Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 23rd, 2019 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, which scratched the Boxcar Children sized itch in my soul: four children escape an untenable home situation to create for themselves a delightful home in the wilderness.
I also completed Unnatural Death, which has only reaffirmed my belief that the non-Harriet Lord Peter novels are not nearly as good, although I plan to plow ahead regardless.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m nearing the end of The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Lots of good stuff here about illegitimacy rates in Revolutionary War-era New England; lots of women giving birth within a few months (sometimes a few days) of their wedding, and not an insignificant quantity who have an illegitimate child and get married a few years later, maybe to the father and maybe not. Often women from comfortable families, too, including one of Martha’s daughters - this wasn’t just a matter of the poverty-stricken.
It’s interesting how at odd this pattern is not only with modern views of the monolithic past, but even from the popular novels of seduction at the time. Ulrich notes that many of these novels were published in the US, written by American authors, following the English model that assumes the seduction will destroy the seduced girl - and people ate it up even though it was at odds with the lived reality in America, or at least in New England. Was it even the reality in England? Perhaps just among the gentry?
It occurs to me that these novels may in fact have made the plight of the seduced girl worse, by making everyone expect that her plight would be wretched and therefore making that fate harder to escape.
I’ve already begun research for my next essay about female literary friendship (this time: Annie Fellows Johnston, writer of the Little Colonel books, and her Louisville writing group), which means that I’ve dived into George Madden Martin’s children’s book Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart, first published in 1902. (George Madden Martin was a penname for a woman whose given name may have been Georgia May, but the internet is not quite clear about this.
Naturally what I’d really like is a book with a dedication like “To my writing group! You guys are great!” (only more Edwardian and flowery). This is not that book, but I’m enjoying (in a horrified way) this tale of Emmy Lou’s school days: she’s in a class of seventy and they spend their days droning through the primer in unison, mat, cat, bat, etc.
Oh! And Odysseus just slaughtered the suitors and also the maids who slept with them (which seems kind of hard on the maids, I mean you slept with Calypso for seven years, Odysseus), and it was way more violent than Wishbone led me to expect. And now he’s all “People are going to be mad about how I slaughtered all the suitors” and it’s like… well, if even the people in your own culture don’t approve, why did you do it, Odysseus? Why not just kick them out of the house and demand they send you herds of cattle to replenish your stock and maybe raid them if they don’t comply?
What I Plan to Read Next
Now that I’ve listened to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I’m contemplating whether I should give the Aeneid a go too… although I did lose some enthusiasm for this plan when I realized that Dan Stevens hasn’t read it for audiobook. Still, it might be worth doing? There’s an audiobook read by Simon Callow.
(I realized only as I was looking up Simon Callow that for years I have conflated him and Simon Cowell. Sorry, Simon Callow! You’ve probably never berated a reality TV contestant in your life.)
I finished Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, which scratched the Boxcar Children sized itch in my soul: four children escape an untenable home situation to create for themselves a delightful home in the wilderness.
I also completed Unnatural Death, which has only reaffirmed my belief that the non-Harriet Lord Peter novels are not nearly as good, although I plan to plow ahead regardless.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m nearing the end of The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Lots of good stuff here about illegitimacy rates in Revolutionary War-era New England; lots of women giving birth within a few months (sometimes a few days) of their wedding, and not an insignificant quantity who have an illegitimate child and get married a few years later, maybe to the father and maybe not. Often women from comfortable families, too, including one of Martha’s daughters - this wasn’t just a matter of the poverty-stricken.
It’s interesting how at odd this pattern is not only with modern views of the monolithic past, but even from the popular novels of seduction at the time. Ulrich notes that many of these novels were published in the US, written by American authors, following the English model that assumes the seduction will destroy the seduced girl - and people ate it up even though it was at odds with the lived reality in America, or at least in New England. Was it even the reality in England? Perhaps just among the gentry?
It occurs to me that these novels may in fact have made the plight of the seduced girl worse, by making everyone expect that her plight would be wretched and therefore making that fate harder to escape.
I’ve already begun research for my next essay about female literary friendship (this time: Annie Fellows Johnston, writer of the Little Colonel books, and her Louisville writing group), which means that I’ve dived into George Madden Martin’s children’s book Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart, first published in 1902. (George Madden Martin was a penname for a woman whose given name may have been Georgia May, but the internet is not quite clear about this.
Naturally what I’d really like is a book with a dedication like “To my writing group! You guys are great!” (only more Edwardian and flowery). This is not that book, but I’m enjoying (in a horrified way) this tale of Emmy Lou’s school days: she’s in a class of seventy and they spend their days droning through the primer in unison, mat, cat, bat, etc.
Oh! And Odysseus just slaughtered the suitors and also the maids who slept with them (which seems kind of hard on the maids, I mean you slept with Calypso for seven years, Odysseus), and it was way more violent than Wishbone led me to expect. And now he’s all “People are going to be mad about how I slaughtered all the suitors” and it’s like… well, if even the people in your own culture don’t approve, why did you do it, Odysseus? Why not just kick them out of the house and demand they send you herds of cattle to replenish your stock and maybe raid them if they don’t comply?
What I Plan to Read Next
Now that I’ve listened to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I’m contemplating whether I should give the Aeneid a go too… although I did lose some enthusiasm for this plan when I realized that Dan Stevens hasn’t read it for audiobook. Still, it might be worth doing? There’s an audiobook read by Simon Callow.
(I realized only as I was looking up Simon Callow that for years I have conflated him and Simon Cowell. Sorry, Simon Callow! You’ve probably never berated a reality TV contestant in your life.)
