery that will never be solved...

Obviously I can't go into too much detail because it will give it all away, but this really was such a fascinating and engrossing read, as much for the social history the book contains as the central mystery itself. This isn't really a 'whodunnit', because it's based on real life and Summerscale can't hide the obvious clues as to the identity of the criminal; I had figured it out after the first few pages. However, it is a wonderful exploration of the rise of the detective in the 19th century; of the vogue for sensation and mystery novels, of the sanctity of the Victorian home, of the reverence of femininity, of the strange irony of the Victorian cult of privacy and domesticity, undermined by the presence of a silent army of ever watchful servants living within most homes; of the fear of surveillance, of the secrets hidden within ordinary looking homes, and of the obsession with madness that meant those who couldn't live within the 'normal' bounds of society were locked up, shunned by a world that couldn't handle any deviance from their perceived notion of normality. These undercurrents emerging in Victorian society made murders like the one at Road Hill House both shocking and mesmerising to the public. To think that the idealised, private, secure sphere of the home, an Englishman's Castle, could be penetrated by evil; to think that, of all people, a woman, that gentle, docile, saintly, domesticated figure of Victorian literature, could be the perpetrator...well, it shook the foundations of society. It also provided a terrific basis for a sensation novel plot; the country house mystery started at Road Hill House.

When I looked this up on Amazon, I was surprised to see so many negative reviews. It seems that many people were misled into thinking The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was an Agatha Christie style thriller; it isn't. If that is what you want, don't read this. It's far more a social history of the detective story, of Victorian values, and of the popularity of sensation novels than it is a whodunnit, and personally, the blend of mystery story and history really worked for me. It does get bogged down with a fair bit of unnecessary detail in places, but all in all, this is a must read for anyone interested in the Victorian period and the origins of the detective story. I have found it a fascinating piece of background reading to complement my season of sensational reading. Highly recommended!

Susan Hill: An Exploration

So even though I jumped on the bandwagon and preordered (paying *gasp* full price) Howard's End is on the Landing by Susan Hill several weeks ago, after hearing how good it was, I must confess that my previous experience of Susan Hill amounted to reading The Woman in Black and watching the stage version in the West End, nearly wetting myself in the process. (Yes, it is that scary, and yes, you should definitely go.)

So, before reading and passing judgement on Howard's End is on the Landing, as it is apparently more of a memoir than the misleading subtitle 'A Year of Reading From Home' may suggest, I thought I should find out a bit more about Susan Hill. That included a cursory google search, as well as pulling the two books I own of hers off my shelves and actually reading them. So over the past few days I have been throughly Susan Hill-ed, reading In the Springtime of the Year and Mrs De Winter in quick succession. These are two incredibly different novels and have nothing to connect them bar the fact that Susan Hill wrote them. This has made for very interesting reading.

First up was In the Springtime of the Year, which I bought during my trip to Bronte land. During my research on Susan Hill I discovered that many people say this is her best novel, so I was quite pleased that I had found this one, and was looking forward to being surprised by its brilliance. In short, I wasn't.

This novel is about a young woman named Ruth, who is 20, has been married for a couple of years, and lives quite contentedly in a cottage in the countryside with her much older husband Ben and their donkey, chickens, and so on and so forth. The story is set in an indeterminate period; I suspect anywhere between the 20s and 50s, as no cars, television, etc were mentioned as far as I can remember. It opens with a brief section describing Ruth in the throes of grief after the sudden, as yet unexplained, death of her husband Ben, and her chosen isolation from the well meaning neighbours and friends who have tried to offer help in the aftermath of her loss. It then goes into a second section, which describes the day it happened, and Ruth's experiences of grief, and then the third part explores the process of Ruth learning to 'move on'. 

Now I don't want to be too harsh about this, as Susan Hill says in the afterword that it is based on her own grief after losing a man she loved, presumably before she married her now husband. Therefore it must be a very personal book to her, tied up with the memories of that time and a cathartic way of expressing her grief. However, you would never know Susan Hill has experienced what Ruth experienced by reading this book. It wasn't particularly emotional, or heartrending; in fact, I found it quite dull and flat. Ruth never came alive to me; I found her unsympathetic, undeveloped and I didn't really care about her at all. Her character was never really explained, neither was her history, and the descriptions of Ben through her eyes, clearly designed to make the reader feel a depth of emotion towards him, were of a silent, untalkative man who never seemed to display much affection towards her. I had no idea why she had loved him at all, actually. Or why he had loved her, for that matter. There was also the rather strange character of Jo, Ben's much younger brother, who came to help Ruth after Ben's death; I found it very odd that this 14 year old child would be running a 20 year old girl bride's home for her, and I just didn't get the relationship or bond between them at all; it just wasn't authentic.

All in all, I thought this was an unconvincing, badly characterised and not particularly well written novel. The subject matter should have been compelling, involving, emotional; and it was none of these at all. As this was based on Susan Hill's real life experiences, I would have expected an injection of real, raw emotion in the story of Ruth's grief, but it just wasn't there. I didn't enjoy it at all, and I had to force myself to finish.

So, my first dabble in Susan Hill since The Woman in Black was largely unsuccessful, but undeterred, I progressed on to Mrs De Winter, in which Susan Hill takes up the story of what happened to the De Winters and the inhabitants of their beloved Manderley from where Daphne Du Maurier left them on the final page of her legendary Rebecca. I love Rebecca, and I was dubious about this premise; I don't normally like sequels of books that aren't written by the original author. All of these 'Pemberley' and 'Darcy and Elizabeth' esque novels that attempt to extend what was already a perfectly fine and complete story don't get very far with me. For me, they can never truly capture the style of the original, and the story they tell doesn't carry much weight, as we can have no idea that the future they imagine for the characters was what their creator had in mind for them. But, nevertheless, I left my prejudices at the door and got stuck in to Mrs De Winter as if it were any other novel. And it was good. Full of suspense, full of menace, a real page turner. I can't really describe the plot because it will give things away, but I will give a brief idea of how it starts; it opens with a funeral, for which Maxim and the still nameless Mrs De Winter return to England after a decade in exile. Mrs De Winter longs to stay, and is tired of traipsing around Europe with no home of her own; Maxim is less sure. They are reassured by their old friends that they have nothing to fear in returning to England now; it is all water under the bridge, Maxim was cleared, and what use would anyone have in dredging up those old stories again? The past is over, done with, finished. What need they be afraid of? Mrs De Winter manages to persuade herself of this, but when it comes to Rebecca, as it soon becomes very clear, the past can never stay buried for long...

I wouldn't say this book was brilliantly written; Susan Hill has a penchant for over description, which does annoy me a fair bit, and there was many an unlikely coincidence, but it was a good read that I couldn't put down, and for that, I give her praise. It wasn't a faithful sequel of Rebecca; I didn't feel the characters had the same three dimensionality that Du Maurier gave them, and Mrs De Winter came across as incredibly sappy, but as a sensation novel using the plot of Rebecca to tell its tale it worked well, though it wouldn't stand alone at all. 

I have come to the conclusion, judging from the three books of hers I have now read, that she is far better at writing suspenseful, sensation based novels than more mainstream ones; of course, my only example of a mainstream one is In the Springtime of the Year, so I may be wrong, but personally, I have not been induced by my experience of that to try another, so I suppose I shall just never know.

I am currently reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, as Mrs De Winter has made me want to launch straight back into my Autumn Sensation reading, and what better than to read a real life version? But after that, I will be sure to read Howard's End is on the Landing, as now I feel a little more better prepared to appreciate a book of Susan Hill's that is more memoir than anything else. I look forward to seeing what side of the camp I fall on; will I love or hate it? Stay tuned to find out!