Alice Jolly: Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile

If the sign of a good book is that, while partway through it, you buy your own copy and take the library copy back, wondering whether to slide a post-it note inside urging the next borrower to do the same; and that you are mentally raking through the names of friends and family who would … Continue reading Alice Jolly: Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile →

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years, Island Farm

Over on Vulpes Libris I've posted a review of the Little Toller reprint of Frank Fraser Darling's two books on living in the Scottish Highlands and Islands for several years in the 1930s and 1940s, Island Years, Island Farm. He and his wife and young son lived in tents and wooden huts on uninhabited islands, rebuilt … Continue reading Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years, Island Farm →

Dorothy Richardson’s Dawn’s Left Hand, and Clear Horizon

With nine volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage down, and four to go, Dawn’s Left Hand is the one in which Miriam has sex with H G Wells. It’s an extraordinary episode, and if you’ve read H G Wells’ Ann Veronica, you’ll be fuming, because the setting is exactly the same as the attempted rape of … Continue reading Dorothy Richardson’s Dawn’s Left Hand, and Clear Horizon →

Beginning a festival of Dorothy Richardson: The Tunnel, and Interim

Today begins a total splurge of reviews of the remaining novels in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. I've already written about the first volume, Pointed Roofs, and Backwater and Honeycomb. Today I'm tackling The Tunnel and Interim, and next week's posts begin with a long conversation with Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page about how we both read Pilgrimage (more or less … Continue reading Beginning a festival of Dorothy Richardson: The Tunnel, and Interim →

Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

This time in the Really Like This Book's podcast script catch-up, I’ve gone west, to Willa Cather’s beautiful novel The Song of the Lark from 1915. If ever there was an advertisement for idyllic American settings, this novel is it. The descriptions evoke desert life near the Mexican border, clean and tidy Scandinavian-immigrant town life in … Continue reading Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark →

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ursula Buchan’s A Green and Pleasant Land

I met Ursula Buchan a few weeks back, after corresponding by email on and off over a year, and we got on like a house on fire, since we are both researching the same subject but from different angles. She sent me a copy of her most recent book - A Green and Pleasant Land: How England's … Continue reading Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ursula Buchan’s A Green and Pleasant Land →

You May Well Ask: Naomi Mitchison’s roaring twenties

‘But my baby died’. That’s the last line in Naomi Mitchison’s second volume of memoirs, You May Well Ask. It's a grim cliff-hanger that isn’t, because this happened in 1940 when she was running a small Scottish estate in Carradale, on a dangling arm of land off western Scotland that snuggles up to Arran in the Firth … Continue reading You May Well Ask: Naomi Mitchison’s roaring twenties →

Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

Today’s letter is D, for Monica Dickens. She’s the great-grand-daughter of Charles Dickens, and she too was very prolific, publishing about 30 novels and memoirs, including the Follyfoot horse stories. I'm not very interested in horse novels, so I didn’t discover Monica Dickens until I found her on my mother’s bookshelf some time in my teens. One Pair of … Continue reading Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet →

Snake healing in Vonda N McIntyre’s Dreamsnake

This week is Vonda McIntyre week. Today's post on her 1979 novel Dreamsnake is from my podcast miniseries on feminist science fiction; tomorrow's post on Vulpes Libris is on her new novel, The Moon and the Sun. With Dreamsnake I’m not talking about dragons, but proper hard-edged science in futuristic fiction, even if it’s made-up science, where … Continue reading Snake healing in Vonda N McIntyre’s Dreamsnake →