Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson

 The governess. The spinster. The Aunt Sallies of life and standbys of British serialized humor. Submerged in other people's garments. 

I had really hoped to read two or even three books this past week for the Persephone Readathon, but I'm sorry to say that the events in the news were so upsetting, I could hardly focus on the book that I had chosen -- and I really wish that I had picked a more uplifting book. I'd been putting off Alas, Poor Lady for years -- it was so long and seemed rather depressing. It did take rather longer than I expected, as I normally zip through a Persephone in a couple of days, but I'm very glad to have read it.

Alas, Poor Lady is the story of a Victorian family with seven daughters, ultimately focusing on the youngest, Grace Scrimgeour, born in 1869. Her father, a retired army officer, is forever disappointed that he has no son (who finally arrives two years after Grace); he takes little interest in his daughters other than providing them a perfunctory education and assuming eventually some man or other will take them off his hands. After nine pregnancies in more than 20 years, her mother blithely assumes the same, without preparing her (or her elder sisters) with the means to find a husband or learn to support her self -- it just wasn't done. 

A Honiton Lace Manufactury. Frederick Richard Pickersgill, 1869.

Some of Grace's elder sisters snag husbands and even have sons, but Grace and her unmarried sisters are doomed to spend their lives doing needlework and Good Works appropriate for middle-class ladies. One of the sisters, Mary, suggests higher education or even teaching as a profession; another, Queenie, the nerve to suggest opening a needlework shop. Both of these ideas are immediately rejected as being unsuitable -- what would people think? 

 Her stillborn love affair, her spinsterhood she might forget if they would let her, the loss of her shop never. It was her real broken romance. 'I could have made a success in business but they wouldn't let me.'
   That would be her story in all the years to come.

Eventually, through bad money management, bad investments, and just bad luck, the unmarried Scrimgeour sisters enter a slow downward spiral to genteel poverty, becoming a burden on relatives and living from hand to mouth.  I'm always interested in the lives of the Victorian, but this book was a tough read in parts, with, as always, women having few choices. The eldest sister, Gertrude, has a rude awakening from her own marriage and childbirth (nearly the same time as Grace's birth); but at least she has financial security. It's a very well written book, but I did have to stop several times because I was so distressed at the mistakes and injustices that these spinster sisters faced. Grace's multiple attempts to catch a husband were especially distressing. 

Author Rachel Ferguson

This book reminded me a bit of Pride and Prejudice, just from the aspect of getting so many daughters married off. (Imagine if Bingley hadn't rented out Netherfield Hall -- would Jane have been forced to marry Mr. Collins? Ew.) Mrs. Bennet is normally the object of ridicule, but if you think about it, Mr. Bennet hasn't done diddly squat to find his girls suitable husbands, and hasn't put any money aside for dowries. He hides in his study and never even thinks about their education, or the suitability of having all five girls out in society at once. It was more difficult for the older girls to find husbands after several seasons -- and if their sisters came out, they would be even more competition. How awful would it be to have season after season and remain unmarried, then see your younger sisters married off before you? At least one of Bennet parents cared about what would happen to them. The Scrimgeour parents basically stick their heads in the sand and just assume everything will take care of itself eventually. And the ending, thankfully, wasn't as depressing as I expected. 

Endpapers from the Persephone edition of Alas, Poor Lady, a detail from an early 20th century tapestry.
The Scrimgeour sisters spent a lot of time doing needlework.

Alas, Poor Lady is the only Persephone by Ferguson; however, the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Press has reprinted three more of her novels: Evenfeld; A Harp in Lowdnes Square; and A Footman for the Peacock, which is the only Furrowed Middlebrow left on my TBR shelves. Bloggers, have you read any of these? Which do you recommend? And did you enjoy the Persephone Readathon? Thanks again to Jessie from Dwell in Possibility for hosting!

Persephone Readathon Check-In and Giveaway!

So excited for another Persephone Readathon! I'm a bit late with this posting, but I've already started my latest Persephone, Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson. I seem to have put this one off forever -- I think I've owned it for at least five years. But I've read more than 100 pages so far and I'm quite enjoying it. It's fairly long, more than 450 pages, but I'd like to try to squeeze in at least one other dove-grey book by the next Sunday if I can -- I also own two newer Persephones which are quite short: Tory Heaven by Marghanita Laski, and The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whitaker. I've been really impressed with Persephone's short story collections, though I do find short stories difficult to review.

And now for the giveaway!!

A couple of months ago I was at the only used bookstore around with books in English (tricky to find here in Germany). I naturally checked the Classics shelf, and was delighted to find a Persephone -- a pristine copy of Cheerful Weather For the Wedding, in the Persephone Classic edition!

I already own a copy (sadly, packed up and in storage) but I could not bear to leave it on the shelf so naturally I bought it! I realized it would be the perfect book to share as a giveaway during the Persephone Readathon! 

If you aren't familiar, it's a novella about a single day in the life of a young woman named Dolly, her wedding day. Things are not necessarily as they seem, as the bride has doubts, and a former suitor arrives. It's a very quick read, only 119 pages, with wide margins. It could easily be finished in a single sitting (and I might reread it before I pop it into the post for the winner). It was also adapted into an excellent film starring Felicity Jones and Elizabeth McGovern in 2012. 

That's Felicity Jones (right) as the bride, and Zoe Tapper (her bridesmaid? I've forgotten.)

• If you'd like to enter the drawing, just leave a comment below and tell me which Persephone is your favorite and why. (If you haven't read any Persephones yet, just tell me which one you'd like to read!) 
• The drawing will be completely unscientific and I'll pick my favorite response. 
• Deadline to enter is Sunday, September 30, 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. 
• The drawing is limited to residents of the U. S. and Europe -- I live in Germany and can mail via European and U. S. mail. 
• Please leave a good contact email in your comment (if it doesn't automatically link) so I contact you if you win!

Anyway -- happy reading to all! Hope you're enjoying your Persephones this week! 

Fall Reading Challenges: R.I.P. XIII, Persephone Readathon, Victober, and The 1944 Club!

So many great reading opportunities on the blogosphere this fall! Here's a roundup of what I want to read soon. Naturally, I'm going to focus on what's on my own shelves. 

Readers Imbibing Peril XIII: September 1 - October 31.

Mystery, suspense, horror, thriller, dark fantasy, gothic. I'm hoping for Peril the Second, at least two books. Possible RIP Reads:

• A ghost story collection -- I have collections by Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James, and E. F. Benson on the TBR shelves
• Something by Wilkie Collins, a shorter work: The Dead Secret, The Evil Genius, or The Haunted Hotel. (Can also count for Victober).
• Frankenstein, for my IRL book club
• Something by Dorothy L. Sayers -- my library has several available for digital audio download.  Probably either Strong Poison or The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Will also count for my final category in the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

Persephone Readathon: September 21 - 30. Hosted by Jessie at Dwell in Possibility. 

Again, just trying to read more books from my own shelves. I have at least a dozen unread Persephones. Possible reads: 

• Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson. It is the dove-grey book that I've owned the longest without reading it.
• Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood
• The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde. My most recent Persephone purchase, bought at the shop on my trip to London in June.
• Tory Heaven by Marghanita Laski. A birthday present -- I should read it before my next birthday.
• The Happy Tree by Rosalind Murray

Portrait of Queen Victoria, painted by Franz Winterhalter  in 1943.
I saw the original at Kensington palace in June.

Victober 2018: October 1 - 30. 

This is a new one for me, a month-long readalong of Victorian literature on Goodreads. Possible reads: 

• The Doctor's Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• The Dead Secret, The Evil Genius, or The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins (also RIP)
• Tales of Mystery and the Macabre by Elizabeth Gaskell (also RIP)
• Who Is Lost and Is Found by Margaret Oliphant
• Is He Popenjoy? by Anthony Trollope -- for my Trollope group readalong
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson -- I've gotten hooked on Black Sails, which includes some of Stevenson's characters -- sort of a prequel which explains the relationship between Long John Silver and Captain Flint.
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The 1944 Club, October 15 - 21.

Hosted by Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings: 

Possible reads: 

• The Green Years by A. J. Cronin. I know nothing about this book, but someone left a beautiful old edition on the giveaway cart at the library last year, and I couldn't pass it up. Apparently it's about an Irish orphan who is sent to live with his grandparents in Scotland. It's only 240 pages so I'll give it a try.
• The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker -- I have a beautiful Penguin copy that I received as a prize several years ago from an online contest -- one of the last of my Big Box of Penguins.
• Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker -- a wonderful book set in Montana, by an author nobody reads anymore. I read it several years ago and loved it, and would love to read it again. It's a coming-of-age story about a young woman working as a teacher in WWII.

It seems like a lot, but it's split up over two months, and a lot of the books cross over into other categories. Bloggers, have you read any of these books or authors? Which do you recommend? And is anyone else signing up for fall challenges? 

Mini Persephone Readathon: Heat Lightning by Helen Hull

In theory I should sit down instantly and record my thoughts about a novel as soon as I've finished it, but sometimes I really need to take a day or two to mull over and absorb first. I had hoped to write this post yesterday in time for the Mini Persephone Readathon hosted by Jessie at Dwell in Possibility but as is often the case, I'm a day or two behind. I did zoom through my selection, Heat Lightning, in just over two days, which isn't bad considering I had three other books in the rotation.

Nevertheless. Helen Hull's Heat Lightning, published in 1932, is one of the few American Persephone novels, and like many books about domestic life, it is about nothing in particular and everything at the same time. Set in the hot, airless summer of 1930 in a fictional small town in Michigan, it's the story of thirtyish Amy Norton, who has left New York City for a family visit. Her husband is off fishing in Canada (as my own father used to do); and her two children are away at camp.

Amy is the prodigal daughter, the only one to move Far Far Away from her hometown, where her extended family still live. Her late grandfather was a successful businessman, and her family are the prominent Westovers, who own a plough factory and like so many of the period, are facing hard times after the financial crisis of 1929. Amy's visit coincides with the early delivery of her younger sister's baby (her fourth or fifth daughter), plus a number of other family crises in which quite a few family secrets, prejudices, and scandals are revealed. The center of this story is the matriarch, Amy's grandmother, who lives next door to her parents and pretty much still rules the family with a firm but loving hand. 

An early edition of Heat Lightning

This novel started out a little slowly with Amy's arrival into town, but picked up pretty quickly with the reveal of a pretty big family secret, and kept on rolling from there. There are a lot of family members -- sisters, brothers, cousins, in-laws -- and I was happy to see a list of the characters and their relationships listed in the front. I'm sure I would have gotten the story quite confused without it. I'm not sure if it's the sign of good or bad writing if the author has to list it up front, but I was glad to have it.

Ostensibly this is a domestic novel, but it was really a sort of microcosm about life in that time period. It's rather timely with some talk about immigration and "foreign invasion" -- which include Italian immigrants (with a few slurs); a French sister-in-law who I can only assume is a war bride; a cousin's wife who is the child of German immigrants; and a Lithuanian domestic, who had been referred to as being of "a different race." I can only imagine how the Westovers would have reacted to  my mother's family of Polish/Germans, who were farmers in Alpena which is northern Michigan.

Heat Lightning also has some really good and insightful writing about family life and marriage, as Amy begins to reconcile her family's history and relationships, and the struggles within her own marriage are revealed. I really enjoyed this book and I'm glad that Persephone chose to reprint it as one of their American selections.

Finally, I have to make a comment about the endpapers, which are one of the nicest features of Persephone books. I imagine that the publishers tried to find an American fabric from the period to use, and I was delighted to see on the website that the name is "Memories of the Alamo" -- not quite the Midwestern setting of the book, but I love that this book set my home state of Michigan also incorporates a little bit of San Antonio, where I spent eleven years. If you look closely you can see that iconic Texas building in the print.

This is my seventh book for the TBR Pile Challenge 2018. And thanks again to Jessie at Dwell in Possibility for hosting the Mini Persephone Readathon which inspired me to read this book.

Persephone Readathon: Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary

I love it when I can combine online reading events like the Persephone Readathon with my annual reading challenges. This week was the perfect time to cross another book off my 2018 TBR Pile Challenge List -- Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary. I actually had THREE Persephones on this list, plus one possible read on my Back to the Classics Challenge list. (The others were Heat Lightning, London War Notes, and Effi Briest). To be perfectly honest, Lady Rose won out because it was the shortest, and because it was owned-and-unread the longest. 

Basically, Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary is a sort of a fairy tale about a little girl growing up in Victorian times on a massive Scottish estate called Keepsfield. Published in 1937, it starts out in the period between the wars when three tourists, two American and one British, stop to tour the empty house that belongs to Lady Rose, who has lived abroad for years. One of the tourists, a British woman, begins to engage the elderly housekeeper about the little girl who grew up there and begins to imagine what she was really like.

Even this cover looks a little twee.

This book starts out rather saccharine and almost twee. Lady Rose as a child was so annoyingly perfect I almost gave up -- in fact, I did try to read this a few years ago and was so put off I put the book down and it was gathering dust until this week. All the reviews implied it would get better, so I stuck with it. It does get better after Lady Rose goes off to boarding school, then her life takes some interesting turns when it appears it isn't such a fairy tale after all. 

Overall, this book was charming, but with a sad undercurrent about the position of women. It made some very good points about the choices women had in the late Victorian period -- but mostly didn't have, even the very wealthy and privileged. My basic impression is that the writing is a little flowery and there wasn't a whole lot of character development. Some parts actually felt more like broad outlines of a story than the finished product. There was some definite foreshadowing that I completely missed -- if you're clever you'll predict some of the plot twists. I wasn't especially observant at the time so I was pleasantly surprised by some of them.

The best bits are Lady Rose's appreciation for the beauty of Scotland, and for Keepsfield, the estate on which she's raised. In the preface, it's described as "a love letter to Scotland," which is absolutely correct -- Keepsfield and Scotland itself are the best-developed characters in this book. (This is nothing like Outlander, though there are very brief mentions of men in kilts. Just in case anyone was wondering). 

There are also some interesting descriptions of what it was like to come out in society in the Victorian era, and to be presented at court. However, there's a huge gap in time about Lady Rose's life after she leaves Keepsfield which I really wish had been more developed. I won't say any more because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

Many people love this book. I enjoyed it, but I have to admit it's not my favorite Persephone. It was a charming, light read, and I could see it might be just the thing if you're having a bad day and need something escapist. It's a quick read and there are some quirky little illustrations. I think I read somewhere that it was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth's mother. 

The Persephone endpapers for Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary

So -- Persephone fans, have you read this book? Did you enjoy it, or was it just a little too sweet? And which Persephone should I read next off my list -- Heat Lightning, Effi Briest, or London War Notes?

My Top Ten Persephones

After reading all the Persephone Readathon posts this weekend, it occurred to me that I've never made a list of my Top Ten Persephones -- seems like the perfect time for this list! I've read more than 80 of the 125 Persephones titles so far and I think I have 18 owned-and-unread on my shelves. I've reviewed most of them and if you click on the titles it will link you to my reviews. I don't own all of them but I wish I did!

In alphabetical order by author, since I really love them all too much for an actual ranking:

Endpaper from the Persephone edition of The Casino

The Casino by Margaret Bonham. One of the excellent short story collections. I don't read short stories very often but I remember these were all excellent and I was prompted to track down more of her work via ILL.

Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton. Charming story about an extended family between the wars, with two competing matriarchs. I know Crompton is famous for the William books but I'd love to read more of her adult fiction. I don't know of any others that are currently in print.

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Wonderful story of a family in the 1920s. After a terrible accident, the parents are forced to change roles. It's a really interesting look at family dynamics and gender roles. Also one of the few Persephones by American authors.

Endpapers from the Persephone edition of The Village

A London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes. Funny and charming nonfiction memoir of a childhood in suburban London by a woman with four older brothers, the first of three volumes (the others aren't published by Persephone but I've since bought the combined edition which is out of print, though used copies are readily available.

The Village by Marghanita Laski. My favorite of the Laski titles available from Persephone, set just after the end of WWII. It's about two families and how the social class structure was changing.

Endpapers of the Persephone edition of Dimanche and Other Stories

Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Nemirovsky. My first introduction to Nemirovsky, who was rediscovered about ten years ago with the publication of Suite Francaise (also wonderful). Brilliant short stories by a French writer who was tragically arrested and transported to Auschwitz, where she died.

Endpapers from the Persephone edition of Doreen

Doreen by Barbara Noble. Another wonderful domestic story set during WWII. Doreen is a nine-year old girl and her mother, a widowed charwoman, struggles with the decision to evacuate her to a small village to live with an upper-class couple who grow to love Doreen as their own child. The book expertly shows how all the adults love her and how Doreen becomes torn between them.

Miss Buncle's Book by D. E. Stevenson. A charming story about a spinster who writes a satirical novel about her village neighbors, and how her life changes with the her surprising literary success.

Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson. My very first Persephone read and one of their most popular titles, it's a Cinderella story about a down-and-out nanny who becomes the social secretary to a flighty nightclub singer due to a mix-up at an employment agency.

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. I could have picked almost any one of the Whipple titles in the Persephone catalog for this list, or more than one. But Someone at a Distance is a great domestic story about a seemly perfect upper-middle class British family and how the family quickly falls to pieces. Not a lot of action, but really well-drawn, realistic characters.

Bloggers, which are your favorite Persephones?