The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair

Posted on 9 May 2024 by Katrina

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair was first published in 1922 but my copy is a Virago Press reprint from 1980. It has an introduction by Jean Radford. Although this book has 184 pages it has massive print so in reality I doubt if it would even be 60 pages with normal sized print.

The blurb on the back says: Ironic, brief, intensely realised, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a brilliant study of female virtue seen as vice, and stands with the work of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson as one of the great innovative novels of this century.

Harriett Frean has been born into a comfortable Victorian household. An only child she has been rigidly brought up to always do the right thing, no matter what. The upshot of that is that when she falls for Robin, her best friend Priscilla’s fiance, and Robin falls for Harriett she refuses to go with her heart much to Robin’s sorrow, and his marriage goes ahead. Harriett is sure that she has done the right thing, and when her mother finds out she praises her self-sacrificing daughter. But her action ends up having a domino effect which ruins Priscilla’s life as well as Robin’s, and Harriett’s as she never moves on from her upbringing, never matures and has thoughts of her own. Never questions the attitudes of her parents. Harriett’s mother is such a fine upstanding member of society that she throws out the maid when she gets pregnant and feels no remorse when the baby dies.

Harriett holds her parents in such high esteem that it comes as a shock to her when years later one of her childhood friends tells Harriett that her father’s bad financial advice had led to the ruin of her father and others in the community.

As an old lady, when new neighbours move in across the road Harriett holds herself aloof from them, she’s sure her parents wouldn’t have approved of the family. Seven years later she discovers that the father of that family had a similar position to her father in society, but for them it’s too late to become friends.

Her father is Hilton Frean and she is amazed when that name is met with a blank stare when she had expected to be shown great respect. Time has marched on, but Harriett had never left her childhood.

I can’t say that I really enjoyed this one, for me there were no likeable characters, I was glad that it wasn’t a long read.

I bought my copy of th ebook in a charity shop recently and I really bought it because it was a Virago in really good conditon, but I didn’t look inside it, I wish I had because somebody had scribbled thoughts all over it, and about half of the book had been underlined – so annoying.

Wave Me Goodbye – edited by Anne Boston

Posted on 14 November 2022 by Katrina

Wave Me Goodbye is a collection of stories of the Second World War edited by Anne Boston. There are twenty-eight short stories in the book, obviously some better than others but it is a very enjoyable read if like me you enjoy contemporary wartime fiction.

The authors include:

Rosamond Lehman
Jan Struther
Rosamond Oppersdorff
Kay Boyle
Mollie Panter-Downes
Molly Lefebure
Rose Macaulay
Anna Kavan
Olivia Manning
Barbara Pym
Jean Rhyss
Edna Ferber
Dorothy Parker
Elizabeth Bowen
Margery Sharp
Pat Frank
Diana Gardner
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Ann Chadwick
Stevie Smith
Doris Lessing
A.L. Barker
Malachi Whitaker
Inez Holden
Beryl Bainbridge
Jean Stafford
Elizabeth Taylor

There are just a few authors that I had never heard of before, but quite a lot by favourite writers. There were just a couple that didn’t enthrall me.

I’m glad to say that I was able to borrow this book from my local library.

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Posted on 24 October 2022 by Katrina

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin was first published in 1901, it’s an Australian classic and I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it for years. I kept seeing copies of it in secondhand bookshops but something else always seemed to be shouting louder at me to buy it so I’ve been passing it by for years, that turned out to be really silly as it is a great read. It was a total surprise to me to discover that Miles Franklin was actually a woman Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, she was born in 1879. She wrote this very autobiographical novel when she was just 16, which seems amazing to me.

Sybylla is not quite nine years old when her father decides to move his large family away from the sheep station where she had been living since she was born. Her father thinks that he has a better chance of making a living on a one thousand acre farm in the flat countryside of Goulburn. But he isn’t any more successful there and his drinking gets worse and worse. The mother is worn out, she had come from a fairly well off genteel family and life hasn’t gone the way she expected it to. She takes her frustrations out on her eldest daughter Sybylla who gets the blame for everything while her younger sister (all of 11 months younger!) is her mother’s darling pet. Sybylla is exhausted with all the farm and house work that she has to do, not that she gets any thanks for it.

As you would expect she dreams of a better life, but things go from bad to worse and even their clothes are in rags, there has been no rain for years and there are animals dying for want of water and grass. Sybylla isn’t going to marry a poor man like her father, she wants to write, and when her mother sends her to live with her grandmother in what had been her mother’s family home Sybylla can hardly believe her luck. They even have books! She has never seen such comfort and she quickly becomes a favourite of her grandmother, aunt and others. She even has a rich young man who is interested in her, but she’s torn away from everything she loves as her feckless father has borrowed money, and Sybylla is expected to work in the home of his creditor in lieu of the debt’s interest. She’s just a slave to a large and dirty family.

Throughout this book the author’s love for the Australian land is obvious although I suspect that unless you have grown up with that sort of landscape it’s difficult to imagine and appreciate the beauty of it.

This book has an unexpected ending, but then Miles Franklin had an unusual life and she stuck to her independent spirit throughout it all. She was a feminist, during WW1 she worked for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in the Serbian campaign and endowed the Miles Franklin Prize for Australian literature and the Stella Prize was named after her too.

Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley – 20 Books of Summer 2022

Posted on 31 July 2022 by Katrina

Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley was first published in the U.S.A. in 1929, but my copy is a Virago reprint from 1984. It’s very autobiographical, which is heartbreaking really.

The main character is Marie Rogers (Agnes Smedley) and her family is mired in desperate poverty in rural Missouri where her father has been working at various jobs, but as he goes home via the bars he’s just a hindrance to his poor wife who struggles to feed and clothe the family and is undernourished herself. Marie is determined not to end up like her mother, with a feckless husband and multiple children. The choices for females seem to be marriage or prostitution, but Agnes wants an education. She manages to get to college for a time and in the future she gets some work teaching and in journalism.

Strangely for a woman who says she’ll never get married as she wants to keep her independence, she ends up getting married TWICE, each time on the spur of the moment, the first time within twenty minutes of being propsed to! The second time within a week or so. Disasters of course.

Marie got a job working for the birth control activist Margaret Sanger who valued her work and hoped she would stay on, but Marie was attracted to the Indians who were in America and trying to gain independence from Britain. She worked for them during World War 1 and it seems that they were being bank-rolled by the Kaiser who was insanely jealous of the British Empire. But the Americans put Marie in jail for two years for her efforts. After that she took up a Chinese cause and became a war correspondent.

I can’t help thinking that it’s a shame that she felt the need to travel far afield with her talents rarther than staying at home and helping with the feminist and birth control movements. It seems like someone like her is needed nowadays in the US!

This was a fascinating but grim read. This was one of my 20 Books of Summer 2022.

The Century’s Daughter aka Liza’s England by Pat Barker

Posted on 16 April 2020 by Katrina

The Century’s Daughter by Pat Barker was published by Virago in 1986. The title seems to have been changed to Liza’s England later on and it is the third book that Barker wrote, not that it reads like an early book, it’s very well written.

Liza was born at the turn of the 20th century, in fact just as the new year was born. The setting is northern England, the Sunderland/Newcastle area I believe. In the first chapter Stephen visits Liza in her home. Her house is due to be demolished but Liza refuses to move and Stephen is a social worker tasked with persuading her to move elsewhere so that the whole area can be cleared. But Stephen quickly realises that he is really on Liza’s side. He loves hearing about her long life which has been hard, her family is scarred by the wars, but before that Liza was damaged by her mother Louise who is definitely not of the apple pie making variety.

The chapters mainly flip from Liza’s story to Stephen’s life as he is having a tough time in other areas of his work. Running a youth club for the youngsters of the disadvantaged area is turning into a nightmare, he just can’t cope and at the same time he’s having to deal with the imminent death of his terminally ill father. He hasn’t been close to his parents, his education and homosexuality seem to have thrown up insurmountable barriers between them.

There’s a lot going on in this book which features the 1930s Depression and the grim early 1980s when there were no jobs for so many young people in the UK and consequently many had no hopes for their future.

That makes it sound like the book will be a depressing read but it really isn’t, although it is sad at times I enjoyed the relationship between Liza and Stephen.

The book begins –

‘No point being eighty, is there?’ said Liza. ‘If you can’t be a bit outrageous?’

And certainly she looked it, Stephen thought, with her scarlet headsquare tilted crazily over one eye, giving her the look of a senile pirate.

She even has a parrot.

Some of my bookshelves

Posted on 9 September 2019 by Katrina

I’m going to be offline for a week or so, so I thought you might like to get a squint at just a few of my bookshelves meantime. I’m actually in the process of cataloguing all of my fiction books on computer, so that I can have a list of them all at my fingertips on my phone. I hate standing in a bookshop and wondering if I already have a copy of a book, it’s so difficult to keep track of them all and doublers do occur. I’m sure you know that feeling! I hate that Virago changed the design of their books, I so much prefer the plain old green ones. An old copy of High Wages sneaked in here, it’s a quandary, should I shelve books by publisher or author?

These books are the top two shelves in the bookcase nearest my side of the bed, within easy reach. I bet you own a lot of these ones too.

Chronicles of Carlingford by Mrs Oliphant

Posted on 3 March 2019 by Katrina

Chronicles of Carlingford by the very prolific Scottish author Mrs Oliphant is a Virago publication which consists of two novellas – The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, originally published in 1863. There’s an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald.

The blurb on the back of this book compares Margaret Oliphant with Jane Austen, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles. I would include Mrs Gaskell too.

The Rector is only 35 pages long, the setting is mid 19th century Carlingford which is a small town close to London. A new rector/minister is coming to the town and his parishioners are anticipating what sort of preacher he will be. Surely he won’t be as low church as the last rector. He had gone to the canal and preached to the bargemen there – that didn’t go down at all well with his snooty congregation. Most of them are hoping for something a bit more stylish – and preferrably a bachelor as there are several unmarried ladies apparently in need of a husband. The new rector has spent the last 15 years cloistered in All Souls and this is his first living. He may be a great theologian but he’s absolutely at sea when it comes to human nature and dealing with his parishioners.

Difficult or awkward men seem to have been Oliphant’s forte. There’s no doubt she had plenty of experience of them within her own family, and in fact she came to believe that her managing and competent character contributed to the weakness in her menfolk.

The Doctor’s Family is 157 pages long. Young Doctor Rider has just moved to a newly built part of Carlingford, he doesn’t know it but that is not going to do his business any good. The old established Carlingfordians look down on that area. His older brother had gone to Australia under some sort of cloud and he had married and had a family out there. Things didn’t go any better for him in Australia – well – he is a drunkard – so he had come home and was living at his young brother’s expense.

Dr Rider had decided that although he wanted to marry a young woman he couldn’t afford to look after his brother and a wife and children, so he had given up hope of marrying at all. Imagine his horror when his brother’s wife and children and her sister turn up and billet themselves on him!

Even worse – it turns out that his brother’s wife is feckless and doesn’t even take any notice of their badly behaved children, and for some reason she blames her brother-in-law for the situation that she and her husband are in.

This one is much stronger I think, but they’re both well worth reading and have moments of comedy as well as frustration at enraging characters.

I read this one for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2019

Sedition by Katharine Grant

Posted on 3 January 2019 by Katrina

Sedition by Katharine Grant was published by Virago in 2014 and I was drawn to borrow it from the library just because of the title – Sedition – and the fact that it was set in 1794, an important date sedition wise and the year that one of my ancestors was transported for 14 years as he was found guilty of sedition. He was one of the founder members of the Society of Friends of the People who had the temerity to ask for the vote for universal franchise and the abolition of slavery.

Imagine my disappointment when this book turned out to just mention sedition in a couple of sentences. The book should really have been at least subtitled – teenage exploitation sex romp. Why Virago decided to publish it is a mystery to me. I have to say that it’s well enough written, it’s just the premise that I found so ludicrous.

Some wealthy men and their wives are desperate to marry their daughters off, preferably to the aristocracy. They plan to show off their daughters in a concert and so they hire a piano and tutor to train them up for the entertainment. However, the owner and maker of the piano didn’t want to hire that particular piano out to them and he decides to ruin the girls by paying the tutor to deflower them all.

One by one the four girls all end up having sex with him – in what they are told is the ‘French’ way, so they won’t get pregnant. Meanwhile the piano maker’s daughter and another young girl engage in lesbian fumblings.

If ever a book was written with an eye on sales I’d say this one was, but to me it was an eye-rolling waste of my time. No doubt it appeals to some people though. I started reading this one in 2018 but finished it in 2019, I just hope that the rest of my reading year is better than the beginning.

The Willow Cabin by Pamela Frankau

Posted on 19 January 2017 by Katrina

The Willow Cabin by Pamela Frankau was published in 1949, my copy is a 1951 reprint. This is the first book that I’ve read by the author and I’ll definitely be seeking out more of her books.

The Willow Cabin covers the years from 1936 to 1948 and the settings are various but mainly London and America.

Caroline is a 22 year old aspiring actress, in fact she’s really talented at it, but she’s also rather immature. Her relationship with her mother and step-father is fraught and when she falls for Michael a well-known surgeon who is much older than her she moves out of the family home into an hotel.

Michael is unable to get a divorce from his wife (hmmm) but that doesn’t put Caroline off and when war breaks out she throws up her acting career to follow Michael around, they’ve both joined the army.

For most of the book Mercedes, Michael’s Anglo-American wife is absent, apparently in France, possibly helping the resistance or even dead. But in the last third of the book the war is over and Caroline goes to America where Mercedes has pitched up. Mercedes had been very well off before the war but she has used the last of her money to buy a farm in America and to build a small house for a family of German refugees who are supposedly her employees along with a French family of refugees.

The two families can’t get along and have absolutely no sense of gratitude for everything that has been done for them. I’m sure that that was Frankau’s way of pointing out how the UK had been bankrupted by a war not of its making and had got nothing out of it but a debt that took generations to pay off and absolutely no thanks from the rest of Europe for all that had been done for them and the sacrifices made.

The atmosphere of wartime London in particular is very well portrayed I think, of course the book was written not long after the end of the war.

The title of the book was taken from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and there seems to be some confusion on the internet as to what it means. However I have always understood that willow was worn by women whose loved ones were away from home – at war or at sea or whatever. It was a way of telling people (men) that they weren’t really on their own, they were waiting for the return of their lover.

All through reading this book I had the 1970s song All Around My Hat by Steeleye Span going around in my head, if you don’t know the song you might be interested in listening to it now.

I believe that Virago have reprinted this book as a modern classic so I’m counting this one towards my Classic Club Challenge, I’m not far off reaching 50 now.

A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith

Posted on 3 August 2015 by Katrina

A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith was published way back in 1965, but it was in the 1970s that I discovered her and then went on a Highsmith binge, recommended to other people that they should read her books, and then for some reason didn’t keep up with her books myself in subsequent years.

So this was a recent library choice for me, I’m fairly sure that I didn’t read this one in the 1970s. It has been republished as a Virago Modern Classic.

Sydney Bartleby is a young American writer and he is living with his wife Alicia in the wilds of rural Suffolk. Sydney has a very vivid imagination and I suppose he is the writer’s equivalent of a method actor as he feels the need to act out one of his plots to see how he will feel, he wants to get the emotions correct as he digs a grave in a remote patch of countryside.

At times I was in two minds as to whether Alicia had actually been murdered by him or not, so when Alicia does disappear from their cottage, supposedly having gone to visit her parents but never arrived there, things look very bad for Sydney indeed. All the clues point to him having done her in and everyone is sure he is guilty, including the police.

This was a cracker of a book, really full of suspense. Why oh why have I left it getting on for 40 years since I read a Patricia Highsmith book?!

Do you have a favourite book by her which you can recommend me to read next?

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

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