Reading Roundup, April and May 2024

[phantomtomato]

The academic term is over and thus began summer reading. Probably a bit too much, to be honest; it's not as though I haven't had other responsibilities for the past month! But this was overall a really enjoyable crop of books, and I'm excited to get to talk about them.

Jeremy at Crale by Hugh Seymour Walpole

I got the tip to move ahead to this third book in the series from edwardianspinsteraunt, thank you for that! To be very honest, I read this at the beginning of April, but my other April reads got their own posts and so I have lumped this in with the May group.

Overall, this wasn’t bad as a boarding school book—unlike the first Jeremy novel, it takes place entirely at school, Jeremy’s grown a bit and established himself among the other boys. (This was an initial point of confusion, as afaict the second book doesn’t show us his first years at public school, it’s only about prep school?) But it’s a strange inclusion alongside David Blaize, back in that blog post I linked for the last Jeremy novel, as a story of romantic friendship. Despite there being a strong potential for romantic friendship between Jeremy and multiple boys at his school (incl. his rival, the older boy who mentors him at Rugby football, maybe the boy who is a sneak, the sad first-year fag, possibly others…), Jeremy’s own main interest is a boy who he spies from afar around halfway through the novel. I must emphasize: all of the boys alluded to in my parenthetical have multiple chapters of interaction with Jeremy. The boy from afar does not talk to Jeremy until the literal last page of the novel.

So in my opinion, this romantic friendship has nothing on that of David Blaize and Frank Maddox. Nor, to be honest, The Hill, or Fifth Form, or even poor miserable Eric.

The author called out a Talbot Baines Reed book in the foreword (The Cock-House at Fellsgarth), and I tried that as well but DNF’ed around 20% through. I will likely try to return to it later, it was just… straightforwardly a boys’ school adventure, nothing particularly slashy about it. My first Talbot Baines Reed disappointment, and I’m afraid the likely trend of his remaining school novels, judging by the quick skims I gave them. Fifth Form and My Friend Smith might be the only slashy ones.

Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr

This was in an exchange tagset (for an exchange I ultimately didn't join), but I knew I'd seen it discussed on meme and, after Middlemarch and Henry Henry, I wanted something lighter to enjoy. I really enjoyed it! Good choice, past self.

This sort of book is not my usual speed—I don’t do much fantasy, and I’ve never been into Arthuriana. The book’s conceit is that of a murder mystery, so the names and figures are largely introduced as relevant to the opening murder, and the need to answer the mystery kept me going through the worst of the info-dumps about vassal kings. I don’t think I’ve been converted to Arthurian myths as a genre, but I don’t regret spending time with this one. The plotting is very strong.

Our narrator is very opinionated: Sir Kay, foster-brother of King Arthur, and castle seneschal. I hadn’t heard of him before this book, but he was a great character. I appreciated that this novel looks at Arthur’s court in its declining years: most of the knights are middle-aged and their glories have faded. Kay is bitterly aware of how his role will be diminished in the stories of the court’s accomplishments. It felt like a nice way of acknowledging the conflicting centuries of myths about these characters, which Karr was doubtless reinventing to suit her narrative.

His counterpart is Mordred, who I had heard of, but not so well that I anticipated the mid-book reveal of his fated prophecy. Mordred’s gloominess is delightful, and the book really shines around his relationships: to Kay (this was shippy! This was also what was nominated for the tagset!), to his brothers, and to his mother. Mordred spends most of the book thinking he’s about to be murdered. Kay spends most of the book telling us how handsome Mordred is. It’s very fun.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

I read this alongside yletylyf and at her prompting, which I'm grateful for! I've probably never read Austen before (there's something I owned in high school, but I can't recall what or if I actually read it). I'm glad for the pushing, which helped me realize both that Austen's novels are not as long as I feared, and also that they're a very clear influence on Forster, which I love. I will make an effort to read at least one more this summer, ahead of the Austen Exchange.

Reading Persuasion was an interesting experience because I had a great time doing it, and I was also deeply dissatisfied with the story. Can a story be both very good and quite bad at the same time? Somehow, this was.

The heart of my complaint is, after talking it over for a while with Lety, that there's all of this pining and no substantive relationship to show for it. Anne and Wentworth barely talk. We don't learn anything much about their whirlwind romance eight years prior to the start of the novel. When they do finally reunite and commit to one another at the end, their entire conversation is left to summary. Wentworth's most famous dialogue (which is beautiful!) takes the form of a scrap of a letter. And Anne, for her part, does very little on her own initiative! We see her help out when Louisa brains herself jumping off of a cliff, yes, but that's only one instance of action. Primarily Anne drifts.

But what a story it is otherwise! I was deeply engaged by all of the matchmaking and the family drama. I mean, I wanted William Elliot to have killed a man, not just... led some friends towards bad financial decisions which they ultimately made by themselves, but. It was still very exciting to see this large and compelling cast of characters play out their roles. I appreciated how well Austen established each person as fully a separate personality with their own motivations for doing things. I will say that this sometimes ran into the issues I had with Anne—Anne displays many of the same character flaws as her family but the narration doesn't treat them with the same censure as it does those other characters.

Ultimately, however, I have a fervent need for a genderbent retelling of this. I want to see the version where Anne is a man. I adore reunions in romantic relationships and I think theirs is primed for a m/m retelling, as there's many ways to fit the social roles of a second son (I think it's vital that Elizabeth is also genderbent) to Anne's story. This is one project I'm considering taking on, or at least prompting for in some exchange.

Howards End by E. M. Forster

During my debate about which Forster to read next, I found an old copy of this at a local antiquarian store, and that decided it for me. (I picked up a pretty specialty printing of A Passage to India during a recent trip, so I'll say that the ordering worked out!) I didn't know much about it going in and I wonder how it would have felt if I did—this is a novel I want to revisit in a few years' time, as I expect it offers a great deal to the rereader.

In the comments of my last Forster review, we talked about how Forster writes het relationships. I can now agree that these particular ones feel sexless, and it's an interesting novel to examine that in because there are so many heterosexual relationships. There's those between the two sisters who are the main focus of the novel, Margaret and Helen, and their partners; there's the married Basts, there's the Wilcox men and their spouses. Unlike ARWAV or WAFTT (lol, that's the first time I've considered the acronym), this doesn't attempt to be a romance; all through, it is a commentary on England and Englishness. The novel covers Imperialism, urbanization of the countryside, socialism, the shift towards working for one's wealth, and (as always with Forster) what it means to have good taste or an appreciation for art. This is what I think will be rewarded by rereading! I hope to only know more about the social and political dynamics of Edwardian England before I stop here again.

The Schlegel sisters Margaret and Helen are the main draws from a character perspective. Their relationships, primarily to one another but also platonically and romantically with the supporting cast, are the field on which all of those issues of Englishness are explored. They are half-German (scandalous!) and their Germanness stands for the free-thinking, irreverent aspects of their personalities. They each have different approaches to it. Margaret, significantly older, kept the household together while her two youngest siblings were still underage (there is a baby brother, more on him later). Helen, who has recently reached the age of majority, has more of the freewheeling iconoclasm that the more staid characters rebuke in the Schlegel family. Margaret, probably owing to her age and sense of responsibility for the family, is more strongly tempted by conventionality—indeed, a large chunk of the novel describes her temporary seduction into it.

I don't relate to the sisters' characters by liking or disliking them. They are interesting. They are the strongest female characters that I've yet read from Forster, and in some ways they make the weakness of those other women stand out more starkly. They're also some of the queerest; this is a novel which begs for a sistercest AU. Helen, towards the end, is living with a woman in Germany (Monica!) and if that's not meant to be read as a lesbian relationship then I really have no idea what Forster put it in there for. Margaret, too, has the sort of complex emotional relationship with another woman (Mrs. Ruth Wilcox) which I initially read as queer, only Ruth Wilcox dies suddenly after it's established. Margaret becoming the second Mrs. Wilcox has an interesting effect, then, of placing her spiritually closer to this departed lover by giving her the trappings of the first Mrs. Wilcox's life: husband, family, home (eventually). If one cannot possess the lover then they can possess the lover's life?

And this is all without digging into the epilogue, during which Maragert, her husband, and her sister all occupy the family home which originally belonged to Ruth—the husband, retired, symbolically emasculated, delighted only by a baby; the sisters, running a household together now, united forever.

Surprising no one who has read my Forster reviews thus far, my favorite character was Tibby Schlegel, the youngest sibling and only brother. Forster always seems to provide someone as a hint that male queerness exists—no matter the marriages and babies which occupy the foreground of the drama, there will be, lurking at the edges, a disaffected brother or an affected suitor. He is probably Forster or one of Forster's university friends. Inevitably I adore these men. Tibby lounges about, eating. He makes flippant comments or absents himself from serious discussions, and yet the narration recognizes that he has depth and exists in a realm of his own, if off-page. I think I fell in love with him at this quote:

Tibby, for all his defects, had a genuine personality.

I can imagine how Forster would have treated Tibby as the protagonist of his own novel. I would have loved to see it. Maurice, for all of its wonders, is not the story of Forster's affected, effete, upper-class Englishmen; even there, they are relegated primarily to the sidelines through the role of Clive Durham. He would have done a marvelous job of it, and I wish that Forster had been able to write a half-dozen stories about queer men so as to give us that variety.

I will limit myself to one more comment: Tibby makes a single offhand mention of a Mr. Vyse, which must be a reference to Cecil Vyse from ARWAV. I wonder if there are any other such crossover references in the Forster Extended Universe! I will look for them in A Passage to India. Whether or not there are, this one makes me very much want Cecil Vyse/Tibby Schlegel fanfic.

Comments

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

I would read the hell out of a Tibby Schlegel/Cecil Vyse fanfic - what an excellent concept! And it's fascinating to hear your thoughts on Howards End as a whole: I reread it earlier this year, and appreciated Forster's handling of the social and political elements even more than I did the first time round - it's such a rich, complex look at class and Englishness, although I'm not fully convinced by his handling of the Basts, especially Jacky (to be fair, he's much kinder to her than most male authors of his time would be, but she just disappears at the end! And the Schlegels - and Forster himself - are so invested in Leonard's interiority and giving him a chance to better himself, but it never seems to occur to anyone that Jacky might also benefit from this and have a complex inner life??)

And I really enjoyed your thoughts on Persuasion too! I first read it (along with most of Austen's novels) at around twelve/thirteen, and consequently I have a very deep and not entirely rational sentimental attachment to Anne and Wentworth's romance (it helps that it's exactly the sort of fraught, restrained, very mannered dynamic that I absolutely adore), but your criticisms definitely offer a lot of food for thought and are extremely valid! For my part, I've always thought Austen does a good job of allowing Anne to exercise agency in the small, subtle ways her society allows, even if they do seem trivial from a modern perspective (but in a society where a well-bred lady isn't allowed to publically declare herself or be seen to be pursuing a man she's interested in, you're limited to indirect communication and eye gazes and overheard moments): the way she approaches Captain Wentworth at the concert, her conversation with Harville in the penultimate chapter (which was revised substantially from the earlier drafts to give her a more active role). But I can see how she might come across as quite drift-y, and I agree that her attitudes to class and filial duty could have been held to closer authorial scrutiny and criticism - I never come out of this book sure of whether Austen wants you to think Anne right in breaking off the engagement the first time round, for instance. And it's frustrating (although understandable) that, for all Anne is willing to criticise Sir Walter and Elizabeth in her head, she pre-emptively shuts down any criticism of them from Mrs Smith - and a lot of her issues with them seem rooted in the fact that they're Bad at their feudal duties, rather than because of the inherent inequality and exploitativeness of Sir Walter's position. (But to be fair, that's an entirely modern objection on my part!) I try to give Persuasion a fair amount of grace, because it was written while Austen was dying and she never got to complete all her revisions - it's a brilliant book but not fully polished or perfected, and it's tantalising to think what it might have been if Austen had had better health or more time.

I love the idea of an M/M Anne/Wentworth AU - I read an excellent fic with this concept on Ao3 called "Two Gentlemen at the End of Summer" a while back, though I don't believe it also genderbent Elizabeth. On my latest reread, I also came out wanting fic for the incredibly niche pairing of William Elliot/Mrs Smith's husband - now that would be a fun corruption arc! (I also saw a fun prompt in the JAFF non-canon ship meme for Mr Elliot seducing Wentworth in an effort to keep him away from Anne, like he does with Mrs Clay and Sir Walter...very intriguing!) Anyway, I'm hoping to sign up to Austen Exchange if it's running this year, so I may well request some or all of these pairings.

[phantomtomato]

I take your criticism about Jacky, certainly. She could have been given those same hints of depth that are so deftly deployed for secondary characters like Tibby, and she was not. I think that as far as the Schlegels' perspective on Jacky goes, though, of course the sisters don't consider her interiority—they access Jacky (and the lower class) through Leonard only, and Leonard doesn't consider his own wife to have interiority. I was not impressed by him, on the whole.

You make a good point about the restrictions on women during the era Persuasion is set, and this was something Lety and I talked over during our book club debrief. I get it, rationally, but I struggle with the payoff, emotionally. There's that line early on where Wentworth talks about wanting a woman who has strength of personality and perhaps I read too much into it, I know it was also meant as a dig at how Anne left him the first time around, but it established an expectation for me that Anne would prove herself less susceptible to persuasion in a bigger way. She has one nice moment of it near the end, but it felt too small. As you say, there is so much additional context around this book to explain irregularities, thematic vagueness, etc., and overall I definitely enjoyed reading it! So much so that I plan to do the rest of Austen, whereas before I was an avowed 'never' on that front. But my enjoyment was absolutely not down to the romance, which surprised me.

I read "Two Gentlemen..." as well! (That and the longer modern AU, which I don't especially recommend—it didn't carry its word count, imo.) TG was part of my development of the idea that in a genderswap AU, both Anne and Elizabeth must be male. It is too vital to my conception of Anne that she lives a life of leisure without purpose, and being the only or eldest son, inheriting the family home and property, would take that passivity away from her.

Those other m/m pairings sound really fun! I also considered Wentworth/Harville, especially before we met his wife—Wentworth talks very prettily about his loyalty to Harville!

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

That's an excellent point re Leonard! I felt for him in the book and the film adaptation, but never really connected with him - his treatment of Jacky aside, he felt like more of a symbol than a character a lot of the time.

And I can definitely understand your attitudes around Anne and agency/strength of mind! I've read an enormous quantity of 19th and early 20th century comedies of manners, so I guess I've become pretty mentally acclimatised both to the social mores of the era and to female characters whose agency is constrained or limited by circumstances and personality.

Interestingly, Anne/Wentworth is probably the only Austen het endgame pairing I'm ride-or-die for - I'm pretty fond of Elizabeth and Darcy, but the others don't really do much for me. But even without the romance, I'd say all of Austen's novels are richly rewarding, and all have the potential for very fun and subversive queer readings!

[phantomtomato]

Oh, very much agreed that Leonard feels like a symbol and not a person. I was a bit shocked by that at first, but more fairly, it’s not like it’s unusual for Forster—he just more usually hands that kind of role to a secondary female character. Male characters with Leonard’s page presence often get some compelling depth beyond their symbolic uses.

I’m looking forward to the queer readings in the rest of Austen! That’s the best part of visiting classic lit as an adult, for me—having the patience to reflect on the historical context and read past the plot. I can’t promise I won’t mostly want to genderbend the heroines, but even that is fun.

[luzula]

Late comment--I got here by journal-hopping. : )

On my latest reread, I also came out wanting fic for the incredibly niche pairing of William Elliot/Mrs Smith's husband - now that would be a fun corruption arc!

May I recommend A Charming Marine Prospect (9950 words) by Hyarrowen? It has the very niche pairing William Elliot/Richard Musgrove, and is a lot of fun. Also has added fossil-hunting.

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

Oooh, thank you for the rec! I've seen that fic in the fandom tag, but haven't read it yet, as far as I recall - what a great concept!