Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth

Although many may think of Jane Austen as the first major woman novelist in English, there were some others even earlier who were very popular in their time. Then they fell into obscurity, until scholars rediscovered them in the last 40 years. Two of these who wrote just before Austen were Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840) and Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). Both cared about and wrote about women's lives and women's rights. Burney's fiction often dealt with the constrictions of women's lives; she also bravely wrote about her own unanesthesized mastectomy. Her best novels are "Evelina" (1778), "Cecilia" (1782), and "Camilla" (1796). Edgeworth was Irish, and wrote about the need for better education for girls and women; she was a businesswoman, serving as property manager for her father's extensive holdings. Her best novel is "Belinda" (1801). I was very happy to find these novels some years ago, and enjoyed them thoroughly. They are gripping stories, deeply steeped in women's lives.

Los Angeles fiction

I was just in Los Angeles for a few days, and its gorgeous weather, abundant green foliage, vivid bougainvillea, and stretches of stunning beaches were all so appealing, and so evocative of all the Los Angeles novels and movies we have all read and seen. (We won't talk about the terrible traffic and the smog....) Even the street names are so familiar, so intensely L.A.: Sunset Boulevard, Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Mulholland Drive.... And the different parts of L.A. have such magical names: Venice, Santa Monica, Hollywood.... When I was there this past weekend, for some reason I started thinking about Nathanael West's novel "The Day of the Locust," which portrays the best and worst about L.A. I also thought of Joan Didion's novel "Play It As It Lays," and her essay collection "The White Album"; both of these evoke a sort of part-dreamy, part-alien, part-scorched, part-fertile Los Angeles - all the stereotypes, all the contradictions we all know, but so beautifully expressed as only Didion can. I also remembered living in Glendale for a few months as a child, near the famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, and so thought too of Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One," the satirical novel about the funeral industry set in L.A. and featuring a very Forest Lawn-reminiscent cemetery. Although it has been many years since I read any of these books, each of them sticks with me - not the details or even characters or plots, but the feelings, the atmospheres, the tones. Although as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I occasionally criticize Los Angeles, there is something seductive about it, something mythic, something that draws you in.

Louisa May Alcott

As a child, I loved, and reread many times, Louisa May Alcott's books: Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Under the Lilacs, and Jack and Jill. Of course Little Women and its two sequels were my favorites. I loved the strength of the girls, especially Jo; the warmth of the family scenes; the relationships among the girls; Jo's writing; the innocent but fraught romances; the pathos of Beth's illness and death; and so much more. I couldn't get enough of these books. However, when I reread some of them with my daughter, and again when I taught Little Women in a Women's Literature class, I noticed what I had mainly missed or perhaps overlooked as a child: the heavily didactic aspect of Alcott's novels. Almost every chapter in Little Women has some kind of explicit, spelled-out lesson about life: be good to those who are poor, don't hold a grudge, control your temper, don't be vain... I think Alcott felt that a book during that time period -- especially a book that was, very subtly, a bit subversive about female roles -- had to prove its moral worth through these lessons; she was probably right. Still, despite the heavyhanded didactic aspect, I will always love these books, especially Little Women.

"The Lake Shore Limited"

It is hard to judge the place of Sue Miller's novels. They have elements of the popular, of the middlebrow, and of the literary. They are well written, but seem to be aimed at a popular audience. In any case, they are always enjoyable to read, and often thought-provoking as well. I just listened to her latest novel, "The Lake Shore Limited" (Knopf, 2010) on CD (Books on Tape, 2010); the author reads the novel herself, which adds to listeners' enjoyment. The foundation of the story, which takes place mostly in Boston and New Hampshire, is the death of Gus - a young teacher - on one of the doomed planes on September 11, 2001. Gus' sister Leslie, who has been almost like a mother to him, mourns him deeply, and becomes even closer than she had been before to Gus' girlfriend, the playwright Billy, assuming they share the same sorrow. But Billy's feelings had secretly been more ambivalent before the tragedy, which makes her uncomfortable with Leslie now. She feels trapped into pretending to something she doesn't feel. Billy's true feelings are indirectly revealed in her latest play, which is attended by Leslie, her husband Pierce, and their friend Sam, whom Leslie hopes will develop a relationship with Billy; Leslie feels it is time for both Sam (who is divorced) and Billy to find love again. After the play is over, we are taken backward in time to various histories of each character, and forward in time to see what happens after the night of the play. The characters are engaging, and we become involved with their stories, feeling pity, dismay, and hope. Some of the characters are less likable than others: Leslie is the one everyone likes, while Billy is more reserved and prickly, perhaps understandably so, but is ultimately sympathetic. I recommend this novel.

Possible Brief Pause

Dear readers, I will be very involved in a (happy) family event over the next three days, so may or may not post on Friday and Saturday; if not before, I will definitely be back with a post on Sunday. Thanks, as always, for reading this blog (and do please tell your reading friends about it!). -- Stephanie

Browsing in Libraries

I have praised libraries and librarians here before; today I write specifically about the pleasures of browsing in libraries. I like browsing in bookstores as well, especially when I want to see what is new. But browsing in libraries has its own particular joys. A few days ago, for example, after what had been a while, I was in our university library with a little time to spare. I started by looking for books by and about Sarah Orne Jewett, about whom I posted on May 2, 2010; I thought I would enjoy rereading some of her work. After I found what I wanted, I remembered that I had been thinking lately about a trio of British women writers who have some similarities, whom I hadn't read for many years, and whom I had been idly considering revisiting: Muriel Spark, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Iris Murdoch. But I had just read a review of a new, rather unflattering biography of Spark; I also remembered that when I reread Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" a few years ago, I liked it much less than when I originally read it in my twenties. So I made the perhaps shallow decision to skip rereading Spark for the time being. I then found, browsed through, and picked up a couple of novels each by the other two writers. (These may well appear in future posts here.) Then I happened to see on the shelf, very near to the Murdoch books, several titles by Penelope Mortimer. I had read novels by her years ago, and had a vague memory of enjoying them, so decided to choose two novels by her as well. As I passed by various shelves, I stopped for a minute or two here and there to look at various other books, but since I had a mini-tower of books in hand already, I decided I had better stop adding to the tower, and went downstairs to check out my chosen books. It is hard to explain how much pleasure I got from my leisurely roaming through the stacks, stopping here and there, making pleasant decisions about WHICH Murdoch, WHICH Mortimer, to choose, holding various books - some quite old, each with its own history of former readers - in my hands as I skimmed through their pages, reading tantalizing passages here and there, even smelling whiffs of the particular scent of books, and knowing that there were so many more possibilities, so many more books yet to read. What a delicious hour that was!

"The Bradshaw Variations": Switching Roles

I had read and liked novels by British writer Rachel Cusk before, most recently and most notably "Arlington Park" (2007), so when I heard she had published a new novel, "The Bradshaw Variations" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), I sought it out. It tells the story of a married couple, Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann, and their year of switching traditional gender roles. Tonie accepts a demanding full-time administrative position at her university, and Thomas stays home to take care of their eight-year-old daughter and to spend time on his music. On the surface, everyone is agreeable and all is well, but certain cracks in the marriage begin to appear, as difficult adjustments are made. Family members are more or less supportive, yet some - subtly or not so subtly - cast doubts on and undermine the arrangement. These family members are almost as central to the story as Thomas and Tonie: Thomas' brothers and their wives, Thomas' quirky parents, and Tonie's awful mother and father. These are all vividly portrayed, each with his or her own backstory. There is much talk among them, much analysis, much taking of emotional temperatures. Despite this, for some reason the characters seem a bit bloodless; although the book focuses on a topic that is of great interest to me (gender roles), I found it hard to care very much about the characters. However, Cusk writes very well, the story is mildly enjoyable, and I never considered stopping reading the novel. It does make readers think about issues of family, marriage, and gender.