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...but this isn't a rant. Not really. No, I meant it's really not! Really. I'm beyond confused by the Lady Grace Mysteries, and would love a bit of input, by anyone who has read them, or read Patricia Finney's adult books written either as Patricia Finney or as P.F. Chilholm -- or who just feels like speculating as to what on earth might be going on.

What do I mean by asking what might be going on? Well, these are books for younger readers, with Grace, "Maid of Honour to Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of that name" being 13 and writing in her "daybooke", given to her by the woman in charge of the maids of honour, to write her "prayers and meditations in". Which makes sense, and is a good way to allow for the diary format. And there's a ton of real detail given about the Elizabethan court, with many an explanation in the glossary and author's note after the book. As well as having a sensible explanation for the book's format, there's a reasonable explanation given for how and why Grace comes to be a sleuth - if one takes the conventions of the children's mystery (series - aren't they almost always?) as the standard for "reasonable". You know the kind of thing - kids stumble onto heinous crime that no adults seem willing or able to solve, overhear just what they need to know, while hiding under a bed or behind a curtain, and are never in the slightest bit of danger throughout their huge adventures. Grace comes to be Elizabeth's "first Lady Pursuivant" - i.e., spy - in a way that fits in with these conventions (and the part of the note describing Elizabeth's secret service and the "tantalizing hints" that she had her own personal sources of information aside from that.)

Which is fine, but these departures from the realm of the at-all-probable aren't so much the conventions of the children's historical novel, and the contrast between factual, accurate bits and things like a Maid of Honour being close friends with a black, Muslim tumbler and a laundrymaid, is just odd. I've read one or two of the other books and just came back to the first, Assassin, to see if there was some explanation for how Grace could have got to be friends with the laundrymaid especially, but there's nothing.

The laundrymaid, Ellie, especially confuses me, as she's described so inconsistently: she's an orphan, has the "poor chapped hands" you might expect, sleeps in one of the storerooms in the laundry, and never has enough to eat. And the three have to keep their friendship secret because Ellie and Masou (the acrobat) would be in a lot of trouble if they were caught. And yet every time Grace goes anywhere, Ellie appears to be available to be sent out of the palace on errands or just to take a look at Grace all dressed up for a ball. I certainly find it very, very hard to believe that the lowest of workers in the laundry would be the one going into the rooms of the Queen's ladies - and indeed, even into the Queen's own rooms - to pick up the dirty laundry.

And then there's the language. It's not too difficult, obviously, but there are lots of words and phrasings used to make it sound Elizabethan, if not very consistently. The Queen, for example, says "But wherefore is Lady Grace's kirtle still not finished? [..] Surely this is not your wonted service to me. Why so long a-making? I had desired to see it before she wears it." Pretty clunky, but definitely period. There's also a description of why Grace knows that the dead man who appeared to have been stabbed had actually been killed some other way, as she remembers what her uncle, a physician, told her about the "sanguine humour" and how it ebbs back and forth like tides, but those tides stop when the body is dead. She also believes they might see an image of the murderer in the dead man's eye, which is really a nice addition, I think. So far, so younger-reader-adapted Elizabethan-ish.

Then, someone

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...and our young protagonist has OCD and is self-harming.

Okay, deep breath, and don't get caught on this too much. She doesn't actually use either of these terms, although she does use 'compulsion' to describe her OCD behaviour, which is not right.

She's the only child of a bell-founder in London, and he 'indulges' her, employing 'a boy' as well as an apprentice so that she can 'spend time learning to read and write'. [more deep breathing] Then she causes an accident which cripples her father, because she's not really paying attention but is 'reading a little book' he'd given her for her fifteenth birthday. [starting to hyperventilate] Because, of course, she spends all her time imagining and wants to be a writer. Just like Chaucer, whom she meets to her great excitement, because he's the 'most famous person' she's ever met. [headdesking starts]

If this sounds like a book you're going to want to read, stop now, because I'm going to spoil this one big time.


Yeah, so she ends up going on pilgrimage to Canterbury, in company with Chaucer, his scribe-for-the-journey (which takes a *very* long time, given the distance, and the fact that they're all traveling on horses) Luke, Sir Knight, the Squire Walter, a Summoner, Prioress, etc, etc. Yup, it's Chaucer experiencing the pilgrimage of which he wrote - a topic that's going to get its own post. Luke had promised to become a monk, in France (why France, I've no idea), if he beat off the many other applicants for the job of recording the pilgrimage for Chaucer. Walter is lovely, and not at all too uppity to hang out with a lowly bell-founder's daughter - or indeed, after noticing that she has cut her legs all up, to gently apply salve to them himself. The Summoner is a vile, blackmailing lecher, and also one of those who've declared themselves 'enemies of the king', Richard II. He blackmails our heroine by threatening to accuse her crippled father of treachery for hanging out in his local. (Don't ask *me* to explain this.) Chaucer is a self-confessed coward, who chooses his loyalties to save his skin. The reasons he gives for helping King Richard actually make him look more like an idiot, as he's planning to help Richard ask the French king to -- er, invade England in order to keep Richard on the throne. (And then go away nicely, of course, although the French were 'the enemy' at the time.) Adventures, fear, spying and romantic tension ensue.

And then it really gets good, when Luke, who is the son of an alchemist, and has never learned to joust, takes part in a 'blood-feud' in the tournament, and when he's injured, Belle and Walter rush over to him and - light-bulb moment! - protag realises something she 'should have understood all along' - Walter's gay. Duh! Protag thinks of the priests 'warning of hellish punishments' (good thing she listened to all those sermons aimed at the young folk and their naughty ways!) but decides she's fine with it. Not only does she recognise he's gay, but Walter tells her that his younger sister guessed, though he doesn't know how, confronted him with it, and when he didn't deny quickly enough, told their father and then ran off with a French knight! (The enemy, remember?) (Nope, none of this makes any sense to me either.) Both Walter and protag. are now clearly in love with Luke.

Walter and our intrepid heroine find the Summoner's black(mail) book, in which he's recorded the wrongdoings of many - mostly those high up in the church, of course - and they're oddly modern clerical abuse style: 'children in charitable institutions were mentioned in connection with clerics and judges.' But there are nuns, prostitutes, animals... 'And of course boys.' Anyway, armed with this, they find a way to save Chaucer - thereby saving innocent Luke - from the Summoner by convincing Richard not to go to the French king if they deliver him a triumphant entry to London. Which they do by re-blackmailing all these bla

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Beswitched is a recently-published book by Kate Saunders, and I saw several recommendations for it which made it clear that it was a have-to-get-hold-of, for the History Project if nothing else. The premise was fantastic: time swap with the present-day protagonist ending up in a boarding school in 1935. That I didn't love it as much as others have is partly for purely personal reasons - it hit some of my weird buttons - but also caused a bunch of Thoughts about the conventions of (the original) school stories and the ones that are followed or abandoned in this modern version. Definitely a winner for the History Project.

I'm not a big reader of school stories, but have read quite a few over the years; enough that I've a sense of conventions but would love the input of those on my flist who are real experts. And those who aren't too, of course!



Why yes, I *do* want people to read behind the cut, even if they're not interested in a review of the book!

Those are roughly the three main conventions (-ish) of the school story that really struck me when reading Beswitched. Starting with the first, it seemed that Saunders had taken the rather typical storyline of a girl or girls whose characters are improved through being in a boarding school and exaggerated it to quite an extreme. I had real trouble in the beginning because Flora was such a spoiled brat I wasn't sure I could stand to read it unless she changed quickly. Even her mother says "you've had it pretty easy up to now" ... "we've run the house around you" and that "you're rather used to getting your own way". Nothing wrong with a protagonist who starts off with a lot to learn, but in this case there are three main characters who are only children (of somewhat older parents in at least two cases) and so almost as a matter of course, are spoiled by those parents.* Flora learns how she's behaved in the past at home (er, that'd be the future but HER past) through observing one of these other girls and the way she treats her parents and other girls.

But there's more than just the several occasions on which Flora 'wondered uneasily' about her own behaviour. The nice older girl Virginia, who's only ever seen being kind and compassionate, shares her experience after explaining why she might not have had measles before she was 17 as being because she'd spent most of her time around grown-ups. "Flora, as the only child of ancient parents, was interested." This is what Virginia says:

"Not at all. [in response to 'Were you lonely?'] I liked being one of the adults. But my father didn't like it. He said that before my mother launched me into society, I needed to learn to be a real girl."

"But you are a real girl! What did you need to learn?"

"Just about everything - how to take a joke, how to make friends, how to share things. I was furious at first, but now I see that he was right. Before I came to St Win's, I was a pampered little madam and I thought I was at the centre of the universe."

Flora wonders uneasily (again) if she was a pampered little madam before accidentally ending up at St Win's. My feeling is that while the "learning to be a real girl" [ugh] might happen a lot in school stories, the importance of being in boarding school is not always quite so insistent, and often so much accepted that personal growth through school experience will happen to some degree if necessary that it wouldn't even be flagged. So this is a convention that's followed, but perhaps slightly different in a more self-conscious highlighting of the convention.

Yes/no? Also, I wondered whether the stories in which this happens quite frequently - or the series, rather - might often have the wise head-mistress - generally in the background and seemingly uninvolved in the girls' lives, but actually acutely aware of each girls' character and experience. Or substitute an equally wise teacher or even teachers. The ideal

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One of the questions that steepholm and I are looking at in The History Book is a potential problem for all writers of historical fiction which may be especially acute for writers of children's historical fiction - how to handle the depiction of beliefs widely held in the past and now considered unacceptable. Two ways of dealing with this problem are to present a 'sanitized past', with at least the main characters (or the sympathetic subset of those main characters) displaying an 'ahistorically liberal breadth of sensibility' and at the other extreme, 'seeming to encourage divisiveness today by perpetuating in fiction the past’s bitter divisions'. (Quotes from our proposal - elegance of expression steepholm's doing.)

Although there isn't really any way to fail fail in this -- I write with slightly gritted teeth -- I suspect most lovers of historical fiction will have their limits for how far ahistoricity can go before they want to start throwing things, and also suspect most people couldn't enjoy a long, painful discourse displaying racial or religious hatred in dialogue or narrative, no matter how accurate. But one sees that latter 'fail' quite rarely, while the former 'fail' is relatively common - especially when romance sneaks in and the all-too-regularly feisty heroine convinces traditional but loving father to let her marry the one her heart has chosen and not the one his pocket/pride has picked out for her. There are many books that avoid either fail, for example by creating a link between reader and protagonist in one or other way, which lets reader feel comfortable with relatively likely (historically) outcomes. (Thinking specifically but not exclusively of Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack and Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy with respect to the question of parentally-arranged marriage.)

It had never even occurred to me that one could fail in both directions simultaneously. Until I read a YA fantasy lent to me recently - I won't name the book, both because I enjoyed much of it and wouldn't feel right throwing around the f-word without lots of tedious disclaiming, and also because the author protested my use of 'historical fiction' in my review on Goodreads but remained very pleasant in doing so. (For the record, we're including historical fantasy and SFnal time-travel, and this book had a map of Europe and an historic character, so was historical enough for our purposes. But not set in Britain so won't be discussed in The History Book.)



Anyway, we're talking an invented kingdom around Lyon roughly in the 1500s. (I think - possibly late 1400s). The King had a long-standing relationship with a woman from 'the Moroccos' and had a son by her, before marrying a Christian woman and having another son - his heir. But no tension between illegitimate and legitimate sons, Muslim and Christian, dark-skinned and lighter - because there's apparently perfect tolerance of all races and religions in this little kingdom. Go them. But also historical Fail of the first sort. Except that King has recently gone a bit off the rails in many ways and declared first son his heir, former heir has gone into hiding, and is there ever protest. So we have protag's horror and shock at the courtier

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Short (I hope) bit of preamble, in two initially separate directions. Yesterday, March 10th, was the day on which my father died in 1966 and on which my grandfather also died, five years later. I liked them both, a lot, and more relevantly here, both were big readers, and both helped foster my early book-wormery. According to my mother, my father introduced my grandfather to Anthony Trollope, and my grandfather got my dad fascinated with the American Civil War. Trollope's not so much to the point, as I haven't done much about reading him since a bit of dipping after the BBC serializations back in the -- ? 70s? -ish, but the Civil War is. Rosemary Wells intersects with children's reading and me through some of the favourite picture books I read many, many times to my own two, including Max and Ruby's First Greek Myth, Shy Charles, Hazel's Amazing Mother, and the Bunny Planet books.  So when I heard Wells had written a book about the Civil War, I was well surprised, but knew it was a must-read. 

Red Moon at Sharpsburg is quite a short book, though it takes India Moody from just before the start of the war to just before its end.  Some of that brevity comes from jumps in action that I found a bit disconcerting at first, until I put them in place with a picture book's page-turning, scene-changing nature.  And I thought I was going to be thrown out of the book early on by reading that a neighbour boy, Emory, had 'asthma', which I was convinced was a later word (OED-online proved me very, very wrong on that one) - steepholm took a quick skim while he was here and thought  'white trash' was similarly a term in use only later - he was also wrong, if less dramatically so.  (The author writes in an afterword that she spent 12 years researching the era, and I can well believe it.)  I soon felt I'd fallen into the rhythm of the book, which is rather different  - generally quite spare, but with lovely passages, and a conversational feel I quickly warmed to.  In terms of the author's stated intent of writing a book about the Civil War which told stories of  people's lives and also revealed the 'profound immorality of war', in a way appropriate for younger readers, I'd say she was fully successful.  I might have criticisms - mostly minor ones- but they're out-weighed by the positives.

"One day, India", Emory tells me, "when you and I are long forgotten, people will ask the reason for this war. There used to be one.  Now, the war has no reason behind it whatever.  It just has a head of steam and a life of its own."

"There must be a reason," I say.

"Is there a reason if a comet flashes out of the sky and hits the earth destroying a whole civilization?"

No reason for this occurs to me.

.........

"Once it gets going, war has a brainless energy, India. It's got a beating heart all of its own.  These horrible battles one after another are like a life force of rage that overcomes any kind of reason...."

...

"...  One morning the war will be over.  When the war's heartbeat stops, a white flag will be waved.  There will be a great silence, then the birds will begin to sing again, and no decent man would dream of shooting his brother because, from one minute to the next, shooting would become murder again."

The book doesn't take India quite to that day, and much in her life and the lives of those she loves has been destroyed by the end.  It's a truism to say war is horrible and civil wars are more horrible than any, but it's no less worth telling the stories which show that because it has been said before.  Although there's quiet humour here and hope for life after the war, there's also horror, and it couldn't be otherwise.

A final major plus, as far as I'm concerned, is the 'dialogic' nature of the book.  It was a bit startling at first to hear the Southern point-of-view - that the Yankees were all cowards who'd be chased back to their homes with their tails between their legs in a few months, that they were all about trying to impose their way of life on the Southerners or just taking their land, and of course, that slavery is a natural condition 'for certain classes of mankind'.  But by the end of the book I thought about how many different beliefs, opinions and experiences had been allowed voice, and was really impressed. 

If some of it might be a smidge improbably forward-thinking for the time (India is determined to go to Oberlin College, to study science, and Emory teaches her science, until he goes to be a military doctor, hoping to do something to change the woefully unhygienic medical practices which killed so many), there were of course people that forward-thinking, if well-diluted among the majority.  And this is one of the big questions about historical fiction, to which I keep returning: is it a bad thing to endow your major character(s) with more enlightened views than are shared by the vast majority of the people of the time, or is it a valid technique for engaging with attitudes which the majority of present-day readers will find abhorrent?   It's probably more common to have a female protagonist who's refusing to accept the 'proper', 'natural' role of women in society, as is found here, than any other possibly anachronistic views, but that doesn't mean it has to be done clumsily.  And if it's carefully done, as here, where an ahead-of-its-time institution like Oberlin becomes a goal for a girl who can't stand the idea of becoming merely a 'proper' woman and giving up learning, then it can help readers to understand how things were for a given group of people at a given time, and especially how they might have been for the minority that couldn't live happily with the generally-accepted. (Clumsily done - well, not good.)  At least, that's my take today and after this book... Read the rest of this post

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Margaret Fuller, the seminal female transcendentalist, was also a literary critic, teacher, editor, journalist, and political activist. In Margaret Fuller An American Romantic Life: The Public Years (the previous volume won the 1993 Bancroft Prize), Charles Capper focuses on Fuller’s struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. The excerpt below details the beginning of Fuller’s trip out west, and paints a complex portrait of one of America’s most influential women. (more…)

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