Miss Read

Dora Saint, who wrote as Miss Read, has died at the age of 98. Miss Read is one of my favourite writers of comfort reading. Her books about life in Fairacre & Thrush Green are familiar, full of humour & interest but never sentimental or twee. I've reviewed some of her books here & here but fortunately I have many more on the tbr shelves so I'm not going to run out any time soon.

There's a lovely obituary here. My favourite quote is from H F Ellis, the literary editor of Punch (I didn't know Miss Read had written for Punch) who called her his favourite contributor. "She had no arrogance at all and didn't feel her work was sacrosanct, and she never minded revising it. In a way she is like Jane Austen. She writes about what she knows and never goes beyond it." Dora Saint seems to have had a happy, fulfilled life with a devoted following of readers, mostly library users which seems very appropriate to me. Her books never made her a fortune but provided a steady income that allowed for a few luxuries. I can't imagine the author of the Fairacre books as a jetsetting glamourous author in the style of Jackie Collins. It seems right that her life was quiet, steady & full of good things, just like her books.

Thrush Green - Miss Read

Thrush Green is the first book in this series by Miss Read. I’ve listened to several others in the series on audio but then decided I should start at the very beginning.  I’ve been tempted by these lovely Houghton Mifflin American paperbacks (although still with the beautiful original drawings by J S Goodall) so I have the first two books on the shelves.

This first book takes place over one day, May Day, when the fair run by the formidable Mrs Curdle, comes to Thrush Green. As morning breaks, the caravans arrive with the stalls, rides, animals & games. Mrs Curdle has been coming to Thrush Green for many years but there are rumours that this will be the last year. She’s getting old & her health isn’t good & she doesn’t feel that she has anyone to hand the running of the fair on to. Her grandson Sam is a bad lot & her other grandson, Ben, has been sullen & out of sorts for months. Mrs Curdle looks forward to consulting old Dr Bailey, the only doctor she trusts after he safely delivered her son, George, many years ago.

Dr Bailey is also feeling his age &, after a bout of illness, is trying to come to a decision about his practice. He has a young GP, Dr Lovell, helping out & he wonders whether he should offer him a partnership. Dr Lovell is enjoying his time in Thrush Green very much, especially since he met beautiful Ruth Bassett. Ruth is staying with her sister & brother-in-law after her fiancé left her just before her wedding. Her broken heart is mending slowly & Dr Lovell is hoping that he can spend more time in Thrush Green to help with that healing. Grumpy Albert Piggott makes his daughter, Molly’s, life a misery with his complaints & bad temper. She has started working at a pub some distance away, only coming home at weekends, but her hopes are centred on the fair. Last year, Molly & Ben Curdle spent an enchanted day together & she has waited all year to see him again.

Bossy, dogmatic Ella Bembridge & her timid friend, Dimity Dean, have several dramas to cope with over the course of the day & eccentric Dotty Harmer causes Ella some pain with a case of Dotty’s Colliwobbles after eating some of her quince jelly. This is a lovely, gentle book, introducing most of the Thrush Green characters. Before the day is over, decisions will be made that affect the lives of several residents of Thrush Green.

Reading books out of order can have its downside. I was pleased to find out in this book why Dotty’s cat was called Mrs Curdle. This had puzzled me as I’d read a couple of the later books in the series & had no idea who Mrs Curdle was & why a cat would have such an unusual name. Perfect comfort reading.

Not at all like Jane Eyre...

Mildred Lathbury is my heroine. Sensible, ironic, independent, with a self-deprecating sense of humour,

Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.

Mildred lives in a block of flats in “this shabby part of London, so very much the ‘wrong’ side of Victoria Station, so definitely not Belgravia,” & works part time for a charitable society helping distressed gentlewomen. It’s the late 1940s, that dreary period of post-war inertia & restraint. Mildred is about to meet her new neighbours, Helena & Rocky Napier. Rocky has just been demobbed from the Navy where he was “the most glamorous Flags in the Med”. He spent the war mixing cocktails & organising the social engagements in the Admiral’s villa in Naples.  Helena is an anthropologist, just back from working in the field in Africa with the enigmatic Everard Bone. The Napier’s marriage was a product of the war & it may not survive the peace. Mildred’s calm routine of work & church activities is about to be turned upside down.

Mildred is the daughter of a country clergyman & his wife, now both dead, & her best friends are the vicar of her London Parish, Julian Malory & his sister, Winifred. Julian is an absent-minded, ascetic man in his forties. Winifred is older, badly dressed in the rejects from church jumble sales, kind, enthusiastic but rather innocent & ineffectual. When the Malorys decide to convert their attic into a flat & take in a lodger, Mildred imagines a nurse or social worker or an Anglo-Catholic widow. Imagine her surprise when Allegra Gray, a clergyman’s widow but a very glamorous one, arrives on the scene. It’s not long before Mrs Gray has beguiled Julian into giving her his hearthrug & is remaking Winifred’s wardrobe. But it’s when Mildred & her friend, Dora Caldicote, catch sight of Julian & the widow holding hands in the park that the upsets really begin.

Excellent Women is my favourite Barbara Pym novel. I’ve read it many times, I even have three copies of it, including this lovely Folio Society edition. That's Helena & Mildred on the title page. It’s full of acute observations & so many ironic & funny lines. Mildred finds herself taken out of her comfort zone by her friendship with the Napiers.  As well as experiencing the horror of meeting by the dustbins in the basement & having to share a bathroom, she goes to a meeting at the Learned Society to hear Helena & Everard Bone give a paper. She & Rocky observe the anthropologists, looking at the books on the shelves with titles like Five Years with the Congo Cannibals & With Camera & Pen in Northern Nigeria. Of course, being an excellent woman, “holy fowl” as Helena describes Mildred & her fellow churchgoers, Mildred also finds herself taken advantage of by the Napiers, becoming the go-between in their arguments & left to supervise the removalists when Helena goes home to her mother.

Through her friendship with the Napiers, Mildred meets Everard Bone, an Anglican convert whose mother is obsessed with birds (she collects newspaper clippings proving that birds are planning to take over the world. I wonder what she would think of Daphne Du Maurier’s story!?) & woodworm. One of my favourite scenes is when Everard meets Mildred as she leaves work one afternoon in the middle of summer,

I was thinking of hurrying past him as I was not very well dressed that day – I had had a ‘lapse’ and was hatless and stockingless in an old cotton dress and a cardigan. Mrs Bonner would have been horrified at the idea of meeting a man in such an outfit. One should always start the day suitably dressed for anything, she had often told me... Although I agreed with her in theory I found it difficult to remember this every morning when I dressed, especially in the summer.

As well as her sloppy clothes, Mildred is also carrying a string bag containing a loaf of bread & a biography of Cardinal Newman. Such a Pymmish detail. Mildred has an annual lunch with Dora Caldicote’s brother, William, who is a civil servant in the City. He takes her back to his office & she meets his colleagues, obsessed with being first to the tea trolley & spending their time looking longingly across at the opposite building that they call the Ministry of Desire. William also shows a more whimsical side of his rather stuffy personality by confessing to feeding the pigeons every day.

...I had not known about William’s fondness for pigeons and there was something unexpected and endearing about it. He seemed so completely absorbed in them, calling them by names, encouraging this one to come forward and telling that one not to be greedy, that I decided he’d forgotten all about me and it was time to go home.

William is upset to be moved to a new office where “Different pigeons come to the window.” It’s this kind of observation that I find so funny. When Mildred can’t sleep, she reaches for one of the books she keeps just for that purpose on her bedside table. Although she thinks Religio Medici would be appropriate she’s quite relieved when she picks up Chinese Cookery instead & drifts off to sleep. On Bank Holiday Mondays, Mildred cleans out the pigeonholes of her desk but, as she always becomes distracted by looking at old shopping lists, she rarely finishes the job. This book has become so much a part of the background of my thoughts that I always add extra cheese when I’m making macaroni cheese after Mildred’s experience of dining with the Malorys,

Not enough salt, or perhaps no salt, I thought, as I ate the macaroni. And not really enough cheese.

And when I clean the bath, I think of Mildred scrubbing away, thinking to herself how difficult it was to properly clean a bath & how she sometimes felt herself to have been found unworthy to have a bathroom of her own as she’s always had to share.

Excellent Women is one of my favourite comfort reads. It always makes me laugh. I love the middlebrow Englishness of Mildred’s life with her distressed gentlewomen, church jumble sales & Lent sermons. I love her awareness of the ridiculousness of everyday life. As I said at the beginning of this post, Mildred Lathbury is my heroine.

There's a copy of Excellent Women (the Folio Society edition, as it happens), and many other books by Barbara Pym, available at Anglophile Books.

Rejecting Tonypandy

It’s not often that you can pinpoint the beginning of an obsession. My obsession with Richard III began in around 1978 in the library at Lalor North High School in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I picked up a detective novel by an author I’d just discovered. But, this was no ordinary detective novel. This was The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Since then, I’ve read the book at least a dozen times, it’s become one of my favourite comfort reads. I’ve gone on to read many other books about Richard III, the Wars of the Roses & medieval history, both fiction & non fiction. I’ve joined the Richard III Society. All this because I read a slim book about a detective, stuck in a hospital bed after injuring his back chasing after a criminal, who relieves his boredom by investigating one of the greatest crimes in history – the murder of the Princes in the Tower.

Inspector Alan Grant features in most of Josephine Tey’s detective novels. He’s a detective in the style of Alleyn & Campion – urbane, civilised, handsome & intelligent. Lying in his hospital bed, bored with the pile of novels given to him by well-meaning friends, he’s visited by Marta Hallard, an actress who became a friend after Grant retrieved her emeralds from a thief.  She brings him a pile of prints, portraits of famous historical figures who were the principals in classic mysteries. Grant can’t do any physical detecting but why shouldn’t he exercise his brain on a classic historical mystery instead?

Grant has made a study of faces, becoming an expert at separating the villains from the good guys by the way they look. When he picks up a portrait of a man in 15th century dress, he thinks he must be a great judge or noble because of the expression of nobility & suffering in the man’s face. He is shocked to discover that this is a portrait of Richard III, the wicked uncle of horror stories. The man who not only murdered his nephews but old, mad Henry VI, Henry’s son Edward, poisoned his own wife & scandalously wanted to marry his niece. How could Grant have got it so wrong? He begins by getting hold of Nurse Darroll’s schoolbooks, then Marta gets him a copy of Thomas More's History of Richard III & his colleague, Sergeant Williams, brings him a stodgy history of England & a historical novel about Richard’s mother, the Rose of Raby. Thoroughly confused by now, Marta introduces Grant to Brent Carradine, a young American doing research at the British Museum as a way of staying in England to be with his girlfriend, an actress in Marta’s company. As Brent says when they start the investigation,

Look, Mr Grant, let’s you and I start at the very beginning of this thing. Without history books, or modern versions or anyone’s opinion about anything. Truth isn’t in accounts but in account books.

Brent goes back to the original sources & they discover that most of the stories told about Richard were written to please the Tudor dynasty after Henry Tudor defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. History is written by the victors & Thomas More’s account of events he was too young to have witnessed influenced Shakespeare who wrote the play that has defined mainstream opinion of Richard as a traitorous hunchbacked murderer of innocents ever since. Grant & Carradine realise that much of the history they learnt at school is just wrong, manipulated by the victors & accepted as fact, which is where Tonypandy comes in.

Tonypandy is a village in Wales where government troops were said to have shot striking miners in 1910. The facts were quite different & Tonypandy becomes shorthand for every falsehood written down in history books & taught in school as gospel truth hundreds of years after the fact. The result of their research is that Grant & Brent conclude that Richard had nothing to do with the Princes’s deaths & that they probably survived him & were murdered by order of Henry VII. Josephine Tey paints such a heroic picture of Richard & such a dastardly one of Henry that thousands of readers have been convinced of Richard’s innocence on the strength of this one book. Many people cite the novel as the beginning of their fascination with Richard & it leads many to join the Richard III Society.

Of course, The Daughter of Time is fiction. It was published in 1952 & research has uncovered a lot more information about the period since then. Vital contemporary sources such as Dominic Mancini’s account of life in London at the crucial period when Richard assumed the throne weren’t discovered until after the book was published. The “white” version of Richard’s story promoted by early Ricardians to counteract the extremely “black” version of More & Shakespeare is just as biased. After reading The Daughter of Time, Richard was my hero. I believed that he was a noble, kind, wise, generous man who would never have killed his own nephews & who only took the throne because he believed he was the only legitimate heir.

Over the last 30 years, I’ve read dozens of books & articles about Richard & I lean more towards a “grey” version of the legend now. The 15th century was a brutal period when violence was often seen as a solution to a dispute & power was the ultimate goal. Richard was no different & probably no more scrupulous than any other prince of his time. I don’t believe there will ever be a definitive account of the death of the Princes now but the fact that they were never seen alive after about August 1483 (two months after Richard’s accession) is a damning fact that does not go away, no matter how many books I read that paint Richard as more sinned against than sinning.

However, the fact that my feelings about the historical Richard have changed can’t diminish my enjoyment of this wonderful novel. I still read it at least once a year, for the nostalgic picture of London in the 1950s, to read about the excitement of research & to visit Alan Grant in his comfortable hospital bed, eating rissoles & rhubarb, rewriting history in the most entertaining detective novel ever written.

There have always been Starkadders...

Since I wrote about comfort reading a couple of weeks ago I’ve been thinking about my favourite books. Elaine’s lovely post on the justification for having two, three or more copies of favourite books also made me think about my own duplicates & triplicates. All of them are comfort reads, so I thought I’d write the occasional post about my favourites.

I recently bought this beautiful Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons to replace a very boring Penguin edition I already own & I immediately started dipping in, reading my favourite bits & laughing over my favourite phrases. Why do I love Cold Comfort Farm? It’s a parody of the rural novels of the early 20th century. I’ve read lots of Thomas Hardy, some D H Lawrence but no Mary Webb or Sheila Kaye-Smith. The kind of novel that Stella Gibbons was laughing at is well-described by Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time, as Alan Grant contemplates the pile of new novels on his bedside table in hospital,


The Sweat & the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthy & spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hay loft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas’s fault that its steam provided the only up-rising element in the picture.


But the humour of Cold Comfort Farm doesn’t rely on knowing the sources of the parody. The characters & situations are funny, no context is necessary. If you’ve read Jane Austen’s Emma, then you recognize Flora Poste as another Emma Woodhouse. Sure of herself & determined to sort out these backward rural relations. Flora knows what’s best for the Starkadders & she’s going to make sure they get it. Flora is left homeless after the death of her parents &, after writing to all her relations asking for a home, her cousin Judith replies to “Robert Poste’s child” inviting her to stay at Cold Comfort Farm. Flora is intrigued by this letter & determined to visit, even though her sophisticated London friends are worried about her fate in the wilds of Sussex.

Flora arrives to find lots of scope for her organizing abilities - & lots of experiences for the novel she plans to write. Old Great Aunt Ada Doom rules her family from her room. The manipulative old woman keeps her family around her by impressing on them that “There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm” & she can’t be crossed because, when she was a girl, she saw something nasty in the woodshed & must be humoured. Cousin Judith is a mournful woman, determined to make up to Robert Poste’s child for the mysterious ill her family did him many years ago & obsessed with her son, Seth. Amos is a hellfire & brimstone preacher at the Church of the Quivering Brethren.

Elfine is a free spirit who drifts around the countryside writing poetry, communing with nature & nursing an unrequited passion for Dick Hawk-Monitor, the young squire. Seth is a brooding hunk of a man, obsessed with the talkies & full of sex appeal. The manservant Adam spends his time washing the dishes with a little thorn twig & predicting doom & gloom for all. His only consolation in life is his love for the four cows on the farm, Feckless, Graceless, Aimless & Pointless. The serving girl Miriam is another child of nature, unable to help herself when the sukebind is in flower & therefore adds another illegitimate child to her family every year.

Flora has a lot to work on here. She also meets Mr Mybug, a literary critic who sees phallic symbols everywhere & is convinced that Branwell Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights. Flora breezes in with her modern attitudes to cleanliness, cooking & contraception & transforms their lives. One by one the Starkadders are dragged out of their ruts & their lives are changed forever. Cold Comfort Farm is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Adam’s clettering the dishes with his thorn twig until Flora buys him a little mop with a handle. Meriam resigned to having a child a year until Flora explains about contraception. Flora taking Elfine up to London for a complete makeover so that she can go to the ball & captivate Dick Hawk-Monitor.

This is also one of the few books I love that has been made into a good film. The BBC version of Cold Comfort Farm was made in 1996 & it’s wonderful. Kate Beckinsale as Flora, Rufus Sewell as Seth, Eileen Atkins as Judith, Ian McKellan as Amos, Rufus Sewell as Seth, Stephen Fry as Mr Mybug, Freddie Jones as Adam & did I mention Rufus Sewell as Seth? It could hardly be anything but wonderful with a cast like that. Maybe it’s not surprising that, although Stella Gibbons wrote many other novels in a long career, the success of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her reputation & until Virago recently reprinted Nightingale Wood, it was the only one of her novels in print.

I was interested to read recently that Vintage Classics are going to be reprinting several more of her novels next year, including the two sequels to Cold Comfort Farm, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm & Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm. Starlight & Westwood (which I know nothing about) are the other titles & they will also have more Gibbons available as Print on Demand. I’m looking forward to reading more Stella Gibbons although I can’t imagine another novel that will delight me as much as Cold Comfort Farm has whenever I’ve been in the mood for a little comfort reading.

Comfort reading

I loved this list of comfort reads on India Knight’s blog that Nicola Beauman mentioned in the latest Persephone Fortnightly Letter. I was amazed to realise how many readers out there loved the kind of books I would call comfort reads. I stopped counting how many I’d read quite soon as it turned out to be nearly all of them. I own quite a lot of them too as you can see.

But, it got me thinking about what I really consider a comfort read. I’ve read lots of the books on the list, but mostly only once. So, they don’t count as true comfort reads for me. A comfort read is a book I go back to over & over again. Or, if not the same book, one of the series like the Miss Read books. I’ve only recently discovered Georgette Heyer & P G Wodehouse but I think they will be comfort reads in that sense. They wrote so many books & they’re in the same vein – romance or humour – that I can see myself reaching for a Heyer or Wodehouse knowing exactly what I’ll get. I also think Joyce Dennys’s books about Henrietta will become comfort reads. The books I've read so far that have been published by Greyladies in Edinburgh also have the qualities I think of as comforting & some of those could become comfort reads in the future. But, the books I’ve read many times & that I always know will satisfy me no matter how often I read them are far fewer.

Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights & Persuasion are always at the top of the list. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain isn’t exactly a comfort read if you consider the subject matter but I first read it over Easter in about 1980, & I was so totally absorbed in Vera’s story that it led to many more books about WWI, especially the experiences of the women involved. Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession was a favourite book long before Persephone was dreamed of. It’s wonderful to be able to read so many of the books mentioned in AVGP thanks to Persephone Books. The Sherlock Holmes stories have always had a great appeal for me. I’ve read them so many times & seen many adaptations although nothing beats the atmosphere of the original stories.  

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey  inspired my fascination with Richard III &, although I’ve changed my views on Richard himself, my love for this passionate book has not diminished. Carol Shields was one of my favourite contemporary writers & The Republic of Love is my favourite of her books. The story is told by Fay & Tom in alternate chapters & it’s romantic & funny about relationships & mermaids.  One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes is a perfect jewel of a novel, set on just one hot summer day just after the end of WWII. Barbara Pym’s novels conjure up London or village life in the 50s, church fetes, clergymen & genteel spinsters with disconcertingly sharp thoughts.

So, what are these comforting qualities? Familiarity, definitely. I know chunks of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights & Persuasion almost by heart. Phrases pop into my head all the time when something reminds me of a character or a scene. Every time I clean the bath, I think of Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women. Atmosphere can be important. The Sherlock Holmes stories conjure up a foggy London, late Victorian or Edwardian, with muffins for tea before a fire in that sitting room that’s so familiar from the stories & the illustrations by Sidney Paget. The Daughter of Time conjures up the 1950s, in a hospital system where you could stay in a private room for weeks waiting for your back to heal. I’m especially attracted to the period between the wars. It’s a very definite period with its own flavour of melancholy. The mourning for the war that had passed & the growing apprehension about the war to come. I feel nostalgic for a period I never experienced. I suppose that when I need comfort reading, I want to be taken away from today & whatever is worrying me, & visit people & places I feel I know. And then, there are comfort movies. Brief Encounter, The Enchanted Cottage, Waterloo Bridge – but that’s a subject for another day.

* I'm very pleased that, with the help of Blogger's new Post Editor, I can now sprinkle my photos through the blog instead of all of them appearing at the top. I'm sure there must have been a way to do this before but I never worked it out. It's made me feel quite technologically competent!