The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010). Selected fugitive articles and reviews, some previously unpublished pieces, covering her work from the 20s to the 70s.
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Academic/Non-Fiction
The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010). Selected fugitive articles and reviews, some previously unpublished pieces, covering her work from the 20s to the 70s.
Alison Oram, Her Husband was a Woman!: Women's gender-crossing and twentieth century British popular culture (2007). Very highly recommended study which covers a wide range of material on women and gender-crossing in the first half of the C20th
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 (2008). Not perhaps quite such radically new territory, but expanding our understanding of male same-sex relationships in the later C19th.
Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (2009): excellent: numerous fascinating figures I had not known about, wish I had managed to get to the actual exhibition
Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (2009). Review to be published, one-word verdict: excellent.
Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (2009): review in progress - contains really excellent thought-provoking material.
Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2010): a tremendously enjoyable read, full of many wonderful titbits of research into issues of female self-presentation, its changing codes, the changing emphases, the development of all sorts of products and practices. There may be further explorations and analyses to be made but this is a wonderful introduction to a complex topic.
Gwyneth Jones, Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics (2009). Full of sharp and interesting critical thoughts,
Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman (2009). Good to see a new generation of women writing feminist theory/polemic, grappling with the difficulty of finding a solid feminist footing in today's society, Some excellent and telling points and a good sense of the importance of a historical perspective. From a Zero Books, who seem to specialise in these short works: perhaps a slight feeling that it's aimed at the short-attention-span generation.
Lynn Sacco, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History (2009). Though placed in a broader historical context of changing attitudes, the core of this book deals with responses to the prevalence of vulvo-vaginitis, a genital affliction found in young girls (caused by gonnorhoeal infection). On the basis of horrendously tenuous evidence doctors, social workers, etc, made huge efforts to argue for its non-sexual origin, rather than actual sexual transmission by some male relative or household member. Solid and dense study on a horrifying and depressing subject.
Eibhear Walshe, Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (2006). A readable biography of this writer whom I have recently been rediscovering (or perhaps properly discovering for the first time, since I read Mary Lavelle many years ago but none of the others I think).
Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (eds) Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). A bit of a mixed bag - perhaps too wide-rangingly interdisciplinary? - but some really excellent stuff in there on this ever-interesting and relevant topic.
Michael Swanwick, Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (2009). A remarkable effort at digging up information on a fascinating and rather cryptic figurre who seems almost not to have wanted to be found.
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007). Some of this was fairly familiar territory, e.g. the problematic constructionist vs essentialist debates on sexuality, but this was a thought-provoking read .
Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (2009): anyone who sets out to write a short history of anything at all is not going to please all of the people all of the time. I have some issues around what was in and what was out in this volume, but it was well worth reading, even if I don't think it's the whole story. Recommended even if I do have some cavils.
***
Fiction (mostly)
Jane Smiley, Private Life (2010). Good as ever, but a rather grim study of a bad marriage.
Kathleen Norris, Martie - The Unconquered (1917). The first thing I've read by Norris - who has been recommended to me from several directions, and I can see why.
Kate O'Brien, The Flower of May (1953). Another excellent novel from O'Brien.
Susan Lanigan, A Trifle (2010). Ebook from Smashwords. Intense and disturbing.
Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's (1945). I had previously tended to bounce off Taylor, but giving her another try and now getting on with her a lot better.
Eleanor Arnason, Mammoths of the Great Plains (2010), a brilliant novella.
Fumi Yoshinaga's manga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers 1 2 3 (2009-10) - I can seldom get on with manga, but I found this gender-reversal alternate history very compelling.
Walter Jon Williams, This Is Not A Game (2009).Strong female protagonist, moral complexity, gripping narrative.
Three of Lee Martin's Deb Ralston mysteries which I had managed to miss when they came out, found via the excellent Stop You're Killing Me! site, an invaluable guide to mysteries and their authors. The Day That Dusty Died (1993), Inherited Murder (1994), The Thursday Club (1997). Inherited Murder had a perhaps rather too intricate plot, but this is generally an excellent series and I wish it was continuing.
Delighted to see a new Barbara Hambly Benjamin January mystery, Dead and Buried (2010). Although the previous one ended on a note that could reasonably have considered to have been a point of completion, I was very glad that these were continuing. The standard remains high.
Victoria Janssen, The Moonlight Mistress (2009): an erotic supernatural romance which I greatly enjoyed - the World War I setting works extremely well.
Noel Streatfeild, The Whicharts (1931), reissued by Margin Notes Books, an adult and darker version of Ballet Shoes - three daughters of the same philanderer by different mothers, brought up by another of his mistresses, become stage children. In a rather different tone to her 'Susan Scarlett' romances, but very readable.
Re-read, the first time for many years, Irene Handl's extraordinary duology The Sioux (1965) and The Gold-Tip Pfitzer (1973), possibly not everybody's cup of tea, but still for me utterly compelling, the reverse of sentimental (in spite of the centrality of a dreadfully ill and suffering child), with moments of comedy, jolts of shock, and heartbreak.
Barbara Hambly, Homeland: A Novel (2009). Epistolary novel told in letters between two women, in the lead-up to and the outbreak of the American Civil War and its duration, one in the North and one in the South and both at somewhat of a slant to the communities around them. Beautifully done. I also enjoyed Hambly's historical detective novel published under the name of Barbara Hamilton, set in Boston just before the Revolution, The Ninth Daughter. Have also read with pleasure two graphic novels of a proposed trilogy by Hambly, Anne Steelyard: The Garden of Emptiness (2008-2009)
E H Young, The Vicar's Daughter (1928). Rationing out these as I don't have many of hers left.. Well up to standard - complex familial dynamics, piercing insights, and a surprising twist at the end.
Sherwood Smith, Treason's Shore (2009) - a really great conclusion to this compelling and complex sequence.
Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices (1941). Excellent novel by O'Brien, set in an Irish convent school just before the Great War, the intersection between the troubled (English) Reverend Mother and a young pupil (and less depressing, ultimately, than Frost in May). More recently read - perhaps not quite as good but still very well worth reading, The Last of Summer (1943) and Pray for the Wanderer (1938), which deal with similar themes of someone used to a more cosmopolitan milieu returning to a family they have never met or have been estranged from in the provinical Irish world of 'Mellick'.
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