Winifred Holtby's 1932 Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir, recently reissued with a preface by her biographer, Marion Shaw. A wonderful book. It's not just that, being written before Woolf got almost buried under the output of the Woolf + general Bloomsbury industry, it comes over as fresh and reading her without all that accretion barnacling up the work and the life. It also reveals Holtby as a sympathetic and insightful critic able to enter into methods and approaches quite different from her own, perhaps not surprising since Hotlby had been a serious reviewer for a good decad, Full of wonderful insights, not just into VW's work but into literature, criticism, women writers, the relationship of the writer to their historical epoch, etc etc more generally.
Two autobiographies by feminists of my own generation, more or less, Michele Roberts, Paper Houses: A Memoir of the 70s and Beyond (2007) and Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007): are very different in their style and the stories they tell, one by a writer (though with some involvement in activism) and one by an academic and activist, but both deal with the excitement of the 'second wave' of feminism and the 'sexual revolution', as well as issues around ageing and changing and finding oneself in different positions at different life stages. Both worth reading.
As usual, caused to rave with enthusiasm by Ronald Hutton, this time with The Druids: A History (2007), which is all that one might expect from him on figures who have become Rorschach blots for a range of different interests, not always complementary, indeed could be diametrically opposed.
Joanna Russ, The Country you have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007). Excellent insightful genre criticism informed by a passionate feminism. There are some writers whose criticism one can enjoy even if one has not read/seen/heard the works in question (and has no great desire to in some cases), and Russ is among these, using particular examples as a way in to talking about broader aesthetic and political issues.
Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (2007). Lots of blissikins, do admit, althouh the latter parts are a bit sad with them all getting older, suffering various forms of disability, and dying (and Nancy's prolonged death is always harrowing), and also getting even crankier as well. But still, well worth the reading.
Katharine Whitehorn, Selective Memory: An Autobiography (2007). Some passages perhaps do echo a little too closely earlier journalistic accounts of e.g. being at Roedean, but on the whole, great stuff from someone who recognises the role of luck and chance and familial and husbandly support in becoming a successful woman journalist at a time before the 'Second Wave' and who does consider that, taken all round, things have improved. Also, portrait of a marriage (to the thriller writer Gavin Lyall) which was both clearly wonderful in ways that are still quite rare in terms of actively supporting her having a career.
Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (2007) - read with a view to review, noted here as excellent study of ideas and practices about personal and environmental cleanliness, grooming, etc, over a long historical sweep, with lots of anecdotal details.
Clara Greed, Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets (2003). Greed is asking the right questions and having the right sort of insights and if anyone ever, finally, wants to do serious historical research on the subject it would be a very good place to start. This study is an exemplar of how attention to some specific, neglected (and in this case, source of jokes), topic can be an enormously productive way into much bigger questions. Like the ways in which being 'gender-neutral' favours men (women's needs are not identical to those of men, but most planners, builders, etc, are men). Like the attitudes towards women in public space and their needs which still inflect the under-provision of public loos and their accessibility if provided - far fewer than those for the other sex, a long tradition of women having to pay to 'spend a penny' even when men don't, the tendency to close them in the evening, etc. Like the attitudes towards men and their bodily needs - 'we need to provide loos or they will foul the streets', combined with attitudes that regard male public conveniences as potentially perilous sites of vandalism and/or cottaging (which may lead to closures of women's conveniences to which these issues do not apply). What comes over is that the person for whom services are (if grudgingly) provided is assumed to be default male, default fit, not suffering from any of the problems of ageing, and not encumbered with either children or heavy burdens (Greed is incisive about the bizarre decision-making that leads to subterranean ladies' and gents' on railway stations, of all places). The whole work embodies a vision of what a truly civilised urban (though not solely urban) environment might look like that took account of the diversity of people's basic physical needs - not just evacuation,
Audacia Ray, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration (2007): neither point and gape at the weirdos, but nor is it completely uncritically 'oooooh the cyberworld is all coooool funnnnn!' Ray maintains a nice positioning of authorial stance between the recognition that yes, online developments have enabled women to explore and enjoy aspects of their sexuality, and a keen apprehension that there are dangers out there. Ray is connected to a tradition of thinking critically about the ways in which female sexuality is constructed within our culture(s), as well as being alive to the possibilities of sexual delight and enjoymen, and is Ray is also alive to issues of power and privilege and their imbalances.
Clemence Dane, London has a Garden (1964). An absolutely enchanting combination of personal reminiscence and anecdotal history of Covent Garden by someone clearly quite besotted with the place and its past. Delightful.
Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (2004): a really, really good biography: not only masses of research both on Rathbone, her family, her associates, etc, but also on all the various causes she was involved with and their context. And extremely well-written. Makes useful and plausible suggestions beyond what the documentation says (and Rathbone and her long-time companion who survived her did a lot of pruning of the personal record) but doesn't go out into the realms of wild speculation.
Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen, and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British Society 1920-1991: People of a Special Mould (2005). An excellent study of the actual people who joined the CPGB, their trajectories in doing so and within the Party. It's so good over all (on issues of gender, class, narratives/life stories, generation, etc) that I can even forgive them for getting Stella Browne dead wrong and only giving her about half a sentence.
Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E. H. Young (2006). Mostly about Young (who I have now started reading, with great admiration and pleasure), but includes h a fair amount on other writers in the area. Mmajor points for mentioning books by Stella Gibbons besides Cold Comfort Farm and and the non-Provincial Lady works by Delafield (among other things). Generally an excellent study of this neglected genre.
Catherine Clay, British Women Writers 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship (2006). I've been waiting for years for someone to look at women's friendship and networks during the first half of the C20th and the studies are finally starting to come along. This one is about (loosely speaking) the circles around the feminist cultural journal Time and Tide, which are fascinating in themselves. Many plus points for dealing with the ambivalences and the rivalry and competition and the bitterness of failed friendships. Also for the ways in which Clay shows the interweaving of work and personal relationships and promoting someone's work interests being about emotional as well as professional bonds, and her examination of the way communicating about writing was central in so many of these relationships. Lots of fascinating thought-provoking stuff in here. It goes a long way towards exploding the pernicious myth that women were shying away from intense friendships because of sexologically induced paranoia over being identified as 'inverted'. This may have created tensions and issues, but it didn't actually stop the relationships themselves. Which were (mostly) fruitful, supportive, nurturing, productive.
Jenna Bailey, Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty years of friendship through a secret magazine (2007): about one of my own pet interests - pre-internet virtual communities, in this instance a women's correspondence club, not 'secret' (that is a bit silly, but I suspect publisher's hand in title silliness), but consisting of regular budgets of articles by the members that only circulated among that restricted group. Very, very good: my only complaints are, it would have been nice to have even more selections (but length was alas presumably an issue) and I'd have liked, but this is probably a whole different project, some analysis of the dynamics of the group and of the changes over time and life-cycle of what people wrote about, how much, etc (as well as the obvious issues like the responeses to ageing).
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007). An excellent study, in spite of the somewhat problematic use of the famous disciplining daughters correspondence from The Englishwoman's Domestic Journal, and rather uncritical deployment of the unfortunately Famous Factoid about Victorian Doctors and Hysteria. But points for noticing that female friendship is widely prevalent and mostly positive in the Victorian novel, and that friendship preoccupied women in their letters and diaries. Also for some intriguing suggestions about the pleasures of fashion plates, and girls and their dollies.
***
Fiction (mostly)
Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown (1944): Sharp's great strength is about gently unsettling assumptions and foregrounding the eccentric and the quirky. It's decades since I last read this, and it holds up very well indeed.
Latest in series by Margaret Maron, Winter's Child (Knott) (2007), Marcia Muller, Vanishing Point (McCone) (2006), J A Jance Dead Wrong (Joanna Brady) (2006): all of which good and up to standard.
Annette Meyers, Hedging (2006). A return to her Smith and Wetzon mysteries set in the New York financial world with some digressions into the theatre. Giving one's series protag amnesia + someone trying to kill her does sound a bit like desperate kick-starting, but once that's been swallowed, it had all the strengths of this series, which I like a lot.
Jo Walton, Ha'penny (2007). Possibly even better than Farthing. Still spot on for period and milieu. Absolutely wonderful, the sense of how people were reacting and changing in different ways in response to the political situation, the complex dynamics of personal relationships (the Larkin sisters, Carmichael and Jack, Viola and her theatrical associates).
Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves (2007). There have been comments on the fresh and gritty take on the animal-companion-bonding trope (and the male-male sex), but it's doing broader interesting things with questions about gender and power and contrasting models of social organisation. Also, I liked that the real threat was not that the trolls were Eeeevil in themselves, but climate change. All of this forms a solid substructure to an absolutely compelling story.
Ursula Le Guin, Powers (2007). This was very good, set in the same world as Gifts and Voices but taking it from yet another angle. Not readily boiled down to any kind of simple message, I felt that there was a contrast being set up between Gavir's unreliable and problematic power of seeing into the future and the stronger and less ambiguous power of story-telling and words.
Kage Baker, Sons of Heaven (2007). This has been such a long complex series that one wondered how it was ever going to be drawn to a conclusion, but this did it rather well, if with less gosh-bang-wow than might have been anticipated. All the threads were compelling in themselves, the outcome was - unexpected, and even immortals shown as capable of change.
Barbara Hambly, Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers (2007). Very much about the invisible but vital labour of women, about marrying into a job, about the conflicting duties that had to be negotiated and the sacrifices made, and the bonds between women even when there were other sources of conflict and hostility (symbolised perhaps by the mirror given by Marie Antoinette to Martha Washington). Hambly is always good on not making historical characters anachronistically modern in their outlook and assumptions.
Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven (2007). There have been rather mixed opinions about this, but I enjoyed it. Perhaps not my all-time top McKinley, but still pretty good: doing that thing which she does so well, which is actually describe a process in a way that makes it just as exciting as more obvious slash-and-bash action.
Naomi Novik, Empire of Ivory (2007). O the sheer thrill of discovering this in an otherwise uninspired bookshop! This took some very unexpected directions (insofar as I had expectactions). As with previous volumes, leaves one longing for more.
Sarah Monette, The Bone Key (2007).A linked series in the 'creepy tales of the supernatural genre', done with absolutely spot-on voice and general tone, and, what one doesn't usually get with this sort of thing, the narrator (I don't think one can exactly call him a protag) does develop over the course of the episodes, is affected by them, is not just a recording device.
Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales 2: In the Cities of Coin and Spice (2007). This was lovely: lush, intertwining stories folding in and out of one another, spiralling rather than linear, echoing rather than reiterating a range of world-wide folktales. Now want to find the time to read both volumes together and pick up even more on the connections and resonances.
Making my way through the novels of E H Young: firstly William (1925), which was indeed a splendid example of the domestic realistic mode in its depiction of the complex interactions within a single family, then The Misses Mallett (1922), Miss Mole (1930), Chatterton Square (1947), Jenny Wren (1932) and its sequel The Curate's Wife (1934). Young is always good, but I think I prefer her works which are more about the problems of women later on in life, although her account of the first months after marriage in The Curate's Wife is very well done.
Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2005): very little in the way of dramatic action going on (at least, in the present of the book rather than the past on which the narrator reflects, and even then it's less his personal past than that of his forebears), but an absolutely wonderful and compelling read.
Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water (2007) Each individual scene was good and gripping, but possibly a second reading would enable a better sense of the bigger picture of which they were a part. But far preferable to something where the overall arc is quite clear but the narrative path taken to get there thin.
Elizabeth Bear, New Amsterdam (2007). A gripping series of linked tales in an AU late nineteenth/early twentieth century. I am picky about the use of alternative history (though having an AU in which sorcery, wampyrs and so forth exist perhaps might provide some degree of pass) but this didn't ever have me grinding my teeth and enquiring 'if x changed at [particular point], how is that y is still the case at [point at which book is set]'. Dense, complex, allusive. Excellent.
Vera Nazarian, Dreams of the Compass Rose (2004). Lovely non-European trope fantasy: not just the setting, but the narrative, suggests entirely different traditions.
Jo-Ann Goodwin, Sweet Gum (2006). This was a compelling if rather odd literary thriller, set in parts of London adjacent to where I live. Partly it's in an (excellent) realist-thriller mode, but keeps veering off into gothic grue. I feel it would have helped to have known Spenser's The Faerie Queen better than I do, since presumably the use of passages as epigraphs, and some character name echoes, was meant to have some resonance.
Jane Haddam, Glass Houses (2007). As good as ever, and starts resolving a situation that has been hanging over the last few volumes. The usual complex gallery of characters.
Susan Palwick, Shelter (2007). This was rather long and I kept picking it up and putting it down but eventually got dragged into it, in spite of the fact that neither of the main viewpoint characters is particularly sympathetic. And in spite of the fact that fairly near future vaguely dystopic society setting is far from being one of my favourites.
Elizabeth Bear, Undertow (2007). Good, engaging, yet somehow not, for me, quite as effective as some of Bear's other work. Which is still leaves it pretty good and above the average.
Emma Bull, Territory (2007). Long-awaited, and did not disappoint. A brilliant essay at producing an American mythic fantasy, embedded in a well-researched and convincing historical reconstruction of how the Old West of the cowboy movies actually was: i.e. including women, Chinese, etc, usually absent or vague scene-setting figures lacking stories of their own. My only cavil is that it's clearly not a self-contained novel but leading to further developments. However, I can live with that, providing I don't have to wait quite so long for the next installment.
Sarah Monette, The Mirador (2007). This was absolutely wonderful. To some extent it's filling in various bits of back story from previous volumes, it also does some great stuff in complexifying some of the characters from earlier episodes, The problems due to characters not communicating are for obvios and plausible reasons, rather than being an otherwise inexplicable necessity to keep the plot going.
Sherwood Smith, The Fox (2007). There are a lot of things that she's doing here that I really love, which said, I enjoyed this slightly less than Inda. I would have liked more about the apparently quieter yet still important things various characters not involved in maritime derring-do were up to, which was such a strong point in Inda. But I am really looking forward to what happens next.
Sharon Shinn. The Thirteenth House (2006). As with Mystic and Rider (2005) at the outset I was thinking "bog-standard generic fantasy, and not even hints of ambiguity" and then found it absolutely rivetting and hard to put down, because of the well-drawn characters and the realistic conflicts of motivation they experience. Dark Moon Defender (2007) kept up the standard.
Currently working through the novels of May Sinclair, as and when I can get hold of them, so far The Divine Fire(1904), The Helpmate, (1908), The Romantic (1920) and Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922). Sing hey for cheapish POD editions of this hard to find author. Most recently: The Belfry (aka Tasker Jevons) (1916). What a compelling writer Sinclair can be: picks one up and grabs one and makes one keep reading. This addresses a number of issues that crop up in her work - cross-class relationships, competition and envy between writers, courage and cowardice. Gripping. Also read, The Judgement of Eve (1907)
George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880). Cable was recommended by Dame Rebecca West in her Paris Review interview as an unjustly forgotten writer. In spite of the phonetically rendered dialect, and long expository chunks of backstory narration, this novel of New Orleans life just after the Louisiana Purchase held up pretty well.
Grace Aguilar, Women's Friendship: A Tale of Domestic Life (1850). Not bad, and surprisingly readable in spite of some deeply unrealistic emotional dialogue and some rather melodramatic happenings for a proclaimed novel of domestic life.
Jill Paton Walsh, The Bad Quarto (2007). A vast improvement after the falling-off in her previous Imogen Quy mystery (Debts of Dishonour), sticking more closely to Cambridge and its idiosyncrasies and traditions (e.g. climbing architectural features).
Elizabeth Bear, The Chains That You Refuse (2006). I am sometimes a bit iffy about short stories, but these were gripping, and likely to be gone back to and savoured.
Edward St Aubyn, Mother's Milk (2006). This was very good indeed. It was a little hard to get into at first, as the first section is from the viewpoint of a prenaturally thoughtful and analytic five-year-old, but once in this really grabbed. It's the continuing story of Patrick from Some Hope, now married and with children but finding that although he has managed not to replicate his own father's appalling defects as husband and parent, he's still in a state of misery, anger and near-alcoholism, as well as facing serious issues with his dying mother. It gains from having read the preceding volumes, but I think it would also stand on its own.
Winifred Holtby's 1932 Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir, recently reissued with a preface by her biographer, Marion Shaw. A wonderful book. It's not just that, being written before Woolf got almost buried under the output of the Woolf + general Bloomsbury industry, it comes over as fresh and reading her without all that accretion barnacling up the work and the life. It also reveals Holtby as a sympathetic and insightful critic able to enter into methods and approaches quite different from her own, perhaps not surprising since Hotlby had been a serious reviewer for a good decad, Full of wonderful insights, not just into VW's work but into literature, criticism, women writers, the relationship of the writer to their historical epoch, etc etc more generally.
