Karen of Books and Chocolate was wondering if Chatsworth is what Jane Austen based Pemberley on in Pride and Prejudice. I read somewhere that Deborah Devonshire (the dowager duchess) believed that she recognised Chatsworth in Jane’s descriptions, and I suppose she should know. Jane does mention that Lizzie visits Chatsworth amongst other great houses in the Derbyshire area, the county does seem to have a plethora of them. But its the fact that Darcy’s sister is given the name Georgiana and that was the name of the 5th Duke of Devonshire’s wife who lived at Chatsworth in Jane Austen’s time which makes me think that she did really base Pemberley on Chatsworth. The house was used for parts of the 2005 P&P film, not a favourite of mine.

As you can imagine it’s just about impossible to get a photo without people in it but I took the one below of a stairway. I love the stairs themselves but I’m not so keen on the paintings, it’s all very heavy and dark looking but it fits in with the age of the house I suppose.

The ceiling in the photo below is of the room which was the 6th Duke’s dining room and it’s much brighter and airier with the crystal chandeliers and white and gold paint.

And this is the dining table, loaded with silver and looking wonderful. I’m so glad that I don’t have to clean all that silver though!

I could have quite happily settled down in the library which is below, I think it would probably be one of the cosiest rooms in Chatsworth.

I might be blogging about the garden and parkland again tomorrow, that really was my favourite bit.

It was Anbolyn of Gudrun’s Tights who nominated the author Edna Ferber for the CPR Book Group, the idea of which is to give neglected authors and or books a bit of a boost and breath some new life into them. So thank-you Anbolyn because I hadn’t even heard of Ferber who was so popular in the 1920s and 30s and even won a Pullitzer Prize.

I started off with Show Boat which I think everyone will know was made into a Broadway musical in 1927. The 1951 movie is so famous that it’s one of those ones which I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen in entirety or maybe I’ve just seen lots of clips over the years. Anyway next time it’s on TV I’m going to watch it to see if it differs from the book.

I really enjoyed this. The show boat is the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre and it plies its trade on the Mississippi River, calling in at towns on the river as the local crops ripen and the inhabitants have money in their pockets. Magnolia’s parents are the boat owners, they are Captain Andy Hawks and Parthenia Ann Hawks and while Andy is a popular and kind chap, Parthy is a grim-faced terror with a dislike of the theatre, actors and just about everything else. She has a tongue that would cut cloot (cloth) – as we say here.

Against Parthy’s wishes Magnolia ends up on the stage and when they call in to St Louis she falls for the wonderfully named Gaylord Ravenal, who ends up joining the show boat’s cast.

That’s a brief outline but there’s lots going on in this book with characters being accused of miscegenation (marriage between a black person and a white person) which was illegal in some places in America at the time and that ‘n’ word is used quite a lot by the more ignorant characters. One of the characters is ‘passing’ as a white person.

As a Jew Edna Ferber was no stranger to prejudice but it didn’t stop her from having a very successful career as a writer, which you can read about here. I have one other book by her – Ice Palace, but I’ll certainly be looking out for more in the future.

I’ve loved the idea of a Mississippi river boat since I started reading Mark Twain years ago but I know that the reality would kill me in no time – too hot!

It’s set in Roman Britain and Marcus Aquila has been given command of a fort on Hadrian’s Wall and he is determined to gain back his family’s honour which was lost when his father and the Ninth Legion which he had command of, disappeared along with their golden eagle standard. The only way he can do it is to find the standard and take it back to Rome.

I quite enjoyed it but the battle scenes were so loud, they shook the whole place and it’s positively painful on my ears. Marcus and his slave Esca travel north into Caledonia/Scotland and some of the Scottish scenery is quite spectacular, the best part of the film for me really. It turned out to have a bit of a Romano-British Brokeback Mountain flavour to it, I think.

We hadn’t been to the flicks for ages, since we saw Tamara Drew actually because we didn’t get around to seeing The King’s Speech. I think we’re the only people in the western world who haven’t seen it. We did try when it was at the wee local cinema but we couldn’t get in as everybody else had booked their tickets! You live and learn!

Unfortunately her books are quite difficult to get a hold of but I bought The Singer not the Song in an Edinburgh second-hand bookshop and it was one which I hadn’t read before. At first I was really disappointed when I realised that the book is set in Mexico and is about the Roman Catholic church, in fact I almost didn’t read it for that reason, but I’m glad that I persevered.

Firstly I have to say that my copy is from 1954 and the blurb on the cover is wrong when it says that it is set in the revolutionary period of the 1920s and 30s. It is definitely post World War II early 1950s and a bishop is interviewing priests for an appointment in Quantana to replace the elderly Father Gomez who hasn’t exactly stuck to his vows and has lost the respect of his parishioners.

Quantana is a small village in the mountains and is very cut off from the rest of society and the whole place has been taken over by Malo, a young bandit, and his sidekicks. Basically Malo – the Bad One – runs a protection racket in that if the villagers don’t pay him ‘tax’, nasty things are going to happen to them. Malo has an affinity with cats and he has the same habit of playing with his victims.

Father Keogh, a young priest from Ireland, is chosen for the difficult position. Just about the first thing he has to do is get Father Gomez out of the village alive as Gomez believes Malo will kill him.

The whole book becomes a fight for the lives and souls of the villagers as Malo is determined to keep his evil hold on them and tries to humiliate the priest. Father Keogh struggles against Malo for the good of the people who are all terrified of the bandit gang.

It doesn’t sound like much I suppose but it is a very good read and the book was made into a film in 1961. I had already finished the book when I realised this but strangely I had imagined Dirk Bogarde as Malo so maybe I did see it when I was knee high.

There seems to be virtually nothing on the internet about Audrey Erskine Lindop. Possibly her mother or grandmother was Scottish as Erskine is a Scottish surname and place name. She was married to a playwright called Leslie Dudley and I’ve discovered that at one point she lived in a place called Chagford in South Devon. I discovered that because someone is selling a letter from her on Ebay at the moment and you can just make out the address. Does anybody have any more information on this sadly neglected writer?

What on earth were the people at Disney thinking about when they decided to cast a 38 year old woman in the part of Miss Marple? Have any of them ever seen a Miss Marple film or TV production?

The whole reason for Agatha Christie writing a character like Marple is that she is an elderly lady, a spinster of the parish of St Mary Mead and people are supposed to think that she’s in her dotage and so they don’t take her seriously.

Marple is meant to surprise everyone and triumph over them all with her superior wits and a long experience gained from observing the inhabitants of her very small village.

They are going to lose the whole essence of the Miss Marple books if they do it any other way. Poor Agatha Christie will be birling in her grave, but I suppose her family felt that they could be doing with the money.

Although he was born in England A A Milne was from a Scottish Presbyterian background, like so many other authors of childrens’ fiction. The severely strict upbringing seems to have encouraged a wild imagination in those people feeling the need to rebel against such a strait-laced background. Hurrah!!

I didn’t actually read Winnie the Pooh until I had children of my own, and I loved it, in fact I went on a bit of a Pooh binge, reading The Tao of Pooh and Pooh and the Ancient Mysteries as well as collecting classic Pooh ‘stuff’.

Everyone I know seems to be a Pooh character. I think I’m a combination of Kanga and Tigger, depending on my mood, if you can imagine that. Two for the price of one as I keep telling my husband! Which character do you resemble most?

I love the original E H Shepard illustrations and I’m not mad keen on Disney as a rule but I have a soft spot for the 1966 Disney film which you can see some of below.

I’ve read three books by Auster and they’ve all been quite different but what I really like is that you never know where he’s going to go next. Reading him is like having my favourite sort of conversation, the kind that starts off with something mundane like a comment on the weather but within 10 minutes I and a friend have covered topics such as Lord Byron, English architecture, Balmoral, the racing driver Juan Fangio and then end up by setting the world to rights!

With Paul Auster he mentions in passing people like Hedy Lamarr and Edward G. Robinson – and I just thought – “How did he know?” Because as a youngster I watched a lot of old American movies, my dad was a big fan, we watched them on tv but he had seen them all in the cinema when they were first released decades before.

So at the age of about 10 if someone asked me who my favourite film stars were – my answer was always Hedy Lamarr and Edward G. Robinson! I can understand the Hedy bit now because she was so glamorous and I wanted to look like her when I grew up. Tragic really because it was never going to happen. She had gorgeous dark hair and mine is red or strawberry blonde as my mum always said. When I got my waist length hair cut for the first time I told the hairdresser that I wanted it cut like Hedy Lamarr’s. She didn’t know who I was talking about. Everybody else wanted a Purdy cut or Farrah Fawcett-Major!

Don’t ask me why I was into Edward G. Robinson, I look at him now and think that I must have been a very strange 10 year old. Happily by the time I hit 12 I was a fan of Cary Grant, Gregory Peck and of course Humphrey Bogart. If I’m honest I still have a wee soft spot for Edward G. though.

Anyway, back to Paul Auster’s writing: For some reason the fact that he mentioned those two almost forgotten movie stars really made me feel quite chuffed. It’s nice to feel that you have a sort of connection with a writer. And all that came about because one night when I was wandering around some book blogs I came across a comment from Judith (Reader in the Wilderness) which led me to visit her blog.

It’s serendipity.

I loved the Posy Simmonds series which was first published in The Guardian newspaper years ago but is now published as the graphic novel Tamara Drewe.

I really enjoyed the film. It’s set in Dorset (Thomas Hardy country) and there is some lovely scenery. Nicholas Hardiment is a successful writer of crime fiction, but he and his wife Beth have opened their house up to putative writers and whilst Nicholas is busy being a pompous eejit his wife is doing all the hard work of baking and cooking and keeping their lovely farmhouse in order.

All is not well, because Nicholas can’t stop having little dalliances which results in a very public bust up, with much effing from the very well cast guests. Actually the whole thing was well cast, even the local schoolgirls who are so bored out of their minds from having to live in such a backwater that they take any opportunity to cause a bit of mayhem.

So when Tamara Drewe moves back into the farmhouse next door and takes up with Ben who is the drummer in a famous band the girls just have to do a bit of meddling.

Well it made me laugh anyway, I’d recommend it to anyone.

A classic tale of mystery and high adventure in a Dorset smuggling village.

Well that’s what it says on the back of the book and I wouldn’t argue with the description. I enjoyed this book, but I must admit that I’m drawn to smuggling tales anyway. Probably because I like the thought of the poor down-trodden souls getting one over the tax-man at a time when they were being taxed even more than we are now.

John Trenchard is 15 years old at the beginning of the book and he is living with his aunt in the village of Moonfleet, which is just half-a -mile from the sea. Both his parents are dead and his aunt has obviously taken him in as an obligation which she would rather not have.

The village has always been full of spooky tales of the ghost of Blackbeard, who haunts the churchyard looking for his treasure – a huge and perfect flawless diamond, which of course is said to be cursed.

When John discovers a secret passageway leading under the church he thinks he will find the diamond there but ends up being embroiled with a smuggling gang.

First published in 1898, Moonfleet is a classic adventure tale, suitable for young and old.

Moonfleet was made into a film in 1955, starring Stewart Granger and that lovely wee Scottish child actor John Whitely.

Obviously the place to visit is the cathedral and although I haven’t been keen on places like that in the past, I have to say that Durham Cathedral has a much nicer atmosphere than any other such places which I have visited.

I’ve been to Canterbury, York and Inverness cathedrals before and to me they all had quite a scary ambience about them, as if they had been built by people who had a real fear of God and they worked that feeling into the fabric of the building.

Durham on the other hand felt really comfortable and friendly. I think part of it may be that the attendants were all very welcoming and helpful. They also have a memorial to coal miners which I thought was a really nice down to earth touch. Usually such places are really snooty and elitist, but not Durham.

Obviously they don’t allow you to take photographs of the inside, it is still a working church and while we were there worshipers were actually using the place and lighting candles and such which is all very foreign to me but no doubt they get comfort from it. I think it must be quite difficult for them to have troops of tourists going around while they are trying to have their private moments.

It’s so big I couldn’t get it in the one picture as you can see. Apparently it costs a shocking £60,000 a WEEK to keep the place going. They don’t have an admittance charge, which is good but on the other hand, donate whatever you can afford.

I hadn’t realised that Durham was used to film scenes in the Harry Potter films until I got there, they must have been paid more than a bob or two for that, which must have helped.