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So, apparently Grace Livingston Hill’s brand of religion makes me want to go read about Amy Le Feuvre’s brand of religion. And I suppose it serves me right that Dwell Deep is more Hill-like that any Le Feuvre book I’ve read to date. It’s the story of Hilda Thorn, a young woman who moves in with her guardian’s family, who have little tolerance for her religious scruples.

I think the fact that she was converted before the story begins was part of what bugged me, although I guess it saved me one of Le Feuvre’s weirdly unsatisfactory conversion scenes. I also wasn’t wild about the first person narration, although I eventually got used to it.

The setup reminds me a little bit of Elsie Dinsmore, with a religious main character surrounded by people who not only don’t share her views, but can’t seem to live and let live. But it seems more pointless here. There’s no real reason for them to get angry with her for choosing not to go to parties, as her guardian does, or to tease her mercilessly about her religion, as her guardian’s son Kenneth does. She even points out to Kenneth how unfair he is to her: if she doesn’t react to his teasing, it’s because she considers herself above the rest of them, and if she does, she’s not as good as she pretends to be. She can’t win. And then he’s like, yeah, I guess that’s true, and continues to be an asshole.

That said, it’s hard to see the Forsyths’ lack of sympathy and occasional hostility towards Hilda as anything resembling persecution. A sickly poor child dies, but that’s the function of sickly poor children in books like this. One of the Forsyths’ guests is more of an asshole to Hilda than Kenneth, even, but that never seems terribly important, either. Even when a major character gets sick and nearly dies, we only find out about it once she’s on the road to recovery. The stakes are never very high, is what I’m saying.

I did get into Dwell Deep, eventually. I stopped being disconcerted by the first person narration, and got comfortable with Hilda as a character. And I like Hilda’s hands-off attitude to converting people, and that the most important piece of advice she gets is basically to trust her own judgement, because otherwise someone else’s opinion could become more important to her than God. It’s not exactly the thing I’m used to seeing from Le Feuvre, but it’s in harmony with the way she always treats religion–as a framework, a system of belief rather than just a belief. I don’t think I’m going to itch to reread Dwell Deep the way I itch to reread Her Kingdom and Olive Tracy, but I still like Amy Le Feuvre a lot.

I never wrote anything about Hilda Wade, did I?

So, obviously I’m pretty into Miss Cayley’s Adventures. So into it that I was kind of terrified of reading anything else by Grant Allen, which is why Hilda Wade has been languishing on my Kindle (and then my other Kindle) for several years. I shouldn’t have worried, though. Hilda Wade is good and bad in almost exactly the same ways as Miss Cayley’s Adventures is good and bad.

It’s narrated by Dr. Hubert Cumberledge, who is to doctor-narrators what many of Carolyn Wells’ protagonists are to lawyer-narrators, except that unlike most Carolyn Wells protagonists, he is capable of seeing women as people. Most of Grant Allen’s characters are capable of seeing women as people. Grant Allen’s female characters command respect.

Anyway, Hilda Wade is a nurse, and she and Dr. Cumberledge work at a hospital with Professor Sebastian, who is a Great Man. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a good man, though, and Hilda Wade knows he’s not. It’s pretty clear to the reader early on that Hilda a) does not like Sebastian, b) had some special purpose in coming to work for him, and c) probably wants revenge for something he did to her father. Eventually these things also become clear to Sebastian, and even, eventually, to Dr. Cumberledge.

Dr. Cumberledge is only moderately bright, compared to Professor Sebastian’s genius and Hilda’s superhuman intuition, but he’s pretty likable, mostly because his awe of Hilda turns out to be greater than his awe of Professor Sebastian. Early on, he’s skeptical of her concerns about Sebastian, but she slowly convinces him, and it works because he respects her and listens to her and is willing to see her point of view. And for all that the novel goes way downhill once he is convinced, that’s a really nice thing.

After that, the book gets adventurous and racist and sentimental, but wound to a close entertainingly enough that I never wanted to put it down. Apparently the last chapter was written by Arthur Conan Doyle from Grant Allen’s notes after his death or during his final illness. I have to say, I wasn’t a huge fan of the last chapter, but I don’t know that him not dying would have helped–he has a tendency to fall apart toward the end of a book. That’s the thing about Grant Allen, though: he starts off so strong, and builds up enough good will, that he’s free to make a mess of things later on–it doesn’t really matter that much. I guess Grant Allen’s heroines are better than his books, which doesn’t bother me at all, because the opposite is so much more common.

Lois Cayley is still better than Hilda Wade, though. She’s funnier.

So, everyone here likes stories about spinsters getting back a bit of their own, right? “The Bachelor’s Christmas” isn’t that, but thematically it’s a cross between that and Colonel Crockett’s Co-operative Christmas. As you can probably imagine, I’m super into it.

Tom Wiggin is the rare Christmas story protagonist who doesn’t have any major problems. I mean, he didn’t get to marry the girl he was in love with, and his servants sometimes break things, but that’s about it. He’s also an incredibly delightful person; when we’re introduced to him it’s Christmas Eve and he’s generously tipping his servants for Christmas preparatory to hand-delivering presents to his married siblings and their families. They’re all booked for dinner with their in-laws, and Tom isn’t invited, which is the problem around which the story is centered, but not an actual problem. And Tom is such a mensch that he’s using his lonely Christmas to provide another, less well-off bachelor with a nice dinner.

And then he expands his plan. He knows a lot of other bachelors who have no Christmas plans, and a lot of spinsters, too — all the members of his social set who never got married, including the girl he wanted to marry. And they’re all in their late twenties and thirties now — old enough to take care of themselves, as he puts it on his invitations — so he throws a Christmas dinner party, with a dance afterwards, and everything is great.

The ending struck a bit of a false note for me, but I still recommend “The Bachelor’s Christmas” unreservedly, because the rest of it is pure Christmas story glee.

So, Thomas Nelson Page was apparently a Lost Cause-er. Gross. I’m glad I didn’t love Santa Claus’s Partner. I mean, it’s fine. It’s a nice, workmanlike Christmas story with no indication that the author was super into slavery. It just doesn’t make me want to read others of Page’s books, which is nice because I wouldn’t want to give Dead Thomas Nelson Page the satisfaction.

Also, while I’m not actually going to spend this review referring to the main character by Benedict Cumberbatch names, well…I want you to know that I could. Because his name is Berryman Livingstone, and if Butterfly Creamsicle is close enough for the internet, then Berryman Livingstone is, too.

I’m also not going to refer to him as Ebenezer Christmascarol, but that’s what he is. His Bob Cratchit is John Clark, his senior clerk, who has eight kids and an invalid wife. His Ghost of Christmas Past is himself.

Livingstone keeps all his clerks late on Christmas Eve mostly because he’s forgotten it’s Christmas Eve, but also because he’s an asshole. He doesn’t have that first excuse for stopping kids in the street from sledding or knocking over a beggar on his way home, and, you know, he doesn’t think he’s a bad guy, he’s just massively self-centered and thinks having a lot of money means he can do whatever he wants. So, again, an asshole.

Once he’s home, he has a bit of an existential crisis, brought on by a headache and no dinner and the realization that his parents were much nicer than he is. He gives himself a short guided tour of his past and comes out of it a better person, but before embarking on his new life as a decent person, he has to earn the approval of Clark’s daughter Kitty, who hates him.

Kitty is maybe six, and was probably my favorite part of the story — instead of being saccharine and cute and angelic, she’s just very, very serious in that way that kids often are. She gives the impression of taking Livingstone on trial, and not being terribly impressed with him. And it’s easy to sympathize — I wasn’t terribly impressed with him either. I did enjoy the way everythign fell into place for him at the end, though. There’s a bit where he realizes that he actually does have friends, he just hadn’t realized it because he was viewing everyone’s behavior through the lens of being a dick.

Basically, Santa Claus’s Partner ticks all the boxes — Christmas spirit, Unity of Christmastimes, small children, a faint whiff of romance. I just might have liked it more not knowing that the author was nostalgic for slavery.

I am in general, not a huge fan of religious fiction, but Amy Le Feuvre is my weird, inexplicable exception. I have just confirmed this by reading a book called The Carved Cupboard. I’ve read a couple of other things of hers, but they were full of angelic dying children and dead dogs, and…no. No angelic dying children for me. The Carved Cupboard, like Her Kingdom, is about young women, and its religious focus is a vehicle for the larger theme of their finding their places in the world.

I just reread my post about Her Kingdom, and I don’t really remember the process of writing it, but I suspect I wrote a long, rambling draft about how much I love it, and then scrapped that and wrote something else instead. So I can’t point you at anything explaining my deep and irrational positive feelings towards it. Part of it is that it’s a mix of tropes I like a lot — the slow remaking of one’s circumstances, taming wild small children, he/she fell in love with his/her wife/husband, etc. But Amy Le Feuvre clearly has something else going on that I’m into, because The Carved Cupboard doesn’t include any of those things. And I don’t love it the way I love Her Kingdom, but I like it a lot.

It starts with four sisters being turned out of their home after their aunt dies, their cousin having apparently bullied her into changing her will in his favor during her final illness. With Aunt Mildred gone, each of the four Dane girls has only about a hundred pounds a year. Shades of Her Kingdom, but also of Sense & Sensibility. The four girls decide to pool their money and rent a cottage together in the country. There a mystery is introduced in the form of the titular cupboard, which the owner of the cottage has told them never to open — shades of Bluebeard. Not that they could if they wanted to, since it doesn’t open in any conventional way.

The eldest and youngest sisters are pretty well off — Agatha has her housekeeping and good works, Elfrida has her music and natural cheer, and both of them have God. Gwendoline and Clare, though, are less content. Gwen is the proud, practical one who needs to learn how to let herself be guided by God, and Clare is the imaginative, discontented one whose fiancé is on a survey expedition in Africa and how needs to learn patience. Each of them suffers — Clare when Hugh’s party is massacred, and Gwen when her plans for her brother in California go wrong — but they learn from their experiences and, with the help of the carved cupboard and the circumstances surrounding it, all four sisters are eventually provided for. Bad things happen, but mostly everyone ends up okay. Not all of the religious people are perfect, and the scheming cousin is never redeemed.

The biggest problem with The Carved Cupboard is that there’s so much story that Le Feuvre doesn’t have space to spread out. Suprisingly, character development doesn’t come off too badly — even minor characters are pretty well developed. Everything fits in the space provided, actually — it just doesn’t fit comfortably, and you don’t get much space for extra detail. And by extra detail I mean the meat of a story like this, which is, under a thin veneer of melodrama, about people growing into change. But while I missed what wasn’t there, I liked what was.

I keep thinking about the religious stuff, and about why it doesn’t bother me, when religious fiction so often does. It might just be a lack of condescension. For now, at least, I’m content to enjoy Le Feuvre, and hope I come across more of her non-children’s books in the future.

I’m not actually sure whether to refer to this book by Mrs. Edward Kennard as That Pretty Little Horsebreaker or Pretty Kitty Herrick the Horsebreaker. They’re both listed as being published in 1891, and if the latter has many times more Google results, I’m pretty sure that’s only because it’s the one that’s available as an ebook. Under either title, I’m pretty pleased with it — even though I was slightly overwhelmed by horsiness. I was never super into horses as a kid, but I did read Black Beauty and at least one Black Stallion book and several series books involving young people and horses, and I’m still able to state unequivocally that this is the horsiest book I have ever read.

It’s also a fox hunting book. I’ve consumed a fair amount of media that features fox hunting in some capacity, from Brideshead Revisited to Top Gear, but I never actually understood what was going on. That Pretty Little Horsebreaker has cleared up the confusion to some extent, but only in that I now understand why I’m confused by it. See, I always thought that there must be some point to all the folks in (red) pink coats riding horses, but it turns out there’s not. They are entirely unnecessary for the business of killing foxes. There’s a pack of hounds to hunt down the fox, a guy to be in charge of the hounds, and a whole slew of people to run around after the hounds for the hell of it. Which I guess I understand, because there’s probably no other way to get the kind of unpredictable cross-country ride they’re going for, but I also find it kind of weird. No, guys, you’re not actually hunting. You’re chasing on horseback dogs that are hunting. Let’s not call this something it’s not.

Not that the book is solely composed of detailed descriptions of people on horses running after dogs that are fox hunting. Mostly it’s about Kitty Herrick’s love life. Kitty is, I think, nineteen, and the only daughter of a widowed father. The two of them are big into sport, and by “sport” I mean “chasing on horseback dogs that are hunting”. Kitty’s got two suitors, both of whom are also really into sport. Captain Cyril Mordaunt is extremely good-looking, not particularly wealthy, and apparently has a really cute mustache. Lord Algernon Loddington is the son of a Duke, has known Kitty since she was a kid, and is kind of dreamy. Obviously Kitty’s much more interested in Cyril, the handsome stranger, but practically as soon as she gets engaged to him and tells her father about it, her father commits suicide and Kitty is left penniless.

It’s pretty clear that Cyril — and his mercenary mother — are a lot less interested in Kitty as soon as she’s found not to be an heiress, but Mrs. Kennard has the engagement break down slowly, so that Cyril isn’t an outright villain. There’s a long, drawn-out process of the two of them negotiating their own ends of the situation, which is pretty great, especially since the two ends of the situation are basically nothing alike.

Once it becomes clear that, whatever Cyril’s feelings, Lady Mordaunt is hostile to her, Kitty takes a job with the local horse dealer, who knows her well and wants to help her out. Everyone — including her employer — deplores this step, but as Kitty points out, none of them were willing to offer any other ideas as to how she might earn her living, so they’re not really in a place to criticize. There are a lot of class issues tied up in peoples’ various objections to Kitty becoming a horsebreaker, and, in Mrs. Kennard’s universe, they turn out in part to be justified. Kennard walks a fine line between having Kitty be amazing at her job and having her be too good for it, and mostly makes it work. And if the only way to remove Kitty from her job is by placing her in physical danger on multiple occasions — well, I’m surprised Kennard held out as long as she did.

I have a weakness for books like this, where the plot can be viewed as a problem to be solved, and the author’s job is first to find a solution and second to conceal the plot’s inner workings. Mrs. Kennard does a pretty decent job with both. Take, for example, the problem of how to detach the gold-digger from the heroine — a classic situation. Kennard brings in an ugly, slightly vulgar heiress — also a classic — as part of her solution, but she makes said heiress kind of great. Judith Van Agnew, as Kitty’s oblivious rival, is the only person who understands the contortions Kitty’s pride has to go through as she adjusts to her new position. And although Miss Van Agnew’s presence often signals Kitty’s worst behavior, neither of them hold that against each other. It’s so easy, in books like this, for the author to end up having most of the women hate each other, and Mrs. Kennard almost goes that route, but Miss Van Agnew is a saving grace. Cyril is luckier than he deserves.

So, yeah, I really enjoyed this book, whatever you want to call it. Mrs. Kennard seems to have written a number of similarly horsey books, and in spite of the fact that I don’t care what a horse’s hocks look like, or even what they are, I’ll be seeking some of them out.

ETA: Horse injury report in the comments.

I keep reading Christmas stories that aren’t Christmas stories, but I guess I can’t blame The Weapons of Mystery or Joseph Hocking for the mistake this time. Project Gutenberg claims it’s a Christmas book — they list it on their Christmas bookshelf — but as far as I can tell no one else does.

There are a lot of things I can blame this book and its author for — terrible prose, extreme stupidity, racism, etc. — and I spent maybe the first third of Weapons of Mystery coming up with mean things to say about it. But the more I read, the less inclined I was to make fun of it. It never stops being terrible, and simultaneously predictable and insane. But it also has a weird appeal, and I say that as someone who had no intention of being appealed to by it. There was the stilted prose, for starters. And Joseph Hocking (a Methodist minister) had named his villains Herod Voltaire and Miss Staggles, which was, to say the least, unsubtle.

I was impatient and uncharitable all through Justin Blake’s trip to his friend Tom Temple’s Christmas house party, his meeting with Miss Gertrude Forrest, with whom he instantly falls in love, his deep and instinctive dislike of the handsome, sinister Mr. Voltaire, and his introduction to mesmerism. I was also uncomfortable, because the narrative kept signaling that things were going to get worse, and I hate that. But then something happened — maybe the plot kicked in, or something — and all of a sudden I couldn’t put Weapons of Mystery down. Not only that, I was actively rooting for Blake to shed Voltaire’s mesmeric influence, and for Miss Forrest not to be prejudiced against him. And I don’t know why, because it’s not like The Weapons of Mystery ever stopped being stupid.

It’s hard to single out good bits, too. On one hand, the parts where Voltaire is exerting mental pressure on Blake are sort of atmospheric, but they’re also still ridiculous. And Blake’s agonizingly slow race to find someone who may or may not be dead is exciting, but it’s also still super predictable. When I started Weapons of Mystery I was pretty confused by Hocking’s popularity, and I kind of get it now, because he was very good at something, I just don’t know what it is.

Hopefully Joseph Hocking is not exerting a mesmeric influence on me from beyond the grave.

You know how sometimes your daily life saps your will to do anything you’re not actually required to do? So, yeah. That. But I wanted to drop by to talk about “The Fool’s Love Story”, which I read on the tail end of the Sabatini kick that started with my reread of Bardelys the Magnificent.

It looks like The Fool’s Love Story might have been Sabatini’s first published story — it’s the first listed on the uncollected stories list on rafaelsabatini.com, and…it reads young. It’s about a Hofknarr, or court jester, in a small German kingdom in the mid-17th century. He’s in love with a young woman who’s engaged to an unworthy Frenchman, and it doesn’t end too well for anybody, really, unless you count the fact that I was completely delighted by it. Which was why I wanted to say something about it, but probably not in the way you think.

This is the thing: this story is pretty terrible. The plot is ridiculous, the writing is more than ridiculous, and you’re sort of plopped down in the middle of a fully formed emotional situation that never really changes. Also, dying heroically and tragically tends to go over a little better if there’s a point to it. But it’s Sabatini, who pretty much always gets me where I live, and I was totally sold by the time I hit “lean, sardonic countenance,” halfway through the first sentence.

Basically, I suspect this is one for the Sabatini devotees — and I’d be interested to know if I’m right.

Of all the English classes I ever had, my 7th grade one was the best. And part of it was that my teacher was great, and part of it was that I realized that grammar is equal parts fun and fascinating — although I realize I may be alone on that one — but probably the single biggest factor was that we had to write an essay on a short story each week. And I could talk a lot about how helpful it was to have to churn out essays and learn to construct an argument and stuff, but what I’m here to talk about today is how much I hated the short stories.

Middle School and High School English classes do a lot to instill in kids the idea that serious literature is super depressing, and short stories, which tend to be sort of single-minded in pursuit of an idea, make it worse — at least with novels, there’s usually time and space to put in a few scenes that will make you laugh, or, you know, offer sidelights on a character that give you hope that they have inner resources to draw on and won’t spend the rest of their lives completely miserable. If they live to the end of the story, that is.

I mean, there were bright spots: “The Speckled Band.” Dorothy Parker. Vocabulary lessons. But I came out of Middle School English with the conviction that all short stories were terrible and that I would hate them forever, with a grudging exception for detective stories.

Anyway, the point of this is that for a long time I really believed I hated short stories — until a couple of years ago when I realized that I was reading short stories all the time, and loving them. It was just that they were short story series, character-driven and funny instead of literary and depressing. These days I get really excited when an author I’ve been enjoying turns out to have a series of short stories or two. So this is the first in what I expect to be a extremely rambling series of posts about those, and how much fun they are — starting with the super obvious.

Sherlock Holmes

It doesn’t get a lot more obvious than Sherlock Holmes, right? To the point where I don’t need to describe the series at all, because if you don’t already know the premise, you’ve been living under a rock since 1887.I’m only including the Holmes stories here to point out that they’re exactly the same as everything else I’m about to talk about — focused on a character, based around a central conceit, and closely tied to a specific setting. And all about a person who’s better at stuff than everyone around him, which is preferred, if not essential. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is, I think, the most fun — first collections usually are — and I retain my 7th grade fondness for “The Speckled Band,” although I think the one that kind of bowled me over the most when I first read it was “The Red-Headed League.”

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the complete Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes or Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, but you get the idea. And the novels are sort of beside the point in this context, but I will freely admit that my favorite Sherlock Holmes Thing is Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love probably beyond reason.

Jeeves and Wooster

Then there’s P.G. Wodehouse. And if Sherlock Holmes is typical of the thing I’m trying to talk about, I don’t know what the Jeeves

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts floating around lately about what to read if you’re into Downton Abbey. One in particular, which talked about Elizabeth von Arnim apropos of one character giving a copy of Elizabeth and Her German Garden to another, made Evangeline at Edwardian Promenade say, “hey, what about Elinor Glyn?” Which, obviously, is the correct response to everything. And then I read it, and thought, “yeah, Elizabeth and her German Garden was popular when it came out in 1898, but would people really be trying to get each other to read a fifteen rear-old(ish) novel by a German author during World War I?” And then we decided that we could probably come up with an excellent list of Edwardian and World War I-era fiction that tied in the Downton Abbey. And so we did.

It’s a pretty casual list, mostly composed of things we came up with off the tops of out heads, a bit of research on Evangeline’s part and a bit of flipping through advertisements on mine, so we’re making no claims to be exhaustive. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, leave a comment.

"Yesterday I was a butler, Miss Cecelia.  Today I seem to be the Prime Minister of England, ... Sometimes life has a way of asking us to take a step up."

And step up they do!  To the direst, funniest, most improbable situations that might be found on a dilapidated paddle steamer plying the 1890 Numchuck River, calling on such colorful ports as Salvation, Patience, Plenty, Woodpile, Blowville, and Boats-a-Cummin. The Glorious Adventure of the Sunshine Queen is not for the reluctant reader; the reader who struggles with contextual clues.  Rather, it is for the reader who glories in wordplay, colorful language, and magnificent adventures.  Ms. McCaughrean does not stop

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So, there’s this really wonderful book that I found at the New York Public Library a few weeks ago. I mean, I don’t even know how to describe how special it is.

The Dull Miss Archinard is not that book. But I probably never would have come accross it on my own.

The book is called Toward a feminist tradition: an annotated bibliography of novels in English by women, 1891-1920, by Diva Daims and Janet Grimes, and it is a list of books by women that have a bit of a feminist bent (or an older-than-average heroine, or a heroine with a career), with blurbs compiled from contemporary reviews. It is the reading list of my dreams. I mean, aside from all the descriptions of books about how having children out of wedlock will inevitably lead to everyone involved dying the most miserable deaths possible, whether for moral reasons or because of the state of society, depending on the political inclinations of the author. But the books that delight in wretchedness seem to be counteracted by books about women founding salons, or farming coconuts. It’s pretty great.

Anyway, I noted down many titles, and The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick, was the first one I sought out. It’s about a guy named Peter Odd, whose estate neighbors on that of the Archinards: a spendthrift father, an invalid mother, and two young girls. Katherine, fourteen-ish, is courageous, scientifically inclined, and very smart. Hilda, maybe twelve, is timid, emotional, and intense. Odd makes friends with Hilda, who quotes Chaucer at him, and it flatteringly fond of his company, but when Odd’s wife dies, he leaves England and doesn’t encounter any of the Archinards for another ten years.

Then he encounters Katherine in Paris. He’s impressed by her wit, her manner, and her velvet gown, but mostly he’s eager to see Hilda again. Hilda, though, is kind of hard to track down. Odd spends increasing amounts of time with Katherine and her parents, but Hilda, if she appears at all, only pops in to say high between coming home from the studio where she paints and going to bed. Eventually Odd finds out what’s going on: Hilda is working herself to the bone in order to support her family in the lifestyle to which they insist on remaining accustomed. And also he realizes that he’s in love with her, which is awkward, because by that point he’s gone and gotten himself engaged to Katherine.

All of this should be significantly more fun than it actually is. I mean, it’s okay. I sort of liked most of the characters. Getting to be indignant about the way the Archinards treat Hilda was pretty enjoyable. The section towards the end where Hilda, Katherine, and Peter Odd all repeatedly accuse each other of being base was as unintentionally hilarious as it was irritating. But it could have been much better. Especially if Sedgwick’s editor had forbidden the use of the word ‘base.’