A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?

While not quite as divisive as Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse can also start a minor flamewar. Upon my first read, I was an unabashed Emma-lover; upon reread, I have more complicated feelings about her as a person, but something approaching awe towards Jane Austen’s work developing her character, because she’s so complicated and contradictory in a way that can be hard to portray without making a character feel simply incoherent. And yet she is entirely coherent, a fully realized creation in all her contradictions; and not only that, but she changes a great deal over the course of the book, perhaps more than any other Austen heroine.

The characteristic that struck me as forcibly unappealing this time is the fact that Emma is such a snob. Surely I noticed this upon first read, because it’s not at all subtle. A smattering of incidents, to which I could append many more: she’s convinced that the illegitimate Harriet must be a gentleman’s daughter, just because she’s pretty and Emma likes her. She twits Mr. Knightly for arriving at events on foot like a plebe, rather than properly in a carriage. Part of her dislike for Mrs. Elton arises from the fact that Mrs. Elton intends to take precedence over her, Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield.

Part of it of course also arises from the fact that Mrs. Elton sounds unbearable. Actually, I did have a bit of sympathy for Mrs. Elton this time around, simply because she’s a stranger to literally everyone in town except her husband whom she knew a mere five weeks before she married him, and she’s clearly trying to establish herself in this new situation… by being wildly interfering in everyone else’s business, by for instance forcibly arranging a governess job for Jane Fairfax who adamantly does not want one just yet.

But, of course, Emma herself has some interfering tendencies, although the velvet glove over her iron hand tends to be far more plush than Mrs. Elton’s. (People often dislike their own worst qualities when they meet them in others.) Most dramatically, she talks Harriet out of accepting Robert Martin’s offer of marriage - all the while loudly proclaiming that of course she doesn’t want to influence Harriet at all! but if a woman doubts whether she should accept a man, she shouldn’t! - largely because she considers Robert Martin beneath the notice of her own intimate friend Harriet.

I found the Emma/Harriet friendship intriguingly femslashy the first time I read it, but somewhat less so this time around: Emma is so obviously settling on the first possible replacement friend who shows up after her dear governess Miss Taylor leaves Hartfield to get married. And part of Harriet’s charm to her is her patent inferiority to Emma in all things except possibly good nature, which Emma herself is well aware of - although perhaps not fully cognizant that it doesn’t speak well of her that she prefers an inferior friend who can never make her envious to a Jane Fairfax, whose skill at music must always make Emma aware that she has not improved her raw talent with practice as she should.

So far, this all sounds pretty negative. But one of the fascinating things about Emma is that this taste for interference, which is perhaps her worst quality, in some ways arises from her best quality, which is her loving solicitude for her father. Mr. Woodhouse is an incredibly nervous man, easily alarmed by even small changes, and Emma has essentially taken charge of him since she was quite young - certainly since her elder sister Isabella married, and possibly even before that, since Isabella’s nerves are almost as weak as her father’s.

Is it any wonder, as the most sensible person in the house since the age of at least thirteen, the one who soothes her father’s anxieties and arranges his life, Emma has come to consider herself capable of arranging lives more generally? And although some of her decisions with regard to Harriet are nearly disastrous, her actions towards Harriet and toward her father are truly guided by loving solicitude.

It isn’t even that she is patient with her father, for to say she is patient suggests that she is occasionally taking a deep, aggravated breath as she bears with his infirmities. Her affection for him is so complete that she enters into all his anxieties, not in the sense that she agrees that he is correct to be anxious, but in fully feeling that the anxiety is real to him and acting always to soothe it.

And, my God, I could never. I may lack some of Emma’s faults, but I also cannot see myself, day after day after day after day, lovingly devoting my time and attention to a whittering old man who never grows used to any change and is constantly anxious about his health, everybody else’s health, the weather, etc. etc. etc. Maybe I’ve never talked a friend out of marrying her own true love; but all the same, like Gunga Din, Emma is a better man than I.

The one drawback of reading all of L. M. Montgomery’s books in publication order was that, in my memory, the last book Anne of Ingleside is pretty dire. So I picked it up with an inward moan, but in fact (perhaps this is a case of suitably lowered expectations?) it’s not nearly as bad as I remembered.

What it is, on the whole, is inessential. These feel like the sort of stories that a modern author might share on Patreon, cute little tales about the characters that don’t change your understanding of them or their world in any way, but might satisfy your need just to stay in that world a little while longer.

They’re pleasant enough tales of the hijinks and youthful mishaps of Anne’s children, mostly, enjoyable enough to read and eminently forgettable thereafter. Except the one where six-year-old Walter walks home alone at night because he’s realized he’s been sent away because Mother is sick, and he’s convinced she’ll die before he returns. That one perhaps has a little more heft than the others.

And I did remember the Anne stories that bookend the book, which is probably responsible for my remembered low opinion. The beginning of the book features Anne and Diana spending a lovely day together, which would be delightful except that the narrative keeps insistently reminding us that Diana is FAT. Now, Diana has always been a plump girl, and if the book mentioned it and moved on as the earlier Anne books do that would be one thing, but it comes up again… and again… and again… It comes to seem so mean-spirited. Just let Anne and Diana enjoy their ramble in the woods in peace!

Then at the end of the book, Anne suddenly becomes convinced that Gilbert no longer loves her! Why? No reason. No, literally, there is no reason. She’s just out of sorts with life, that’s all. Eventually she realizes her folly and then she and Gilbert are off to a medical conference in Scotland, HOORAY, but first we have to bushwhack through a few chapters of pointless jealousy.

And, I mean, sure, people do get these notions into their heads sometimes. I can’t argue that it’s unrealistic. But I don’t read L. M. Montgomery for her stone-cold realism! I read her so that the characters and I can saunter together down the White Way of Delight!

***

And that concludes the L. M. Montgomery readthrough! Which of course means that it is time for me to tackle some other reading plans.

1. First, I’m going to complete the Jane Austen reread that I started... back in 2022 or so... okay, so it’s been on hiatus a bit, but it is halfway done. Next up is Mansfield Park.

2. Then I intend to get around to the Newbery books of 2024, which I have disgracefully neglected thus far this year.

(2.a. Yes, indeed, I am still working on the Newbery project! It’s whirring slowly away in the background. I have seventeen books left to go in the 1930s, which means that at the current rate I’ll probably finish it... sometime in 2026. Good grief.)

3. Then John Le Carre’s Smiley books! I’m not sure how this will go, to be honest; I may end up deciding that I need long breaks between books, as Le Carre can be so bleak. But I’m looking forward to it all the same. There’s just nothing like a Cold War spy novel, you know?

I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time in high school, and hadn’t reread it until now. However, I’ve seen a bunch of adaptations, not least my beloved Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the modern-day vlog retelling over which I obsessed for a year. So it’s interesting to see how both the passage of time and the new light shed on the story by adaptations has changed my opinions over time.

Of course in some cases, I mean that my opinion has come full circle. In high school, I shared Elizabeth’s horror when her friend Charlotte agreed to marry that rat Mr. Collins. Later on, I grew more sympathetic to Charlotte: surely marrying Collins would be better than being a spinster in Regency England! (My recollection is that the 2005 adaptation makes this point with particular force.)

Rereading it now, it occurred to me that Jane Austen, Regency Spinster, probably has a better idea than I do what fates would be worse than being a Regency spinster, and she is absolutely right that being married to Mr. Collins would be on the list, at least for sensible, level-headed Charlotte Lucas. Moralistic Mary Bennet and Mr. Collins might have been well-suited, although they would have encouraged each other’s worst tendencies and become utterly unbearable to everyone else. Compare their reactions to Lydia’s elopement: Mary reflects piously how easily a woman’s precious reputation can be stained, while Mr. Collins writes to the Bennets to state that he’s shocked, shocked that they received Lydia at their house after the way she behaved! A match made in heaven. Pity Mr. Collins didn’t think of it.

Speaking of Lydia. Modern adaptations often seem troubled by Austen’s unsparing portrayal: she is gleefully unrepentant when she returns from her elopement with Wickham which would have destroyed her own reputation and severely injured her sisters’ future prospects, and continues just as “untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless” as ever.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, in particular, makes it one of its main projects to rehabilitate Lydia both with viewers and with her exasperated sister Lizzie. (And, let it be said, it succeeded, at least with me: Lydia is my favorite character in LBD, although it pains me to say so because I love them alllllll.) For the most part she displays that same noisy, unabashed character, although with a strain of vulnerability that Austen’s Lydia never shows… right up until the Wickham debacle, which in this version takes the form of a sex tape that Wickham intends to sell online for cash. LBD Lydia collapses like a house of cards.

Now of course this is an extremely understandable reaction, and given that aforementioned streak of vulnerability it follows naturally from Lydia’s character in the adaptation. But the adaptation would have been closer to the original if Lydia had yelled, “Woo hoo! If this sex tape goes well, I’m going to start a career as a camgirl, and then I’ll be financially independent LONG before Jane and Lizzie move out of the house!”

…actually that would be a fantastic adaptation choice, but it would definitely have alienated a lot of viewers (probably including my 2013 self) and therefore undermined LBD’s “reconcile the sisters” project.

Jane Austen hasn’t any intention of reconciling Lydia with her despairing elder sisters. She has no more sentimental investment in sisterhood than she has in marriage, or friendship, or parent-child relationships, or indeed any other human relationship that you can name. None of these relationships are either good or bad by nature: they are good or bad entirely as the individuals within them make them so. And from that point of view, there's no reason for Jane and Elizabeth to try to reconcile with Lydia: she is what she is and they are what they are, and the mere fact that they are sisters will not make them mix.

The new Persuasion movie has had one good effect, at least: watching it made me decide that it’s time to begin my long-planned Jane Austen reread. Which means Northanger Abbey, and a chance to revisit my beloved Catherine Morland!

Northanger Abbey is both Austen’s first and last novel: it was accepted for publication in 1803, but the publisher sat on it so long that Austen eventually bought the rights back, and then the novel was published posthumously with Persuasion in 1818. After getting the rights back, Austen revised the first half of the novel (or so I recall from that useful source “I think I read this somewhere,” although Wikipedia is not backing me up), which may account for the fact that the book is somewhat lopsided.

The first half is a brilliant, incisive tour de force as naive young Catherine Morland visits Bath with her kindly neighbors and discovers, astonished, that what people say is not always what they mean.

I was about Catherine’s age the first time I read this book, and enjoyed it in part because I could feel affectionately superior to Catherine’s naivete. (As Austen comments, “Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant.”) Rereading it now, I must acknowledge that on my first read I was probably about as naive as Catherine (although perhaps a little better supplied with general knowledge), not only in my own life but as a reader. For instance, it’s only on this reread that I grasped that Isabella Thorpe pursues Catherine as a friend at least in part as a stratagem to attach Catherine’s brother.

The first time around, Isabella didn’t make much impression on me, but upon reread, what an amazing foil she is for Catherine! What absolute comedy gold! The contrast between her professed disdain for young men and the keen interest betrayed by her actions is continually hilarious.

But she also struck me as a somewhat tragic figure this time around. She’s duplicitous because she can’t be open: it would be a gross breach of decorum to openly avow that she needs to marry for money. And yet that need is very real, and artful as she is, she’s not quite artful enough to land that marriage - at least within the confines of this book. As she’s described as a beautiful girl, I imagine she’ll manage it eventually.

It is perhaps in part the lack of Isabella that makes the second half of the book weaker than the first. It’s still entertaining, and the set-pieces sending up gothic tropes still make me laugh, but in comparison to the seemingly effortless first half, these scenes sometimes feel labored.

In particular, the book bobbles in the scene where Henry Tilney discovers that Catherine has been imagining that his father murdered his mother. The narrative strains to force a confession from Catherine’s lips, and once she’s confessed, Henry’s response is oddly muted and impersonal. He takes her to task for imagining such a thing could happen without becoming the gossip of the entire county, but he doesn’t seem the least personally offended on his father’s behalf.

But perhaps he feels that although Catherine is wrong about the facts, she’s hit on an important emotional truth about his father: he’s so demanding and persnickety that he squeezes the life out of everyone around him. Indeed, maybe the exchange brings him a sort of relief. Naive though Catherine is in some ways, she clearly knows just what kind of father-in-law she’d be getting if she married into the Tilney family, and that knowledge may help clear the way for Henry to propose.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.”

I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, a book of short stories - flash fiction, really, in many cases, some of them are barely more than a page. I must admit that I often wanted them to be longer, for there to be more to sink my teeth into - but they do share with Atwood’s novels that razor-edged humor, the wry dark way of looking at the world.

I was hoping that Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom would be something along the lines of a detailed fandom wank guide: allll about the Fanny Price wars! Not to mention a more critical attitude toward Arnie Perlstein, whom she notes is such an obnoxious commentator that message board moderators have been forced to warn each other about him, but this is mentioned almost as an aside. Instead it’s more of a general tour of the many different types of Austen fandom, dipping a toe into the worlds of Austen cosplay, Austen fanfic, Austen profic etc, without getting very detailed about any of it.

However, I did like Yaffe’s summation of Austen’s widespread appeal. “The rich diversity of responses to Austen captures something real about her - the depth and complexity of her writings, which, like diamonds held up to sunlight, reflect something different from every angle. Her stories are not blank canvases onto which we project ourselves; they are complicated, ambiguous pictures of lived reality. We all find ourselves in her because, in a sense, she contains us all.”

I’ve returned to the Eleanor Estes’ Moffat books, continuing the series with Rufus M.It’s poignant to realize that Estes was writing this retrospective about the end of World War I while the world was still in the thick of World War II.

“Look!” he exclaimed in excitement. And all the Moffats drew around the stove and looked in. They looked at the word that stood out on the burnt sheet of newspaper. In tremulous, glowing letters lit by the last glow from that burning paper, as though it were seen through the water of an ocean, was the one word PEACE, the headline of Joey’s newspaper.

Mama looked at the word and the children looked too, silently. Then Mama said again, “Yes, you know what that means, don’t you? It means better times are coming now, for all the people.”

And she took the poker and gently scattered the charred fragments of the newspaper and of the papers on which the children had written, so that all the dreams and wishes and plans of the Moffats were gathered in a little pile in the middle of the stove where they soon were wafted up the chimney and became part of the air.

What I’m Reading Now

Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History languished on my to-read pile for ages, but I’ve finally begun it and I’ve learned so much not only about Disney’s female animators, but also about the sheer process of animation, which I must confess I always vaguely envisioned working like one of those flip books where you turn the pages real fast and the sketches appear to move.

(Also, there were at least two different female Disney animators in the 1930s & 40s with powerful interests in aviation. Someone ought to inform Elizabeth Wein.)

I’ve also begun Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a memoir about Norris’s time as copy-editor at the New Yorker and also general musings about grammar. “Sing to me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been beavering away at the story I mentioned last week, the one with the boarding school friends who reconnect after much suffering in World War I, and I have decided that in this pursuit I obviously must read the sequel to David Blaize (although apparently David Blaize and the Blue Door is in fact a prequel and also a fantasy novel even though David Blaize had no fantasy elements? Weird flex, but okay), and also I have REALIZED that this is the perfect opportunity for me to read all sorts of books that I’ve meant to read for ages because they influenced Tolkien and/or C. S. Lewis. Obviously what the readers of m/m romances want is for the characters to have vociferous opinions about William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sarah Handley-Cousins’s Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North turned out to be less useful to me than I had hoped. Not only was there very little about amputees, it’s a lot more focused on northern perceptions about war disabilities (particularly ones less blatantly obvious than amputation) than on the lived experience of disabled veterans, with the notable exception of one chapter focused on Joshua Chamberlain who got shot through the hips (as in, the bullet entered one hip and went out the other), which caused various complicated health problems for the rest of his life.

I also read Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, which I had somehow failed to read until now, and found almost unbearably gripping: even though it’s very short, really a novella more than a novel, I barely restrained myself from checking Wikipedia to reassure myself that Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica would escape her mother’s machinations to force her to marry a man that she loathes, a plan which Lady Susan pursues with spiteful tenacity.

Lady Susan’s behavior toward her daughter is so chilling. She puts up the facade of the loving mother of a troubled child, but it’s only a selfish pose: she uses it to gain sympathy for herself (so patient with the pigheaded child!) while turning everyone else against Frederica so the girl will have no allies against Lady Susan’s machinations.

What I’m Reading Now

I really MEANT to wait a while before reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch... but I definitely failed, am reading it right now, may be enjoying it even more than The Secret History. The Secret History kicks off with a murder and spends the rest of the book unspooling it; The Goldfinch kicks off with a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum of Art but as yet has displayed little interest in that attack (we hear in an aside that it was committed by right-wing terrorists) except insofar as it pulled the rug out from under thirteen-year-old Theo’s feet when his mother died and left him virtually an orphan.

Through a convoluted series of events, Theo has started helping out refurbishing the furniture at an antiques store, and I would not have expected this but I am HERE for the loving descriptions of antique furniture.

I’ve also begun yet another William Dean Howells novel (possibly I have a Howells problem?), A Modern Instance, which Wikipedia informed me is one of the first American novels to deal seriously with the possibility of divorce. So far, Howells hasn’t even gotten the unhappy couple together, so it will be a while so I can report back on the divorcyness of it all.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Goldfinch waylaid me in my goal of finishing all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s before the New Year, but I did make a good dent in them: there are only two left, Splendors and Glooms and Heart of a Samurai, and I figure I can finish those before the 2020 winners are announced near the end of January.

Also!!! I have a copy of Don Quixote!! And I have high hopes of getting on with this book better than Kristin Lavransdatter. (It helps that the chapters are very short, a much better size for bedtime reading.) evelyn_b, I liked to finish up the Newberys of the 2010s before I get cracking on Don Quixote, but I should be done with those by the end of January. Perhaps a February start?

I enjoyed Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home so much that, rather than take advantage of DC's multitude of museums (they've got a postal service museum, you guys! A MUSEUM ABOUT MAIL), I spent a large proportion of my day in DC reading while ensconced in a cafe with a pot of Earl Gray tea at one hand and a chocolate croissant in the other.

It's just a very pleasant book. It's probably not the deepest study of Austen ever (I could have done with a bit more about the books themselves, although it is probably unfair to wish a biography were literary criticism), but it's light and engaging. And Worsley has a good eye for when Austen is being sarcastic in her letters, which (given that Austen seems to be have been sarcastic just about every other sentence) seems to trip people up.

Also, in Lyme Regis, Worsley actually stayed in the selfsame lodgings that Austen inhabited all those years ago. I'm so impressed by the way she melds the experience of being there now with what we know of those places in the past - so you get a very powerful evocation of what it might have been like ("powerfully evocative" does not always mean "accurate," I know, but it's nonetheless a pleasure to read.)

And she's so unobtrusive about the fact that she stayed in THE VERY ROOMS were Jane Austen stayed. I would be screaming it from the rooftops, and probably bore my readers with a lengthy description of the scones at the charming little seaside teashop on the beach - but Worsley just mentions it, I think in part to let her fellow Janeites know that staying in the very rooms hallowed by Jane herself is an option (I'm certainly intrigued!), and then gets swiftly back to her real subject: Jane.

I do have a couple reservations. One is that Worsley seems sometimes almost too insistent on the importance of Austen's relationships with other women - like admitting that Austen also had strong relationships with a few men (her father, one or two of her brothers) would undermine this - but I suspect this is a reaction against earlier biographies that did overemphasize her connections with men because of the cultural assumptions that relationships with men are always more important than relationships with women.

The other is that Worsley suggests that Austen might have been clinically depressed, which I found interesting but not quite convincing - although to be fair, I may just need more time to get used to it. I realize that one perhaps should not assume to much about an author's inner life based on their work, but Jane Austen through her novels has always struck me as one of the most balanced and level-headed and mentally healthy writers ever - to the point of being quite unsympathetic to the Mariannes of the world.

It certainly is a possible explanation for Austen's fallow period in Bath. And yes, the irritability and sadness and sense of helplessness in some of her letters might be symptoms too.

But on the other hand, who is not occasionally irritable and sad? And how can we call a sense of helplessness a symptom of anything when it was such a genuine reflection of her reality? Worsley makes it very clear that she was pretty much at the mercy of her male relatives - who fortunately seem to have been pretty decent chaps - but nonetheless they decided where she lived and who she'd live with (one brother saddled his female relations with his new bride) and how much money they'd have.

And when, through her writing, she does gain some financial independence, she pursues it gleefully, driving hard bargains with her publisher when her brother (who had been acting as her agent) becomes too ill to do so. The sense of helplessness disappears when she's no longer actually helplessness.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, with which I was ultimately quite disenchanted. I felt (as I felt when I watched the movie) that the ending is simultaneously too neat - all the young characters carefully paired up - but also leaves the old lady out: even if she didn’t find love, I wanted her to reconnect with her old friend Kate Lumley, or find a son who was thought long ago lost at sea, or something.

Also Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen, which starts each chapter with some object from Austen’s life or her fiction - a family silhouette portrait or a cashmere shawl - and from there ranges out over some aspect of Austen’s life and English society. It reminds me Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun, although Byrne lacks Ulrich’s virtuoso ability to start with a basket and end up encompassing the entire history of colonial America without ever losing sight of the basket weaver: Byrne is apt to get a bit lost along the way.

But nonetheless I enjoyed the book very much, because I’m very partial to the method. I have an idea for a book based around an advent calendar, where the object in the advent calendar becomes the nucleus for the chapter each day… I’m not sure quite how to write it; I think the danger (even more than the danger for most Christmas books) would be that it would become too obvious or twee.

I also read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which I found even more engrossing than I expected, and as it’s three things I enjoy very much (a childhood memoir, about a childhood spent among an unusually intense religious sect, set in the Victorian era), I expected to find it pretty engrossing in the first place.

Gosse was the only son of two devout members of the strictly Calvinist Plymouth Brethren sect. His mother wrote exceedingly popular religious pamphlets and his father was a naturalist, and a quite highly regarded one until The Origin of Species came out and the elder Goss rejected it decisively. The younger Gosse is at his best describing this incident: he’s sympathetic to the titanic difficulty this presented his father, who hitherto saw no conflict between his work as a naturalist and his faith in a literal reading of the Bible, and does an excellent job delineating the turn of mind that led his father to ultimately cast his lot with Genesis rather than Darwin.

I would have liked a bit more detail about what the Plymouth Brethren believed, but I suspect that Gosse’s audience when the book was first published in 1907 would have been able to reconstruct a fairly accurate picture based on his allusions, so I can’t really hold that against him.

What I’m Reading Now

Marie Brennan’s The Tropic of Serpents, which alas strikes me as almost as slow to get started as A Natural History of Dragons. However, I very much enjoyed A Natural History of Dragons by the end, so hopefully I’ll have the same experience with The Tropic of Serpents.

What I Plan to Read Next

J. B. Priestly’s The Good Companions, once the library has fetched it for me through the magic of interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan, where have you been all my life? I think we should consider a torrid affair.

Day 17 - Favorite mini series.

I’ve already written about this! Desperate Romantics, all the way.

But my second-favorite miniseries is probably the 2009 BBC Emma, with Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller, which is simply perfect in every possible way. It is, in the first place, just beautiful: the costumes are stunning, as are the sets, as are the actors (the young lady playing Harriet is absolutely lovely).

It’s so beautiful that it might be worth watching even if it was awful, but in fact it’s amazing. The miniseries gets Emma, which (as Emma Approved and the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma both demonstrate) is a difficult task. Emma is neither an incompetent Machiavellian nor an airhead; she’s a competent, intelligent, and often kind social leader, whose very real abilities have given her a slightly overblown self-regard. She’s usually right, but she’s come to believe that she’s always right, and therefore never considers the possibility that she might make a mistake.

And Romola Garai plays this to perfection. It’s easy to see why everyone in her circle adores Emma. Not only is she funny and vivacious, the life of every party, but she smooths the conversation over rough patches and makes sure everyone has a nice time. One of those people is invariably her fussbudget father, which makes it an even more impressive feat.

(Emma’s relationship with her father is one of the highlights of this miniseries. He realizes, at least on some level, that Emma has grown up so well as much despite him as because of him and his overprotective instincts - there is a really touching scene where he apologizes to her for his failures. But Emma realizes that his limitations are not his fault, and loves him back despite his flaws.)

That’s why the scene at Box Hill where Emma is unkind to Miss Bates is so startling, because this is not at all how she usually behaves. Frank Churchill is clearly a bad influence (I like him less and less over time; I realize he needs to maintain some distance from Jane to keep their engagement secret, but there was no need for him to encourage Emma’s suppositions that Jane had a dalliance with Mr. Dixon, or to pick at Jane like he does. I don’t think he means harm; he just doesn’t seem to quite realize that other people have feelings that might be hurt by his high spirits.)

I suspect this is what makes Mr. Knightley so unusually sharp with her in the Box Hill scene: he’s envious of Frank Churchill’s influence, which he thinks goes deeper than it does.

Jonny Lee Miller’s performance as Mr. Knightley is also outstanding. His dialogue is mostly drawn from the book, but whereas in the book he often seems scolding - if not a father figure, then certainly an older-brotherly one - Miller’s liveliness, his frustration, the fact that he usually speaks to Emma as an equal arguing with her rather than an elder scolding her, all make him seem like a good match for her despite their age gap. They’re like the dueling protagonists in one of the better-made screwball comedies, all rapid delivery and sparkling wit.