Wednesday Reading Meme (41. The Governess Affair)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I began with The Red Cross Girls in Belgium, which opens with a capsule summary of Eugenia’s courtship with Captain Castaigne, and you guys, its all missed opportunities all the time. Eugenia aids French soldiers in escaping from the Germans and ends up in jail and nearly dies of some kind of disease...and all the time Captain Castaigne is a million miles away and not involved at all! He doesn’t show up at all till it’s all over! WHAT. What a waste of possible hurt/comfort! But for books about nursing these books are notably low on that.

I was also disappointed by Angela Brazil’s Bosom Friends: A Seaside Story, because the title seemed to promise an epic Anne of Green Gablesian friendship, but in fact it’s about a chance friendship that eventually breaks because one of the friends is actually shallow and silly and abandons her supposed bosom buddy as soon as a more fashionable friend shows up at their seaside resort. For what it is, it’s actually rather charming - the description of the beach hut that the group of children build is delightful - but the title is totally false advertising!

On the other hand, I also read Courtney Milan’s The Governess Affair, on egelantier’s suggestion, and it is exactly as charming and well done as she said. Unfortunately the library doesn’t seem to have the rest of them (so frustrating!), so I probably won’t continue the series.

Finally, I read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men and a Boat, which I also enjoyed in the end, although it took me a bit to get into the swing of things. Victorian comic writing works quite differently than modern comic writing. It’s not so much a matter of one-liners, but rather the cumulative effect of everything building up together. Like this:

Harris proposed that we should have scrambled eggs for breakfast. He said he would cook them. It seemed, from his account, that he was very good at doing scrambled eggs. He often did them at picnics and when out on yachts. He was quite famous for them. People who had once tasted his scrambled eggs, so we gathered from his conversation, never cared for any other food afterwards, but pined away and died when they could not get them.

What I’m Reading Now

E. L. Voynich’s The Gadfly, again on egelantier’s recommendation, because how can you go wrong with a book about a young man whose one true love is REVOLUTION? He’s just been arrested. On Good Friday. This book, it is not so much with the subtlety, I love it.

Also, if I ever become an evil dictator, I am going to outlaw arrests on Good Friday and possibly the entirety of Passion Week. Why hand the revolutionaries symbols like that? I mean really. This is Evil Dictatorship 101 here.

What I Plan to Read Next

So many books! So many books to choose from! I have one last Angela Brazil, The Princess of the School; I am growing rather tired of her fondness for saddling her school stories with unnecessary mysteries about mysterious foundlings, lost inheritances, etc. I just want school hijinks, damn it!

Alternatively, perhaps Leave It to Psmith. There are entire walls of Wodehouse in bookstores all across England (seriously. WALLS), so I figured I should give him another go.

And I got a whole stack of books at Persephone Books, which specializes in reprinting beautiful editions of unjustly forgotten British women writers of the twentieth (and occasionally nineteenth) centuries. So basically it’s my dream bookstore and I feel rather wistful that I didn’t think of this brilliant idea first. Then again, no one seems to have done this for American writers yet...

The Tate Britain

Hello again! I have had a most splendid day, and as the hostel computers are for once not jammed, I am going to tell you all about it.

I began at the Tate Britain, which I meant to get to earlier this trip, only I kept going to the National Gallery instead. The National Gallery took up part of three days, partly because I kept getting lost, giving up, and repairing to the cafe to have a slice of cake and tea.

The Tate Britain, however, went much more smoothly! I believe I saw all the best things - I didn't go over the modern galleries very firmly, but then, I am rarely in sympathy with modern art.

I arrived right after the museum opened, so I had the pre-Raphaelite room more or less to myself, which was lovely. It isn't actually the pre-Raphaelite room - there's a lot of other things in there, Sargents and Watts and so on. Possibly it's the "here's all the stuff people come to the Tate to see, we're going to put them all in one place so the more hardcore art enthusiasts can enjoy the rest of the museum in peace" room.

But quite a lot of those works are pre-Raphaelite. I particularly enjoyed the Burne-Jones paintings, the staircases with all the maidens descending down it in particular, and even the Rosettis seemed charming in person (although I still think he is always drawing the same ideal maiden). Not a big fan of William Holman Hunt, though. I'm not sure why, given that he tends to choose rather grim subjects - fallen women, goats wandering through salt plains, etc - but something about the brashness of his color use always reminds me of a kitschy Christmas card.

And John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose! It's huge in real life. I bought a notebook with the painting (suitably miniaturized) on the cover, I liked it so much. It looks like a suitable book for composing a children's book.

(Speaking of composing books, The English Breakfast Affair is going very, very well! I have decided to cut out the virgin martyrs subplot and consequently it is going rather more smoothly. Perhaps I will have to chance to reference them, at least?)

The Tate also had a room devoted to paintings that had been very popular in Edwardian times (Forgotten Faces), which inevitably - my artistic tastes are probably best described as Edwardian - I enjoyed very much; Edwardian art often suggests stories (without tying you down by alluding to a specific story, which earlier works generally do), which is fun.

After that - after the inevitable tea and cake, I mean; I am going to be so disappointed with American museums and their lack of tea and cake after this - I went to Ripping Yarns, which is a bookstore that specializes in children's books from around the turn of the twentieth century, which: !!!!!!!!!!

But ultimately I didn't buy anything: there was so much choice that I quite lost my head and couldn't make any decisions at all. And so I went to the park and walked through the forest, and at last came back to the hostel.