A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca, which was a delight. Through the power of her impeccable good manners and nerves of steel, the mouse Miss Bianca saves the little human girl Patience from the dread Diamond Palace where she is held in bondage as the Duchess’s maid-of-all-work. A lively fairy tale with a deliciously arch voice and beautiful illustrations by Garth Williams.

I also finished Violet Jacob’s Flemington, which alas I struggled to get into. The main relationship of the book is between characters who basically never see each other again after the first few chapters, and while this happens for extremely solid plot reasons, it meant that my attention kept wandering. (Oddly the only part of the book that gave me a really shippy vibe was the end, when ( Spoilers )

And I finished Angela Brazil’s A Patriotic Schoolgirl, in which patriotic schoolgirl Marjorie signally fails to catch the German spy right under her nose. She believes that the spy is her cranky form mistress, BUT IN FACT it’s her very own best friend, Chrissie Lang(e)!

Interesting both for its snapshot of Britain on the home front during the Great War and for Marjorie’s sensational ability to get crushes: “She had worshipped by turns her kindergarten teacher, a little curly-headed boy whom she met at dancing-class, her gymnasium mistress, at least ten separate form-mates, the Girl Guides' captain, and a friend of Nora's,” the narrator notes, and her schoolmates tease her for her ability to have multiple crushes going at once: "Marjorie is a pagan," laughed Rose Butler. "She bows down to many idols."

At this point in the book Marjorie’s idols include Chrissie Lang (not yet revealed as a spy, of course); the Head Girl, Winifrede; and a soldier she accidentally ran into in the train station, and then accidentally ran into AGAIN in the hospital, and then it turns out that he’s a friend of her brother’s so it is all right for her to crush on him, probably! But unlike the others, this crush is STRICTLY SECRET, because although the headmistress smiles on schoolgirl friendships (she “beamed rather than frowned on those who walked arm in arm”), the school frowns severely on girls having crushes on boys.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembaron. So far, she’s speedrun the hero’s entire hardscrabble orphan childhood in the first chapter, and now Mr. Tembaron has a crack at doing the society page for a newspaper in New York.

In The Last Hawk, Elizabeth Wein’s characters read and reread Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s memoir of his life as a pilot in the interwar years, Wind, Sand and Stars, and even though I am the only person alive who didn’t care for The Little Prince, their enthusiasm about this memoir made me want to read it myself. So far it seems promising!

What I Plan to Read Next

This is not high on my priority list, but if I happen across any of Margery Sharp’s other Miss Bianca books I’m definitely going to read them.

Due to the exigencies of traveling I have not had a chance to post this until now. I have been doing much reading! Mostly Angela Brazil.Last time I was in England, I read great works of literature. I feel that the switch from Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte to Angela Brazil may indicate a downward slide in my intellectual development.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, which is actually a reread, which I usually don’t count for this meme because I usually don’t reread books straight through - I flip through till I land on a likely page and then read for a bit, then flip about some more.

But I reread this one from beginning to end and very much enjoyed it. My favorite chapter remains the one where Carpenter recreates an Inklings meeting - sadly there are no minutes from the Inklings meetings (although perhaps it’s just as well; it would have altered the character of the Inklings awfully to be so formal about it), but Carpenter builds on the extant records and on the participants’ numerous writings to create a remarkably seamless whole. If someday someone decided to write an entire book of Inklings meetings - someone, I mean, as steeped in the voices of the participants of Carpenter - I would probably read it till my copy fell apart.

I also read Angela Brazil’s The Youngest Girl in the Fifth and The Jolliest Term on Record, which I quite enjoyed - particularly The Jolliest Term on Record, which is about a pair of artistic sisters (Gwethyn and Katrine, and I also love Brazil’s penchant for slightly oddball names) who go to boarding school because their parents are headed to Australia for a conference. Gwethyn eventually befriends a cranky goose girl named Githa (these names!), who has a secret and of course angst-filled past involving the vast decaying house out in the woods.

There is much painting! Also tennis! And nature descriptions! Also World War I is going on somewhere out there (the book was published in 1915), but although the girls are occasionally afflicted with bursts of patriotism, mostly it seems very distant.

Both books have blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments of racism, but it could easily be excised - nothing like as pervasive or thematically important as in Gene Stratton Porter’s Her Father’s Daughter.

What I’m Reading Now

Angela Brazil’s The Madcap of the School, which I am enjoying markedly less than the first two Brazils. It opens with one of those unpleasant sequences where the heroine and her chums decide they need to break in the new girls, who they have decided are far too full of themselves. In this book, they humiliate one young lady in front of the entire school - which is especially awful because she was so grateful for their advice: “Thanks awfully!...I’d have done the same by you if you’d been a new girl at The Poplars,” the new girl gushes.

But does our heroine feel a prick of conscience at this appeal to her empathy? “The idea of imagining me as a new girl at her wretched pettifogging old school,” she seethes. Empathy shmempathy!

At this point I wanted nothing more than for heroine to get a kick in the pants, and sharpish, but of course the narrative is on her side.

This is a transatlantic fault. Jean Webster’s American novel Just Patty opens with a similar sequence, except it’s followed up by an extended sequence wherein the headmistress opines that Patty’s victim is terribly priggish, totally deserved to be picked on, and doubtless will be improved by having cocoa dumped on her bed. At this point steam boiled out of my ears, because YOU ARE THE HEADMISTRESS, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO STAND FOR ORDER AND FAIRNESS, WHY ARE YOU SIDING WITH THE BULLIES?

(The Molly Brown college series, written about the same time, has a send-up of these scenes: Molly’s chums throw a mocking dinner party to discipline a new student who walks around wearing her high school medals and bragging about her high school achievements. The young lady, mercifully, doesn’t notice they’re mocking her and continues on her irritating way. But eventually, unhappy at her inability to make friends, the new girl asks Molly for advice and Molly kindly explains that perhaps she ought not to brag quite so much.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I think I should branch out from Angela Brazil. I’m thinking either Elizabeth von Armin’s The Enchanted April or Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Has anyone read either?