Tag: Female writer

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. 

AT FREDDIE’S by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald is such an extraordinary writer that I really did not care this novel did not have a plot.  It is about a childrens’ theatre school in the 1960s, run by a woman call Freddie, who is an institution, and knows it. She gets away with a lot :

. . . only because Freddie cared so much, and so relentlessly, for the theatre, where, beyond all other worlds, love given is love returned.  Insane directors, perverted columnists cold as a fish, bankrupt promoters, players incapable from drink, have all forgiven each other and been forgiven, and will be, until the last theatre goes dark, because they loved the profession.  And of Freddie – making a large assumption – they said: her heart is in it.

The story, which does not matter much, is about a new young teacher in whom Freddie discerns: “that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster.”

This made me laugh, as did her first flat in London where:

The interior smelled powerfully of feet.  Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. 

What a writer!

OLAV AUDUNSSON: VOWS by Sigrid Undset

I just had to quit this book, even though it was well-written and impeccably researched.  It was set in thirteenth century Sweden, and was fun journey into that very different world.  It starts with a teenage couple having sex after a night of drunken feasting.  They know they shouldn’t be doing this, as they aren’t formally engaged, but they do it anyway.  And things start to unravel from there.  It may sound unreasonable, but I just had to stop.  Like I appreciate that if you make a bad decision you have to pay the price, but do I need to read a whole book about it?  Like I get it okay ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES and it sucks. 

Especially actions you take when you are young.  When you’re young you end up writing these blank checks (I’ll choose this career, I’ll marry that person) and then life, like some kind of loan shark, just keeps cashing it for decades.

THE WRONG KNICKERS by Bryony Gordon

Here is a memoir that I thought would be a fun canter through someone’s twenties in London. In fact I found it rather triggering. Will sound dumb, but I guess I had never really thought about what it would be like to come up in this city and not be an immigrant. And let me tell you: it’s very different.

It’s wild to imagine what it would be like to feel free to live in your overdraft. The author was of course not happy about struggling to pay her bills, but she kept doing it, because she enjoyed booze and clothes and cigarettes more. I mean: don’t we all? But I guess if you know full well you have a Plan B, in terms of a family home in Fulham to return to, you have that freedom.

If she is in a flat she doesn’t like, she just leaves. Because she has somewhere to go to. Imagine! One time she gets mugged, and she regards that as a good enough reason to go. And so, wildly, does everyone she knows! I can’t even imagine a London with so much mercy in it.

THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears

I chose this on impulse as an audiobook to listen to on a long car ride, and I did not expect to emerge as TEAM BRITNEY. I am not sure what I thought the #freebritney movement was all about, but WOW I did not realize how right they were.

I knew that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was quite common to get rid of difficult women by putting them in asylums, but did not realize how very much this is exactly what happened to one of the more famous pop stars of our generation. Britney’s father knew exactly what he was doing, because both his mother, and his step-mother, were put in asylums by his father. I am not saying Britney is 100% well, but she was well enough to be forced to do Vegas shows 7 times a week, tour the world, go on morning TV shows, etc. She certainly was well enough to have her own cell phone and choose her own boyfriends and eat french fries if she wanted to!

I can’t believe it went on for thirteen years! It is an appalling story. I recommend it. Britney had a wild and interesting life even before she was imprisoned in plain sight by her father, and it makes for a great memoir.

NORMAL WOMEN by Ainslie Hogarth

There were lots of bits of this book that I liked. Try this:

One of the cats levitated to the porch railing, where it lifted its leg, long and straight as a geometry compass, and made a noisy, jubilant feast of its asshole.

Or this, in a mall food court:

They saw men’s pale legs. Frail as roots. Buried all winter. Exposed, now, too soon. Cold. Tortured. Standing in line for fast food. Bringing their trays to small tables, tucking in the attached chairs, alone, knees pointing in opposite directions. Too much thing. Unsettling tendons. Dry knees. Leg hair. White socks. Sneakers.

But in the end I could not finish it. I just got too irritated. It was about a rich woman who never organized herself to have a real job, and now that she is married and a full-time mom, is anxious about unlikely scenarios in which her husband can no longer earn money. I mean I sort of feel for her but on the other hand she is so checked out she doesn’t even know whether their mortgage is expensive for them or not. I mean?!? It just seemed super-whiny. Suffragettes did not go to jail for this I can tell you that much.

THE TRIO by Johanna Hedman

I had a lot of confused feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was quite more-ish, and I finished it very quickly.  On the other hand, I felt kind of annoyed, and I can’t really explain why.  It tells the story of a sort of love triangle involving undergraduates in Stockholm.  If this is giving you fun TWILIGHT vibes, let me stop you right there.  It is way more tortured than that, and ends with the girl getting with the wrong guy.  Mostly because they DON’T COMMUNICATE.  I was like: just talk to each other! How hard is it to say: are you my boyfriend?!  Or: my feelings were hurt when . . .

Not to sound like I’m so perfect at relationships, but jesus.  Also annoying was the almost mind-boggling level of safety in which these Swedish people live.  It is deeply disorienting to read a book, especially a book about young people, that is not drenched in economic anxiety. 

I spent a good 4000 pages in Stockholm a few years ago (shout out to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s MY STRUGGLE) so I feel eerily familiar with the upper-middle class of this city that I have never even visited.  This book is very much of that world. There is a lot of describing grocery story visits and eating simple and healthy foods (grr!).  There’s also a lot of this kind of writing:

That summer, August and I would bike to Djurgarden in the mornings, and pick a tree close to the water where we’d park our bikes and lay out our towels and then spend the day swimming, sunning and reading.  I’d bring a thermos of coffee and August would come with tuna sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil.  The empty wrapping glittered in the sun after we’d eaten.

That last sentence in particular gives you a flavour of what we are dealing with.

DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT by Diana Athill

Athill’s writing is just so completely clean and unpretentious it feels like a near-miracle. I am close to having read all her books, and am going slow, because I don’t want them to be over. Her memoir INSTEAD OF A LETTER was a searing story of getting dumped, while SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is an only slight more searing story of what it is like to get old. This is not memoir, but fiction, and I did not like it quite as much.

It tells the story of a young woman who gets to move to London after the second world war. The freedom that I, fifty years later, take for granted, is for her and her friends completely unexpected and thrilling. She gets a job (!), has sex (!!), and meets immigrants (!!!). She is also a pretty cold-hearted tease. She’s a very pretty woman, and is not too bothered about making it clear when she is not interested. I don’t want to be too judgmental, but I found it really pretty mean.

Let’s close with a lovely snippet, about her arguing with her mother as a child: “If I sulked and cried I could usually make my mother cry too – during our rows we would sob rage and frustration at each other – but she always won because an adult’s tears are more frightening than a child’s . . “

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood

It’s incredible how any time a book is really weird you can tell it is written from life. This one is really loopy, being a thinly fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandmother and grandmother. The great-gran is pretty intense, being a rigid and lonely old woman who spoke to no one but her one-eyed servant for months at a time. Eerily she spends most of all day in a hard-backed chair, in total idleness, not even reading a book. Her grandmother meanwhile appears to have had some kind of post-partum psychosis, believing in fairies and elves and trying to kill her son who she thought was a changeling. A lot of the action of the book takes place in a crumbling Irish stately home, which her grandfather does not have the money to keep up. I find it strange how many books there are about how difficult it is to have an inheritance. I’d like to give it a try.

This book apparently was denied the Booker because Philip Larkin, chair of the committee, thought it could not be classified as fiction. I have no evidence but you just know he thought women talking about their own lives was low value. It’s a good thing I love AN ARUNDEL TOMB so much or I would have a lot more to say on this.

THE ART OF SCANDAL by Regina Black

This book sounded like it was going to be fun. A politician’s wife finds out her husband has been cheating on her, and agrees to a payment of $1M to stick with him till the next election cycle. It didn’t quite work for me though. I thought it was going to be fun and silly but in fact it was rather bleak and sad. And there was quite a lot of therapy speak. Not my kind of book I guess.