rymenhild

I keep complaining to people about historical lesbian romance novels with no edges and no tension. Rose Lerner's delicious The Wife in the Attic, first available on Audible and just last week available in print/e-book, doesn't have these problems. But it isn't a romance at all, really. It's textbook Gothic, more Sarah Waters than Olivia Waite, and although it's set in the world of Lerner's Lively St. Lemeston series, with crossover characters, it doesn't resemble Lerner's other books at all.

Protagonist Miss Oliver (I won't give you her first name, since she doesn't use it until a significant moment halfway through) is an educated spinster barely surviving on music lessons when she is offered a job as governess to a five-year-old girl in a manor by the sea. The food is much better than Miss Oliver was offered at her boarding house, and the master of the house offers intelligent, if uncomfortably flirtatious, conversation. On the other hand, our protagonist is locked in her rooms every night, and there's always some reason she can't leave the manor on her Friday half-holiday. And she never sees Lady Palethorp, Sir Kit's wife and the child's mother, who is supposedly ill in her own rooms. And Miss Oliver is terrified of fire, having heard too much about the time her Portuguese Jewish grandmother's family were burned by the Inquisition. And the child is afraid that her mother's soul might be destined for hell...

This setup does lead to an affair of sorts between Miss Oliver and Lady Palethorp, as advertised in the book's marketing, but I think my favorite thing about their relationship is that it in no way matches the beats I'd expect in a romance novel. Lady P is offstage through most of the first third of the book, and when she does appear, her dynamic with Miss Oliver has as much two-way jealousy, resentment, and anger as attraction, and although their relationship changes, it never does become simple.

Meanwhile, 19th-century British antisemitism, very precisely drawn according to Lerner's careful research, is one of the driving forces of both plot and characterization. So is 19th-century British Jewish immigrant culture. The interplay of ethnic identity, religious identity, and social class matters very much. Miss Oliver's mother was a Portuguese-British costermonger and the governess herself is destitute, while Lady Palethorp's equally Portuguese-British father and grandfather sold many straw hats and left her their wealth. I'm convinced by the nuances of Lerner's work on class, status, ethnicity, and religion in ways that I haven't been convinced by Lerner's prior writing.

I want to talk about the last third of the book, but I really can't until more people have read it, so if this description sounds good to you, read it and come back!

I subscribed to the New Yorker recently, as I'd been running out of free accesses regularly and the introductory subscription price was ridiculously cheap with a .edu email address. One of the advantages (or disadvantages, depending on how much work I should be doing instead of reading articles) is that the New Yorker sends me emails with links to particularly interesting articles in their archives.

Stage Mothers by Elif Batuman (December 2012) may be the best thing I've read all year, and I just want to talk about it with all of you. Ümmiye Koçak, a peasant woman from Southern Turkey with a middle-school education, saw a school play for the first time when she was in her forties:

Ümmiye had never seen a play before, and it seeped into her thoughts. For a long time, she had been puzzling over the situation of village women—the many roles they had to play. In the fields, they worked like men; in villas, they became housekeepers; at home, they were wives and mothers. "I kept turning it over in my head, how is it that I do all these things," she later recalled. "Then I saw Hüseyin’s theatre. That’s when I decided that the thing I’d been turning over in my head was theatre."

So, naturally, Ümmiye founded a theater group made up entirely of village women, and put on plays about marriage and poverty and domestic abuse inspired by the actors' lives, and performed these plays in front of the village. Then she founded another theater group. She went to Cannes with a documentary about one play. She adapted Hamlet for a Turkish audience, and put on a goatskin mustache so she could be Hamlet herself. I mean, naturally, right?

Batuman's article itself is a magnificent work about what it takes to make art, and the way art comes out of struggle.

Anyway, read the article yourself and then come talk to me about it. You won't regret it.

I have been trying to write a review of Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette)'s new novel, The Goblin Emperor, and it's coming out in clichés: A beautiful book, a moving book, a book about loyalty and building cross-cultural bridges and making a place for oneself in a terrifying world, a book I did not want to end.

( More detailed comments behind the cut. Some general, unspecific spoilers for Goblin Emperor; some references to plot and character developments in Doctrine of Labyrinths. )

Seanan McGuire's half-fae San Francisco investigator Toby Daye solves approximately one mystery per book, but she lives in a world with plenty of mysteries left. This post, which I began writing months ago but have been saving until muchabstracted finished the series, begins to guess at some of the hidden mysteries. Expect major spoilers for all three published books, as well as the sample chapter for the fourth book. Also, be warned that the post is enormous.

( Let there be gall enough in thy ink )


I know that posting this on Christmas Eve probably limits my readers, but I encourage everyone who's read the series to join the conversation in the comments, both on LJ and Dreamwidth.

(I began this post in November. See, I can finish posts I promise myself I'll write! Sometimes!)

The year is 1910*. You are an Englishman or -woman of no particular importance. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, a small principality has mislaid its rightful prince. Because you are both insatiably curious and lucky enough to be connected to this principality in some way, you find yourself on your way to the principality, about to restore order!

*Or 1890, or Sometime Before 1914.

( If this is happening to you, congratulations; you are living in a Ruritanian romance. )

( Some examples of the form )

If I've missed any romances, please share; I'm in the market for more imperialist monarchist wacky hijinks.

--

Edit: I was wrong about the name of the kingdom next to Galazon. It's Aravill, not Aravis. All those unpronounceable imaginary foreign names are the same to me. ;)

(Or: In which rymenhild spends a dissertation afternoon writing 680 words of anime critique instead of analyzing medieval literature.)

( Series-destroying spoilers for season 2 of Princess Tutu. I mean it. If you haven't seen the whole series, please come back and read this after you're done. )

During a visit to my family home this week, I have accomplished very little dissertation work. I have, however, spent much of the time uplifting my mind and my morals with some edifying words. You see, the local public library had a book sale this week. I acquired, for the price of a single dollar, John S. C. Abbott's enthralling book The Child at Home: Or, the Principles of Filial Duty (New York, NY: The American Tract Society, 1833) (full scan; Project Gutenberg e-text).

I have learned from Abbott that if you take the smallest step off the path of righteousness to pick flowers on the way to school, you will probably be led farther and farther astray until you die and go to hell. If you should play with your little friends and make them laugh, and your aunt should come scold you for making the children laugh so loudly, and you lie to your aunt, saying, "It was not I who made them laugh," be warned. A young girl who did precisely that died at the age of eleven with a troubled soul, and while Abbott does not tell us certainly that she went to hell, it is possible that she may have done so.

I have also learned that it's kind of God to put all the sinners in a permanent prison so that the few who do get saved can live in eternal peace, untroubled by any wickedness. By the way, heaven must be appallingly boring. Anyone who has ever been known to enjoy attending parties or even playing with other little children in the streets is unlikely to go there.

What have you been reading lately, O Friendslist? Is it immoral pap that will ruin your virtue and deprive you of your hopes of heaven? If so, send me a recommendation, because I think I need a change of pace.

Dere Maister Chaucer:

Mesemeth that TNH of makinglight wolde ben a moste fyne drynkynge confrere (consoeur?) for thee. For when shee partoke of her neighboures vodka, shee fel into a moste straunge and lovelie tongue verray muche like unto thine. Povre wif.

Thine admirer,
Rym

In other makinglight news, if anyone with an interest in the subject hasn't seen the discussion of fanfic yet, and you have an hour or two at your disposal, go read. It's acquired 567 thoughtful and interesting comments so far. Basically, professional writers, fan writers, publishers, lawyers and interested onlookers of all stripes and varieties have shown up to debate the ethics of producing stories about other people's worlds. Some highlights:

• Jane Yolen argues that works should be copyrighted long enough to earn money for the writers' heirs.
  
• Mercedes Lackey admits to writing collaborative MMORPG fanfic.
  
• Joss Whedon is, unsurprisingly, awesome.
  
• A fanficcer named C.Elisa describes fanfic as "a form of full-contact literary criticism."
  
• rhandir provides the Cliff Notes for the whole discussion.
  

I can't believe I just went back to find the good parts of that conversation instead of writing more of this thrice-damned paper.

While taking yet another break from the current project, I went looking for an online copy of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

In the course of my search, I encountered a massive work of panfandom crossover fanfiction. Yes, I encounter massive works of panfandom crossover fanfiction all the time. The one I found today is special because it was published in 1890. Andrew Lang, author/compiler of the Fairy Books, wrote a series of letters between fictional characters in Old Friends. Sadly, most of the letters are nearly incomprehensible for readers who, like me, lack a strong background in nineteenth-century popular fiction. (I do recommend the hilarious letter in which Catherine Morland of Austen's Northanger Abbey describes her experience at Mr Rochester's house party.)

The best part of Lang's book, especially for those of us who are otherwise interested in crossovers as genre, is his introduction:

( Did the persons in contemporary novels never meet? )

( What if the readers aren't familiar with the characters in the crossover? )

(That, of course, is why half my friendslist has seen Firefly and read Dark Tower.)

Oh dear, Harold Bloom is on his soapbox again. This is never a good thing. (Italicized passages are quotations from Bloom's Wall Street Journal article on Hans Christian Andersen. If you click, you might discover that Bloom has two different spellings for "Andersen". You might also find smoke coming out of your ears. Be warned.)

I myself see no distinction between children's literature and good or great writing for extremely intelligent children of all ages.

So far, so good.

J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers, appropriate titans of our new Dark Age of the Screens: computer, motion pictures, TV.

...I admit that there are many better writers out there in the universe than J.K. Rowling, but Professor Bloom, sir, does the phrase "Dark Tower" mean anything to you?

Outside of Browning and Shakespeare, that is?

Also, Dark Age of the Screens? Professor Bloom, I sit at the computer for hours to read Middle English poetry. I am sure you would not be quite so pleased by some of the other things I read when I sit at the computer for hours, but really, now! Think of the vast quantity of text we are lucky enough to have in this century. Certainly, not all of it is high-quality. Nevertheless, there is quantitatively more high-quality literature, film and drama available today to the average person than there ever was in any other time in the history of the world. Much of this literature, film and drama appears on the Internet. I can't imagine what you mean by "Dark Age."

One goes on urging children of all ages to read and reread Andersen and Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, rather than Ms. Rowling and Mr. King. Sometimes when I say that in public I am asked: Is it not better to read Ms. Rowling and Mr. King, and then go on to Andersen, Dickens, Carroll and Lear? The answer is pragmatic: Our time here is limited. You necessarily read and reread at the expense of other books.

I have read works by Andersen, Dickens, Carroll, Lear, Rowling and King. All but Carroll and Lear I have read in the last two years. I do not feel that I have sacrificed precious Dickens reading time by devouring all seven Dark Tower novels within a month.

That said, I have sacrificed a precious ten minutes of my life reading your appreciation of Hans Christian Andersen today. Our time here on Earth is too limited to waste it on an article containing a few ill-conceived rants about popular entertainment and quite a long discussion of Andersen's sex life. With comparisons to Michael Jackson, G-d help us.

Thank you, Professor Bloom.