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You may have noticed I haven’t been around much lately. I’ve been pretty busy, and I haven’t been doing much other than working, sleeping and eating. That bit’s over now, but somehow the idea of reading a book is still kind of daunting. I’m working on that.

Mary Webb’s Precious Bane was the last book I managed to finish before I got too busy to read, which was, I guess, a few weeks ago. This is the second time I’ve read it. The first time was during my freshman year of college. It kind of bowled me over then, and it bowls me over even more now.

I feel sort of guilty about liking Precious Bane as much as I do, because my favorite book when I was in my early teens was Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, and when she’s not sneaking in weird futuristic bits about glass pants and videophones, Gibbons is making fun of exactly this kind of earthy rural novel. On the other hand, “earthy” sort of implies that something takes place on earth, and it is my private conviction that Precious Bane does not.

I’ve never been all that into fantasy novels. I read a fair number of them as a teenager, and I liked a lot of them, but I always liked them for the characters or the politics or the swashbuckling. I never got all that excited about magic, or any of the other fantasy elements. Which is not to put down fantasy novels in any way — there were some that I loved then, and some that I still love now. I just never found the fantastical bits to be all that exciting. Precious Bane isn’t a fantasy novel. It takes place in Shropshire. It is, strictly speaking, a historical novel. But it’s also something that I’ve secretly wanted every fantasy novel I’ve ever read to be: fundamentally foreign. This book makes me feel like I’m visiting another universe. It’s pretty cool.

There’s another special thing about Precious Bane, and that is its heroine. Prue Sarn is observant, intelligent, and massively competent — all good things — and also she has something no other heroine I’ve ever come across has had, and that is a harelip. That’s not a great thing to have in rural Shropshire in the early 19th century, because people are pretty superstitious, and the people who don’t know Prue well tend to think she’s a witch, but that’s actually not the worst of her problems. That would be her brother.

Gideon Sarn is hard-working, ambitious, good-looking, and inclined not to pay any attention to the local superstitions — again, all good things. But he’s also completely unable to relate to the people around him. He’s fond of Prue, and he falls in love with their friend Jancis Beguildy, but he is completely unable to comprehend what anyone else is feeling, and that turns out to be something of a fatal flaw. Basically, I guess, he’s a sociopath. And his lack of understanding of peoples’ feelings, and the consequences when he hurts them, causes him to destroy everyone and everything around him.

As the central character in possession of a fatal flaw — and, for that matter, the destruction of everything around him — implies, Precious Bane is pretty tragic: Prue gets a happy ending (heavily foreshadowed from the beginning) but pretty much everyone else dies. And I tend not to like books like that, but this one works for me. It’s not tragedy for tragedy’s sake. All the bad things happen because of decisions the characters make, and none of those decisions are out of keeping with those characters’ previous behavior. And Prue’s narration helps, too, because she’s a genuinely kind and charitable person, and the way she deals with the awful

Rogues & Company (written by I.A.R. Wylie, recommended by Anshika) has all the ingredients of something impossibly awesome. A young man wakes up on a doorstep with a bump on his head and no memory of who he is, and two possibilities soon present themselves. He could be famous burglar Slippery Bill (Pro: he has Slippery Bill’s famous lucky golden pig in his pocket. Con: he doesn’t feel like a criminal. Positively identified by: Slippery Bill’s brother), but it’s equally possible that he’s Count Louis de Beaulieu, who escaped from a nearby hospital with a concussion (Pro: the location of the bump on his head. Con: he doesn’t speak French. Positively identified by: the Count’s fiancée). Our amnesiac is pretty sure he’s the burglar, but he’d much rather be the Count, because he’s fallen in love with the fiancée.

Things get progressively more ridiculous in a way that should be delightful, and probably is…only I found as I went on that I increasingly regarded oncoming plot twists with dread rather than glee. On the plus side, I think that was because I was having no trouble identifying with the protagonist. But then, I also kept feeling like I ought to be having more fun.

Time for entry three in the ongoing saga of “Do I or do I not like Ethel M. Dell? How long do I have to decide?” The short version: I think I need more time.

Charles Rex isn’t ever going to be my favorite anything — not even my favorite book where a wealthy aristocrat with a bad reputation takes a waifish young boy under his wing only to discover that the boy is a girl and fall in love with her — but it’s not terrible, and “not terrible” is, to be honest, all I’m looking for from Dell. I never expected her to rise to the level of The Way of an Eagle again, although I kind of expected her to try in this one, after what seemed in The Obstacle Race to be a half-hearted attempt to duplicate Nick Ratcliffe.  Sadly, Lord Saltash is neither as monkeyish nor as appealing as Nick, although, to be fair, he’s not as crazy either. But then, nor is the heroine occasionally repelled by him, as Muriel was by Nick. Toby, AKA Antoinette, Mignonette, Nonette, Toinette, etc., worships Saltash from the moment he rescues her from a hostile Italian hotel proprietor.

Toby’s hotel-boy disguise fails her when Saltash’s yacht the Night Moth gets hit by a larger ship and she, Saltash, and the Night Moth’s Captain Larpent are the only survivors. Saltash passes Toby off as Larpent’s daughter to save her reputation, and, as Larpent is badly injured and unconscious, there’s not much he can say about it.

While Larpent is recovering, Saltash brings Toby to stay with what I assume must be the hero and heroine of Dell’s novel The Hundredth Chance, Jake and Maud Bolton. Maud had once been engaged to Saltash and still has a soft spot for him, and I have the impression that Jake is meant to be American, although it’s hard to say: on one hand, he uses the word ‘reckon’ a lot, but on the other hand, it sometimes shares sentence space with ‘shan’t’.

Anyway, Toby settles down with the Boltons and their four small children and tries not to swear as often as she normally does. She also makes friends with Maud’s younger brother, Bunny, and they basically hang around betting on horse races together until he realizes that she’s pretty, sexually assaults her, and badgers her into getting engaged to him. Weirdly, this is supposed to indicate that he’s young and innocent, and not just an asshole, although that fiction wears thin when he finds out that Toby used to work as a hotel boy and promptly repudiates her. The fact that he thinks dressing as a boy is synonymous with being sexually promiscuous is, I think, also meant to indicate his innocence, and — to give credit where credit is due — it is slightly more convincing than the sexual assault.

At this point, Toby goes and tells Saltash that she found Bunny kind of unconvincing too, and that what she’d really like is to be Saltash’s mistress. This is apparently what it takes to convince him of her love, and since he’s been silently pining for her almost as long as she’s been silently pining for him, he’s like, “Okay, cool. Let’s get married.” And they do. Only, for some mysterious reason, he neglects to inform her that he’s in love with her.  I guess Dell didn’t think the book was long enough yet. Also, she had a really funny bit she hadn’t yet had a chance to use, and she didn’t want to let the whole Toby-masquerades-as-Larpent’s-daughter/Larpent-has-a-mysterious-romantic-past setup go to waste. Yes, it tur

After I finished reading Ethel M. Dell’s The Obstacle Race, I spent a while trying to figure out why I liked The Way of an Eagle so much. Some of it was obviously that I’d come up with an alternative reading that made things I normally find problematic a little less so. But I think amost of it was that it’s actually kind of a well put together book. I mean, Ethel M. Dell wasn’t a great writer or anything, but The Way of an Eagle really works. The subplots shed light on the central conflict between the hero and heroine. Separations between different sets of characters move their storylines forward. Everything moves toward the one climactic scene, and after that we get a brief epilogue to show that things are still going well, and then we’re done. Nothing is superfluous — I mean, except for all the flowery language. Once I realized that, I knew why I couldn’t quite like The Obstacle Race. It’s not the overuse of the word ‘mastery’, or the way that the heroine falls in love with the hero at least partially because he gets kind of scary when he’s mad, or the way Dell kills off the disabled kid brother, although those things were really not good, and sort of disturbing. It’s the way the plot is all over the place, and the characters are inconsistent, and the book drags on and seems like it doesn’t know what it’s driving at — although it’s hard to blame the book for that; I certainly didn’t know, and I suspect Dell didn’t either.

Presumably this is what happens when you’ve written a string of successful book and everyone talks about how passionate and romantic they are. You think up a bunch of random characters, each with a few conflict-creating skeletons in their closets, and let them be all passionate at each other until you run out of skeletons. And I’m sure that worked for Dell, financially. It’s just that there’s something to be said for, you know, figuring out in advance what’s going to happen.

In this case, Dell  has plopped us down in an English seaside village. The local big shot is Mr. Fielding. He was in love with a woman of lower social standing, but now she’s dead and he’s married to Vera. No one likes Vera very much, but that’s okay, because she doesn’t like them either. Dick Green, the local schoolmaster, is the  son of Fielding and his dead lover, but only he and Fielding know that. He has two younger half-brothers, twins. Jack is an asshole. Robin is developmentally disabled and/or brain-damaged, and it’s probably, but nonspecifically, Jack’s fault. Also, Dick is has been anonymously publishing satirical novels, which — well, I can see how that adds some symmetry to the plot, but a) more symmetry really isn’t what’s needed here, and b) at no point does this make sense.

Juliet Moore has come to board with the local blacksmith’s family in order to get away from the frivolity of London, where she acts as a companion to Lady Joanna Farringmore, except that obviously that’s nonsense and Juliet is Joanna Farringmore, as you will soon realize if you have, at any point in your life, read a book. The rest is pretty easy to figure out, too: Juliet and Dick fall in love, although not until Juliet has seen Dick look at Jack as if he’d like to murder him, the power balance between them shifts uncomfortably into Dick’s favor, and Dell tries to convince us that there are many obstacles to their union.

Chief among the obstacles is Robin. Or maybe not. It kind of depends on who you ask. Juliet says that’s she’s very fond of Robin, and that he wouldn’

I meant to post this sooner but last week just flew by and then this weekend – eek!  Worked late Friday night, cleaned all day Saturday and Sunday was spent doing shop stuff which is fun but a lot of work all the same.  Which reminds me – I’ve sold out of Silhouette Holiday cards for this year!  Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.  Now I wish I had ordered more, I hate to turn away lovely customers.  I’ll plan to issue more holiday cards for next season.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff: this dress!  Don’t you LOVE the color?  The picture doesn’t do it justice, the color is so vibrant and rich.  Overall I’m really happy with it.  After years of sewing for myself I now seem to be getting the hang of choosing the right fabric and pattern combinations to make something I’d actually wear in public.

Before I forget, some outfit notes in case you’re wondering:

• Merino ribbed cardi: Banana Republic (probably from 10 years ago!)
• Butterfly brooch: Mama’s Little Babies
• Handbag: vintage (my favorite cozy weather bag)
• Tights: Hansel from Basel (Finally, I was able to afford these because they were on sale.  I spied them on the lovely Lost in the Forest blog (April’s outfits are hugely inspiring and full of personality and fable).
• Shoes: Operetta by Fluevog (They’ve had this style for years and years.  These were my “I’ll eat rice for a month so I can buy them” basic black heels.)

I actually wore this outfit the other night when husband and I went out for dinner.  The cardigan is a little snug for this loose 1920s style but I think it works for the most part.  I like the black with the green regardless.

This photo (above) probably best represents the color.  The silk georgette was pretty easy to sew, surprisingly, but not very fun to cut.  So very slippery. I’m sure if you were to lay the pattern pieces on what I cut out, they’d be way off.  Oh well.  Here is the pattern, Butterick #1223:

It’s a junior’s or girls’ dress.  These styles don’t have much shaping anyway so the fit was mostly good.  I followed the pattern except for the capelet.  I like the idea of a capelet but I wanted something less dramatic and created the ruffle from the same pattern piece.  At first I thought it might look clownish but it really works with the cardigan.  I also didn’t follow the directions exactly where it came to putting the front and back together; I couldn’t understand the instructions and winged it.

Oh and I did tweak the keyhole a bit too.  Initially it was just a slit that was to be covered up by the capelet but I rounded it out and extended it, to make it more like a regular keyhole.  I don’t know if it was this change or the

The more I read by Temple Bailey, the more unsure I am about how I feel about her books. Judy was delightful. Glory of Youth had its moments, but mostly I found it kind of irritating. The Trumpeter Swan is never irritating, exactly, but it’s definitely never delightful, either.

It’s one of those post-WWI novels, where every young man in sight has gone and been heroic overseas, and now they’re home and they don’t know what to do with themselves. And The Trumpeter Swan is a lot more explicit about that theme than a lot of books are, but underneath all of the complaining about how unappreciated the returning soldiers are, there’s not a lot going on. I mean, it’s theoretically a WWI novel, but it’s actually one of those books where an assortment of young people get paired off.

The main young people, I suppose, are Randy Paine and Becky Bannister. They belong to neighboring aristocratic Virginian families, and, predictably, Randy has always been in love with Becky. But he’s poor — he returns home after the war to find that his mother has turned their home into a boarding house — and she’s rich — semi-secretly an heiress, actually — so he doesn’t think he can tell her. Meanwhile, there’s George Dalton, rich, handsome, dissolute, and probably not quite as excitingly dangerous as he’s meant to be. He doesn’t know that Becky’s rich, although, to be fair, his intentions to trifle with her affections probably wouldn’t be affected if he did. Anyway, because this is kind of a predictable book, he gets in over his head and actually falls in love with Becky, although not until she’s realized that he’s kind of an ass. There are a couple of nice bits when he finds out how wealthy she is and is sort of humiliated, but there should be more.

Meanwhile, Randy finds himself a nice job selling cars, and, because otherwise this book would not be able to maintain pretensions to being a Significant Novel about soldiers returning from the war, he decides that he also wants to write a Significant Novel about soldiers returning from the war. This is entertaining because a) it’s fun to try and figure out how similar the novels he’s writing is to the one he’s in (with which it shares a title), and b) his attitude is so casual, all, “yeah, I never actually tried to write before, but I’ve always wanted to, and I’m pretty sure I can.” And then of course the first thing he writes is amazing, and he’s lionized by the entire New York publishing industry.

Randy and Becky are fine, I suppose. Of the three eventual couples, they aren’t the least interesting, anyway; that honor goes to Mary Flippin and her secret husband, who we’re eventually completely unsurprised to be told is Becky’s cousin Truxton Beaufort.

Madge MacVeigh and Major Mark Prime aren’t terribly interesting as a couple either, but Madge is pretty interesting as a character, so they get points for that. Madge is George Dalton’s sometime girlfriend, and, like him, she’s rich and indolent. Unlike him, she longs for the simple life, although no one believes her when she says so, and it’s hard to blame them, because she tans her skin to match her hair and always dresses in mauve. She manages to pull off being artificial and forthright at the same time, which I found to be pretty impressive.

Madge is one of only three characters in this slightly overpopulated book that I ended

Being homosexual was more accepted in the 1920s and early 1930s than in later times, although in a different way than it is today. Here, check out this video:

I ordered Snobbery with Violence, by Colin Watson, on the recommendation of Cristiane, and on the whole I liked it, but I do have some reservations. Well, a  lot.

Snobbery with Violence is a discussion of some of the most popular authors of crime fiction between, approximately, World War I and the 1960s, when the book was written. Watson’s premise is that an era’s most popular fiction tells you the most about its reading public, and obviously that’s a thesis I can get behind. What bothered me was that most of the snobbery involved seemed to come from the author. Colin Watson may think he likes mystery novels, but my impression is that he hates them and the people that read them.

The best parts are when he recounts the plots of ridiculous thrillers by Edgar Wallace, Sapper, and the like — my favorite includes an episode where Bulldog Drummond hits a tarantula between the eyes with a poker — but once he finishes the description, he always makes sure you know that he’s laughing at the authors and the readers, not just the funny plot twists. At times, the book feels like a list of popular mystery writers with a brief explanation of why each one was bad. He rarely gives anyone credit for anything positive.

I also, somewhere near the middle of the book, became a little bit suspicious of Watson. I wasn’t very familiar with most of the writers he talked about, but I have read all of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey novels, and when Watson began to talk about them, I could see where he was simplifying things in order to make his points, and where that simplification led to false impressions.

An example: he talks about a bit in Have His Carcase in which Harriet Vane spends time with a professional dancer. She can dance with him, says Watson, but she can’t socialize with him for any other purpose than to get information from him, because heroines have to be chaste. And that’s true enough, as far as it goes, but Watson probably ought to have chosen another example, because we are frequently reminded, throughout the books in which she appears, that Harriet Vane used to live with a man she wasn’t married to, and to leave that out seems deliberately misleading. And it’s a little thing, but it made me doubt Watson’s information on the books I was less familiar with.

So, yeah. Watson is a horrible snob who hates popular authors, the reading public, and television, and I don’t think he’s the most ethical writer out there. But Snobbery with Violence is a fun book to read, and it’s helped me to add lots of things to my reading list. Just — if you read it, take it with a grain of salt.