Category Archives: reading

Omigod omigod!

Just this morning, I was thinking about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and how I want to go back to The Age of Homespun and finish it. This was related to thinking about reading and crafting (more on that later), but then I got to thinking about LTU, and wondering if she’s had a new book out recently.

Then, like a strong wind blowing my way, I read of her new book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, in Slate just this morning! It’s an exploration of the practice of women’s history, among other things. It’s not her standard fare, studies of ordinary women in early America, but it still looks neat. I never knew that Ulrich coined “well-behaved women seldom make history” in her first scholarly article! I’ve never been a fan of it as a pithy, rah-rah catch phrase, but hearing its provenance makes it a lot more interesting.

I must now buy this book, in hardcover. And review it here =).

Just finished Dr. Thorne and I have such a huge smile on my face. Wonderful, wonderful! I totally recommend it.

I’ve realized something about Dr. Thorne. Early in reading the book, I thought that the views Trollope expressed (or had his characters express) about class and marriage were his own opinions, which were not to be questioned. But the entire book is an exploration of these questions of money, love, marriage, and class. The whole thing has many more dimensions that I’d anticipated after reading 75 pages or so. I think I turned the corner when I met Miss Dunstable. She’s the “money” that Frank Gresham’s relations so badly want him to marry in the first half of the book. Frank is sent to Courcy Castle expressly to court Miss Dunstable, the daughter of the “Oil of Lebanon man”, who has inherited her father’s vast (and recently garnered) wealth. When Frank leaves home, the reader is busy wondering what Miss Dunstable will be like. We already know that she’s about ten years older than Frank, and we just know that she’ll be mean, stupid, ugly, horrid. In the back of our minds we think perhaps Trollope will play with our assumptions and make her lovely and have Frank truly fall in love with her. And Trollope does surprise us, but not a predictable surprise, the oxymoron that lovers of narrative have come to expect from so many stories. Trollope surprises us by making Miss Dunstable real. She’s ruddy, unfashionable, has a loud laugh, and she’s completely aware of her role in the society she’s found herself in. She does charm Frank, but from the start they’re nothing but friends, laughing in a corner about everyone else while his aunt thinks Frank is gearing up to propose. Miss Dunstable becomes a fast friend who supports Frank in his love for the illegitimate and poor Mary Thorne. After we met Miss Dunstable, I saw that this is a novel that’s seeking to look at an issue from all kinds of angles, in all sorts of instances. And my faith in Trollope was restored. 

I’m now about 75 pages from the end, and I’m ready for it to finish. I’m not reading anything else at the same time, which is rare for me, and I’m ready to move on. I’m hoping that the last chapters will provide the satisfaction promised by the rest of the book.

Dr. Thorne has now fully pulled me in. I’m so in Trollope’s world that I don’t even mind the idea that the daughter of a gentleman demeans herself by marrying a tradesman for money. I really only disagree with half that notion, anyhow. And the whole idea that a man is 100% responsible for a seduction, a woman 0% (since she can’t be expected to know what’s what, certainly?)? Sure! I’m just so there, man, the characters are so real and so compelling that I’m now taking them completely on their own terms. Damn, this guy’s good.

This is a huge power, really, the ability to swallow someone up and put them in your world. And Trollope is kind with his power (at least in the Barchester novels) – he doesn’t bring you in and then break your heart, like getting sucked into a wave and then slammed onto the sand. I really can’t stand books where awful things happen. I know! I’m a baby. I think it’s a hormonal thing related to my child-bearing years. When I was a teenager, I could read about all kinds of ill shit happening to characters and be fine with it (as long as it wasn’t an animal – I’ve never been able to stand animal suffering). And I’d see my mother crying at a movie and think she was so lame. But now I’m just the same, and you’ll never see me crying at a movie only because I never see ones that I know will do it to me. I’m really looking forward to menopause, literarily-speaking. I’m hoping I’ll be able to read about the big nasty stuff again.

Anyways, speaking of writers who can suck you into their world and their characters’ hearts, how about Naguib Mahfouz? I read most of Palace Walk, and I had to stop. Not because of anything really bad happening (I was all prepared for the death in the family that comes at the end), but I could not stand being in the mind of the patriach of the family. As I’ve said before, unfairness is physically painful to me, and this man is such a demon hypocrite, tyrant, and all-around pig – and Mahfouz makes him so real and understandable and almost sympathetic! – that I could not go on. Being inside the brain of an asshole – that is just harrowing. Often I seek it and appreciate it; I read literature to answer the question, “why do people do what they do”? And great psychological novels do a job of that like nothing else. But when there’s no relief, when we’re seeing a household dominated and ruled by this terrible power, as in Palace Walk, I must get out.

I’ve just changed my “in progress” tag on LT to reflect reality. I’m not reading anything right now but Dr. Thorne, which has finally gotten into primary narration, thank God.

Bought Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby last night. Looking forward to starting it.

Started Trollope’s “Dr Thorne” yesterday. I wanted a nice English pastoral, and I knew this was not quite that (better to go with Angela Thirkell’s interpretation of the Trollope universe for that), but I was not expecting this riff on the English character:

“If in western civilized Europe, there does exist a nation among whom there are high signors, and with whom the owners of the land are the true aristocracy, the aristocracy is being trusted as the best and fittest to rule, that nation is the English..
“England a commercial country! Yes; as Venice was. She may excel other nations in commerce, bet yet it is not that in which she most prides herself, in which she most excels. Merchants as such are not the first men among us; though it perhaps be open, barely open, to a merchant to become one of them. Buying and selling is good and necessary; it is very necessary, and may, possibly, be very good; but it cannot be the noblest work of man; and let us hope that it may not in your time be esteemed the noblest work of any Englishman.”

Eeeew! The American in me just recoils at this passage! I was hoping for some of Trollope’s wondrous characterization, not his conservative-ass social views! He’s hit this note as well as airing his opinions about a woman’s proper role in the family and society by page 23. Sigh. Hopefully after we get through his “introduction” chapters things will get a little more interesting. It’s when his characters start bumping up against each other that things usually get good in a Trollope novel.