A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Beyond the Gates is a wild ride from start to finish. In heaven, the narrator attends a concert by Mozart - a sermon by St. John the Apostle - and then a symphony of color directed by Raphael, which sounds like Fantasia, and Imax, except genuinely a sphere so the color is literally all around you, and as saturated and intense and yet also as delicate as the most wonderful sunset...

Among other prominent men, Phelps also places Darwin in heaven; I wonder how her readers reacted. Then she goes on to muse, “Where was Buddha, ‘the Man who knew’? What affectionate relation subsisted between him and the Man who Loved?” which ecumenicism I imagine made some of her readers froth too…

Someday I should track down contemporary reviews and see what people really did think. Although it seems likely the people who would blow their tops about Darwin in heaven would probably know better than to read a Phelps book by that point in her career.

What I’m Reading Now

Jean Webster’s Just Patty, an American girls’ boarding school story. Did you know that the Americans actually got cracking on girls’ boarding school stories before the British did? (What Katy Did at School is an early example; the Little Colonel series also contains a book set at boarding school.) Then in the twentieth century the British took it over so thoroughly that we all think of it as their genre, which is a very British thing to do, really.

Patty’s school has a farm attached to it; Webster tosses out this detail as if it were a regular thing for schools to have. I note this down because I’ve got a dim idea about writing an early twentieth century American boarding school story (or perhaps women’s college story? Those were also quite popular) and it might be a useful detail. There could be horses.

I’ve also continued on in Thanhha Lai’s Listen, Slowly and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, but I have nothing new to say about them, except that I’m trucking on. NaNo is rather hard on one’s reading time.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library ought to have Abbie Reese’s Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns for me any day now. ANY DAY. ALL I WANT IS NUNS, LIBRARY.