It's Always More Complicated

Have only just discovered that there is a new (came out in November) biography of Decca Mitford: Carla Kaplan, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.

Via a review in the latest Literary Review which is, alas, not fully online, sounds less than whelmed, and gives the impression that it may be a tad po-faced.

Yes, about Jessica Mitford, that great tease.

Can't find any other unpaywalled online reviews of any great credibility - there are some on GoodReads but they all sound to be from people who Nevererdofer previously.

So before I, that already have several of her own biographical works and essays, collections of letters etc upon my shelves, also the previous biography, spend moolah and time on this, I wonder if anyone has already read it and has opinions?

(Have just had thought that as far as I recall, Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd did on at least one occasion encounter Unity Mitford, while undercover in Germany: but not, I think, Decca &/or Esmond, anywhere in his exploits.)

What I read

I managed to plough through The Wheel of Fortune and do not think I will be plunging into a major Susan Howatch re-read binge. O all those angsty men. As for man handing on misery to man, Larkinesque-like, it deepens like the Mariana trench. Plus, the Katherine Swynford-analogue character gets no interiority, and besides being pretty much normal and sensible (unlike pretty much everybody else, no, Anna seems fairly stable) is full of deep mystical working-class Welsh wisdom. Good for her levanting to Canada (can one levant in that direction?). The last section in particular had me muttering about codfish.

O what a thoroughly delightful change to move on to Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. (1977) - you do not need heaving melodrama or even actual plot to be compellingly readable, just saying.

On to Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room (A Dance to the Music of Time, #10) (1971) in anticipation of group discussion at beginning of November. Getting faint frissons of that narrative pattern of that period which was eschewing ominiscient voice but having a first-person narrator who just happens to be in a position to see or hear Events and can reflect upon them.

Latest Literary Review.

Also finished the book for review but have not yet got round to getting any thoughts on it written, this week having been a bit of a week, so far.

On the go

Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (2025).

Also happened to notice Jonathan Rose, Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda (2018) when I was looking for something else - I think this must have been something in return for reading something for a publisher? - I don't think I actually bought it - but looked interesting in the light of recent musings about reading.

Up next

Having discovered that I do, in fact, have a copy of The Making of a Muckraker, maybe a spot of dipping into that?

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*Wombat Awareness Organisation: World Wombat Day!

Or, do the details matter?

Concede that sometimes they do, cue here whingeing from me and from others about historical inaccuracies anent the rules of succession, the laws on divorce, etc, which have completely undermined our belief in the narrative we were reading.

But exchange earlier today on bluesky about specific time/place cultural references, do they throw you out -

At which I was, have I not read books involving baseball, and, on reflection, elaborate gambling scams, and I do not understand these at all, but this does not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Possibly we do need to feel that the author knows what they're writing about and is not commiting solecisms on the lines of 'All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke' - though apparently this is apocryphal.

I also felt that when I was reading that Reacher novel the other day that perhaps we had a leeeetle more detail than we really required about his exact itinerary whenever he went anywhere - the street-by-street perambulations in NYC, for ex. I am sure one could trace them exactly on a map, and any one-way systems were correctly described, and the crossings in the right place.

Which is sort of the equivalent of where I got 'futtock-shroudery' from, which was reading Age of Sail novels with Alot of period nautical terminology. (On the whole I though O'Brian got the balance on this right.)

There has been a certain amount of querying expressed in the Dance to the Music of Time discussions about some of the significance of parts of London invoked by Nick Jenkins, which is not just geography but Class (there was at least one passage where I was getting strong Nancy Mitford's Lady Montdore dissing on Kensington vibes), connotations of bohemianism, etc.

Sometimes the detail is load-bearing. But often it's not, particularly.

Channeling (though one suspects that the Channel/La Manche is perhaps not actually in play here?) the spirit of Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford's work, the following from a recent post in agonyaunt:

When I was 28, I did a last-minute flight to Paris with friends. The very next day, my sister conferenced my mother into a call to berate me for putting myself at risk for rape and kidnapping.

We rather suspect that these are people that had little sis been going to London (Eng), their vision would have been of dystopic hellhole of gang violence and knife-crime (looks out at peaceful leafy streets, where, we may add, the rubbish is currently being collected).

Anyway, okay, assuming this is not just about 'Abroad is dangerous and full of violent criminals', and specifically about Pareee, we wonder what they are drawing on to come up with this? Victorian pornos? or early C20th horror-mongering sensationalist literature about the Dangers of White Slavery? - and the pervasive myths around same that were familiar to the Mitford sisters, Decca records that she and Debo were constantly on the watch for white slavers while the family was resident in Sodom and Gomorrah London, and even identified a friend of Nancy's who smiled and said hello thusly. And in The Pursuit of Love when Linda has bolted from Christian and finds herself changing trains in Paris and Fabrice makes his first approach, her inital instinct is to inform him that she is not 'un esclave blanche'.

We concede that Les Messieurs have a reputation for being, shall we say, oncoming, such that it is within living memory (well, mine) that a French woman politician claimed that she had long supposed all Englishmen to be gay on account of they did not routinely harass women in the streets. But I think that, while tiresome -

- though in my own experience, and I will admit that these experiences were a decade apart - I got a lot more of that in New York c. 1970 than in Paris c. 1980 -

- is not quite the same thing as the sensationalist narrative of 'completely disappeared from the face of the earth'.

Readers, I boggled and shrieked: A New Chapter, Nancy Mitford at Heywood Hill Bookshop:

Diana, the sister to whom she felt closest, was branded (along with her Fascist husband Oswald Mosley) a public danger and imprisoned in Holloway for more than three years. When Diana was released at the end of 1943, the shop was bombarded with telephone calls from journalists seeking Nancy’s reaction.

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Scotland's Missing Women Poets, and why we need them - we wonder a little how far this situation is at all particular to Scotland and a specifically macho misogynist pub culture there? (On the Uni of Glasgow Union, I virtually attended a seminar this week which certainly indicated that there was a very trad male culture in place.)

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I am hesitant to give the Express links, but this is a piece interviewing the very reputable historian Chuck Upchurch on representations of m/m relationships in Bridgerton. (And I am really somewhat concerned for him given that his present institution is Florida State U...)

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And picking up on an intersection of 'leaving stuff out' and 'gay history', this review of Alan Meades, Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade does not mention that the 'socialization and community' included cruising for rent-boys.

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Looking in unexpected places: BIPOC Voices in the Victorian Periodical Press:

In 2021 and 2022, scholars and students from One More Voice (OMV) and COVE worked in collaboration with Special Collections, SOAS Library and Adam Matthew Digital (AMD) to identify, document, encode, publish, and critically study a series of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices from Victorian missionary periodicals.... Our project demonstrates that BIPOC voices appear in considerable numbers in Victorian missionary periodicals. As elaborated below, we identified and documented some 250 such voices between the two branches of our project. These voices represent an important, little-studied primary source. The voices, in the words of the One More Voice “Mission Statement,” offer glimpses of “perspectives that scholarship in majority has hitherto overlooked or silenced” and so promise “to transform our understanding of imperial and colonial history and literature.” This potential – alongside the wide array of cultures and ethnic groups involved and the many social strata within the cultures documented – makes these voices worth studying. Yet our work with these voices over the year and a half of the project has also revealed that any sort of critical or casual engagement with the voices requires extreme caution. Among other challenges, the wording of relevant pieces often suggests that missionary periodical editors and others reduced or otherwise curtailed the textual control of BIPOC creators considerably.

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Problematic anatomical collection re-opens: From foetuses to penises: anatomical museum reopens in London. Hunterian Museum collection amassed by 18th-century surgeon-anatomist John Hunter includes body parts of humans and animals:

The relaunch of an extraordinary collection of human and animal specimens gathered in the 18th century by a medical pioneer has prompted the Royal College of Surgeons in England (RCS) to commission research into complex questions about provenance and consent.

Idly wafting through Twitter feed, came across this in a last year's article about ongoing foofarraw in the National Trust about the application of actual historical analysis to their properties as opposed to lovely myths:

Country houses are easily mythologised as Britain’s soul, places in which tradition and inheritance stand firm against the anonymising tides of modernity. They are places of fantasy, which help us imagine a rooted relationship to the land that feels safe and secure. As Wright pointed out, this makes the project of preserving them necessarily defensive, and one that doesn’t sit well with the practice of actual historical research – which contextualises, explains and asks uncomfortable questions.

How one would love some modern-day Waugh or Mitford or Raven to write a novel in which the fount of all moral goodness flows from a country house in Gloucestershire and the lower orders are portrayed as shiftless and venal.

And then I thought of that longstanding if not exactly high literary genre, The Country House Murder Mystery.

Is this, we ask ourselves, the return of the repressed? the dark side emerging? the history of death and violence manifesting as a body in the library or even the drawing-room?

Is there, in fact, a rather strong counter-narrative suggesting the instability of the apparent rootedness and tradition of the country house?

(I will concede that the 'limited cast in enclosed space' also imposes formal generic constraints and can and has been reworked in other milieux.)

Hadley Freeman in today's Guardian Weekend is miffed off at male columnists dissing on not just Nancy Mitford and The Pursuit of Love but anyone (silly gurliez!!) who enjoys it.

Okay, yet again this is men crapping on anything that women dare to like that they do not.

But I also take exception, or at least have problems with, the blanket dismissal of the Mitfords as 'dead posh women' and “overvenerated, overrated and overprivileged women”.

Sure, they were posh, but how much privilege did they have on their own account?

I invoke Virginia Woolf and her deconstruction of the unfortunate position of the 'daughters of educated men' who did not get the education or the career possibilities or the likelihood of independence that fell to their brothers.

If - and I'm sure these men do not - one reads Decca's autobiographies as well as The Pursuit of Love one observes that the sisters were brought up in a state of haphazard education by a succession of ill-qualified governesses, had no money of their own, and no qualifications for earning any. Which was why Nancy took to her pen in the first place.

There is also a whole swathe of novels writ about the time the Mitford sisters were making their debuts about the awful situation of young women whose only destiny was to make it on the marriage market and their horrible fate if they failed to do this in a timely fashion with a suitable parti.

I note from when I was reading Kimberly Schutte, Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485-2000: An Open Elite? (2009) aristo daughters were about bloodline and kinship networks when they married, and it was a dog's life for the ones who did not marry.

While she was alluding to an even more elevated stratum within society - the female offspring of monarchs - Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon remarked: 'It is only in some special and esoteric sense that women are the protected sex'; 'to what a limited degree it is possible, without falling into the most savage irony, to describe women as the protected sex' as they were dispatched to and fro across nations, often at very young ages, to seal treaties by marrying men they had never met with whom they might not even have a language in common.

So I'm not persuaded being born posh necessarily connotes, for women, certain aspects of privilege that their male relatives would have. Except, perhaps, at the price of very strictly conforming to expectations (which socal conditions, post-Great War, might not have favoured).

In the light of attacks on historian explor[ing] links between its properties and colonialism, I think some consideration might be given to the way in which that institution has drifted, or, indeed, been hijacked, from the intentions of its original founders. who were worthy late-Victorian reformers Octavia Hill 'social reformer....worked tirelessly to improve urban housing and to protect green spaces, Sir Robert Hunter, who was all about preserving the commons from the landowners, and Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, another passionate social reformer.

It was not until 1937 that it became a scheme of out-relief for the upper classes unable to maintain their stately homes, and enabling them to avoid death duties: the architect of which was the Marquis of Lothian, member of the Cliveden set....

However, in 1939 they did acquire Quarry Bank, one of Britain's greatest industrial heritage sites, home to a complete industrial community.

I note that the National Trust site is perhaps curiously silent about the role of James Lees Milne, who seems to have froliced in some very sus social circles of the 30s (did he really shag both Tom and Diana Mitford???):

In 1936 Lees-Milne was appointed secretary of the Country Houses Committee of the National Trust. He held the position until 1950, apart from a period of military service from 1939 to 1941.... He was instrumental in the first large-scale transfer of country houses from private ownership to the Trust.

Do we have a feeling that the original founders might have been rather more sympathetic to historicising the sites for which the Trust is responsible rather than focusing on aesthetics? They were, I am like to suppose, rather on the side of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant.

What I read

Finished The Shirt on His Back.

Robin Steven, The Case of the Drowned Pearl: A Murder Most Unladylike Mini-Mystery: World Book Day 2020 - one of the shorter interspersed ones. Agreeable but a bit slight. Pulls a classic Christie solution...

Aster Glenn Gray, Briarley (2018), a (freebie) very charming riff on the Beauty and the Beast theme which not only asks some hard questions of the original but also relocates it in time to a particular historical moment, makes a major switch, very good. Would have sought out more of author's works, but am a little deterred by reviews that suggest that the one set around the Russian Revolution is pro-Romanov, wot?

Cat Sebastian, Redressed (2019), a freebie short-story, somewhat fantastical f/f coda to the Turner series.

Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), which was very good even if I had some quibbles with it (Lord Peter 'swashbuckling'? even in the earlier books?) - which is probably down to having some existing familiarity with her subjects. E.g. have sense from various works on Sayers that her objections to John Cournos practising contraception might have been partly religious but that she also found 'rubber goods' erotically repulsive. In the Jane Harrison chapter I was a bit surprised that she omitted Harrison's famous dream of the dancing bears; and while I felt it was implied, would have liked a bit clearer sense that her post-Revolutionary Russian friends were a rather mixed lot of White Russians and Red Russians who did not happen to be in agreement with the Bolshevik regime...

Nancy Mitford, Pigeon Pie (1940), because I was looking it out for that quote about the protag's expectations about the coming of war vs the actuality. It's not top Mitford by any means, and certainly we would not have urged Nancy to go into thriller writing, it was most certainly not her metier, but it has its pleasures.

Simon Brett, A Deadly Habit (2018): re-read. O Charles Paris nevair evair change...

On the go

Still dipping into Female Sexual Inversion but I'm not sure I'm really quite in the right frame of mind for it. (Also have come across what I feel is a misreading of one of my own articles, harrumph.)

Up Next

Dunno - my tastes have been random and whimsical lately.

Well, okay, Will Self sez, yet again, that Novel B Ded, or at least, on its way out, though this does not seem to stop him writing and publishing the things -

But I do wonder to what extent when people say X or Y is DEAD they are actually talking about some particular niche manifestation or subgenre - and I very much doubt that there is a mainstream of fiction these days for him to be part of.

But the thing that always comes rising off of everything Self says about literachoor like a toxic miasma is the idea that it is not meant to be FUN, you are not meant to ENJOY it, it is a gruelling experience but it is (possibly) good for you.

And how old is Self and why did it take a student drawing it to his attention to make him start reading 'important woman writers' -

(Oh god, give the man Nancy Mitford, Anita Loos, Cold Comfort Farm, the Provincial Lady, please, please: and if he is reading Woolf, we suggest beginning with Flush and moving on to Orlando.)

But this vision of fiction as Good For You was something I also recently came across in a very different register to Self's up-himself literary ponceyness and higher codswallop - in fact I think it is possibly what we might call the lower codswallop of self-improvement-speak: Why Reading Books Should be Your Priority, According to Science.

It makes reading sound quite ineffably dreary, the equivalent of making sure you do your X number of steps per day: 'Reading fiction can help you be more open-minded and creative.... People who read books live longer.... Successful people are readers.'

Now that she has made a goal to read 50 books in a year, she says that she has traded wasted time on her phone for flipping pages in bed, on trains, during meal breaks and while waiting in line. Two months into her challenge she reports having more peace, satisfaction, improved sleep while learning more than she thought possible.

Heaven forfend there should be any indication that it is a source of pleasure or comfort.