Terms and Conditions: I Am SO GLAD I Never Went to Boarding School

I grew up in a very dull middle-class Midwestern suburb, so I traveled the world vicariously through books. I adored reading anything set in a boarding school -- all the neat rows of beds, made up just so with hospital corners! Uniforms (so no one would judge my lack of fashionable wardrobe)! Communal living with cheerful girls called Bunny, who would naturally want to be my friend. 

OR SO I THOUGHT. Until I read Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.

Published by Slightly Foxed back in 2016, this small volume of recollections about 20th century girls' boarding schools was all over my small corner of the blogosphere a couple of years ago. Naturally I HAD to have a copy, so I ordered this adorable book, a beautiful little hardcover (just the size to fit in a purse or pocket). Whereupon it then sat unread for a good two years until the TBR Pile Challenge behooved me to put it on this year's reading list. Spanning the years 1939 to 1979, this is a chatty, casual look at the lives of girls and young women in British boarding schools. 

The Slightly Foxed edition, available through their website. 

This book basically shattered all my childish fantasies about the delightful years I missed by taking the bus to my suburban public school -- in actuality, many of these girls were undereducated, bullied (by both students and staff) and constantly cold. So cold, in fact, that hot water bottles froze overnight. Inside the dormitories. 

Their stories both fascinated and horrified me. Though many of the young women interviewed have fond memories of school, and made deep, lifelong friendships, this book horrified me. In reality, it seems like many girls' boarding schools had sketchy education programs, bad food, and forced the students to spend hours running around cold, muddy fields playing lacrosse and tennis. If by some miracle I'd won a scholarship (or had a benefactor bequeath me a fortune for tuition) I would definitely NOT have fit in at one of these schools -- I'm bookish, bad at sports, and no connections to famous people or aristocrats. In short, life in a boarding school would have been absolute hell for me, as it was for some of the girls interviewed -- some of them ran away, and others seem traumatized for life. 

Don't get me wrong -- this is an entertaining read, and I feel like I have a better understanding of British culture and literature. It's been described as hilarious, and though there were parts that made me smile and laugh out loud, my reaction was to thank my lucky stars that I went to that dull suburban public school system. 

The Roedean School in East Sussex.

I bought my copy from Slightly Foxed, but it's also available in a paperback edition (pictured above). And just for fun, while researching images of British girls' boarding schools, I read the Wikipedia entry about the Roedean School, pictured above (other photos show the opposite side, situated dramatically above a cliff). Apparently many famous people attended Roedean, and it's also a fixture of literary and pop culture -- fictional Roedean students include characters from P. G. Wodehouse novels and my beloved Chummy from Call the Midwife. I can absolutely picture Chummy on the lacrosse field, can't you? 

Miranda Hart as Chummy.

This is my fourth book for the TBR Pile Challenge, and I'm also counting it as my book set in the U.K. for the European Reading Challenge. 

Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Letters, 1936-1939

One of the nicest perks of working in a library was getting first pick of the donated books for the semi-annual Friends of the Library sales. Gone with the Wind was one of my all-time favorites, so I was naturally intrigued by Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Letters, 1936-1949, and was happy to part with $1 for this edition from 1976. Of course it only took me five years to get around to finally reading it.

As the title indicates, this book is a collection of letters written by Margaret Mitchell regarding her iconic novel Gone With the Wind, first published in 1936 and famously adapted into a blockbuster movie in 1939. It's a really interesting chronicle of how GWTW exploded into an international phenomenon and affected Mitchell for the rest of her life, not to mention her husband and indeed the city of Atlanta. The letters are chatty and for the most part interesting, and it's quite fascinating to see how this novel became such as sensation. 

Margaret Mitchell was a born-and-bred Atlantean, and grew up hearing stories of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in 1900 and attended Smith College and originally hoped to become a psychologist, but left college when her mother died suddenly and never graduated. She returned to Atlanta to keep house for her father and eventually got a job as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal in the early 1920s. After her marriage to attorney John Marsh, she suffered an ankle injury that didn't heal, so she was forced to quit her job. Spending months bedridden, she read nearly every book in the library and out of frustration, her husband brought her a stack of paper and a typewriter and told her to write her own novel, which she did over a period of about three years. 

The novel then lay unpublished in manuscript form for several years, until MacMillan editor Harold Latham came to town. Goaded by a braggart acquaintance who claimed her own manuscript would win a Pulitzer while Mitchell's would never be published, Margaret grabbed most of the envelopes with the manuscripts and gave them to Latham as he was getting on the train, so that "at least she could claim that she'd been refused by the very best publisher." She was given a contract and merely hoped that the publishers would make enough to cover their costs, never dreaming that it would be of interest to anyone but the most hard-core Atlanta fans and Civil War buffs. 

GWTW then became a massive success, winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming one of the best-selling novels of all time. The book of letters was really interesting to me, to see her perspective and all the problems the attention from her book created, with fans constantly hounding her for autographs, other authors claiming plagiarism, issues from foreign publishers pirating the books, and then the whole circus that erupted after the movie adaptation was announced. It was an absolute circus, and I can't even imagine how much worse it would have been today with the internet and social media. Mitchell was basically hounded for the rest of her life, and never had time to write another book. With all the hullaballoo, I I'd be surprised if she weren't sick to death of it, not to mention the pressure she would have been under if she had written a second book. 

This book is very interesting to learn the context of the publishing and the movie adaptation, especially with the looming backdrop of WWII. There are also a lot of letters written to other authors that she enjoyed, mostly history but there are poets and other contemporary authors mentioned, including Betty Smith who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was also delighted to find a letter from 1946 to a writer from the New York Herald Tribune in which she requests the address of Angela Thirkell so that she can send her a holiday care package during the severe rationing in Great Britain after the war. She mentions how much she loves Thirkell's novels and is about to read Miss Bunting (#14 in the Barsetshire series, which I haven't yet read). 

For me, the collection of letters did rather slow down after the war years, I suppose because much of the attention toward GWTW had died down. The last letter included is from July 1949, just a few weeks before Mitchell's death after being hit by a drunk driver. The book ends after the last letter, without any mention of her death, or any biographical details, so I suppose I'll have to track down a biography, and of course I have to watch the film adaptation of GWTW, now that I've already re-read that book as well. 

But that's three books finished for the TBR Pile Challenge -- I still have a biography of Edith Wharton and a memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard, so that makes four books by and about 20th century female authors for this challenge. 

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester

I'm not much of romance reader, but back when I lived in Texas I read The Grand Sophy for my Jane Austen book club and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Georgette Heyer wrote 50 novels, mostly historical. They're rather light and fluffy, but mostly great fun and they're very well researched. I was poking around Half-Price Books in San Antonio and found this biography, so I thought it would be a good addition to my TBR Pile Challenge list. Georgette Heyer wrote 50 novels. in 72 years. Starting when she was just 17, she published a book nearly every year of her life, sometimes more. Most of them were romances and historical fiction, but she also wrote mysteries and a few contemporary novels, and nearly all of them are still in print. 

Heyer's first novel, The Black Moth, began as a story she made up to amuse her younger brother, who suffered from hemophilia. She continued writing after her marriage to a mining engineer, with whom she moved to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Macedonia. They moved back to the UK and Heyer mostly supported the family with her writing while her husband made some career changes (he and her son both became lawyers). Heyer's commitment to research and her literary output are pretty astonishing -- her historical novel An Infamous Army is now considered one of the best historical works on the battle of Waterloo. And once she had completed the research and settled on the plot and characters, she could write a book in a matter of weeks. 

Though she's now best known for her historical romances set in the Regency period, she actually only wrote one (Regency Buck) before WWII. Her most successful novel before that time was about the Napoleonic Wars, but she couldn't bear to write a war novel during the Blitz. Heyer was afraid that it was frivolous to write a light historical romance, but she needed a distraction and wrote a Regency novel, Faro's Child. It was just what the public wanted and was a huge success. Thereafter she continued with mostly Regency novels until her death. 

This book is very fact-heavy, especially on issues of publication and tax payments -- often she would write a book specifically to pay off a debt. She also sometimes made unwise decisions to sell off the rights to books for what now seems a pittance. I would have loved to read more about her creative process, but Georgette Heyer was an extremely private person and gave almost no interviews, so Kloester had to rely on letter and papers. However, I found it an extremely fast read. There were some surprises, like the fact that Heyer's publishers did essentially no editing -- she would just send them the title and some basic information, then her manuscript would arrive and that was pretty much it! She did have some fights with printers who would take it upon themselves to change spelling without consulting her -- then had the nerve to charge her! 

Even if you're not a fan of Heyer's romances, this is an extremely interesting look at the life of a prolific writer (it also inspired me to read two more of her books while I was reading this one!) I still  have literary biographies and memoirs of three other writers on my TBR Pile Challenge list: Margaret Mitchell, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Bloggers, which should I read next?

This is my second book for the TBR Pile Challenge 2019. Only ten left to go!

The Bolter by Frances Osborne: A Real-Life Fascinating Train Wreck

I first heard the nickname "The Bolter" back when I read Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, which I loved. In that story, the narrator, cousin to a family of eccentric sisters loosely based on the Mitfords, has been abandoned by her mother, who has "bolted" to live with her lover, or new husband, or something like that.  Anyway, Mitford was inspired by an actual bolter -- the infamous Idina Sackville, a socialite who left her husband and two small sons to live in Kenya with the scandalous Happy Valley set: rich white settlers who drank, did drugs, and took multiple lovers between the wars. Idina married and divorced five times and was possibly the most famous of them all. 

Married at just twenty, Idina left her first husband to marry another man and start over in Kenya because of her husband's infidelities. Apparently it was extremely common for the British aristocrats (both men and women -- as long as the women had produced "an heir and a spare") to take multiple lovers, as long nobody talked about it publicly or had the poor taste to file for divorce, thus making it common knowledge. But when Idina's husband fell in love with her younger sister's best friend, she decided she would rather leave her sons (who could never be raised by another man) and start over in a new country. However, the wild behavior of the upper crust was even worse in the colonies. One of her ex-husbands was almost killed by his new lover in an unsuccessful murder/suicide, and her third ex-husband was eventually shot and killed by the jealous husband of his then lover. 

Dina with her third husband, Josslyn Hay, Lord Errol.
He was later shot and killed by his lover's husband.

All this made the news and was naturally terribly scandalous, both in Kenya and back in Britain. After she left her first husband, Idina wasn't allowed to contact her two young sons and didn't see either of them until they were in college. She had a daughter by her third husband, who was sent back to England to live with family there, and eventually became estranged because Idina's behavior and multiple marriages were just too scandalous. She did have stepchildren by her fourth husband that she loved very much, but eventually that husband also left her to marry another woman, taking those  children with him to South Africa. 

Idina's life was really tragic and quite fascinating, in a trainwreck sort of way. I had a hard time with her leaving her small children behind, but then of course I can't imagine what it would be like to have my husband having an affair with my sister's best friend either. (I guess I'm just not cut out for that crazy lifestyle.) She had to have known that eventually her bad behavior would eventually cut her off from her family, but she kept on doing it. 

Portrait of Idina by Sir William Orpen.

The Bolter was written by Frances Osborne, Idina's great-granddaughter by one of the sons of her first marriage. I can definitely imagine that having such an infamous ancestor would inspire you to write a book. I did enjoy this book though I have a few quibbles -- mainly that the author seemed to take a few liberties with the narrative of the story. Osborne writes about what Idina is thinking and feeling, or describes exactly what she does, without source material. But it's a pretty riveting story, though I did want to jump back in time and yell at her. I was also imagining Lady Mary from Downton Abbey though Idina was way more scandalous -- why hasn't this been turned into a miniseries? 

This is my first book completed for the TBR Pile Challenge 2019.

TBR Pile Challenge 2019: My List

After much agonizing, I have finally settled on a list of books for the 2019 TBR Pile Challenge hosted by Adam of Roof Beam Reader. I decided to go with all non-fiction this year after realizing how few non-fiction books I'd completed last year (only 7/100, pathetically small). 

So here are my choices, a mixture of memoirs, biographies, and social history.

Here are the titles, in case you can't read them (not in the same order as pictured):

1. An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway by Louise Carpenter 
2. One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens. Completed 4/28/19.
3. Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood 
4. Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Completed 3/31/19.
5. Slipstream by Elizabeth Jane Howard 
6. A London Family 1870-1900 by Molly Hughes 
7. Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester. Completed 1/29/19.
8. Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee 
9. Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" Letters, 1936 to 1949. Completed 3/12/19. 
10. The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicholson 
11. Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace by Virginia Nicholson 
12. The Bolter by Frances Osborne. Completed 1/08/19.

Alternates:

Period Piece by Gwen Raverat 
Bluestockings by Jane Robinson

So that's my list -- some very long (the Wharton bio is more than 700 pages!); some short, and I've wanted to read all of them for a long time! All of them were written by women, except for The GWTW Letters which is edited by a man (Margaret Mitchell wrote all the letters). 

So what do you think of my list? And which one should I read first? Bloggers, are you signed up for the TBR Pile Challenge? What's on your list? 

TBR Pile Challenge 2019: Viragos or Non-fiction?

I'm so happy that Adam from Roof Beam Reader is hosting another TBR Pile Challenge! It's my favorite book-blogging challenge (next to my own). I love it because it really inspires me to read books from my own shelves, which I am woefully bad at. Only about half of my 2018 books were from my own shelves -- better than past years, but not nearly as many as I would like.

However, I have a bit of a conundrum -- I've made up two potential lists, and I'm torn between the two. One is all Virago Modern Classics (e.g., mostly out-of-print, mid-century women writers); the other is non-fiction, a mix of history, memoirs, and biographies. Bloggers, which one should I choose?

The Virago list: 

1. The Loved and Envied by Enid Bagnold
2. At the Still Point by Mary Benson
3. Fenny by Lettice Cooper (one of last year's alternates)
4. Crossriggs by Mary Findlater 
5. Joanna Godden by Sheila Kaye-Smith
6. Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane
7. Troy Chimneys by Margaret Kennedy 
8. Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
9. The World My Wilderness by Rose Macauley
10. The Play Room by Olivia Manning
11. Frost in May by Antonia White
12. The Misses Mallet by E. H. Young 

Alternates:

The Little Ottleys by Ada Leverson
Jenny Wren by E. H. Young


The nonfiction list: 

1. An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway by Louise Carpenter 
2. Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood
3. Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
4. Slipstream: A Memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard
5. Speaking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith
6. Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
7. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 to 1949
8. Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace by Virginia Nicholson 
9. The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicholson 
10. The Bolter by Frances Osborne 
11. A Very Private Eye by Barbara Pym 
12. Bluestockings by Jane Robinson 
13. The Other Day by Dorothy Whipple

Alternates:

Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester
Period Piece by Gwen Raverat


I realize there are 13 on this list, so one has to go. But which one? And I suppose I could just compromise and pick six from each list!

Bloggers, have you read any of these? Good choices or bad -- I have until January 15 to amend my list, so I'd love your input. And are you signing up for the TBR Pile Challenge? I'd love to see your lists!