Austen fans, a (not modern) book for you!!

It's not one of those modern takes, but an almost contemporaneous title I'd missed

KIDS. This was the best discovery, and I will be re-reading it this summer for sure. Maybe you remember that in January, even though I’m trying not to buy any books I don’t intend to basically take home and read that night, I was in Beacon Hill Books, where they have an entire shelf dedicated to books published by Persephone Books… no! You don’t! Because I thought I wrote about it but I did not…I only thought I did.

Okay, background: Persephone Books “reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century”. (It’s also a bookstore in Bath, how perfect is that? I have been to Bath all of once but I would go back in a heartbeat.) And the books all have lovely simple classic covers and I would read very nearly any one I took off the shelf, and I could not resist these two:

The Making of a Marchioness (1901) by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Mariana (1940) by Monica Dickens

I mean, Frances Hodgson Burnett! HOW MANY TIMES have I read The Little Princess or The Secret Garden? Only seventy-billion. I didn’t even know she’d written something like 70 total books and plays, was wildly popular in the vein of Dickens and supported her family in great style on her earnings. And had very very modern views, based on bitter experience, of women’s role in society, marriage, etc—and yet was still a total (if slightly embittered) romantic. I’d say, how did I not know this, but the answer is pretty much the reason Persephone Books exists—because female.

So of course I snatched this up. FHB lived later than Austen, so the book isn’t Regency, it’s Victorian but still—things, they had not changed much. It’s the gloriously, shamelessly romantic but also somewhat cynically narrated story of a woman rescued from a life of gentil poverty that would almost certainly end in a workhouse by a Marquess, largely for practical reasons but of course they fall in love in the (deeply melodramatic but at that point who cares) end.

Fans of The Little Princess or The Secret Garden will totally recognize her style and way of structuring a drama. Fans of Austen will be so on board for the fact that almost a century after Austen’s death, marriage is still almost the only option for a “well-born*” Englishwoman. And also it’s just—it’s so OLD SCHOOL. You can sink right into the grand houses, the people, the way they gossip about one another, the village fete… look, it’s not Austen. It’s Austen by way of Dickens at his most magazine serial cliffhanger. But it vibes right in there, and if you have not read it (it’s far from unknown, and a better student of women’s lit than I would have been there already) can I just tell you…. move heaven and earth, friend, by way of the sometimes wonderful internet, and get yourself a nice fat paper copy and settle in.

I also grabbed Mariana, by Monica Dickens, because I have read her memoir One Pair of Hands multiple times (it sits right next to Diary of a Provincial Lady, which sits next to Betty McDonald’s The Egg and I and both of those go right along with FHB and Shirley Jackson as authors whose partners could not handle their success and then things happen… that’s basically a cliche at this point but I digress.)

One Pair of Hands (1939) is a story of the tail end of the era when “well bred* Englishwomen” always had “an extra pair of hands” to do jobs ranging from pretty much everything to just the floor scrubbing to cooking, and M.Dickens (Great-granddaughter of C. Dickens!) being “well bred*” but poor herself, had basically no idea how to do any of it, making this a bit of an early stunt memoir and very entertaining. No idea how Mariana will be. Will report back!

**please know I use these phrases with full air quotes and eye rolls

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The Berry Pickers update: Last week I scolded myself roundly for finishing a book I didn’t even like instead of this one, which I was… not reading after about the halfway point.

Why did I finish this lousy book and set aside this good one?

I finished. I was glad I did. It’s possible I enjoyed having read the book and having it to think about more than the experience of actually reading it, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I would say that overall I liked it, and that it’s pretty much exactly the book it promises to be. I would not press it into your hands and beg you to read it, partly because it’s a tough hang.

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Now reading: The Match, by Sarah Adams (one of her early indie books, now trad pubbed, a very very easy hang). Next up is either Mariana or The God of the Woods. Probably. What are you reading and would I like it?