Some book reviews
Aug. 3rd, 2024 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
de_eekhoornBooks I am allowed to buy: -10
Six to Sixteen - Horatia Juliana Ewing, 1872
I first read this somewhere during middle or early high school, in my first great wave of venturing into the wilds of the public domain. I saw it mentioned somewhere on Dreamwidth some months ago and got as far as ‘with the Italian dictionary in the kitchen’, when I thought: ‘wasn’t that the book with drawing willow leaves outwards and the really red peony?’ And it was.
The book is a fictional memoir of the life of one Margery Vandeleur, from the age of six to sixteen, as composed by herself at the last-named age. Six years old finds her in India where her father is stationed, when both her parents die in a cholera epidemic. She is taken under the wing of another, somewhat ‘worldly’, military family on their return back to England and for some time after, being especially a companion to Matilda, a daughter of the family who is four years older than Margery. Margery is also for a brief period sent to live with her grandparents. Margery and Matilda then are sent to boarding school together with Eleanor, five years older than Margery, who is the daughter of a vicar from the north of England who was also a friend of Margery’s father.
The school turns out to not be a very pleasant environment, especially for the girls’ physical health, and the eventual upshot is that Margery now comes to live with Eleanor’s family in the north of England. This family, consciously anti-‘worldly’ and religious, provides the idiosyncratic and intellectual company evoked in the story’s opening, indeed taking the Della Cruce into the kitchen, having new ‘enthusiasms’ every season, and bringing new waterweeds home for their mother, a serious naturalist in a very Victorian style.
In some ways the obvious parallel to this book is The Secret Garden, not just in some of the accidents of the story (from India to the healthy, rugged, rural English countryside), but also in tone, themes, and overlay of moralizing Christianity. But the points that are strong and unique to each book are quite different: it is especially the description of grown-up, Victorian progressive intellectualism that feels very real in Six to Sixteen. While I quite liked the book as a whole, to me the good bits are the moments when a more naturalistic description of life shines through the melodramatic framework of the story.
What I didn’t like is the ending, and the trope of the romantic gesture of two girls writing their memoirs for each other getting repurposed for Eleanor’s newly dragged-in husband. I tended to forget while reading both how young Margery is relative to Eleanor and how old she is actually supposed to be at any point in the story; and I do think that throughout she is consistently presented in ways I feel correspond to just a couple years older, in part so the author can do social commentary through her mouth. Anyway, at least in the opening scenes set in the narrator’s present, I really do read Margery’s attitude to Eleanor as romantic: “To please Eleanor I would try to do a great deal (…) though it seems rather (…) a “need-not” to provide for our being separated in life, when we have so firmly resolved to be old maids, and to live together all our lives in the little whitewashed cottage behind the church.”
What makes this book stand out is that its framework may be melodramatic, but the fabric in which it is clothed is made out of observation from real life. This shows in the physicality of the characters, how they stand and hold themselves (from the opening section: Eleanor resting her head sideways on the table, Margery leaning on the sideboard). This is a thing which I haven’t seen often in books from the period, especially for female characters, and it makes the characters seem suddenly real. Another example of this is the description of Matilda’s headaches: “They seemed to stupefy her… her complexion took a deadly, pasty hue, one eye was almost entirely closed… whatever she learned in such circumstances was afterwards wiped as completely from her memory as an old sum is sponged from a slate.”
Another thing which I liked is that Margery’s interest in drawing and painting is not merely mentioned and described, but that it informs how she experiences the world and then describes her experiences to us. This is shown in her eye for color and attention for flower arrangements throughout, and, in a scene I really liked, in her description of her arrival at sunset for her second visit to her grandparents. This informing of the narrative voice is something I always appreciate greatly, since it parallels the way I am with music: I like getting a glimpse of how that would work with drawing.
So on rereading I did find a lot of worthwhile elements, and description with a sharper point to it than I had realized when reading it before, but at the same time I am not overly surprised that I forgot all about this book until I saw it mentioned. Possibly some of what was revolutionary at the time does not stand out as much now, but I do not think that for the modern reader it can really be called a success as such, although it repays attention better than many contemporaries in its genre. I wonder if the quantity of death and disease, which is one of the things that seem the most melodramatic to me, might not have seemed so to a contemporary audience? Wikipedia mentions that the author’s mother really was one of England’s foremost sea- and waterweed specialists, and also that Kipling cited this book as an influence, which I can kind of see now that I know it. I will definitely be reading the memoir written by the author’s sister, also on Gutenberg, which seems to also include some of the author’s letters.
What the Buddha Taught - Walpola Rahula
Given that this was another thing I picked up from a free-books box, and its original date of publication is 1959, I was somewhat unsure if this book would actually be any good. I need not have worried: it is quite thorough and scholarly for its length, and one third of it is given over to primary sources. It is mostly written from a Theravada Buddhist perspective (the book on Buddhist psychology I read before was written from the Mahayana tradition), but it is trying to be so to speak ecumenical. The only thing that placed the book in the time of its writing for me were a number of exasperated digs at the what I presume to be the Theosophists, which I thought rather interesting than otherwise.
The primary source texts given were transmitted for some centuries in oral tradition before they were written down, and it shows in the style: I would now be interested to read a more outside-view history book on the formation of the (if the terms are correct in this context) liturgical canon.
As to what I actually thought of the philosophy presented, I liked some parts of it and disliked others. The parts I liked most are still those that have to do with the theory of mind and the construction of personality: in other words, Buddhist psychology again. I certainly found this book worthwhile to read: it is a very clear presentation of its material, which gives the reader the freedom to agree or disagree.
Six to Sixteen - Horatia Juliana Ewing, 1872
I first read this somewhere during middle or early high school, in my first great wave of venturing into the wilds of the public domain. I saw it mentioned somewhere on Dreamwidth some months ago and got as far as ‘with the Italian dictionary in the kitchen’, when I thought: ‘wasn’t that the book with drawing willow leaves outwards and the really red peony?’ And it was.
The book is a fictional memoir of the life of one Margery Vandeleur, from the age of six to sixteen, as composed by herself at the last-named age. Six years old finds her in India where her father is stationed, when both her parents die in a cholera epidemic. She is taken under the wing of another, somewhat ‘worldly’, military family on their return back to England and for some time after, being especially a companion to Matilda, a daughter of the family who is four years older than Margery. Margery is also for a brief period sent to live with her grandparents. Margery and Matilda then are sent to boarding school together with Eleanor, five years older than Margery, who is the daughter of a vicar from the north of England who was also a friend of Margery’s father.
The school turns out to not be a very pleasant environment, especially for the girls’ physical health, and the eventual upshot is that Margery now comes to live with Eleanor’s family in the north of England. This family, consciously anti-‘worldly’ and religious, provides the idiosyncratic and intellectual company evoked in the story’s opening, indeed taking the Della Cruce into the kitchen, having new ‘enthusiasms’ every season, and bringing new waterweeds home for their mother, a serious naturalist in a very Victorian style.
In some ways the obvious parallel to this book is The Secret Garden, not just in some of the accidents of the story (from India to the healthy, rugged, rural English countryside), but also in tone, themes, and overlay of moralizing Christianity. But the points that are strong and unique to each book are quite different: it is especially the description of grown-up, Victorian progressive intellectualism that feels very real in Six to Sixteen. While I quite liked the book as a whole, to me the good bits are the moments when a more naturalistic description of life shines through the melodramatic framework of the story.
What I didn’t like is the ending, and the trope of the romantic gesture of two girls writing their memoirs for each other getting repurposed for Eleanor’s newly dragged-in husband. I tended to forget while reading both how young Margery is relative to Eleanor and how old she is actually supposed to be at any point in the story; and I do think that throughout she is consistently presented in ways I feel correspond to just a couple years older, in part so the author can do social commentary through her mouth. Anyway, at least in the opening scenes set in the narrator’s present, I really do read Margery’s attitude to Eleanor as romantic: “To please Eleanor I would try to do a great deal (…) though it seems rather (…) a “need-not” to provide for our being separated in life, when we have so firmly resolved to be old maids, and to live together all our lives in the little whitewashed cottage behind the church.”
What makes this book stand out is that its framework may be melodramatic, but the fabric in which it is clothed is made out of observation from real life. This shows in the physicality of the characters, how they stand and hold themselves (from the opening section: Eleanor resting her head sideways on the table, Margery leaning on the sideboard). This is a thing which I haven’t seen often in books from the period, especially for female characters, and it makes the characters seem suddenly real. Another example of this is the description of Matilda’s headaches: “They seemed to stupefy her… her complexion took a deadly, pasty hue, one eye was almost entirely closed… whatever she learned in such circumstances was afterwards wiped as completely from her memory as an old sum is sponged from a slate.”
Another thing which I liked is that Margery’s interest in drawing and painting is not merely mentioned and described, but that it informs how she experiences the world and then describes her experiences to us. This is shown in her eye for color and attention for flower arrangements throughout, and, in a scene I really liked, in her description of her arrival at sunset for her second visit to her grandparents. This informing of the narrative voice is something I always appreciate greatly, since it parallels the way I am with music: I like getting a glimpse of how that would work with drawing.
So on rereading I did find a lot of worthwhile elements, and description with a sharper point to it than I had realized when reading it before, but at the same time I am not overly surprised that I forgot all about this book until I saw it mentioned. Possibly some of what was revolutionary at the time does not stand out as much now, but I do not think that for the modern reader it can really be called a success as such, although it repays attention better than many contemporaries in its genre. I wonder if the quantity of death and disease, which is one of the things that seem the most melodramatic to me, might not have seemed so to a contemporary audience? Wikipedia mentions that the author’s mother really was one of England’s foremost sea- and waterweed specialists, and also that Kipling cited this book as an influence, which I can kind of see now that I know it. I will definitely be reading the memoir written by the author’s sister, also on Gutenberg, which seems to also include some of the author’s letters.
What the Buddha Taught - Walpola Rahula
Given that this was another thing I picked up from a free-books box, and its original date of publication is 1959, I was somewhat unsure if this book would actually be any good. I need not have worried: it is quite thorough and scholarly for its length, and one third of it is given over to primary sources. It is mostly written from a Theravada Buddhist perspective (the book on Buddhist psychology I read before was written from the Mahayana tradition), but it is trying to be so to speak ecumenical. The only thing that placed the book in the time of its writing for me were a number of exasperated digs at the what I presume to be the Theosophists, which I thought rather interesting than otherwise.
The primary source texts given were transmitted for some centuries in oral tradition before they were written down, and it shows in the style: I would now be interested to read a more outside-view history book on the formation of the (if the terms are correct in this context) liturgical canon.
As to what I actually thought of the philosophy presented, I liked some parts of it and disliked others. The parts I liked most are still those that have to do with the theory of mind and the construction of personality: in other words, Buddhist psychology again. I certainly found this book worthwhile to read: it is a very clear presentation of its material, which gives the reader the freedom to agree or disagree.
