A Bluestocking Knits

Summer Reading

I was sitting here some weeks ago thinking suddenly, I need to read more, and so I pondered for a while what to choose.  I decided that it was time, after a great many years, to reread the Narnia books, and though I finished Prince Caspian with a sigh of pleasure and my hand was reaching, metaphorically, for Dawn Treader, it occurred to me that there were six volumes of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series on my shelf still utterly unread.  I had picked up Swallows and Amazons at our beloved local children's bookstore, and enjoyed it very much, enough that when the owner decided to retire and was selling off her stock at half-price, I went over and bought all of the rest of the series that she had -- and yet, there they sat on the shelf, for years.  And so I thought now that they would be just the thing right now, in these difficult times when one wants children's stories with plenty of adventure but the assurance of a safe homecoming at the end.  It had been long enough that I thought I should read the first book again, just to get the sail filled, as it were, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time around.  But I have to say that, while the first book is certainly good, Ransome really hit his stride as he went on.  He clearly knows his stuff, both boats and the Lake District in which many of the stories are set, and better still, he has that rather rare ability to write from a child's perspective that makes you forget that he isn't one himself -- as I say, I love the Narnia stories, but it is always clear that they are being told to you by an adult, where Ransome reminds me quite a lot in this respect of Elizabeth Enright's Melendy family series, a different sort of story but with that same feeling of immediacy, of being immersed in it yourself, this is what it's like. 

I read, in rapid succession, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday, Pigeon Post, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, Secret Water, and Great Northern?, coming suddenly to the end of my collection with a sigh of dismay.  They are all, of course, boat-related but the focus is on different things in each, and new characters come in here and there, so that each book is quite different -- especially, I thought, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, as throughout the series there are adventures and risky situations of course, but, perhaps because I'm a parent now and long past being the same age as the Walker children, the very real danger they are in at being literally swept out to sea was more than unsettling.  (This one contains the only mention in the whole series of one of the children being seasick, and the physical reality of it comes as quite a shock.)  But, as I say, I enjoyed the series immensely, and can see why so many readers still think of them as beloved favorites.  I am amazed only at the fact that I had never heard of them before!

(The photograph is a still from the 2016 movie version of the first book.  I haven't seen it -- I found out about it not long after I finished the book the second time, but after reading in reviews that the writers felt it necessary to insert a completely new subplot about real spies, I thought, "oh no!"  Hearing that Susan has been turned into a whiny bumbler who can't even manage to cook a fish made me shriek -- apparently Peter has also been made "more real".  Why, why, why take classics that generations of children have loved passionately, and change them??  Oh, well -- it looks beautiful, at least.  Sigh.)

The D.E. Stevenson list is reading Amberwell, and this time around I volunteered to lead a section, offering a summary of each chapter and some discussion questions.  Mine turned out to be quite early in the book, chapters 4-6, which I estimate to be taking place around 1930.  The Ayrton family live in a fine old estate on the west coast of Scotland -- the story begins a few centuries earlier with the building of the house and the establishment of the Ayrtons, but by chapter 4 the main characters of the "present day" have been introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Ayrton, his two sons from his first marriage, and three daughters from this second, which daughters are all still under ten and in the care of their Nannie.  One of the central events of this section, and a recurring motif in the story, is the dedication of Mr. Ayrton's contribution to the estate -- others in the generations before him were a walled garden, a bowling-green, a stone terrace, and so on -- Mr. Ayrton has decided upon a fountain with the statue of a little mermaid. On the day of the ceremonial Turning on the Fountain, the girls are sitting on rugs on the bowling-green in their best dresses and the boys in their kilts, waiting for the festivities, and Nannie is nearby keeping an eye on them, and knitting.  This seems too good and opportunity to pass up, to choose something for my "Knitting with DES" virtual knit-along -- so what might Nannie be knitting, I asked myself.

This is a bit later than ca.1930, by about a decade, but how could I possibly resist three little girls in matching boleros? and just the right ages!  This is in the Bestway 749 booklet, this pattern available for a small fee from FabForties.co.uk (who seems to have changed her name recently from The Vintage Knitting Lady, perhaps to specialize in the 1940s?).

(The house in the photo above, by the way, is Inchmarlo, not on the west coast as in the story but in Aberdeenshire.  My Scottish-immigrant ancestors worked there, according to the 1840 census!  The descriptions of Stevenson's Amberwell and a number of the dust-jacket illustrations in the book's long publishing history remind me of Inchmarlo, and so I was delighted to find this photo available for Creative Commons use at Geograph.uk -- this one is by Stanley Howe.)

"Swallows and Amazons" leads quite naturally to a grown-up sea adventure, and I picked up Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander after many years -- too long!  I've only just finished the second in the series, Post Captain, enjoying every moment.  O'Brian's prose is so complex yet wonderfully fluid that it is a pleasure to read, and his flashes of wit and deft characterizations are sheer genius.

(The photo -- from Wikimedia Commons -- is the stern of the Surprise built for the 2003 movie and now at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.)

It's been too hot lately for snuggling-under-a-blanket reading, so I just made one instead, and gave it away as a house-warming present -- it is the simple-but-effective "Modern Granny Stitch Blanket" by Jess of Make & Do Crew.  I used the recommended Lion Brand "Heartland" yarn, in "Glacier Bay", "Hot Springs", "Olympic", "Mount Rainier", and "Kings Canyon" (for a lark, try guessing which is which! I think I got only one right). 

I ran out of "Olympic" just a little over two rows short -- there had been only one skein of it in the store, so I bought a sixth color but decided that I'd risk looking for another skein somewhere else.  And rather surprisingly, because it's 100% acrylic and therefore produced by recipe that isn't subject to the whims and eccentricities of natural fibers, the dye lots of "Olympic" at least are noticeably, even disappointingly, different.  There is much less of the black in the second skein, leaving the color rather dull and flat -- oh, well.

I'm not generally a huge fan of acrylics, but this is quite pleasant to work with, and I must say it makes yummy tassels!

"Kindness In"

A progress photo for the "Froth and Bubble" sampler.  The original is surprisingly garish for my usual tastes, but I love it, though I admit to having toned down the colors a bit for my own version.  I think Long Dog's style might best be described as "neo-traditional" -- this one looks Elizabethan in its motifs, yet the colors are quite modern (even though, yes, the Elizabethans loved bright colors!), and the verse is from a much-longer poem by the early-Victorian Australian poet, horseman, and sometime politician Adam Lindsay Gordon.

The stitching frame I'm using is a bit ungainly and a pain to shift, so I am working a page of the chart at a time -- it is six full-sized pages!  I was a bit alarmed to see how very hot-pink that one flower stem (!) is, so I've left it either until I resign myself to it or can find a somewhat milder pair of pinks and pick this one out.  The dark-brown outline would tame it a bit, but it's awfully vivid ...

In other news, I got a dirty big stack of books for my birthday, pictured here with a ringer.  We went to go and hear Isabella Tree speak at the Theodore Payne Foundation recently, on a subject that interested both Julia and me, that of native-plant gardening and our relationship with our local environments -- the book was included in the ticket, but I would have bought it anyway, as it was fascinating to learn the effects of simply not doing anything, as it were, to the land, albeit on a much-larger scale and a very different climate than our own arid little suburban lot, and to begin to think about how we might work with nature instead of against it.  I very much enjoyed reading the two volumes of memoir in the Lucy Boston book, the first of which was new to me -- it reminded me in many ways of Gwen Raverat's Period Piece, though Boston is more fierce in her independence and tart in her manner, even as a child.  I will probably never get tired of leafing dreamily through Ben Pentreath's book, which seems to me to illustrate pretty much exactly what a comfortable home best looks like.  The small lives of women throughout history interests me, and so now I've just started The Jamestown Brides, about the literal shipment of fifty-six young women who volunteered their futures -- they were to be bartered off as brides -- in exchange for passage to the New World in 1621. More to come!

Celebrating International Translation Day

In honor of International Translation Day and the often-unsung translators without whom the world of literature, and thus the world itself, would be poorer, here is a link to an interesting article about translations of Jane Eyre.

In Which I Come Home from the Public Library with a Stack of Books

I went to the public library a while back to pick up the audio-book of The Clock-Maker's Daughter I'd put on reserve after reading a review, and of course I cast an eye over the new-books shelf (as one does), and picked up Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce.  The premise sounded fun -- an aspiring journalist in 1940 London get a job that she thinks will be her first step to becoming a Lady War Correspondent but turns out is mostly just typing up letters for the agony aunt of a second-rate women's magazine.  From the beginning, the book feels like a screwball comedy, with Emmy's tendency to speak in capital letters, her light-hearted dialogue with her best friend and flatmate, her larger-than-life boss (who would doubtless Take Umbrage at the term "agony aunt"), and the increasingly-sticky situations she finds herself in when she begins to secretly reply to the desperate letters that Mrs. Bird refuses to even consider.  But because Emmy's sympathy for the unfortunate letter-writers is genuine, the serious turns that the plot takes once she is deeply embroiled are wholly believable.  Pearce's writing is deft and intelligent, and aside from a very few slips ("on Such-and-such Street" or "called me on the phone") has a real 1940s ring to it, which surely is much of the book's strength, that despite it tottering at times on the brink of farce, it feels, like Emmy, very genuine.

(I have bemoaned a number of times before about the inexplicable tendency of a number of historical novelists to set their books in a period about which they seem to have done little research, about which they seem not even to care very much.  Why do they bother, if they don't know, or care, why people did the things they did, behaved the way they behaved, talked the way they talked in a given period of history?  Pearce, though, clearly does care about this late 1930s/early 1940s period, and it shows in her novel and in its characters, who are both believably 1940s Britons and people that we understand ninety-some years later, because they too have to deal with love and loss and friendship and uncertainties.  If there is a period about which a novelist feels compelled to write, then the story needs be thoroughly rooted in that period, however universal its themes, or it makes no sense to set it there and then.  This can be done with manners and behavior, with clothing -- the much-vaunted attention to detail in "Downtown Abbey" comes to mind, even though it is film and not a book -- but language is also an important part of this.  (It is also one of the things that "Downtown Abbey" fell strangely short on.)  As I said above, Pearce's diction in Dear Mrs. Bird had a few anachronisms that leapt out at me,

but on the whole succeeded very well.  I applaud, for example, Pearce's deliberate use of the word "gay," as in "the conversation became gay," which would doubtless cause many a snicker now among schoolchildren, but was an entirely appropriate, even ordinary, thing for someone to say in 1940, probably even the first word they would think of in that context.)

(Google n-grams -- how cool is that?)

I also picked up no less than three of Alexander McCall Smith's novels -- A Distant View of Everything, My Italian Bulldozer, and The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse, all of which I enjoyed.  The composer Vivaldi has been accused of "writing the same concerto five hundred times," which could be said also of McCall Smith and his books, but it would be doing both an injustice.  There is much about his books that is "predictable," for want of a better word -- in the the Isabel Dalhousie series, she meets someone, either again or for the first time, she thinks of something which reminds her of something else, she talks with Jamie, she thinks of something else that reminds her of something else, she has dinner, and this one was pretty much just that, but I found it all charming and endlessly absorbing.  The second book is one of his "farcical" stand-alones, with an absurd situation -- here, while on holiday in Italy, a rental-car snafu lands the main character driving not a Fiat but a bulldozer to his Tuscan destination -- gradually turning almost surreal, yet in McCall Smith's gentle hands it is still somehow not quite unbelievable.  And the third is one of his "serious" stand-alones, still with all of his hallmarks -- interesting characters, intelligent and thoughtful writing, some plot twists, and an ending that is if not entirely happy still utterly right.

And last but not least was The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton, in an audio version read by Joanne Froggatt, who I think was pretty much perfectly suited to this novel.  The story uses multiple viewpoints and historical periods to tell the story of what happens after a small circle of artists centered around the young Edward Radcliffe (who is not unlike the Pre-Raphaelites in his passion to reinvent art and design) spend the summer of 1862 at Radcliffe's country house on the idyllic upper reaches of the Thames -- his fiancée is murdered, ostensibly during a break-in, and someone else is missing, and afterwards the broken-hearted Edward never paints again.  Pieces of the story gradually emerge through the voice of Edward's younger sister, who grows up to inherit the house and turns it into a girls' school, through the voice of Edward's model and muse and lover, a girl from the London slums, and the voice of a young archivist in the present day who discovers an old leather satchel containing an artist's sketch-book with a drawing of a house by a river, and an old photograph of a strikingly beautiful young woman.  There are other voices as well, other storylines, and I think the fact that I never lost hold of the different threads was in part due to Joanne Froggatt's excellent reading -- she used, even more literally, different voices for each, sometimes varying only the timbre of her voice, sometimes her accent as well -- from upper- and lower-class English to American to Australian, always beautifully judged. 

During the listening of this, I finished up a miniature carpet that I had started some time ago, playing around with a skein of new-to-me DMC Coloris, the familiar six-stranded embroidery floss but in variegated colors.  This one is 4515, also known for some reason as "Paris" -- some of the colorways are rather vivid, but this one is beautifully subtle.  I decided to make a sort of "rag rug" just to see how the colors worked on a large field, so this is simply basketweave stitch, which is said to be good for covering large areas of canvas since it distorts less than continental or tent stitches.  (Basketweave, and even more so basketweave-plus-Coloris, is also, not coincidentally, a great choice for listening to a suspenseful audio-book, as you don't need to pay much attention to the stitching! no changing colors or counting!)  I'm not entirely sure about the "good coverage" part as there were frequently strange diagonal streaks of canvas visible across multiple rows, but in this case it worked out all right as the canvas (as many of the cotton ones do) shrank a bit in the blocking, thereby tightening the stitches.  I used shade 931 to edge the carpet with long-legged cross-stitch -- according to the chart Mary Corbet gives at Needle 'n Thread, the component blues are 930 and 932, but 930 seemed a bit too dark to edge this, and 932 too light, so I used the one in between.  You can see that it's ever-so-slightly darker than the light blue in the Coloris, but it's a good compromise between the darker and the lighter ones.

One of these days, I might try working the wrong side of the basketweave stitch on the right side -- it has a fascinating "woven" texture that I'd like to see without all of the worked-in thread ends!

And last but not least, though not actually from the library as it is on my Kindle, the D.E. Stevenson list is currently reading Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, the 1947 continuation of Hester Christie's diary.  Here, with Tim off with the Army in Egypt and their children heading to boarding school, Hester finds herself unexpectedly accepting a job offer as the assistant to a woman who has turned her Scottish country home into a small hotel.  Hester is a thoroughly engaging character, like many diary-keepers rather reserved in public but with so much to say in her diary that you quickly warm to her, even though if you thought about it, she would be one of those people in the corner of the train carriage of whom you are often vaguely aware but don't really notice.  The diary format is unique among Stevenson's novels to Mrs. Tim, but like all of Stevenson's books, it is full of her quiet intelligence, humor, and philosophy that everything works out pretty much all right in the end.

I usually try to make at least some effort in choosing a pattern for my D.E. Stevenson virtual knitalong, not wanting to just take the first old thing that pops up, but this was the very first one and suited in at least three ways.  It's charming, obviously, that is certainly a plus!  But the story is set in Scotland in the very early spring, and while the weather is glorious, and gloriously described, often enough for us to feel Stevenson's love for her native land, it cannot be denied that Scotland in March and April, even southern Scotland, can be somewhat, well, let's say bracing -- according to a chart of average temperatures, perhaps only towards the end of the latter month does it get up to a high in the mid-50s F (10 C).  One would be glad of a few jumpers, I expect!  And this one is immensely practical in the post-war time of continuing clothing rations too -- the title is in fact "A Fair Isle to Use Up Your Small Scraps of Yarn".  The list of recommended colors of wool brings up an uncomfortable reminder of the casual usage of certain words in the 1940s that today make us shudder -- curiously, but thank goodness, the abbreviation in the instructions is just B for brown. The first pattern of open and solid diamonds is brown on yellow; the second pattern of diamonds is saxe blue on white (I had to look it up); the third is red on turquoise (!); the fourth is green on white; then a bit more plain yellow ground, and the pattern repeats from there.  (I very much hope that that diamond just under the opening-point of the collar is centered ....)  Amusingly, Sirdar's "Super Shetland" is the same wool that the Victory Jumper uses, my choice for the previous Mrs. Tim book! 

This pattern is available free courtesy The Sunny Stitcher at the Vintage Knitting Pattern Archive.

Talking of libraries, I very much enjoyed the short piece "From Bag End to Babel: Top 10 Libraries in Fiction" in "The Guardian" --

A Bit of War-time Knitting in "Mrs. Tim Carries On" and "Spring Magic"

The D.E. Stevenson group is reading the "Mrs. Tim" series, interspersed with related DES titles, and we have just finished Mrs. Tim Carries On (1941) and started Spring Magic (1942).  Being wartime, of course there is knitting for one's menfolk and others in the armed forces sprinkled throughout, especially in Mrs. Tim Carries On, but since there are so very many patterns available for "soldiers' comforts" and really, how many variations can there be on plain, dark socks, I chose for my virtual "Knitting with D.E. Stevenson" project the girl's socks in this late-1930s/early-1940s Bairnswear leaflet available in reproduction from The Vintage Knitting Lady. The photo reminds me not a little of Hester's young daughter Betty who likes dolls and girlish things, to be sure, but doesn't stick at climbing trees as well.  As a knitter, I like how these particular socks have different kinds of heels, too -- I know it's comfortable to knit something that one is familiar with, but it's also pleasing to have different options.

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Dean Street Press -- especially Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow, whose Furrowed Middlebrow colophon debuted there a few years ago and specializes in "works by lesser-known British women novelists and memoirists" -- three of the four Mrs. Tim books are now available in e-book format (the first was reprinted some years ago by the Bloomsbury Group), as well as Spring Magic and 1935's Smouldering Fire, of which more in another post.  I have been very much looking forward to the group read of Spring Magic, as it is one of my favorites.  We've only just started, and already have had interesting discussions about books a sheltered child might have read (a child such as Frances, though she is now at 25 not sheltered so much as trapped), the idiom "doing the messages" (which may or may not involve actual messages, depending on whether one is north or south of Hadrian's Wall ...), horsehair mattresses (and sofas), the Pioneer Corps, and potential inspirations for the setting's Scottish fishing village -- not to mention sidetracks like April Fool pranks and plagiarism.

But knitting, that's what I was talking about.  In one scene in the book, during a rather terrifying air raid -- this isn't London, mind you, it's a fishing village on the west coast of Scotland -- the ladies of the inn where Frances is staying are knitting -- who could sleep? -- and Annie offers to share a knitting pattern.  "It's quite an easy pattern," she says, "you slip one and knit one and pass the slipped stitch over.  I'll give you the pattern tomorrow if you would like it --"  In searching the internet hopefully for "lacy knitting pattern 1940s", I came across this one --

which is available free from the V&A (here's the Ravelry link) as part of a page about 1940s knitting patterns (huzzah!).  The lace stitch is a simple two-row one with a familiar "sl1, K1, psso" maneuver that combined with K2tog and judicious yarn-overs produces the pretty scallop effect, here in patriotic red, white, and blue -- so it seems particularly appropriate for my Spring Magic choice!  I've used the Ravelry link instead of going straight to the pattern itself so that you can see some examples of how changing the colors or simply changing the number of rows of red, white, or blue can vary the effect of the jumper.

W is for Whimsy

Someone gave me a set of "Pride and Prejudice" page flags which I found irresistibly like paper dolls, so here is a bit of Whimsy for my ABChallenge W!

The background image is an illustration of a ball at the Argyle Rooms in London, from "The English Spy" serial (1825).

Jumping the Queue

Okay, so I've had this post sitting in the drafts folder since February -- which I suppose is perfectly appropriate for a post inspired by a book that I really want to read but keeps getting passed over for other ones, for a myriad of reasons and all of them probably quite good.  I have long enjoyed watching the "Historical Farms" series which Alex Langlands has done with Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn, and of course traditional crafts are an ongoing interest of mine, so I was delighted to find this his book Cræft -- which I understand is not a how-to book, but more of a why-did-they one.  I remember, alas, sitting down with it one afternoon, and the door-bell ringing or some other flimsy interruption, and there it still sits on the end table, floating upwards in the stack now and then (as it were) as other books come and go.

This was on the new-books shelf at the public library -- Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill.  I am quite aware of my tendency towards "cosies" -- and I think, the Wikipedia notwithstanding, that it should be spelled in the British manner, at least here since I certainly gravitate to the British ones far more often -- and so I decided, standing there at the public library, that since the book sounded intriguing, I would not after all pass it over in favor of a long-put-off Agatha Christie reread, say (tempting though that is ....).  I enjoyed the book very much, as it happens, which just goes to show -- and it apparently bears repeating, both to myself and to the world in general -- that one should extend one's horizons at least now and then.  Massey's heroine approaches what I was just recently decrying, those characters in historical fiction who are anachronistically feminist/socialist/whatever-ist but to my relief and admiration does not seem out-of-place, because she is at that turning-point for young women in which the wider world lay before them thanks to higher education but society still resisted letting them enter.  The mystery itself is well-plotted and intriguing, and the setting of 1920s Bombay has that remarkable balance between exotic and familiar that goes such a long way towards making us realize that other cultures are really just a lot like ourselves.  My only complaint is one that I have had before with historical novels, with characters speaking in a more modern way than they really ought.  No one who spoke British English in the 1920s would say, for example, "rushed across the street" or "on Bruce Street" or "I will call her".  And perhaps more esoterically, I don't really think that people who are rich enough to drive a Silver Ghost -- old-school English people, I mean -- would actually refer to it as a Silver Ghost.  To my ear, they would just say "the Rolls" or even more casually, "the motor", and only parvenus would be any more particular than that.  But certainly I just feel that if a writer is interested enough in a particular time period to set a novel in it, it should be little trouble to expend a little effort to find out how they behaved and how they spoke.

I don't actually get to go to Vroman's a lot any more, but when I do, it's almost always far more than worth the journey. I saw Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires there over the (last Christmas!) holidays, and of course was intrigued -- read the first few pages there, and bought the book.  (I have learned to be rather skeptical of the usual unstinting praise on a dust jacket -- "an instant classic", "riveting", "a new voice in fiction" -- but the three on the back of Fraser's book are not only considerably longer than the usual Twitter-friendly bite, but all three came from authors I have read and appreciate in varying degrees, and Elaine Showalter was in fact the subject of my senior thesis.)  Fraser's is an excellent book, well-written and perceptive, objective yet clearly regarding the Little House books – and thus Laura Ingalls Wilder – with great respect. I never really took to Rose -- she always seemed to have an air of condescension about her, even from the first time I heard her voice, in On the Way Home – but I remember reading The Ghost in the Little House and feeling sympathetic to her as a person, though still more than a bit resistant to the notion that Rose’s hand in the books was so thorough as to tip the percentage so much in her favor as Holtz describes. Who is right? I wonder if it is possible to tell -- I wonder if Laura and Rose really knew themselves. I think that Fraser really does try to be objective, because she rationalizes much of Rose’s behavior, her peremptoriness, the incessant house-making and “adoptions”, by offering possible reasons, though towards the end it’s clearly very difficult. (Another writer, from "The New Yorker", offers this: “By the time that Laura published her first book, Rose was a frumpish, middle-aged divorcée, who was tormented by rotten teeth and suffered from bouts of suicidal depression, which she diagnosed in her journal, with more insight than many doctors of the era, as a mental illness.”) And conversely, Fraser tries to explain Laura’s need to smooth out the difficulties of her life, making the book feel that much more careful and objective. On a side note, I was flabbergasted -- there is no other word, really -- to find that Almanzo had written in Laura’s autograph book circa 1883, “Friend Laura No Pearl ever lay under Oman’s Green water more pure in its shell than thy spirit in thee. Yours Truly, A. J. Wilder”. Here I am thinking of him as a laconic, unromantic farmer -- unromantic, little-educated farmers don’t quote “Lalla Rookh”! How is it that I have never heard this story before??

I remember reading, many years ago, a number of books by Beverley Nichols about his house and garden deep in the English countryside, and being delighted with their wit -- and then finding much later, when gardening itself began to interest me, that Nichols was apparently regarded by public librarians in general as outdated and not worth keeping -- at least not in Southern California -- for there was not a one left anywhere.  ("I live in a desart, sir, thow it paines me to saye it.")  I decided to add the first one, Down the Garden Path, to my wish list, duly received it for Christmas, and began to read.  Well, like the curate's egg parts of it are still excellent, but others ... not so much, and I'm afraid that this also became for me one of those books that sat around half-read for months -- though as it happened Julia read it and says she enjoyed it, but she has a more sarcastic sense of humor than I do, so perhaps she didn't really notice Nichols's frequent cattiness.  I didn't realize, in my naive youth I guess, how camp he could get, either.  It is entirely possible, of course, that he didn't really hit his stride until later in his writing career -- this was the first of some dozen books on gardening, and he was equally prolific in a number of other genres -- and so I will recommend it with, as they say, reservations.

A friend gave me Kory Stamper's Word by Word, knowing that I love words, their evolutions and etymologies, their solidity and liquescence. (!)  Stamper writes dictionaries -- yes, somebody actually does that, sits down and researches what a word means, where it came from, when it was first used, whether its usage has changed or remained the same over the years, and then decides how best to distill all of that into a manageable "definition".  Stamper's enthusiasm for her wonderfully geeky job is infectious and engaging, as well as often hilarious, and I would recommend it without hesitation for word-lovers of all ages were it not that her writing is also pretty salty at times.  English is a richer language for the four-letter words, to be sure, but I still would rather they weren't sprinkled throughout everyday conversation when they are only modifiers, not topics of study themselves.  But that is my only beef with the book, to be sure!

I picked this up at Vroman's too, caught by the Barbara Pym chapter -- What She Ate by culinary historian Laura Shapiro, essays on six seemingly-disparate women throughout relatively-modern history, each of whom intrigued Shapiro by her connection with food, some positive, others not so much.  Pym, it turns out -- whom friends have been telling me for years I should read, and whose diary I long ago galloped through, finding her no small kindred spirit -- Pym used food in her novels as a way of showing character, that the meals her "quiet women" heroines ate or made for themselves were not the drab, lonely stereotypical white sauces and cold shapes that had already gone a long way to giving English cookery its bad reputation -- or that those who do serve dry rissoles and "stringy cabbage" are, if not to be censured -- for Pym I think rarely has villains per se -- then certainly to be quietly pitied.  Shapiro spends some time looking at a particular meal, cold chicken in white sauce, because not only does it play a large part early in Pym's novel Some Tame Gazelle but is in remarkable contrast to one recalled with horror by Julia Child in the 1950s, and appears in a popular 1935 cookbook not the way Child describes it, but the way Pym does, with its "sharpness added by the slices of lemon".  I admit that I had not paid much attention to how novelists use food as a way of revealing character -- if indeed they do at all -- only perhaps the way that Laura Ingalls Wilder, used as she often was herself to hard times and making-do with little, contrasted to those her husband's boyhood meals where the table practically groaned with buckwheat cakes, oatmeal with cream and maple syrup, sausages and gravy, and pie, just for breakfast.  Shapiro is an excellent writer, and all of her essays are worth reading -- the six women are Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis (the inspiration for "The Duchess of Duke Street"), Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, and Helen Gurley Brown, some of whom admittedly I would not have given a second glance but whose stories have opened my eyes to a different way of looking at people and their relationships to food.

I'm pleased to say that Shapiro's book also prompted me to dash over to the library, where I chose Jane and Prudence from the rather-appropriately few books left of Pym's, plain and easily-overlooked, entirely appropriate to what Shapiro calls Pym's "minor-key world located well back from fiction's cutting edge".  I enjoyed the book quite a lot, and the next one I chose, No Fond Return of Love, though I will say that it took a little while more for me to feel involved with the latter, but perhaps this is because I found the object of Dulcie's quiet obsession to be rather repulsive -- though I suppose this can also be a credit to Pym, for who has not been either in that position or that of the friend looking on, who finds the passion incomprehensible?  I had the feeling even early on that Pym might be "Austen-like", as so many readers describe her, in no small part because it is in the re-readings where her humor blooms most fully, when one knows what is coming and savors the anticipation.

Penelope Lively's memoir A House Unlocked is one that I'm afraid got jumped over quite a lot, and it deserves better, though I suppose the format Lively chose allows the reader -- unlike with, say, a mystery novel -- to read a chapter and set it down and come back to it some time later without much difficulty, for instead of a traditional memoir, what she has done is to take objects and rooms from her grandmother's house, where Lively herself spent much of her childhood after moving back to England from Egypt at age twelve, and use these  not only to remember the family members and their way of life around the turn of the last century, but also to consider more sociological and philosophical aspects that the various objects lead her to think about.  This sounds rather dull on the face of it, but the effect is like having tea with a great-aunt -- a widely-read and thoughtful great-aunt -- and listening to her talk, ostensibly about her childhood, but leading from there, as so often does with thoughtful people, to all sorts of topics.  Her own bedroom at her grandmother's house, she begins in one chapter, had formerly been her late grandfather's dressing room, and this leads to ruminations about the domestic arrangements of middle-class marriages in her grandparents' day, and the differences between their marriage, with their almost-completely separate spheres, and Lively's own more modern one, and from there to the ways of raising children that her grandmother and her contemporaries espoused and the post-Freudian, post-Dr.-Spock way that we do now -- and Lively is not judgmental here, either, for while she recognizes the benefits of modern marriage and parenthood, she regards the "old-fashioned" ways with a gentle if somewhat bemused tolerance.  (I wonder myself sometimes, if that post-Freudian, post-Dr.-Spock philosophy doesn't make us too selfish, that in a way our lack of self-control and consideration for others that so many decry now as "just 'manners'" leads people to believe that their own needs come first over anyone else's, from running red lights to shooting people one doesn't even know.  This is not to say, of course, that things were always better in the "old days," for intolerance and racism are not new inventions.)  The effect of Lively's style and format isn't really "chatty" -- more discursive, I think, and somewhat elegiac, but fascinating if you don't mind rather slow-moving digressions and philosophical meditations, which I don't!

Maybe I will get back to Cræft soon ...!

"Why We Need Libraries"

Here are four remarkable "quotes" from the pictorial essay "Why We Need Libraries" by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell, in the Guardian a few weeks ago.

Knitting in the Movies and Television: "Anne With an E"

On their way to Mrs. Lynde's house so that Anne can apologize for her temper, Marilla wears, here in the 2017 series based on Anne of Green Gables, the shawl that figures so largely in another scene from the book and the series.  The one chosen by the costume designer here is rather decidedly untraditional for a late-Victorian lace shawl -- but then, it is very plain and serviceable, much like Marilla herself.  I couldn't find a better view of the shawl -- there is one closer in another scene, when Anne is admiring the brooch, but that part wasn't included in the recap at the Netflix website.  Perhaps the stitch is either "Falling Leaves" or "Shetland Leaves," from Martha Waterman's shawls book? or the one that FreeKnitStitches.com calls "Shrubs"?

But I confess that there will probably be no more here on this particular series, as I have decided that this was my second and last attempt to watch it.  I had heard that it was coming, and was a little wary -- how could anything hope to compare with the near-perfection of the 1985 "Anne of Green Gables"?! -- but was delighted to find that Marilla and Matthew were to be played by Geraldine James and R.H. Thomson -- oh, if anyone could come close to the standards set by Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth, it would be James and Thomson!  And the photos only increased my interest.  I was a bit dismayed, then, upon the debut of the series here, to find such an emphasis, even in the first episode, even forewarned as I was, on cynicism and sordidness.

I cannot fault the production values, from photography to costumes to set design to casting, in the first episode, but this leaves only writing and direction to blame for the direction the series takes.  I got as far as the beginning of the second episode -- at about the 90 minute mark -- where Anne alights from the train on her way back to the orphan asylum after being wrongly accused of stealing Marilla's brooch.  It was difficult enough to watch this Anne's bitter and vicious encounter earlier with the hired boy, but after the child-snatcher (yes!) at the railroad station, I turned it off.  I already knew from other reviews that this version not only emphasized the grimmer aspects of Montgomery's story but added in more than a few of its own, and so I had sort of steeled myself for things like Anne's flashbacks to the brutality of life in the asylum -- but I just didn't want to watch it diverge so very much from the intentions of Montgomery's original novel.

(I understand the rationale behind that first scene with the hired boy because, clearly and understandably, Anne is afraid of being replaced -- but Montgomery's Anne is not cruel.  That's all.  If Montgomery's Anne felt that she was in danger of being replaced, she would far more likely have intuitively "imagined herself" into the boy's own situation -- which he tells her right at the beginning of the scene, that he needs the work to help support his family -- than she would have shrieked at him like a harpy.  What I don't understand is why screenwriters choose to adapt a story by throwing out much of what is essential to it, and adding things that the author never intended.  The fact that this series is not called "Anne of Green Gables" is a warning, indeed.  We don't need to be bashed over the head with how hard an orphan's life is -- we get it!  Anne's parents died when she was a baby, she's homely and skinny and she talks far too much, and nobody wants her -- nobody.  It's an awful life.  Why does the series feel it necessary to exaggerate things to the point that fellow orphans are actually physically abusive and the bullying father of Anne's only foster family dies not from a violent outburst at work but from a violent outburst while beating Anne? or worse, add in 21st-century lectures on the evils of racism, sexism, and homophobia?)

It's a real shame that the writer didn't love Anne herself and Montgomery's book enough, that she didn't trust the original story enough to film the the real Anne, the one who brings joy and love to Green Gables and in the process finds the joy and love and family that she herself craves.

"Mrs. Tim of the Regiment"

"Second June.  Spend the morning lying in a deck chair in the garden pretending to knit.  How glorious to have nothing to do!"

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment always seems to me like the "first" D.E. Stevenson novel, though it was neither the first one she published nor the first one I read.  But it is so indelibly and characteristically Stevenson that it is difficult not to think of it as such.  As it happens, this "diary of a officer's wife" was actually based on Stevenson's own, so that I'm sure we can take much of Hester Christie's character and sense of humor as very like Stevenson's own as well.  Mrs. Tim's diary -- there are four books, spanning the early 1930s to the early 1950s -- are rather like the Provincial Lady's, whom Jilly Cooper calls "gentle, disaster-prone, yet curiously dry-witted," though probably less of the last two than the Provincial Lady's, especially if you read the P.L.'s humor as more often than not verging on the satirical.  Mrs. Tim, though an army wife and therefore subject to the whims of the Service, has many of the same things to deal with as the Provincial Lady, being of a similar age and situation -- running a household, raising children, managing servants and an occasionally obtuse husband, and observing the quirks of those around her -- which last Mrs. Tim for the most part enjoys, I think in a warmer manner than Delafield's heroine.  That, I think, is one of Stevenson's salient characteristics, and Mrs. Tim's humor and good-nature I think keep her from seeming to us as caustic and near to the razor's edge as the Provincial Lady occasionally can.  Mrs. Tim seems to enjoy life much more than her contemporary.  One of the chief delights of both, however, is that wonderfully English -- British, I must say, for Stevenson was a Scot -- understated self-deprecation.

"I've heard a lot about Mrs. Christie from some friends of hers staying at the hotel -- Mr. and Mrs. McTurk," [says Mr. Baker to Mrs. Loudon.]
     I try to explain that I don't know them very well, but Mr. Baker does not listen.  "Very nice friends to have, Mrs. Christie, especially the lady.  She's always saying how sorry she is at you leaving Kiltwinkle.  It must be a bit trying for a lady like you not to have a settled home of your own, isn't it now?"
     This statement is often made to me, and it always annoys me, chiefly, I think, because it is true.  But some time ago I found a quotation which seemed to meet the case, and I always make use of it on these occasions.
     "'To a resolved mind his home is everywhere,'" I reply sententiously.

For my virtual D.E Stevenson Knitalong, I couldn't decide between two patterns from "Patons Specialty Knitting Book No.33" by Patons Australia, the "Faith" jumper, above, originally in blue bouclé with one of the ties in a contrasting grey, or

the "Amy" originally in Paton's Rose wool (a fingering weight) in "Kenya Red" -- I wonder what shade that is?!  Interesting that we would certainly call that a cardigan now, where in the early 1930s or so when this came out it was a "coat" -- there are three other front-buttoning garments in this particular book, two of which are called coats and one which is, strangely, called a "jumper-cardigan" though it clearly has two front pieces buttoning up in the middle.  They both seem very "Mrs. Tim" to me -- sensible, not too frivolous or youthful but still not at all dowdy (the frivolity would come with the hat, no doubt!), practical yet appealing.

(This Paton's book is indexed at Ravelry, though the patterns are not available there; the entire booklet has been scanned and is available here courtesy Bex of Subversive Femme.)

Actually, I'm strongly tempted to knit one or both of these!