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Object: Matrimony isn’t really long enough for a review, but I do want to point people towards it, because it’s adorable. So, instead of a review, here’s a very brief excerpt:

“After all, Margolius,” Feigenbaum commented as he lit an all-tobacco cigarette on their way down the front stoop of the Goldblatt residence—”after all, she ain’t such a bad-looking woman. I seen it lots worser, Margolius.”

“That’s nothing what we got it this evening,” Philip said as they started off for the subway; “you should taste the Kreploch what that girl makes it.”

“I’m going to,” Feigenbaum said; “they asked me I should come to dinner to-morrow night.”

But Philip knew from his own experience that the glamour engendered of Fannie’s gefüllte Fische would soon be dispelled, and then Henry Feigenbaum would hie him to the northern-tier counties of Pennsylvania, leaving Philip’s love affair in worse condition than before.

Philip is the protagonist, who’s got a bit of a Taming of the Shrew situation on his hands, and is trying to set his friend Feigenbaum up with Fannie Goldblatt so that he can marry her sister Birdie. Fannie’s temper isn’t a problem — she’s just really unattractive. But her cooking maybe makes up for it.

The draw here isn’t the story, but the turn of the century New York Jewish characters. It’s the speech patterns and the bits of Yiddish that had me passing my kindle down our row of airplane seats and making my mother and brother read the good bits.

So, this is what happens when I ask for recommendations: I download everything that looks appealing, read maybe half of it, and leave the rest sitting on my kindle indefinitely. Except that I also sometime come back to things. I’ve had Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey’s Peggy Saville books on my kindle since James recommended them more than a year ago. I finally got around to reading them last weekend, and I really enjoyed them. I mean, I thought there were some structural issues, and also when I look back at the two books it seems like nothing ever actually happened, but it was entertaining nothing.

Mr. Asplin is a vicar and he also prepares young men for college. The first boy who boarded with the Asplins was Arthur Saville, and everyone loved him, so when Mrs. Saville writes and says she’d like to leave her daughter Peggy with the Asplins while she joins her husband in India, they’re happy to have her. Peggy joins a group of young people that includes Mr. Asplin’s pupils Robert Darcy and Oswald Elliston, his son Maxwell (in the second book his name is sometimes Rex), and his daughters Esther (serious and studious) and Mellicent (plump and stupid and yes her name is really spelled that way). After some awkward and sometimes hilarious posturing, Peggy becomes the ringleader of the group and shows herself to be clever, creative, talented, bossy, and occasionally thoughtless. She and Rob become especially good friends, enlisting each other for help and support for everything from Peggy’s homesickness to the magazine contest Rob wants to enter.

I like Peggy and Rob’s relationship a lot. I also like that Peggy is allowed to have faults, and that the book doesn’t try to correct them. Rob’s beautiful sister Rosalind has faults too, but she’s not a bad person and she and Peggy go from not liking each other to liking each other very much without either of them really changing, which is cool.  And that’s About Peggy Saville.

The second book skips ahead a few years. Peggy has, in the intervening time, spent two more years with the Asplins, and gone out to India to be with her parents. When More About Peggy opens, they’re returning to England, planning to buy a house and settle down. Peggy is recognizably herself, but also recognizably more grown up (I gained a lot of respect for Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey over the course of these two books) and it’s not hard to believe that Rob’s older brother Hector, who happens to be on the ship with them, would fall in love with her. And Peggy recognizes the fact and isn’t really sure what to do about it.

That’s kind of the most fun thing about this book, because it’s a really enjoyable mix of practical and romantic. Peggy makes no attempt to disguise to herself the fact that when she’s returning to England, she’s really looking forward to reconnecting with Rob. And when they meet, there are no stupid things keeping them apart; they’re really pleased to see each other. Peggy and Rob are both refreshingly straightforward all the time. When things get (moderately) complicated, it’s only because Hector thinks he’s in a different story.

Then there’s Peggy’s brother Arthur, who is in love with Rosalind Darcy. Everyone’s in love with Rosalind, because she’s super pretty, but Arthur is the one who she’s a little in love with back. And obviously this is a really common romance trope, one that’s kind of angsty in a really enjoyable way, and then…Rosalind decides

I hate to do this. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Here, for Captain Blood Day, is a bad review of a Rafael Sabatini book. But, given the book itself. I couldn’t very well have written a good one. And it’s not like I uncritically love all of Sabatini’s other books. This one is his first novel, The Suitors of Yvonne, and while I probably wouldn’t have been sure it was by Sabatini if his name wasn’t in the title page (and if, you know, I hadn’t known for years that his first novel was called The Suitors of Yvonne) you can sort of see hints of what he’s going to be like later.

For instance, Sabatini’s heroes are almays saying really cleverly insulting things to people they don’t like. And because they’re so cool and self-posessed and have such clever senses of humor and we know they’re all romantic and sensitive on the inside — and because their enemies are usually warped caricatures of human beings — it’s fun.

Gaston de Luynes, hero of The Suitors of Yvonne, is not like that. He is, in fact, kind of an asshole. I mean, he’s got the insulting part down, but not the clever part, and certainly not the sensitive part. Mostly, he’s just offensive.

In fairness, his situation is difficult. A week after being hired as a companion to Cardinal Mazarin’s nephew Andrea de Mancini, the boy gets drunk on his watch and the Cardinal fires him. It seems incredibly unjust at the time, but after having getten to know de Luynes a little better, I wonder whether maybe the Cardinal had a point. Anyway, the following day a guy named Eugene de Canaples forces a quarrel on Andrea and they schedule a duel. De Luynes agrees to be Andrea’s second, but then the Cardinal pays him a visit and insists that what he actually has to do is to stop the fight from taking place altogether. He accomplishes this by fastening a quarrel on de Canaples himself, and incapacitating him. Andrea still has to flee the city though, because a) de Canaples’ friends still want to kill him and b) the Cardinal wants him to go to Blois and court Yvonne de Canaples, Eugene’s sister. Which is why de Canaples wanted to fight Andrea in the first place. And the Cardinal is still threatening to hang de Luynes, for whatever reason, so he accompanies Andrea on his trip. St. Auban & Co. (de Canaples’ friends) come after them, and de Luynes proves many times over that “when in doubt, attempt to provoke a duel” is his motto in life.

On the way to Blois, de Luynes and Andrea encounter Yvonne de Canaples and her sister Genevieve. Andrea, inconveniently, falls head over heels in love with Genevieve, but that’s probably mostly so de Lynes is free to fall in love with Yvonne. And he does, and it makes him only slightly more sympathetic.

Basically, this is an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” kind of book. Has de Luynes saved Yvonne from being kidnapped? Well, now he’s going to be arrested. And when the arresting officer turns out to be a nice guy who will trust de Luynes to go fight a duel before he’s taken to the cardinal, the duel turns out to be a trap. It’s one miserable situation after another, and whenever de Luynes has a few minutes to look around him, he orchestrates another duel. My favorite instance of this is when he’s all excited about the cunning plan he’s come up with to deal with St. Auban, who has arrested Yvonne’s father and moved into her house with a bunch of soldiers. His cunning plan, it turns out, is to climb into St. Auban’s bedroom window and challenge him to a duel. A duel, by the way, in which de Luynes describes himself as cruelly toying with St. Auban. (“I made him realise that he was mastered, and tha

Sylvia is nineteen, the daughter of a woman from California and an Italian Count (both dead), and the most beautiful woman in Europe. But while her aunt wants her to marry a Duke — unless maybe a prince is available — Sylvia says that, if she ever marries at all, she’ll choose an American man. Philip Monroe would be happy to be that man. Eric Fielding has to deny to himself that he’d be happy to be that man, since he’s engaged to a girl in New York. Dick Ames knows there’s no likelihood of his being that man, so he becomes her good friend instead.

Really, though, Sylvia’s not interested in marrying anybody. But her aunt is really pushing the Duke, so Sylvia runs away to her other aunt in California and changes her name to Barbara Gordon. She — obviously — will henceforth be known as Batgirl, to avoid confusion.

Meanwhile, we learn more about Eric and his fiancée: Her name is Edith, she’s very beautiful and very much in love with Eric, and he doesn’t care about her at all. He asked her to marry him because he overheard her confess to another girl that she was in love with him. She knows he doesn’t love her, but she’s holding out hope that she can win him over. Any chance of that happening is gone, though, when he travels to California on an errand for his sister and meets Batgirl in her Barbara Gordon guise. They fall in love, but he can’t say anything because he’s engaged to Edith, and she won’t say anything because she thinks he’s in love with someone who died, and eventually he goes back to New York.

This would all be perfectly satisfactory, if  only it weren’t terrible. I still have no idea why Eric and Batgirl fell in love, and the writing is ridiculously clumsy: “He had to stand very near in order to help her dismount, and as she jumped a lock of her hair brushed against him and caught in a college society pin fastened to his waistcoat, that it was de riguer for him to wear at all times and on all occasions.”

On the way home, Eric decides that he needs to do something to be worthy of Batgirl, so he decides to make literature his profession — in the most obnoxious way possible. He’s like, “Well, I like books a lot, so if I have a talent, it must be for writing.” And because the author of this book is so extremely misguided, we know his assumption that he does have a talent isn’t going to be proved wrong. Although, if this is Evalyn Emerson’s attitude towards writing, I suppose we now have a very good explanation for the existence of this book.

Anyway, it gets worse. Eric, having decided that liking to read qualifies him to be a professional writer, says to himself, “Hey, you know what else I like? Ancient Egypt! I think I will write a novel about an Egyptian princess. It will be fictional, but she will have a ‘true oriental character.’” His heroine is to be the daughter of a Pharaoh, of course, but he decides to make her mother a white slave so that the girl can be blonde. Eric feels  that blonde hair is necessary to beauty because Batgirl is blonde. Also, this is how you’re going to prove yourself worthy? By writing a trashy (if Eric writes it, you know it’s going to be trashy) historical novel?

He returns to New York and sets to work. Eventually Edith returns from her trip abroad and they have a series of pretty frank discussions about their situation — she loves him, he has no interest in her and is in love with someone else — during which Eric takes the incomprehensible position that, being the man, he’s honor bound not to break the engagement, and that it would be far better for him to marry her, to continue to be cold and occasionally cruel to her, and never to let her touch him.

I know Eric is playing by the rules and Edith isn’t. He had to ask her to marry him, and a well-regulated heroine

Lavender and Old Lace had most of the right pieces to be awesome, but instead it was lopsided, frustrating, and, most importantly, not engaging. I’ll put up with a lot of structural problems and disagreements with the author’s worldview for characters I can like and believe in, but Myrtle Reed never quite pulled it together.

Our heroine is Ruth Thorne, a newspaperwoman who has taken the summer off, partly for the sake of her nerves and partly at the request of Jane Hathaway, her only living relative. Ruth and Miss Hathaway have never met, but Miss Hathaway has received a legacy and is using it to go abroad, and she wants someone to take care of her house. Ruth arrives a week after Miss Hathaway’s departure and finds that the house is quiet and beautiful and that her only responsibilities are to take charge of the unmanageable servant, Hepsey, and to light a lamp in the attic window every night. Miss Hathaway doesn’t explain why the lamp must be lighted, and Hepsey doesn’t know, but she suspects it has something to do with Miss Ainslie, another spinster living nearby. Miss Ainslie and Miss Hathaway grew up together. They’re both in their mid-fifties, and both seem to have some kind or romance lurking in their pasts. But Miss Ainslie is shy, sweet, and reclusive, and lives in a house full of beautiful things, while Miss Hathaway, when she returns, is cranky and bossy, and keeps her Colonial mahogany furniture in the attic.

Meanwhile, Ruth is joined in her exile from the city by Carl Winfield, a young man who will be working on her newspaper in the fall, if his overstrained eyes are up to it by then. My brief hope of a romance between Ruth and her editor was shattered within a couple of pages of her first meeting with Carl; they were obviously going to fall in love. And that’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with Carl. Or with Ruth, for that matter. Their romance, like the book, seemed as if it ought to work for me, but never did. And it really should have. Ruth is prickly and Carl is accommodating, but he takes a while to figure out how to interact with her, so there’s this thing where they keep accidentally offending each other and not knowing how to fix things. It reminded me a little of The Silver Dress (which is apparently my default reference for Myrtle Reed). But in spite of their mutual wariness, and some reasonably good banter, they never fully captured my interest. And once they acknowledged that they were in love with each other, it got worse. It takes a very special writer to be to tolerate something this sickeningly sweet, and Myrtle Reed is clearly not that writer.

She also, I think, resolved the romance way too soon, only about halfway through the book. After that, Reed switches gears and takes the book somewhere a bit more comedic with the return of Aunt Jane. And then she switches gears again, focusing on Miss Ainslie and a mood that goes back and forth between poignant and maudlin. And none of it pulled me in.

The thing is, Myrtle Reed starts out with three possible sources of narrative tension: the romance between Ruth and Carl, the romance of Miss Hathaway’s youth, and whatever the hell is going on with Miss Ainslie. She uses all three serviceably, if not well, throughout the first half of the book. Then she wraps up the Ruth/Carl story, aside for an awkward bit where she wants to keep working and he wants her to stay at home and she gives in after maybe a page and a half. Then she wraps up Jane Hathaway’s romance in a manner that’s meant to be funny but is mostly sad. That doesn’t take long, either. We spend the rest of the book on Miss Ainslie, but her mystery? Never fully resolved. There are a

Until recently I knew Mary Cholmondeley only as the author of Red Pottage, a bestselling turn of the century novel that I feel like I ought to read — so much so that I now sort of don’t want to read it. Then I came across a short story of hers in Pearson’s Magazine and, as I skimmed past it, read just enough to be intrigued.

That story was “The Pitfall,” and I tracked it down in Moth and Rust. I often find, with author’s from this era, that what appear to be books of short stories are more often novellas bound with a few extra stories to make them book-length, and that’s the case here. “The Pitfall” is the last story in the book, and possibly the most interesting, because its protagonist is a bit of an antiheroine.  Cholmondeley lets us know right away that Lady Mary Carden is dull and conventional and possibly a bit of a hypocrite, but she also shows us how to sympathize with her,  and we do — or I did, anyway — much more than we would with a character whose author wasn’t aware that she possessed those qualities. And then Cholmondeley slowly leads Lady Mary to a cruel and indefensible act, and it’s horrible, but interesting.

Of the other stories in the book, only the titular novella is less depressing. “Let Loose” is a ghost story involving the death of a dog, which always kind of freaks me out, and “Geoffrey’s Wife” is a kind of appalling story about a young couple caught up in a mob. Both are sort of straightforward and narrow-focused, almost to the point of claustrophobia, and it works well for them. In “Moth and Rust,” Cholmondeley gets to stretch out a little more, with a story that’s larger in lots of ways: there are more themes, more characters, more plots, and more locations, as well as two intertwined love stories.

The love story that ends badly is that of Janet Black and George Trefusis.  Janet is exceedingly beautiful and pretty intensely in love with George, but uneducated, uncultured, and, frankly, stupid. George is way above her socially, but he hasn’t got much going for him except his extreme moral rectitude. You can see where this is going. It’s the same place it always goes. Lady Anne Varney, pretty, quietly intelligent and intensely well-bred, has more luck with Stephen Vanbrunt, her rags-to-riches millionaire soul-mate. I enjoyed both characters very much — Stephen is innately sympathetic to children and dogs, but a little bit confused by women and society, and Anne has to negotiate the terrain very carefully to convince him that’s she’s not just interested in his money. They reminded me a bit of Lady Ethelrida and Francis Markrute in Elinor Glyn’s The Reason Why, except that the situation is reversed, and somewhat less ridiculous.

I think Mary Cholmondeley is pretty good, but she’s got an incredible gift for making me really uncomfortable. She writes the kind of stories where awful things happen, and she makes sure you can tell that the awful things are going to happen, so that you get to dread them for as long as possible. I have yet to decide whether this is clever or mean. Or, possibly, both.

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Now up at Edwardian Promenade: Lord Loveland Discovers America, sequel to Lady Betty Across the Water.

I really don’t know what to say about Dr. Ellen. Except this: if you read Pleasures and Palaces, also by Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, you will not find it to be anything like that.

Structurally, Dr. Ellen is centered around three women: there’s Ellen Roderick, who lost a husband and a child in quick succession, used her period of mourning to study to become a doctor, and then moved into a mountain cabin and set up as a physician for the locals. Then there’s her younger sister, Ruth Chantry, who lives with Ellen, but doesn’t share her ideals or sense of purpose. Ruth is young and vibrant and wants to be around people all the time, and she’s increasingly resentful  about the way Ellen keeps her in isolation. The third woman is Ruth’s friend Christine O’Hara, shallow, easygoing, and flirtatious, who provides Ruth with a brief respite from her exile when she invites her for a visit.

It’s on that visit that Ruth and Philip Amsden meet. Philip is in his thirties, and architect, and not so much stuck-up as aloof. Also, he’s the person the book is about, really. He’s captivated by Ruth’s enthusiasm, and her naive enjoyment of everything, and lets himself be drawn into the various activities Christine has scheduled for Ruth’s amusement.

This leads, eventually, to Amsden, Christine, and Will Wallace — chubby, good-natured, has the reputation of having a good sense of humor — joining Ruth for a visit once she returns home. There Amsden finds Ellen Roderick to be less tyrannical than he expected, and a lot more impressive, especially for the way she weathers the several scandals in which they become embroiled. There were a fair umber of preachy bits that I was never entirely sold on, but the problems Ellen is faced with seemed real and serious, and the people who caused them were vivid, well-realized characters.

There’s a lot to like here. The stakes always seem high, even when they’re not.  Ruth is far more interesting than I would have ever expected. Rory Dorn the probable lesbian is kind of awesome. But there were also things that just left me confused. And by “things,” I mostly mean the ending. I have very little idea of what happened. On multiple levels. And then, the tone of the book was sort of puzzling as well. Some of it felt so heavy, while other parts were uncomfortably light. This isn’t comic relief at work, unless Tompkins was trying for comic relief and hadn’t quite got the hang of it.

So, not a perfect book–not by a long shot. But it was really interesting, and I was definitely hooked for the couple of hours it took me to read it. In a way, I think Dr. Ellen‘s unevenness worked in it’s favor. I never really felt like I had a handle on what was going on, or what was about to, and so it felt suspenseful and exciting. And interesting, in plot, character, and content, which is hard to pull off. This is one that I found in a bookstore, rather than one I read online, and, while I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it, I think I’m glad I own it.