Booking Through Thursday: A Favorite Author

Booking Through Thursday wants us to pick one of our favorite authors.

1. What are some of your favorite books by this author? Wait, I'm still trying to choose just one author....  Right, I'll say D.E. Stevenson (although I am tempted just for a lark to say Antonia Fraser, who I admire not only for her fascinating histories, but because she can write mystery novels as well!).  I've talked about Stevenson before, but she's rather old-fashioned and so her books tend to get weeded off the public library shelves by those rather less-discerning librarians (ahem!), and I think she deserves to be more widely-known.
2. Why do you like this author? Stevenson (1892-1973) has a deceptively effortless style, the kind that looks quite easy to do until one tries it oneself.  She has three main types of novels, mainly divided by tone -- some serious (Smouldering Fire, if I remember correctly, deadly serious at times), some quite funny (the Miss Buncle books, for instance), and most somewhere in the middle.  Her plots tend towards romance, the standard girl-meets-boy, girl-gets-thwarted-through-shyness-or-circumstance, girl-gets-boy-after-all kind, and quite often you can see the outcome quite early on, which man the heroine is going to end up with, but the way that Stevenson gets us there is what makes it so enjoyable.  Many of her characters appear in multiple books, some as a series and some coming in as supporting players; she also frequently returns to the same location.  The "Mrs. Tim" series is I think the only recurring character whose story is told in the first person, here in diary form -- the adventures of an army wife -- so laugh-out-loud funny at times that my husband was intrigued enough to read them (more than one!).  (Mrs. Tim reminds me of E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady but not so cynical.)  I think that one of the things I like most about Stevenson is that she's just nice -- she seems like a nice, sensible, intelligent, polite lady, and to be honest this is in rather short supply these days.  She is possibly most similar to Miss Read, although of course this is open to debate; the earlier Rosamund Pilcher novels seemed to me a modern heir to the rather more serious Stevensons. There are three Stevenson fan sites that I know of -- one by Susan Monahan, which includes a pleasant little virtual tour of Stevenson's home and the prototype for many of her novels, Moffat in Dumfriesshire, Scotland; a brief appreciation by A. Bunting; and a rather extensive one by Dalyght with a light but discerning tone (including a pair of 1/12 miniature scenes from Stevenson's novels!).
3. Have you read everything by this author? Why or why not? I own about a dozen of her novels, out of about forty that she wrote.  I think I've read almost all of them, but there are one or two on the list that I can't place.  For a long time -- pre-Amazon -- almost all of her novels were either out-of-print or available only in large type, and it was pretty hard to get books from the U.K. without actually going there, so I had to content myself with what I could find at the public library.  (I did read a lot of them in large print, which oddly gives them a completely different air in my memory.)

Postscript (1 April 2006): I need to add that while one of the things that I love about D.E. Stevenson is that she is "old-fashioned" -- even, I suspect a bit old-fashioned to her contemporaries in her writing heyday, the 1940s-1960s -- she does have a regrettable tendency to reflect common opinions of that time about race.  Perhaps, as an American I am more sensitive to this than other Westerners of my generation.  I hasten to add that I have seen this in Stevenson's books less than half-a-dozen times, usually as casual remarks by certain characters, and not as a deeply-held philosophy of Stevenson herself.  I suspect from having read so much of her and therefore feeling that I now have something of an insight into her own character, that if this had been pointed out to her, she would have regretted it.  (It reminds me of the "Bad Tuesday" chapter of Mary Poppins, that has since been rewritten.)  I don't want to make a lot out of this, but it is there, and it needs to be said now.  There is far more about Stevenson to love than there is not.

Comments

[erin]

So many interesting posts for me to catch up on. I am definitely going to check out Ms DE Stevenson. I like Miss Read, I just bought another one of her books yesterday. And what struck me most about your comment is the part where you say Stevenson is "nice, sensible, intelligent, polite lady, and to be honest this is in rather short supply these days". I find the last part so sadly true.
Loved the pink gallery 2, especially the first one. And I always like Carl Larrson, precisely because it's charming.
And I like the milk and not too dark chocs best, although I'm now eating a Japanese bar of dark choc called "black", yum.

[Marie]

I know which author's books I am going to seek out next time I go to the library. :) Thank you for such a well written and intriguing review of Ms. Stevenson's books! I am in awe as I had such a difficult time trying to describe what the books of my favorite author were like...

[Dawn]

I agree with you about DE Stevenson, I have 4 or 5 at home bought in secondhand book shops and I have read many more from libraries. Recently I have had an urge to reread her books, but living in the Netherlands, I am not likely to find them on the shelves. I have thought about buying some from Amazon secondhand.

Anyway, thank you for your review of a rather forgotten author.

PS I prefer milk and white chocolate myself but hubby prefers plain.

All the best,
Dawn