Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Daphne Du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall, a book that is part memories about Cornwall during Du Maurier’s youth, partly a history of Cornwall, and partly a series of colorful local legends about smugglers and tinners and eccentric vicars etc. My favorite was the tale of the most recent eccentric vicar, who installed ten foot walls around the vicarage, bought about a dozen savage dogs, and installed a box at the end of his drive so all deliveries could be made at a distance.

The locals begged the church to appoint a vicar who might occasionally do vicar-y things like “visiting the sick and dying,” but as the vicar was still giving the Sunday service every week (in a church with pews filled with cardboard cutouts, as his parishioners had fled), the Church pled that its hands were tied.

I also finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, which is fine, but not as detailed as I’d hoped about the actual work that servants did.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Vanity Fair! Does anyone care about spoilers for a book that is over 150 years old? If you do, they are upcoming so please look away.

My Waterloo predictions were exactly backwards: Rawdon Crawley survived, while George Osborne died with a bullet in his heart, too swiftly even for Amelia to rush to his bedside to weep.

Amelia has now spent the last SEVEN YEARS in mourning. Mr. Thackeray, Amelia is so boring. Mr. Thackeray has foreseen this complaint and assures us all that female readers who think Amelia is boring are just JEALOUS because the men LIKE HER SO MUCH, but Mr. Thackeray, this is not jealousy-inducing when the character in question is all, “I could never return your feelings, for I remain in deep mourning for the husband who barely give two pins about me.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Feeling a yen to continue on with the George Smiley books. Next up is The Secret Pilgrim.

Comments

[asakiyume]

So that vicar was a real person?! Wowwww.

Maybe that Amelia character might be appealing in an ego buffing sort of way for a male reader who can't think of anything more boring than a wife. Like, if you're going to have to have someone in the wife category, it's nice to know that she's a cipher who will keep a candle lit by your icon even after your death, and while you're alive, you can just ignore her and have affaires d'amour and adventures. But I would submit to Mr. Thackeray that no woman wants to end up an Amelia. At all.

[osprey_archer]

He was still alive in Du Maurier's youth! She and a friend tried to visit him twice, but were stymied both times, which is not surprising given the ten foot wall and pack of angry dogs.

I would be fascinated to know if Thackeray also got letters from male readers complaining that Amelia was boring. Even if they thought she was the perfect wife, surely some male readers had to admit that she was just less interesting to read about than Becky Sharp?

[troisoiseaux]

I really enjoyed Vanity Fair as a book but Amelia is just such a drip - even the otherwise delightful 2018 miniseries could not salvage that whole situation - and I'm convinced that Thackeray never actually had an actual conversation with a woman in his life.

[osprey_archer]

I often like characters who other people believes are drips (Fanny Price represent!) but Amelia simply has no depths. She is a puddle. She is sweet and gentle and in love with George and that is all there is to her.

I'm sure Thackeray THOUGHT he had had conversations with women, as he clearly believes he has a clear and penetrating view of the whole sex. But in fact I suspect his conversations were kind of like that old comic about the dog (Thackeray is the dog) whose owner is talking to it and all the dog hears is "Blah blah blah blah GINGER." GINGER in this case being something that can be interpreted to conform with Thackeray's pre-existing opinions of women.

[kore]

(FANNY FAN NO APOLOGIES)

[adore]

Amelia has now spent the last SEVEN YEARS in mourning. Mr. Thackeray, Amelia is so boring. Mr. Thackeray has foreseen this complaint and assures us all that female readers who think Amelia is boring are just JEALOUS because the men LIKE HER SO MUCH, but Mr. Thackeray, this is not jealousy-inducing when the character in question is all, “I could never return your feelings, for I remain in deep mourning for the husband who barely give two pins about me.”

THANK YOU! SOMEONE FINALLY SAID IT

[osprey_archer]

At the beginning of the book, Amelia is wildly popular among her schoolmates, but as the book goes on, Thackeray is leaning harder and harder on "ALL WOMEN DISLIKE AMELIA." (Even her mother has turned against her!) It seems that he was piqued by the letters from female readers about how she was boring.

[thisbluespirit]

I also finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, which is fine, but not as detailed as I’d hoped about the actual work that servants did.

If you want details about the actual work, then any of Pamela Horn's books on the subject will do you! I think the main 19th C one is The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, but there's one on the 18th/19th C era, Flunkeys and Scullions and I know she's done a 20th C one as well.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, that sounds perfect! Thank you so much!

[silverusagi]

She mourns for her husband for SO LONG.

[osprey_archer]

As of this writing she is STILL IN MOURNING. Oh God Amelia PLEASE get a new hobby.

[kore]

Amelia is like Dora is like all the other super passive ideal Victorian wives written by male writers at the time. Ugh!

[osprey_archer]

In fairness to Dora (words I never thought I'd write!), I think if David died first she would get over him in, like, six months. Oh, she'd continue wearing mourning like a good Victorian widow, and she'd keep his daguerreotype on the mantelpiece and occasionally clutch a locket with a piece of his hair in it and sigh sentimentally, but she'd be on the hunt for a new husband because otherwise she'd have to look after HERSELF and that would just be INSUPPORTABLE.

In the meantime she'd probably make Agnes move in to be her companion.