women’s lives

The Quiet Librarian, by Allen Eskens

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Hana Babić is at work in the stacks of her library in Minnesota when she is approached by Detective David Claypool. He tells her that her best friend Amina is dead, possibly murdered, in a fall from her balcony.

I expected Hana to be shocked and saddened by the news, and she is. What I didn’t expect was for her to immediately become tense and guarded.

Claypool came to Hana because he is investigating Amina’s death, and her will names Hana as the guardian for her young grandson Dylan. Hana responds by stating that there is no way Amina committed suicide. Her firm convictions and thoughts reveal her to be something more than the modest, self-effacing woman her colleagues call “the sweater lady” because of her cardigans.

It turns out that Hana originally lived in Bosnia as Nura Divjak. At the start of the war, 17-year-old Nura vows to find and kill the Serbs who raped her mother and murdered her family. Eventually she joins a militia as a warrior and spy. She’s so feared by the Serbs that a legend grows up around her; they call her the Night Mora. When they put a bounty on her head, the militia help her emigrate to the U.S. with a new identity.

Now she wonders if that 30-year-old bounty is what led to Amina’s death. Amina would never have revealed Hana’s identity and whereabouts; she’d proven her ability to withstand torture back in Bosnia. Hana feels responsible and must protect Dylan as well as find her friend’s murderer.

As the tension grows, the story moves back and forth between the two time frames: Bosnia in 1995, where the details of Hana’s past emerge, and the present day in Minnesota, where she has to decide how much to reveal to Claypool and whether to help him or work independently.

I often wanted to look away, overwhelmed by the tragedies I experienced along with Hana, but I couldn’t. Such a complex and fascinating character! I just wanted to learn all I could about her and her life. The other thing that kept me reading had to do with the way the author withheld and revealed information. I would love to see his map for the book, if he had one.

Eskers also does such a good job of arranging the two storylines so that, despite their covering different places and times and events, the book feels unified. The jump between the two never felt jarring to me. However, it did seem unrealistic that a detective would reveal so much information to a stranger and potential suspect.

I came away with the song War, by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, in my head. What makes people one day turn on their neighbors and believe that they are justified in raping and killing them and stealing their property? If you avenge your family’s death by killing their murderers and then their survivors come after you, where does the cycle of revenge end?

“War . . . What is it good for?”

Have you read an absorbing historical fiction book with a dual timeline?

A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner

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“Perhaps if one really knew when one was happy one would know the things that were necessary in one’s life.” Marion Milner

In 1926 Marion Blackett (later Milner) set out to discover “what kinds of experience made me happy.” Although armed with a First Class Honours Degree in Psychology and working in that field lecturing and researching, the twenty-six-year-old became aware that she was dissatisfied with the life she was living.

Among the possible cures she considered were adopting the habits of her peers or the standards of her parents’ generation. She also discarded the idea of following her own reason or developing a logical argument. She says, “So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.”

To learn what made her happy, Marion decided to examine her own perception, that is, her senses. Instead of making “the centre of awareness in my head,” she chose “knowing with the whole of my body.” In doing so, she takes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and expands upon it by offering a potential process for creating space in that room.

The process she chose started with keeping a diary of times she felt happy. Later she added freewriting to examine her entries further. Finally, she began writing this book, partly so she would have a record of this exploration and partly in the hope that others might find the process useful. Many of the epigraphs for the chapters come from Robinson Crusoe, echoing her deliberate isolation in this endeavour.

I wish I’d first read this book when I was young. Now that I’m well gone in years, I find myself greeting many of her discoveries and insights like old friends. For example, she found that once she started noting down when she was happy, she noticed more and more things that brought her joy, anticipating our current interest in paying attention, mindfulness and gratitude. Also, she found that being out in nature brought her joy, as did clearing out the spaces in her home.

Still, I enjoyed following the peculiar track of her mind, as she resists her temptation to control her thoughts instead of leaving them to themselves. Her prose, too, is clear and jargon-free. As someone who has kept a journal for most of my life, I also liked reading her excerpts and her thoughts about the value of her diary entries.

I also found the thoughts and preoccupations of a woman of that time interesting. The seven years she spent on this work held tumult and uncertainty, both personally and politically. During that time, the western world was roiled by the Great Depression and the run-up to World War II. She herself married Dennis Milner, had a child, and moved from Britain to the U.S.

What made me actually pick up the book, though, is that I love reading about people who shrug off society’s roles and rules in order to create their own lives from scratch. Many of us who came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s chose to reject the straitjacket of that era’s roles in order to find our own path, often without any models to guide us. In midlife I found I needed to remake my life, and again after I retired. Perhaps this effort, though most intense when we’re young adults, is one we come back to again and again.

Are you happy with your life? What might you change about it?

The Next Ship Home, by Heather Webb

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Two sisters from Sicily arrive at Ellis Island in 1902 after a nightmare ocean journey. Fleeing their abusive father, they hope to build a new life together in the U.S. However, Francesca worries that her beloved sister Maria will not pass the health exam; she has become ill in the crowded and unsanitary third-class compartment where they were confined. They might both be sent back to Sicily on the next ship.

Meanwhile Alma, a second-generation German-American, lives in a tenement in the Lower East Side’s Little Germany where her stepfather owns and runs a bierhaus in the basement. He thinks Alma is worthless and mocks her interest in learning languages spoken by their Irish and Italian neighbors. Deciding her unpaid labor in the bierhaus and home is not enough, he forces her to take a job at Ellis Island processing new arrivals telling her she must give her pay to him to help support the household.

Although Alma starts her new job filled with the prejudice against immigrants she’s learned at home, her compassion is stirred by the fear and suffering she encounters, and she gradually learns that these are just people like herself. Becoming especially close to Francesca and Maria, Alma works hard at her language skills so she can help by translating for those who don’t speak English. She also tries to find ways around the roadblocks put in place by the bureaucracy and some corrupt officials.

At first Alma doesn’t believe the whispered stories of extortion and abuse at Ellis Island—carefully researched by the author and based on real events—but Francesca has first-hand knowledge of them. The courage of two women and the growing friendship between them are inspiring.

Unlike some historical fiction that glosses over the practical details of everyday life, the author gives us a full picture of these women’s lives. I love that Webb has chosen to portray this neglected but important part of history: the corruption at Ellis Island, the mutual support of the downtrodden, and the dreams that women fight for despite the forces arrayed against them.

The story also follows Francesca after she leaves Ellis Island, providing unusual insight into this critical phase, including the hoops that new immigrants—especially women—must jump through and the traps they must avoid. I’m learning so much these days about the immigration process as I follow the news, so I appreciate the author’s depiction of the inner lives of both Francesca and Alma.

As we confront and protest against the atrocities visited upon legal immigrants in this country by a rogue regime, I found both comfort and inspiration in this story. Corruption and the abuse of immigrants have a long history in the U.S. and Webb’s portrait of the Ellis Island bureaucracy shows the range of workers, from those who actively abuse arriving immigrants to those who look the other way to those who try to help the new arrivals as best they can. At the same time, Webb shows what seemingly powerless people can accomplish by working together.

Can you recommend a fiction or nonfiction book about the history of Ellis Island?

A Good Neighborhood, by Therese Anne Fowler

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In Oak Knoll, a diverse and modest North Carolina neighborhood full of trees and ranch houses,  professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is concerned about the people who’ve just moved in next door. Flush with new money, the Whitmans have ignored the character of the neighborhood and instead cleared all the trees from their plot and built a McMansion complete with in-ground pool.

Although Valerie is worried about the health of her beloved and historic oak tree, its root system disrupted by all the digging, she tries to find a way to get along with her new neighbors, inviting Ms. Whitman—Julia—to a book club meeting. Then Valerie’s bright and talented biracial son Xavier meets Julia’s teenaged daughter Juniper.

In order to shield her daughters Juniper and young Lily from the hardscrabble life she led until marrying her boss, the up-and-coming millionaire Brad Whitman, Julia had the family join an evangelical church. Juniper agreed to take the church’a purity vow in which she agreed that her virginity belongs to God and, until she marries, to his representative on earth: her stepfather Brad. Having just watched the Neflix documentary Trust Me, this vow gave me the creeps. Already Julia’s purity vow has opened her up to bullying at her new school.

Meanwhile, Xavier, a classical guitar prodigy, is off to college in the fall on a music scholarship. He has close friends to hang out and play music with. He’s had two brief relationships with classmates, but his heart wasn’t really in either. When he meets Juniper, though, he discovers the power and glory of love. And miracle of miracles: she, too, falls for him.

Fowler makes this familiar story both urgent and utterly engaging with a relatable setting, masterful pacing, and vivid characters. I like that she works against stereotypes with some characters, but wonder if she doesn’t go too far, making them either too good to be true or too evil.

What really makes the book stand out, though, is the use of the neighborhood itself to narrate the novel. They say right on the first page: “[W]e never wanted to take sides.” They come back as a chorus throughout the story, reminding me of Euripides’ plays and other Greek tragedies. Just as the main characters are changed in the course of the story, so too is the collective group.

Using the first person plural “we” as the point of view in a novel is unusual and difficult to do well. I loved Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, where he maintained that point of view until near the end of the book. Here the chorus appearing between more traditional third-person scenes adds to a sense of looming tragedy. Even more importantly, it includes the reader as part of the “we,” making us complicit in their attitudes and opinions.

What a brilliant way to work issues of class, race and women’s lives into an old story! Because of our involvement, we readers are put on the spot: What we really think it means to be a good neighbor? How can we share our community with those who may be different from us?

Fowler’s story is more important than ever during this time when resurgent racism is polluting our  society. We may not want to take sides, but standing aside while tragedy unfolds carries its own consequences.

Have you read a novel with an unusual point of view?

The Woman with the Cure, by Lynn Cullen

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Meet Dr. Dorothy Horstmann who worked tirelessly and in the face of persistent gender discrimination to stop the polio pandemic. Now mostly forgotten, polio epidemics between 1948 and 1955 paralyzed or killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, around the world. President Franklin Roosevelt is the patient with whom most people are familiar.

 

Cullen brings this time period to life with searing portraits of wards filled with children in iron lungs and scientists competing against each other to be the first to find a cure. Dorothy doesn’t care about fame; fighting polio is her only concern. She freely shares what she learns with the two leading competitors—Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin—as well as with others working to end the scourge.

 

I love that biographers and historical fiction writers are bringing to light women whose essential contributions have been downplayed and forgotten while only the “great men” are credited and remembered. It’s worth noting that polio research was one of the first uses of HeLa cells which I first learned about in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. How much we owe to Ms. Lacks! Check out the book if you’re ever looking for an example of how one person can—even unwittingly—change the world.

 

Rejected for a residency because of her gender, Dorothy applies again as D. M. Horstmann and is accepted. The first to suspect that polio travels from the gut to the blood, she is refused support needed to investigate and conduct trials. She finally gets funding years later after a male scientist proposes the same thing; meanwhile thousands of children continued to be paralyzed or died each year. Nominated for a Nobel Prize for her work, she is passed over for two men.

 

With no time for bitterness, Dorothy pushes forward. The first woman to become a full professor at the Yale School of Medicine, she travels around the world to participate in polio conferences and to study polio outbreaks, thus contributing valuable data. She is also instrumental in the Russian study that validated Albert Sabin’s successful polio vaccine, enabling it to be approved.

 

Cullen takes us behind the scenes as scientists race the clock and each other. I felt Dorothy’s despair at setbacks and her thrills at successes. The delays caused by infighting I found frustrating, thinking of the children around the world left to suffer while male scientists kept their secrets. One of the holdups was danger of human trials with children.

 

We learn that the first round of Salk’s initial vaccine (which was greeted with cheers of relief) left 164 people paralyzed and 10 dead, due to one of the suppliers cutting corners, so that their vaccines actually gave people polio. The resulting distrust of vaccines lingers to this day.

 

I’m old enough to remember those awful years, with terrified parents keeping children apart and swimming pools closed. Some of the children in my school stumped around in their leg braces, while other children never got to attend because schools couldn’t accommodate wheelchairs.

 

I vividly remember the day at school when we lined up to get our first sugar cube with the vaccine and my mother crying. Since then I’ve been a confirmed advocate of vaccinations and nothing that drug-addled creep currently in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—who has made millions of dollars off of anti-vax activities—can say will convince me otherwise.

 

For me, the most moving scene in the book occurs in Detroit, Michigan in 1953 when Dorothy tours the Henry Ford Hospital’s polio unit with its rows of “groaning and wheezing iron lungs out from which heads stuck.” Dorothy herself had tried out one of them early on so that she’d better understand her patients and had immediately panicked.

 

On the tour, Dorothy is distracted by a little girl in a wheelchair. “With her physician’s eye, she noted that the muscles of both the child’s legs had atrophied from the hips down and were thus likely to remain permanently paralyzed.” The child is playing a board game with a grown woman in an iron lung, Mrs. Konkle, who cheerfully announces that all the children beat her at the game, even her own children when they come to visit.

 

The game is Candy Land which we played incessantly when I was little. I never knew that it was invented by a schoolteacher in California while she was in the hospital with polio. Mrs. Konkle had her husband buy it and spent her days cheering up the children in the ward with her by letting them win. Such courage!

 

Occasionally the ins and outs of such a complex, multifaceted effort became a bit tedious, and perhaps some of the side stories could have been eliminated, but it is worth pushing through to get the full story of the dedication and sacrifice, not only Dorothy’s but that of others as well, which finally brought about a cure. Of course, Dorothy—the daughter of immigrants by the way—didn’t stop there but went on to work on the rubella vaccine still used today to protect children.

 

Did you ever play Candy Land? Were you aware of its history?

Bloomsbury Girls, by Natalie Jenner

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In 1950s London, Bloomsbury Books is a relic of an earlier age. Offering new and rare books, the store has resisted change for a hundred years, and its stodgy general manager, Herbert Dutton, with his 51 unbreakable rules is determined to keep it that way. However, the three women who work there have other ideas.

Vivien staffs the Fiction department and loathes her one-time lover Alec who heads the department. She wants to introduce more female authors while Alec refuses all but the usual classics like Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ambitious and clever, Vivien provides much of the humor in the book. I especially love the way she comes up with witty and daring names for the people and places in the bookshop, like the Tyrant and the Via Dolorosa.

As Mr. Dutton’s secretary, Grace is the unacknowledged angel of the house. She helps Mr. Dutton manage his workload and tries to keep things on an even keel. She’s an anomaly for the time: a wife and mother who decided to take a job to avoid her abusive, unemployed husband. She cannot leave him because she doesn’t make enough to support herself and the children and fears she’d lose custody of them.  

Despite a brilliant career in Cambridge, a member of the first class of women awarded degrees by the university, Evie’s academic plans are crushed when she is passed over for a less accomplished man who takes credit for her work. At the bookstore she is in charge of cataloging the jumbled collection of rare books on the top floor, but she has an ulterior motive for working at Bloomsbury Books.

All tea-making is done by the three women, in obedience to Rule No. 17: ‘Tea shall be served promptly four times a day.’ Each of the four departments is run by a man, and they, of course, cannot be expected to make their own tea. The exception is Ash, head of the Science Department, who makes his own chai. As an immigrant from India, Ash’s presence brings portents of change and adds another dimension of discrimination.

I selected this story when looking for a light but engaging audiobook for a trip. Not only does it check those boxes, but it also features a few of my favorite things: a bookstore, London, one of my favorite actors as narrator—Juliet Stevenson—and the post-WWII time period. It also offers something I look for and rarely find: people, especially women, functioning in the workplace. Yes, raising children and running a household is work, and there are many stories about that, but little is written about the rewards and difficulties of working in an office (literal or figurative).

Jenner’s story abounds with the kind of rivalries and shifting alliances, the kindnesses and restrictions recognisable to anyone who has worked in an office. They keep the plot roiling and force the characters to show what they are made of. Other characters come and go, including real people of the time, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Daphne du Maurier, and Samuel Beckett.

Of course I hate the use of “girls” in the title applied to women, but it is true to the time period. I was a child then, but I see my parents in these characters. Many of those who survived the worldwide depression and WWII treasured security and stability, like Mr. Dutton and his 51 rules. And after the war many women like my mother had to give up jobs they found rewarding and confine their ambitions to home and family. Thus, I found Grace’s journey and her impulsive decision to work at the bookstore particularly touching.

If you’re looking for a cosy read with a bit of a bite, check this one out. You don’t need to have read Jenner’s previous book The Jane Austen Society which includes some of these characters. In writing this book, she was inspired by rereading 84, Charing Cross Road. She describes Bloomsbury Girls as “Mad Men meets You’ve Got Mail” which is pretty accurate. Of note, Jenner once owned an independent bookshop in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives now.

Can you recommend a story set in a bookshop?

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon

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The blizzards that have been pummeling New England recently might hold us up for a while until the plows come through. They might send us scrambling for generators and firewood while waiting for the power to be restored, or putting on snowshoes to go out and assess the damage from fallen trees.

But what if we were in Maine in 1789 when the Kennebec River freezes and stalls activity in our small community? What if the river freezes early and traps a man’s body? Midwife Martha Ballard learns that two men fell through the ice that dark night: Sam Dawin who escaped and Joshua Burgess who didn’t. 

Called to examine the body Martha determines that Burgess was beaten and hanged before being thrown into the river. She’s interrupted by Dr. Page, a recent Harvard graduate and newcomer to town, who calls her an amateur and declares the death an accidental drowning. She later learns that her son Cyrus fought with Burgess shortly before the man’s death. Burgess and Judge North have been accused of raping a local woman, one of many secrets swirling in the village.

We follow Martha’s investigation through her activities as well as through the journal she keeps to record her work as a midwife and community events. Her story is “inspired” by the real Martha Ballard who lived in Hallowell, Maine, delivered over 800 babies, and left a diary covering 30 years of her life. While the author draws on the diary, a nonfiction biography of Ballard, and court transcripts, this story is firmly categorised as historical fiction.

I liked the use of the journal. Even when fictionalised, documents add veracity to a story. Although they sometimes repeated events already dramatised, these sections brought home the physical labor of using ink and quill. I also liked the use of a flashback at the end of each section to fill in information about Martha and her beloved husband Ephraim. These brief forays into the past come just when the information is needed.

The overriding image of the river is powerful; everyone depends on it and is controlled by it. The patriarchal limits on women are powerful as well. Martha’s work makes her an anomaly at a time when women had almost no power and rarely worked in a profession. A woman could not testify in court without her husband accompanying her. Midwives were being supplanted by male doctors who often lacked rudimentary knowledge of sanitation and dismissed women with complaints as lazy or crazy.

Being already well aware of these conditions for women in the 18th century, I found their frequent and unsubtle deployment made the story drag, as did the pace of events now and then. At the same time, I recognise that the slower pace is appropriate to life at the time, when it might take days or weeks to travel between towns, and that there are many readers who might not know about the limitations women suffered then. Similarly, the bullies and corrupt locals seemed exaggerated until I looked around at what is going on here today.

Without giving the ending away, I will say that I appreciated the story’s unusual path to resolution. I also appreciated how the Martha of this story adapts her strategies as needed during the investigation, sometimes backing down, sometimes attacking, sometimes negotiating.

The story also made me think about the body. Not just the dead man, the necessary start to a murder mystery, but also how we inhabit our bodies, whether it’s pushing a quill pen across rough paper or delivering a baby into the world, making love with a husband of 35 years or trying to move quickly through deep snow, riding a horse or dealing with the effects of rape.

Things have changed in the centuries since this story takes place, but not human nature, its insecurity and greedy grasp for power on the one hand and its generous care for everyone in the community on the other. And no matter how much we may think we’ve controlled the natural world since then, it only takes a blizzard to remind us how wrong we are.

What is frozen in your life? What will it take to unfreeze it?

The Cherry Robbers, by Sarai Walker

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Reclusive Sylvia Wren is a famous artist, now in her eighties, living in New Mexico and painting flowers that resemble women’s private parts. Her peaceful life is upended when a journalist discovers her long-buried secret: She is actually Iris Chapel, an heiress who has been missing for sixty years. Concerned that her story might be distorted or sensationalised, she begins to write it herself.

With that, we leave the frame story and plunge in the life of Iris Chapel, the fifth of the six Chapel sisters, born in the 1930s and all named after flowers. Their strict father is a gun baron, owner of Chapel Firearms, while their mother is a distant woman, obsessed by her own fears and her belief that the victims of those guns are haunting her. Alternating between screams and silence, Belinda also believes that the women of her family are cursed, and tries to keep her daughters from marrying

However, as the sisters begin to come of age in the 1950s, marriage seems to be the only way to get out of their restrictive home. Some of them long to live “normal” lives and head for that escape hatch, certain that the curse is just part of their mother’s madness. Iris comments:

It’s easier to say that women like my mother are crazy. Then you don’t have to listen to them. And so maybe in a way she became crazy. Maybe she could communicate only by screaming.

This novel was recommended to me when I was reading ghost stories around the solstice last month. I love the way Walker handles the spooky side of the story. People are haunted for sure, and sometimes ghosts are mentioned, but the story remains in a liminal space where the reader can believe in the ghosts or not. What is unmistakable is the underlying unease, a sense that something is dangerously wrong, and the way that unease intensifies as the story unfolds.

Iris alone believes her mother and tries to help her sisters. I loved the depiction of the communal life of the sisters, with their quarrels and tenderness, their jealousies and generosity. Like the plucky heroine beloved of gothic novels, Iris tries to be the compliant, self-sacrificing young woman her society demands, but says:

When you live in defiance of yourself, you can adapt to your circumstances, but remnants of who you are at your core remain. A bit of wildness that can’t be tamed.

With Iris as an engaging narrator, the first part of the story absorbed me. I found the  characters strong; the setting atmospheric, and the pacing excellent. However, the story went on too long and became repetitious. Also, coming back to the frame story at the end felt a little flat and predictable.

The use of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life and work to characterise Sylvia Wren disturbed me. Walker did acknowledge the artist in her note at the end, and she has a right to imitate O’Keeffe this way, since the artist is considered a public figure. If O’Keeffe were still alive would she object to this imitation? I don’t know, but somehow feel that this depiction is as jarring as commercials of Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner. Similarly, using Sarah Winchester’s supposed fears as the centerpiece for Iris’s mother earned a raised eyebrow. I’m reminded of Milan Kundera’s Immortality where he delves into the morality of manipulating a person’s image and reputation after they are dead and cannot protest.

The title comes from D. H. Lawrence’s poem with its sensuality, blood and tears. While the metaphor of the cherry seems almost too direct, the poem brings more context to the uneasiness summoned by the image of a robber. I ended up liking the title and glad I read this book.

What do you look for in a ghost story?

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

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Reading this classic novel now, more than fifty years since I first encountered it as an undergrad, is quite a different experience. Back then I was confused and thrilled by Woolf’s modernist, experimental style that expanded forever my idea of what a novel could be.

Now I see it as a story of midlife, in several senses of the word. The story unfolds as a day in the lives of a handful of people in London going about their ordinary business, and we get thrown right into the middle of things. Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to give a party. Newly returned from India, Peter Walsh sets out to recapture the past by exploring London and visiting Clarissa, his first love. Richard Dalloway is off to lunch with old friend Hugh Whitbread at Lady Bruton’s. Septimus Smith, a damaged veteran of the Great War, and his wife Rezia are walking through the park, on their way to an appointment with a doctor.

Since Clarissa, Peter and others are in their early fifties, we have another sense of midlife. It’s a time of life when we look back nostalgically, but also when we measure ourselves—and others—assessing how we have changed with age, and calculating what we have made of our years. Have we measured up to our early promise?

Time comes up frequently, not just in the characters’ reflections on how they and each other have aged, their memories of the past, and the bustling busy lives of their present; but also in the more linear sense of the clocks sounding the hours of the day. Time in this novel is both infinite and finite.

Another sense of midlife underpins the story: the Bible’s “Media vita in morte sumus”—“In the midst of life we are in death.” Death comes up frequently, whether it’s Septimus thinking of suicide or Clarissa hearing old Mrs Hilbery at the party say “how it is certain we must die.” Clarissa herself has recently been ill which has turned her hair white and left a concern still about her heart.

In my youth the book’s theme that struck me most strongly centered on solitude versus society. Plunging into this novel, we have opportunities to see most of the characters alone—really see them; right into their jumbled, chaotic thoughts, sublime ideas, and snarky digs. We see Peter like his namesake in Kensington Gardens never having fully grown up, and Clarissa awash in memories of a golden childhood and gloriously loving her present life—until she’s brought low by self-doubt or sensing criticism from others.

We also see them with others, whether through intimate conversations or Clarissa’s crowded party. In some instances simply exchanging a look with someone else—a young woman in the park or an elderly woman in a window across the street—becomes a vital communication.

Clarissa believes that her strength is that she knows what other people are feeling. In fact, all the characters think they do, but they are mistaken. Richard is certain that Clarissa will know he loves her without his saying so. Peter thinks he and Clarissa read each other’s minds. The worst offenders are the two doctors to whom Septimus goes for treatment; they burst with confidence that they know what is wrong with him, but their pompous, one-size-fits-all solutions are worse than useless.

There’s a reason why so many books and essays and dissertations have been written about this novel. It is so rich—so full of life. You can look at it through the lens of class or gender; you can hold it up to Woolf’s own life; or consider the fragility of a world that is on the cusp of change—the book came out in 1925, so this year is its centennial.

For me in this reading it is the sense of time that demands my attention. Like these characters I strain to reckon the long years behind me: the golden times that I weave into stories for my grandchildren and the bitter griefs and regrets that I keep to myself. I consider what I will do with the few years that remain, knowing how much I value being alone and how much I enjoy being with others.

We are all born and we all die. That is what we have in common. What comes in between is our own unique story. By slicing one day out of the lives of this small group of people, Woolf gives us a glimpse of the extraordinary richness of the lives humming all around us.

If you’ve read Mrs. Dalloway, what did you think about it? If you’ve reread it, did your opinion change?

Note: My thanks to Tash for her discussion of the novel on her Woolfish! Substack and to all the commenters there as well for expanding my understanding of the novel.

The Real Mrs. Miniver, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

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The Real Mrs. Miniver, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

We’ve seen the movie, of course, and thought it a sentimental film about a woman who is practically perfect in every way keeping her family together and holding the home front together during the Blitz—the bombing of London during WWII. The book the film is based on, a collection of columns from the London Times, was something else altogether: an idealised portrait of an ordinary upper middle class woman’s life in pre-WWII England.

Those columns were written by Joyce Maxtone Graham (née Anstruther) using the name Jan Struther, and she modeled the family on her own husband and three children. However, as we learn from this biography by her granddaughter, the loving Miniver family was a far cry from Joyce’s own. Her marriage to Tony Maxtone Graham, initially fun-loving and amusing, had dried up as he’d been taken hostage by golf, leaving Joyce to her articles and poems many of which were published in Punch among other periodicals.

Joyce had been a tomboy as a child, loathing the ceremonial tea parties and dance lessons, preferring to run and shoot with the boys. She and Tony initially shared a comic view of the world. I loved the way they shared the silly things they noticed during their days: pebbles, as she called them, like children turning out their pockets at the end of the day. As they drew further apart, Joyce fell deeply in love with Dolf Placzek, a penniless Jewish refugee from Austria gifted with intelligence and a strong appreciation for the arts.

The Mrs. Miniver columns depict a happy, loving marriage that was a far cry from what Joyce’s had become. Yet for many, those columns embodied an England that was being destroyed by the war and a reminder of what they were fighting for. Mrs. Miniver’s upper middle class life was comfortable, with a London house and a weekend cottage in Kent, a son at Eton, and servants to do the chores. The columns contain the small things she notices during the day, some pleasurable, some not—like the pebbles she and Tony used to exchange. While Mrs. Miniver could be critical of her social circle, she was alive to its charms.

Joyce—now Jan all the time—was shocked by the surprising success of the book and the reading tours and talks that followed. She came to be haunted by Mrs. Miniver. Many fans assumed they were the same person. She struggled to finding a firm place to stand.

Of all emotions, she perhaps felt the emotion of missing most acutely. At a party, she missed solitude. Abroad, she missed home. Cut off from her children, she longed to be with them again. When she was, she longed again for solitude. The raggle-tangle gypsy in her head beckoned her to escape.

Why read biographies? In my twenties I read lots of biographies of women writers and artists, looking for inspiration during a time when women were second-class citizens when it came to the arts. I was also looking for ideas for how to write while wrangling two babies and an ex who refused to contribute. Just keeping the heat on and some kind of food on the table was a miracle. Forget about finishing a story and sending it out.

These days I still look for inspiration from brave women and men as I struggle with how to live a moral life in an increasingly compromised and chaotic world. I’m especially drawn to women living during dark times. I’m also interested in the wide range of life choices people make. One thing that is so fascinating in this book is the contrast between the life of Mrs. Miniver—a model for womanhood at the time—and that of the woman who created her.

 

Sometimes with a biography, it is enough to see myself in a reckless tomboy unwilling to knuckle under to social norms or an almost accidental writer. Now if only I can catch the zeitgeist the way Jan Struthers did! Perhaps it’s better I don’t. Her story is yet another cautionary tale of how too much success and celebrity can wreck a person.

It’s been difficult lately to find books that hold my interest. My reading record is full of DNFs. This one, though, fascinated me and kept my attention right through to the end. Jan reinvented herself several times over, which I find wonderful. And she changed the course of history, inadvertently perhaps and not alone, but for sure. What kind of world would we be living in today if the U.S. had refused to join the Allies fighting Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and Africa?

I take courage from her story and the stories she wrote about the ordinary people of Britain as we fight today’s fascism.

Have you read a biography that inspired you?