Female writer Archives -

ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman

Clearly I did not really understand what total ballers some Victorian woman were. This book is the first-person account of some young nurses who decided to come to Mashonaland in the 1890s, and it is some hair-raising stuff. I thought they were all at home wearing corsets and having vapours, but apparently not.

This was when Florence Nightingale had made nursing acceptable for Victorian women, and what I got from this book is that girls who wanted out grabbed this opportunity with both hands. In this case, the nurses are asked to go to Mashonaland when there is no road or train, and after various efforts by boat, (and being abandoned by the Bishop), they get tired of waiting and decide to walk – from Beira! Here is a discussion with the various men telling them not to try it:

No women he had known had ever walked in Africa; even men found it trying, and sometimes died on the way. We told our excellent advisors that we could only die once, and that dying was just as disagreeabale in a room as on the veldt. If women had never walked in Africa there was no reason why they should not begin

It’s an extraordinary walk, and when they get there the hospital is hardly a hut. They spend two years dealing with ‘fever’ (I assume malaria?), and with all kinds of other wild problems, lions, etc. One of them finds someone to marry. I liked this line:

Africa is the land of the unforeseen. . . ‘Questions,’ ‘wars,’ ‘difficulties’ spring up at an instant’s notice.

So true still today, though we call them ‘challenges.’ So tough are the conditions that when the next batch of nurses arrive to take over (a road having been built) half of them turn around and go back to Beira!

An amazing story of people leading big crazy lives against the odds.

SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila McDonald

If you are from London, you have many books about past life in your town. If you are from Harare, not so many, in part because Harare is just that little bit younger than London. This is a book created out of letters sent home by a young wife after moving to what was then Salisbury in 1909, shortly after the city’s founding.

I am struck by how very little seems to have changed. People are in and out of each other’s houses, without calling in advance; people take pride in not being thrown by accidents and emergencies (I am not quite Rhodesian yet, she confesses at one point, when she weeps after an unplanned 10 mile hike with a baby); and people love a little drink at sunset. ‘I’ll never think of Salisbury without the sundowners,’ she says, and 110 years on it’s still the case. Her mother, who she wrote the letters to, was obviously worried about her moving from England to the colonies, and the letters are remarkable for the enthusiasm with which she adopts her new country. I guess pioneers are self-selecting.

I was also very interested to learn that Rhodesian women were thought to be ‘fast.’ She assures us this is the wrong impression (sadly I agree). Apparently it comes form a book called VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS, which was a huge hit. I am naturally in hot pursuit of a copy to find out that hot 1900s goss

A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim

The review I first read about this book was illustrated with a photo of a young Asian woman holding the hand of a much older European man. The review spent much time discussing whether or not the book is revenge porn, and to my surprise the pornographer is in fact the young woman.

Basically, the guy was married, and had an affair with this lady, and this is the story of that affair. This is all sounds very salacious but in fact for a book with really a lot of sex in it, it is remarkably straightforward. There’s a lot of chat about what she wore, and when he did or not text her back. It was drafted in real-time, as the relationship was happening, which gives it an interesting kind of immediacy.

What I found especially interesting was what this lady did for a living, which, as far as I can tell, was nothing too much. She had previously been with another much older man, Malcolm McLaren, who she met when she was a student at Yale, and after his death (about which she is clearly heart-broken) she mostly curates his artistic legacy. She spends her year going between New York and various European capitals, having dinners, going to openings, and wearing designer shoes. I tried not to think the word ‘parasite,’ as of course that is uncharitable. I guess I like my artists starving.

One unfortunate sidepoint is a comment on the quality of a Yale education. She tells us (without shame!) that she has never paid for a first date, because that is not her ‘role.’ She also says she is not a feminist, because, get this, she ‘takes sexual equality for granted.’ What gibberish. Should have been whipped out of her freshman year.

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.

SUPER-INFINITE by Katherine Rundell

I don’t know why but somehow I took it into my mind to read this biography of Renaissance poet John Dunne. It was pretty interesting but extremely random. I found learning about the Renaissance pretty interesting, as for example, that they used to serve a roast pig with a roast chicken posed on top of it, dressed up as a jockey.

It was comforting to learn that despite being today regarded as a major poet, Dunne was in his time as confused as the rest of us. As he explained to his friend in a letter: “I would fain do something.” His problem was figuring out what. He fell madly in love with a rich girl who abandoned her family to be with him. She then spent her entire adult life pregnant, dying in her twelfth childbed at age thirty-three. As I so often reflect in reading about history, THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Interestingly Dunne often wrote his poems in letters to his friends, and did not keep copies. They poems only survive because they were copied by others, and handed around. He had no way of knowing how popular they were. It is quite possible that some of the ones that are most famous today he had already forgotten about in his own lifetime. He eventually went into the church, becoming a famous speaker, with 6,000 people (!) coming to see him at St Paul’s.

Particularly impressive was how he handled his death. As he lay dying, he not only gave instructions for the carving he wanted on his tomb (him, wrapped in his own winding sheet); but also got out of bed and got into his winding sheet, so the artist could sketch it and take his comment. It still stands in Westminster Abbey, being one of the few that survived the Great Fire of London a hundred years later.

LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham

I REALLY loved this one. I have already recommended it to about five people, none of whom seem enthused. It is the real dairies that the author kept as a 19 year old in London during WWII. They brought her huge fame when published in the 1980s, after her granddaughter found them in her attic.

Part of the interest is a day-by-day account of what it was like to live in London during the war. But, curiously, that’s not really most of what it focuses on. She’s a 19 year old girl, so mostly it’s focused on BOYS. She is desperate to lose her virginity, and then when she does, desperate to have an orgasm (takes 4-5 boys, all of whom we learn about). She is very jealous of her friend, who claims she can have one just by leaning on a railing (!) I don’t know what I thought a diary by a wealthy teenage girl in the 1940s was going to be like, but I did not expect it to include the taste of semen (bitter almond, in her opinion)

There is also something exceedingly touching about hearing about someone’s daily life long ago in a city you currently live in. One night, for example, just before the Blitz begins she tell us they: “climbed the hill that looks over Highgate and lay in deck chairs at the top, smoking in the moonlight.”

Or once, when she is with her friend they see an old man on that street

“Dorothea said, ‘That is Professor Freud.’ Back to Chelsea in a tube like an oven.”

Living in Chelsea she meets many artists – Julian McLaren Ross (read his OF LOVE AND HUNGER here), Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas, who gropes her. She volunteers for the WAAF, where she has a job tracking planes. She meets a man who has managed to get out of Poland, and, awfully, no one believes him when he tells them about the concentration camps, thinking it is too dreadful to possibly be true.

I find in writing this summary I struggle to capture what I loved in this book so much. I think it is partly the dailyness of it (cold peas for supper!) and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, who seems to find so much to enjoy in those days.

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn. It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub. You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting. This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story. Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country – might be being staged for her benefit. Things get weirder from there. It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice.

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny. For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.” It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession. At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again. The lesson being:

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”

I like this.

THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver

A fun novel of the near future, in which America slips into hyperinflation and then economic collapse. It was written with real joyful sizzle of wide-eyed surprise and horror, with a strong vibe of this-could-never-happen, which is quite fun for a Zimbabwean, to whom it has already happened.

I have not Wikipedia-ed the author (who I know from the wonderful WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) because I am a little worried about how much time she spends on Twitter reading about questionable topics like Replacement Theory (snore). That said, there were lots of fun parts of this book. I really enjoyed imagining a world in which the young work low-level jobs (the rest taken by robots) and pay 90% tax so the old can live lives of luxury. That feels uncomfortable close to likely to me.

There is lots of juicy writing here. Try this couple, who are well-off but love to bargain hunt:

Which is how they ended up in a pretty drab apartment in Florida: it was a steal. Caught up in money-as-a-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize. Because the only thing that bargain hunting ‘won’ was more money.

Or this, about looking after grandparents:

After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside. To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

Or this, about someone regretting her choices before the collapse:

But assumptions about her angelic nature were off-base. After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely.

I love that phrase – ‘moronic double major.’ This book is full of the author proving to us how wrong we all are and how stupid. I really enjoyed picturing her banging away at her keyboard. Every page absolutely pulses with the rage of the well-fed. It made me LOL.

THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer

There are many novels about unhappy marriages. This is a particularly good one. I had never heard of THE PUMPKIN EATER before, but I am informed by the Introduction that is among the first and most important of the twentieth century. I don’t know about that, but I thought it was banging.

Try this description: “His eyes twinkled as though hung in his head to frighten the birds away”

The book tells the story of a woman on her third marriage, with a large number of children. She gets pregnant again and her husband is not happy, so she agrees to an abortion and sterilization. The day she gets back from the hospital, she finds out he is having an affair. This is back in the day when cheating was more acceptable, but she does not find it to be very okay. To be fair to him, she herself admits she is unhealthily obsessed with children, and especially babies. She makes this interesting summary:

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none. Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers.

I found this so interesting! It’s rare you see this idea expressed, but I think it is in fact very common for married people to be extraordinarily lonely and friend-less, and not even know that they are.

SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

To show there has been a book written about everything, here is one on local government. It is a touching story of a Yorkshire community in the 1930s, covering the rich, the poor, and everything in between.

It’s shockingly contemporary in many ways. Most affecting is the story of a very bright teenage girl whose mother dies giving birth to an eighth child, and who thus has to drop out of school at 15 to look after the other kids Note, the doctor had told the mother she should not have another child, and she did not want one, but I guess she could not refuse her husband, who got a bit drunk and after all it wasn’t his death sentence and THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Also THANK GOD FOR VACCINATION. The author, Winifred Holtby, died at 36, of kidney issues from the Scarlet Fever she had as a child. She knew she had only about two years to live and dedicated it to finishing this book. It was her fifth, and she was disappointed none had been very warmly received. This one, published posthumously, was a huge hit and is now considered a twentieth century classic.

Side bar, this Winifred Holtby was a dear friend of Vera Brittain (whose TESTAMOUNT OF YOUTH I read a couple of years ago). They lived together when they moved to London after university, and then, touchingly/weirdly, carried on doing so even after Vera got married. To answer your question, the husband did not like it, no.

How much do you love this line from the introduction, about how Winifred was in 1935 “staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue of life in London . . .” The distractions and fatigue of a life in London! I hear you Winifred, I hear you.