A Certain Slant of Light

I just finished Louise Rankin’s Daughter of the Mountains, a 1949 Newbery Honor book in which a Tibetan girl named Momo treks all the way to Calcutta to rescue her stolen dog. A delightful book! Not only is it a fun adventure, but I’ve been contemplating an essay about Newbery Trends Across the Years, and this book provides a perfect window onto a few major ones.

Caveat to say that I haven’t read all the Newbery Honors of the 1930s & 40s yet. so further reading may modify some of my opinions. However, I’ve read enough that I think it’s fair to say that the 1960s were clearly a turning point in the Newbery books, as in American society as a whole, and in many of the same general areas.

Racial Diversity. If I say “The Newbery Awards became more racially diverse after the 1960s,” this is both true and misleading, because it tends to give the impression that the pre-1960s books were all white-bread Dick-and-Jane books about white kids doing white stuff, which is not at all true. By the time the Newbery Award was first award in 1922, the American children’s literature scene was pretty well committed to the idea of the Republic of Childhood: that is, that all children, all around the world, have something important in common just by being children, and as such children love to read about children from all different times and places. Thus, Momo the little Tibetan girl experiences the universal childhood emotion of loving her pet.

So in the first few decades of the Newbery Award, you have books set in Tibet, India, China, Central and South America, and Nigeria. There are books in ancient Mayan cities and among modern-day indigenous peoples. (The Newbery got way into Native Americans in the 1950s.) What changed after the 1960s is that decade by decade, these books became more likely to be own voices, and more likely to focus on the experience of racial minorities within the United States.

Gender Equality. Overall, women’s liberation caused greater changes in society as a whole than in the Newbery books, largely because the Newbery books were way ahead of everyone else on this one. Momo’s cross-country trek to rescue her dog in Daughter of the Mountains is the sort of plot that was more often given to boys, but she’s not the only Newbery adventure heroine, and even the heroines who don’t get full-blown adventure stories tend to be lively, interesting, well-rounded characters.

There is an ongoing Newbery dialectic about The Problem of Tomboys, but I’ll save this discussion for another post, as Rankin is not the least bit interested in the question. Is Momo bucking expectations of appropriate feminine behavior in chasing her dog across the continent? Who knows! Who cares! Sometimes the tea shop owners who give Momo aid and comfort gently suggest that she should go back home, but that’s because her parents must be worried, not because she’s a girl. Momo brushes their concern off like so many cobwebs and continues on her dog-rescuing way.

Dead dogs. The current stereotype about Newbery books is that they’re always killing off beloved pet animals and family members. As it turns out, this is also a 1960s trend. (Okay, technically it started in 1957 with Old Yeller, but Old Yeller was a weirdo outlier in its own decade. Almost all the pre-1960s books have happy endings.) In recent years, the award seems to have backed off from the animal slaughter, but the bonfire of the family members is still going strong, as witness 2022’s Red, White, and Whole.

My completely unresearched theory about this onslaught of death: post-World War II advances in medicine (antibiotics, vaccinations, etc) meant that children were much less likely to lose a sibling or classmate in real life. Therefore, adults felt that children needed to learn Important Lessons about Death from books. And how better to learn about death than the narratively contrived murder of a beloved pet!

I think it is possible for books to teach Important Lessons about Death, but the Newbery approach mostly seems to have taught that books are a source of pain and suffering, especially if they’re about animals. So that didn’t work out too well for anyone.

Fortunately, Daughter of the Mountains won its Newbery Honor in 1949, so you can rest assured that it has a happy ending.

Another installment of Newbery Honor books of the 1930s! These three books made an interesting accidental trilogy on the topic of Attitudes Toward Women in the 1930s, with a special sidebar on What Do We Do about Tomboys?

Hilda van Stockum’s A Day on Skates is a charming and richly illustrated chapter book about a class of Dutch schoolchildren whose teacher takes them for a day-long field trip skating on the canals. They keep stopping for delicious treats, hot cocoa and snow pancakes (made with snow mixed into the batter, apparently!) and poffertjes, and it just sounds like a delightful day out. It annoyed me that the boys got all the adventures, though, while the girls got stuck washing the pancake dishes.

Fortunately an antidote was close at hand in Erick Berry’s The Winged Girl of Knossos, a thrilling adventure story loosely inspired by the story of Daedalus and Icarus - except that Icarus is gender-swapped for a daughter, Inas.

We first meet Inas diving for sponges off the coast of Crete, not because she needs sponges but just for the thrill of the thing. Inas is an all-around tomboy who aspires to jump bulls in the next festival in Knossos and loves to test the new gliders that her father has invented. (The only flying-too-close-to-the-sun is metaphorical: the people of Crete suspect black magic in Daidolos’s flying machines.)

Although the Minoans view the gliders with suspicion, they are not at all bothered by Inas’s tomboyishness: Berry’s answer to the Problem of Tomboys is “there is no problem,” and her vision of Minoan culture (based on new-to-the-1930s archaeological information) features a well-developed tomboy tradition: Inas is only one of many female bull-jumpers in Knossos. Moreover, there’s no tension over her tomboyish ways, and Inas gets along easily with more traditionally feminine women: one of her best friends is Princess Ariadne, who has developed an unfortunate interest in that doltish Greek tribute Theseus…

A lot of Inas’s disdain for Theseus arises from the fact that he (like the other Greek tributes) has no idea how to play the bulls: confronted with bulls in the arena, he clubs them inelegantly on the head. This is an excellent character detail that also says so much about Inas’s culture, and its unthinking assumption not merely of superiority but of centrality. If the Minoans know how to play the bulls, then surely all other civilized people must know too.

I really liked this book. Berry’s Knossos feels real and lived-in, her descriptions of bull-jumping are thrilling, and Inas is a delight. Stylistically it feels much more recent than it is: if I hadn’t gone into the book knowing it was written in the 1930s, I might have guessed the 1990s, or even more recent.

I struggled more with Mabel Louise Robinson’s Bright Island, which has a tomboy heroine in what you might call the “I hate all the other girls” mode. Thankful and her four older brothers grew up on an island off the coast of Maine; now only Thankful is left, and her parents decide it’s time for her to go to the mainland to get some schooling and also learn “what a girl is for.” (An actual chapter title!)

She does eventually become friends with her roommate Selina, but mostly because they realize that actually neither of them are interested in their classmate Robert, a handsome boy whose dash and charm obscure his feckless selfishness. (There's a wonderfully done sequence where Robert visits Thankful’s island home and Thankful realizes that, despite his charm, he’s a black hole of self-absorption.) But there’s no real sense of any personal connection between Thankful and Selina.

Near the end of the book, Thankful’s mother falls ill - you can tell this is one of the early Newbery books because she doesn’t die - and as she convalesces, Thankful takes over the housekeeper role, although retaining also many of her earlier tomboy traits, like a preference for old clothes and a habit of taking an early-morning swim in the icy ocean. It’s a gentler and less complete transition than in Caddie Woodlawn, perhaps the ur-tomboy book of the 1930s.

I was getting what you might call vibes from this book, particularly the scene where Thankful throws her girdle into the sea, so I looked Mabel Robinson up on Wikipedia and discovered that she was a lesbian who lived all her adult life with her partner Helen Rose. (Lest you be too impressed by my vibe-spotting, however, I was also getting vibes from Erick Berry, nee Evangel Allena Champlin Best… but she was married twice, so probably not a lesbian.)

Julie and I have been talking for ages about doing a Disney animated movie rewatch, and this week we finally bit the bullet and started off with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Disney’s first feature-length film and in fact the first animated feature film ever.

I’m pretty sure I only watched this movie once as a child: the scene where the forest itself turns against Snow White and started grabbing at her with its horrible twiggy hands terrified me. (This will be an oft-repeated refrain as I write about these films. Many, many Disney movies frightened me. The Fox and the Hound baffled me and broke my heart because I couldn’t understand why the fox and the hound couldn’t be friends when they wanted to so much.)

Anyway! Back to Snow White. It’s fascinating to see how assured the animation was right out of the gate (of course Disney had been doing shorts for years at this point): you can see a direct line from the fawns here to Bambi, and I’m pretty sure that goofy turtle shows up again later too. And the vultures! The vultures are direct kin to the vultures in Jungle Book!

It also struck me that Disney, at least early Disney, shares one of the qualities that I find so charming in Studio Ghibli films: both studios are interested in work, particularly women’s work. Snow White’s task of cleaning the cottage looks way more involved than the dwarves’ mining: they’re plucking already-faceted gems from the ground, whereas Snow White needs the help of dozens of woodland creatures to get the house clean.

But it must be admitted that I’m a biased observer: I had an argument years ago in which I held that Disney was a more feminist studio than Pixar, on the grounds that it came right out of the gate with a female main character in its very first feature film, whereas Pixar took 17 years and twelve movies (including TWO Cars films!) before it managed the same thing.

I did not win the hearts and minds of my listeners, as you might guess by the fact that I’m still arguing it out in my head. But I still think I had a point.

I dragged my feet about watching Dumplin’, because I’m not a big fan of “everyone is beautiful!” stories; I think these stories are actually trying to say “everyone is lovable!”, but the framing ends up just strengthening the “lovable = beautiful” tie, and we’d be better served deemphasizing beauty altogether.

However, it turns out that this preconception did quite a disservice to Dumplin’. asakiyume and I watched it last Friday and we both ended up loving it. A few things I loved:

1. There’s a big Dolly Parton theme going through the movie, and I loved this because I have had a great love for Dolly Parton ever since I saw 9 to 5 - but also because it’s super thematically appropriate, because people look at Dolly Parton’s big hair and big boobs and think “trashy” (I know this because pre-9 to 5 this was my own unenlightened opinion) and the whole movie is about not knee-jerk judging people based on their looks.

2. Because the main character is a big girl named Willowdean, this theme mostly plays out in the way that society views big girls, but the movie also subtly pointed out that society also has negative stereotypes about your average thin ‘n’ pretty pageant girl (shallow! bitchy!) and undermines those, too.

3. I liked the fact that the boy who has a crush on Willowdean has a crush on her before any of the pageant stuff happens: when she shows up looking fabulous in her pageant dress, that’s not the moment when he falls for her, but a sign that she has accepted that she’s fabulous enough to be loved just the way that she is.

3a. I also liked the fact that he’s a super minor player in the movie, because that left more room for Willowdean’s friendships, and most importantly for her relationship with her mom.

4. Willowdean’s relationship with her mother, former pageant winner and current pageant runner, is the highlight of the film. I loved the way that it developed from the two of them not quite getting each other and not totally respecting each other (Willowdean scoffs at the pageant that is her mother’s career; Willowdean’s mother is tired of her attitude) to a place where they really understand each other, to the point that when Willowdean does something that disqualifies her from the pageant, her mother understands instantly that it is in fact an act of respect toward the pageant itself.

The pageant sequences in general are beautiful and dynamic. I looked up the director, Anne Fletcher, and discovered that she was a choreographer before she became a director, and you can super see that in the pageant, even the parts that aren’t specifically dance numbers. It’s all beautifully timed and staged.

I love movies about dance, so I’m super planning to delve into Fletcher’s backlog now. Step Up, here I come!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Kay Armatage’s The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, which has given me for an excellent idea for a novel about a young woman directing a movie near the end of the silent era (I’m thinking about 1924, which was the year Shipman’s productions closed down: the big studios really began to squeeze out independent productions at that point), involving either a car chase or a boat race, and she swoops down on her best friend/former lover all “You should star with me! Our characters are running away from bootleggers!”

I also watched one of Shipman’s short films on Youtube, so I should write a quick review of that.

Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse, the first of a trilogy I probably won’t be continuing, because I found this book pretty meh. It’s a slavefic that’s not quite iddy enough to be proper slavefic but also not socially astute enough to be a serious book about slavery, and I found the main romance pretty mushy.

My biggest reaction to Penelope Farmer’s Emma in Winter was that I simply have to read Farmer’s earlier book, The Flying Summer, because Emma in Winter refers to it so heavily that it feels like a reflection of the earlier book rather than a book of its own.

Psychologically this makes total sense. If I learned how to magically fly one summer, I would probably spend the rest of my life pining for it. But from an entertainment standpoint, I wanted there to be a bit more to it than “Emma and a classmate share a dream of flying, which takes them back in time to watch the geological history of England I guess.”

What I’m Reading Now

“When [Freud] dismissed women’s yearning for equality as “penis envy,” was he not merely stating his own view that women could never really be men’s equal, any more than she could wear his penis?”

Betty Friedan is socking it to Freud in The Feminine Mystique and I’m having a good time with it. It’s especially fun because she starts out by proclaiming her enormous respect for Freud and then goes on to demolish his failure to understand at least half of the human race.

I’ve also about a third of the way through Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, which is a weird book. In someone else’s hands I think this would become a satire - prophecies about the world’s imminent end are so easily satirized, after all - but here it’s gaining uncanny force from the characters’ belief in it, reluctant though that belief is in some cases.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field for my reading challenge “a book outside your genre comfort zone,” and I really ought to begin reading, but I have come to the glum conclusion that “outside my genre comfort zone” will almost inevitably mean “something I’m not that interested in reading.” Ugh. But the point of a challenge is to push oneself, right?

Jennifer Mroz’s Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us about Female Friendship is a useful compendium of interesting books about female friendship. I jumped right into Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, about which I shall write a review anon, and I’ve added Marilyn Yalom’s The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship to my reading list.

Otherwise, though, Girl Talk is rather a wash. She opens with a facile chapter about the history of female friendship, which kicks off with the assertion that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought women couldn’t be friends, when in fact we only know that Greek and Roman men thought women couldn’t be friends. We have very little evidence what women thought about the matter.

And the absence of evidence shouldn’t be assumed to imply agreement. In societies where we have ample sources from both men and women (like, say, our own; or nineteenth-century England and America) there’s often a distinct difference in what men say about women and women say about themselves. Just because the men thought “women can’t” doesn’t mean women agreed. Sappho would be a far better starting place to understanding the lived experience of woman in classical antiquity than Seneca.

But okay. Mroz is a science writer; history may not be her forte. Maybe it’ll get better once she gets to the science.

But no. Mroz seems puzzled about what possible evolutionary advantage female friendship could have, and she remains puzzled even after she quotes evidence that shows that animals (including humans) with wider social networks tend to live longer and have more surviving offspring.

That’s… that’s the definition of an evolutionary advantage. I don’t know what else she’s looking for.

Or actually I do: she wants some kind of scientific, evolutionary explanation for the patterns she’s noticed in her own friendships, like the fact that female friends feel compelled to be supportive of their friends even when they know their friends are in the wrong, and to sweep conflict under the rug, which can lead to friendship break-ups as devastating as divorces.

But evolution isn’t going to answer these questions, because this is a cultural issue, not an evolutionary one, as becomes clear in Mroz’s chapter about female friendship in other countries. In Korea, for instance, friends are not expected to be supportive no matter what, but to bluntly confront each other with their flaws if necessary. If your friend loses her job, and you know that she’s been late every day and she spends most of her time in the office playing Candy Crush, a white American might feel compelled to say, “How could they fire you! You’re so great!” (aware all the while that this is a base lie, but that telling the truth may destroy the friendship), whereas a good Korean friend would say, “They fired you because you were a horrible employee. Play less Candy Crush next time.”

Mroz writes an entire chapter about this sort of thing - and then pops right back into “so how can we use evolution to explain (white, probably middle- or upper-class?) women’s friendships in America (or maybe the Anglophone countries more generally?” And the answer, as Mroz just demonstrated, is that you can’t! Because these are cultural patterns, not genetic ones! Did she write that entire chapter about the differences in friendships in different cultures without ever realizing that it meant most of her generalizations about women and the nature of female friendships are bunk?

I missed The Miseducation of Cameron Post when it was in theaters here, but sometimes the world offers you a second chance: the IU cinema showed it last weekend, and my friend Caitlin and I caught it then.

My shorthand description of the film has been “the drama version of But I’m a Cheerleader,” which is… yes and no. There are definite similarities between the two films. In both films, the heroine is sent to a gay conversion camp intended to turn her into a heterosexual; in both, the proximity of other gay teens instead helps the heroine embrace her sexuality, leading in the end to her escape from the camp.

But the difference in tone is more significant than that capsule summary suggests. But I’m a Cheerleader is an over the top comedy in bright pinks and eye-searing blues. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is earth-toned, muted, downbeat. Mountain sunlight streams in through the windows, but rather than brighten the place up, it washes it out.

As with the color palette, so with the emotional tone. But I’m a Cheerleader is, in the end, a joyous movie. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is not a tragedy - the ending is ambiguous - but it is a sad movie.

Not in any dramatic, flashy sense - the movie eschews big dramatic setpieces - but in a small, muted, quietly devastating way, where the sadness grows larger the farther you get from the movie. It feels like the whole world is ranged against these kids. There are moments when Cameron wavers, when she’s tempted to get with the program and try to be “cured,” even though she never really believes it would work, just because everything is so hard.

Late in the film, an investigator is sent to the camp in the wake of a suicide attempt. (It is typical of the film’s approach that we only see the blood left behind, not the attempt itself.) He’s meant to find out if the camp is abusing the kids. But as Cameron points out to him, the point of the program is to make them hate themselves. Isn’t that abuse?

( Spoilers for the endings of both films )

***

Only semi-related, but kore linked me to an article about The Original Six: The Story of Hollywood’s Forgotten Feminist Crusade, which is about six female directors who sued the studios for gender discrimination in the late seventies/early eighties - only to have their case dismissed in court - and I thought everyone ought to have a chance to see it.

The article mentions some of these directors’ would-be projects, including a biopic of Emma Goldman and “a buddy road-trip comedy called Bad Girls.” I would kill for a road-trip comedy made in the late seventies or early eighties starring a pair of wise-cracking women.

When I made my New Year’s Resolution to watch a film by a women director every month, I briefly considered doing a 52 movie challenge instead: committing to watching a film by a woman director every week, for 52 movies total over the year.

“No,” I thought. “Fifty-two movies is a lot of movies. I might not make it.”

You may have guessed where this is going. After watching Cleo from 5 to 7 this afternoon (review still forthcoming), I hit fifty-two movies for the year so far.

In the grand scheme of things, fifty-two is not a lot of movies, but it’s enough to get good and mad about the piss-poor job Hollywood does representing women both in front of and behind the camera. The estimates I’ve seen vary (largely because the numbers vary year by year), but less than 10% of directors in Hollywood are female. Less than 10%! When we’re half the population!

And actually this is misleading: men direct an even higher percentage of high-budget blockbuster must-sees, while women (when they get to direct at all) are shunted into smaller niche films that don’t have nearly as much impact on the cultural conversation as, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where women exist only as secondary characters and are apt to drop out of the story without warning, and yet we’re like, well, hey, isn’t it great that Jane’s a scientist! In that one movie. Then she forgets about it because she’s moping about Thor, and then she sort of disappears, but hey, it was great while it lasted!

Hollywood throws us crumbs and they’ve been doing it for so damn long that we’re grateful when they throw us a slightly larger crumb than normal rather than infuriated that we’re getting fucking crumbs.

This is not to say that every film directed by a woman is a shimmering feminist masterpiece, but generally speaking female directors remember that women are people with human emotions who do things for comprehensible if sometimes horrible reasons, a low bar which many male directors fail to meet.

I have a theory about why girls tend to read more than boys. It’s because boys can turn on the TV or pop in a movie or a video game and see themselves reflected in all directions, and books are the only place where girls have even half as much chance to do the same thing.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My mixed feelings about Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies continued right through to the end. On the one hand, yeah, it’s nice to have a book focusing on single women that is actually positive about increased levels of female singleness rather than having vapors about the fact that Women Aren’t Getting Married, The End Times Are Nigh.

On the other hand, I felt the book was sometimes boosterish at the expense of being truthful, like in the chapter where Traister celebrates college hook-up culture - even as she admits that her own research assistant (a college student herself, and therefore presumably closer to that culture) objected to her rosy portrayal and suggested that many young women participate in hook-up culture not because they want no-strings-attached sex that won’t distract them from their career goals (Traister’s interpretation) but because they feel that’s the only way to get guys to pay attention to them.

If you can’t convince your own research assistant, then maybe your interpretation needs a little more work, you know?

I also finished Mud City, the third book in the Breadwinner quartet, which focuses on Parvana’s friend Shauzia rather than Parvana. On the one hand, I quite liked getting a different viewpoint on things with Shauzia, who is more independent and impatient than Parvana; but on the other hand, I super want to know what happens next for Parvana, now that she’s been reunited with her family, so it’s a little frustrating being sidetracked! But fortunately the fourth book is about Parvana again, so I’ll get a chance to catch up with her soon.

And I finished Miss Timmins’ School for Girls, which was unsatisfying in the way that literary fiction with strong mystery elements often are. Is it a matter of honor among litfic authors not to offer satisfying solutions to their mysteries? Not that mystery writers always manage it, but at least when they fail you feel that they haven’t set out to frustrate you on purpose.

There’s also a totally unnecessary last-minute maiming. Why do I even try reading grown-up books for grown ups?

What I’m Reading Now

Adeline Dutton Whitney’s A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life, a novel for girls published just after the end of the Civil War (really just after: in 1866). This would have been so useful for my project about American girls’ literature between 1890 and 1915 - as background, you understand; how can you understand how girls’ literature has changed if you don’t know what came before?

Although honestly I think what we might learn from A. D. Whitney is that the difference between the two periods is that the heroines’ unladylike yet lovably boisterous best friends become heroines in their own right in later years, probably because of the belated influence of Jo March. Although Gypsy Breynton (a heroine of a popular girls’ series that preceded Little Women by three or four years) was also a bit of hoyden, so really maybe all I've learn is that my periodization is bunk.

I’ve also begun Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin, her second piece of Hemingway RPF (the first of course being The Paris Wife), which is just as well written as the first and seems like it might be less depressing, although of course it’s early days and Martha Gellhorn has only just arrived in Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War. So there’s plenty of time for things to get sad.

What I Plan to Read Next

My Name is Parvana, the final book in the Breadwinner quartet. I know the animated movie is unlikely to have any sequels, but it would be super cool if they did make a complete trilogy (I liked Mud City but as it focuses on Parvana’s friend Shauzia rather than Parvana, it could be left out for reasons of artistic unity) for all of Parvana’s life.

Oh! And E. Lockhart’s Genuine Fraud. You know, I have some issues with Lockhart’s writing (the way she writes female friendships bugs me), but I realized today that aside from this most recent offering, I have read all of her books.

Well, except for How to Be Bad, which Lockhart co-authored with Sarah Mlynowski and Lauren Myracle… neither of whom I’ve read. So maybe this book would be a good way to sample their work?

I suspect that Alias Grace is Netflix’s answer to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale: in response to an acclaimed series based on a Margaret Atwood novel of future feminist dystopia, they’ve adapted a Margaret Atwood novel about that other feminist dystopia: the past.

Or, at least, for an Irish-born servant girl with no connections, no means, and no luck, mid-nineteenth century Ontario comes very close to it. Grace Marks hasn’t caught a break since the day she was born: her father is an abusive drunk, her mother died at sea when the family immigrated to Canada, and the happiest time of her life are the months after she takes her first job in service, when she shares a room with a spirited servant girl, Mary Whitney.

Until Mary Whitney falls pregnant by the son of the house, who refuses to acknowledge the child, and dies in a botched back alley abortion.

After that Grace’s life spirals downhill till she lands where we find her at the start of the series: locked in a penitentiary, convicted of murdering a later employer and his housekeeper. There are doubts about her guilt, however - she claims that she has no memory of the murders - so a group of philanthropists have hired a doctor, a specialist the nascent field of psychology, in hope that his findings will help win her a pardon.

This, then, is the frame story: Grace is telling her life story to Dr. Simon Jordan. He hopes to win her trust through his sympathetic interest in her story, which may cause her to drop this pretense of amnesia and at last tell the truth - or possibly allow her to break through the amnesia that has hitherto veiled her memory - or… something. It’s the 1850s and psychology is still wild and wooly terrain.

I was a little afraid that he was going to be yet another abusive man, and I just didn’t think I could take another when Grace’s life is already littered with them. But although he entertains some romantic fantasies about Grace he never makes an actual move - and as Grace says, if we could be executed for thoughts, we would all be hanged.

It’s Grace, however, who is the star of the show: Grace and the long, long thoughts that she’s thought in prison. She’s uneducated but clever, and with the things she does know - about quilts, and the Bible, and housework - she’s got a strikingly unusual way of looking at the world, and it’s always fascinating to see what she’ll say next.

I also loved Grace’s friendship with saucy Mary Whitney, whom Grace often quotes (or claims to quote) when she wants to say something that is not exactly modest or proper - but nonetheless true.

(I don’t know how much of this is the screenplay and how much comes direct from Margaret Atwood, but this is an excellent example of historical fiction where the social justice message that has been successfully translated into the language of the time, which is something I love when it’s done well and can’t abide when it’s been done badly or, worse, not even attempted.)

( Spoilers )

In short - I think I’m going to have to read the book. Once I’ve had some time to recover from the miniseries.