The Awakening by Kate Chopin

bookshelves: victorian, summer-2014, tbr-busting-2014, published-1899, women, lit-richer, classic, fradio, play-dramatisation, shortstory-shortstories-novellas

Recommended for: BBC Radio Listeners

Read from August 16 to 21, 2014

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dk864

Description: Holidaying on Grand Isle in 1899, Edna Pontellier feels she is living in a dream, so the attentions of the dashing young Robert Lebrun serve merely to amuse her.

When it was published in 1899, Kate Chopin’s novel shocked society and divided critics. Respectable, married Edna Pontellier, 28, is away from her home in New Orleans, holidaying on Grand Isle in the Gulf of Mexico with her husband and children. Teaching her to swim is the debonair young Robert Lebrun, known for forming an attachment with a different woman every summer. Despite warnings from her more conventional friend, Adele, Edna falls incontrovertibly for Robert. When he leaves Louisiana for Mexico, Edna realises she’s been “awakened” and questions everything: her marriage, her position, the society she lives in. But what is left for her? The novel is regarded by many as the first in a new wave of modern American literature.
Produced and directed by Marion Nancarrow
Dramatised by Janice Okoh

1/5 Holidaying on Grand Isle in 1899, Edna Pontellier feels she is living in a dream.

2/5 After a disagreement with her husband, Edna plans a trip alone with Robert.

3/5 Edna continues to be enraptured by Robert’s company, but there is a shock in store for her

4/5 Leonce hopes a visit from her father will stop Edna’s unconventional behaviour.

5/5 Edna thinks Robert’s return will make her happy, but events are to overtake them both.

How kind of BBC to help me shift a long-term TBR item. I’m sure this was a pearl-clasping tale back then and opened many a young lady’s eyes.

bookshelves: mystery-thriller, published-1993, series, victoriana, tbr-busting-2014, summer-2014, britain-england, london, rape, families, women

Read from May 08 to July 29, 2014

 

Narrated by Davina Porter

Description: Prudence Barrymore, a talented nurse who had worked with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, is found strangled to death in a London hospital. Private inquiry agent William Monk is engaged to investigate this horrific crime. Gradually, Monk assembles the portrait of a remarkable woman. Yet he also discerns the shadow of a tragic evil and a frightening glimmer of his own eclipsed past . . .

Whoah! this was a bloated, soap box of an episode. Really not a favourite.

3* The Face of a Stranger (William Monk, #1)
2* A Sudden, Fearful Death (William Monk, #4)
3* The Shifting Tide (William Monk, #14)
4* Dark Assassin (William Monk, #15)
4* Execution Dock (William Monk, #16)

3* Death in the Devil’s Acre (Charlotte & Thomas Pitt, #7)

2* The Sheen on the Silk
3* A Christmas Guest (Christmas Stories, #3)
3* A Christmas Beginning (Christmas Stories, #5)

Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker

bookshelves: history, hardback, published-2002, stuarts, restoration, civil-war-english, biography, books-about-books-and-book-shops, summer-2014, skoolzy-stuff, one-penny-wonder, under-50-ratings, women

Recommended to ☯Bettie☯ by: Miss M

Recommended for: Wanda, Jemidar, Laura

Read from June 02 to 14, 2014

 

Description: Margaret Cavendish’s life as a writer and noblewoman unfolded against the backdrop of the English Civil War and Restoration. Pursuing the only career open to women of her class, she became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Henrietta Maria. Exiled to Paris with the Queen, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle. In exile, Margaret did something unthinkable for a seventeenth-century Englishwoman: she lived proudly as a writer. Eventually she published twenty-three volumes, starting with Poems and Fancies, the first book of English poetry published by a woman under her own name. But later generations too easily accepted the disparaging opinions of her shocked critics, and labeled her “Mad Madge of Newcastle.”Mad Madge is both a lively biography of a fascinating woman and a window on a tumultuous cultural time.

After the Dissolution, St John’s Abbey and land, just outside the city walls of Colchester, was released for a tidy sum to private ownership. It was in this gatehouse that Thomas and Elizabeth raised their young, Margaret being the baby of the family.

Why isn’t this biography better known within the history lovers’ circle? Because of her prolific and thinly veiled scribblings of actual people and events there was little difficulty in finding so many facts to relate, and Ms Whitaker has done a fine job here in bringing something entirely palatable to the table. Heartily recommended.

TRIVIA: Literature of the Country House Week 1 Bolsover:

CR Mad Madge
TR A Royal Passion

The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth by Edvard Munch

Recommended for: Don, Laura, Susanna, Fionnuala

Read on May 29, 2014

Watch the Full Film (3:32:03)

La Belle Epoch Norwegian style.

From wiki: Hans Henrik Jæger (2 September 1854, Drammen, Norway – 8 February 1910, Oslo) was a Norwegian writer, philosopher and anarchist political activist who was part of the Oslo (then Kristiania) based bohemian group Kristianiabohêmen. He was prosecuted for his book Fra Kristiania-bohêmen and convicted to 60 days’ imprisonment in a supreme court ruling in 1886. He and other bohemians tried to live by the nine commandments Jæger had formulated in the Fra Kristiania-bohêmen.

The following year, he was forced to flee Norway. He had been sentenced to 150 more days in prison after the Norwegian government learned that he had sent 300 copies of Fra Kristiania-bohêmen to Sweden under the auspices of a volume of Christmas stories. He was a friend of Edvard Munch, and was the subject of one of Munch’s paintings.

And so to Paris…

And now Berlin, where he meets up with August Strindberg

Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska (8 June 1867 – 5 June 1901) was a Norwegian writer, famous for her liaisons with various prominent artists, and for the dramatic circumstances of her death. She was the model for some of Edvard Munch’s paintings. She had relationships with Munch and briefly with August Strindberg. In 1893, she married the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski. Together they had two children. She was shot by a young lover in a hotel room in Tbilisi in 1901, three days before her thirty-fourth birthday. See also The Legs of Izolda Morgan

How I feel for you, Munch, what with your poor health and existential angst.

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius, Jamie Bulloch (Translator)

bookshelves: paper-read, shortstory-shortstories-novellas, translation, women, war, wwii, under-500-ratings, spring-2014, next, bettie-s-law-of-excitement-lost, published-2006, yawn

Read from April 29 to May 18, 2014

grrrrramazon description (which seems to be a personal review):

So the good news first: It’s got the usual suspects – Rome, the war, the Germans. Now to the slightly trickier aspect: there is just one, 105-page-long sentence with a single full stop after the final word. I have been advised “Don’t mention the sentence”. But this is no twisted, unreadable Germanic syntax a la Thomas Mann. Far from it: Instead it’s a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost – even at the risk of excluding reality.

Usually the plot line of a single sentence is quickly told. And this is no exception. It describes a walk through Rome one January afternoon in 1943. A pregnant young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. Innocent and naïve, the war is for her little more than a day-dream, until she realizes that her husband might never return.

Will she change her attitude? Her refusal to understand the obvious turns this slim book into a page-turning thriller. No really. The author’s stroke of genius is to present the young woman as credibly normal. She commits no crime, she just walks along having thoughts and some doubts too. We understand her. We engage. And we follow her because we all want to know if she finally admits reality of her situation. Or at least Peirene did.

However, it’s not for the page turning that I chose this book. After all there are many spell-binders out there. But it is plain and simply for “the sentence”. Its rhythm mirrors so beautifully the steps of a walk – you can almost feel the paving stones beneath your feet. At the same time the text is astonishingly clearly structured. It drives towards an end just as the young woman heads for her concert. Neither lose their direction. The book enchants like a Bach cantata and so enthralls us with the rhythm of the words and the beauty of Rome that we too are tempted to forget the reality of war.

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch.

Dedication: For U.B.

Opening: Walk, young lady, walk if you want to walk, the child will like it if you walk, Doctor Roberto had said in his funny German with a strong Italian accent

Came to this story for no other reason that it is part of the delicious Peirene Press series ‘books to red in two hours or less’. However this entry did not strike me as at all palatable.

3.5* Next World Novella
4* The Brothers
WL Sea of Ink
1* Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman
4* The Murder of Halland

The Complete Works of Nellie Bly: Ten Days in a Mad-House, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days by Nellie Bly

bookshelves: spring-2014, e-book, mental-health, nonfiction, women

Read from May 11 to 18, 2014

 

Bly’s strategy was simple, yet anything but easy: She’d “assume the characteristics of insanity to such a degree [as to fool] the doctors,” and then proceed to write “a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management” — a mission she knew would be at once delicate and difficult. What she witnessed there — cold baths, forced starvation, beatings, the hovering threat of sexual assault, and a general atmosphere more akin to a concentration camp than to a healthcare establishment — is a timelessly tragic parable for what happens when largely arbitrary circumstances render one group of people helpless and another in power, a heartbreaking real-life enactment of the Stanford Prison Study revealing just how much cruelty humans are capable of when they assume positions of authority, however minuscule, over those less fortunate. Above all, it’s a sobering reminder that the true measure of power is not how deftly we can assert our authority but how much kindness and compassion we can show others in their greatest moments of vulnerability.

– Maria Popova

Introduction: SINCE my experiences in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies.

I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.

Opening: ON the 22d of September I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management, etc. Did I think I had the courage to go through such an ordeal as the mission would demand? Could I assume the characteristics of insanity to such a degree that I could pass the doctors, live for a week among the insane without the authorities there finding out that I was only a “chiel amang ’em takin’ notes?” I said I believed I could. I had some faith in my own ability as an actress and thought I could assume insanity long enough to accomplish any mission intrusted to me. Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

Read Here

The Mad Woman by Chaim Soutine

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

bookshelves: spring-2014, gardening, forest, gutenberg-project, e-book, lit-richer, maine, published-1896, victorian, travel, shortstory-shortstories-novellas, period-piece, north-americas, women

Recommended to ☯Bettie☯ by: Laura

Recommended for: Wanda

Read from May 16 to 18, 2014

Read for free: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/367/36…

Opening: THERE WAS SOMETHING about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

Brazilliant calls these stories adorable – and that, dear friends, is more than good enough for me.

“A shipmaster was apt to get the habit of reading,” said my companion, brightening still more, and taking on a most touching air of unreserve. “A captain is not expected to be familiar with his crew, and for company’s sake in dull days and nights he turns to his book.” – Captain Littlepage.

Mrs Almiry Todd: ‘There was something lonely and solitary about her great determined shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. How I would love a friend such as this one.

And said of Mrs Todd’s mother: [..]she had that final, that highest gift of heaven, a perfect self-forgetfulness.

Note: SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909) was born and died in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was the region’s most distinguished doctor and, as a child, Jewett often accompanied him on his round of patient visits. She began writing poetry at an early age and when she was only 19 her short story “Mr. Bruce” was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly. Her association with that magazine continued, and William Dean Howells, who was editor at that time, encouraged her to publish her first book, Deephaven (1877), a collection of sketches published earlier in the Atlantic Monthly. Through her friendship with Howells, Jewett became acquainted with Boston’s literary elite, including Annie Fields, with whom she developed one of the most intimate and lasting relationships of her life.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett’s finest work, described by Henry James as her “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Despite James’s diminutives, the novel remains a classic. Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified through both setting and theme. Jewett herself felt that her strengths as a writer lay not in plot development or dramatic tension, but in character development. Indeed, she determined early in her career to preserve a disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who lived in the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast.

Jewett died in 1909, eight years after an accident that effectively ended her writing career. Her reputation had grown during her lifetime, extending far beyond the bounds of the New England she loved.

“

 

Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes

bookshelves: spring-2014, fradio, nonfiction, published-2014, women, victoriana, biography, politics

Recommended for: BBC Radio Listeners

Read from May 02 to 09, 2014

BOTW

Listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b042j8y1

Description: Rachel Holmes’s new book is the lively, engaging and informative life story of the daughter of Karl Marx. Beginning with Eleanor’s upbringing in a happy and creative household – where she enjoyed the company of her parent’s friends including Engels – and moving on to tell of her achievements as a feminist, and activist and also her troubled love life.

Her achievements are remarkable, she was instrumental in preserving her father’s memory by sorting through his letters and laying the foundations for his biography. She was a pioneering feminist who made as profound a contribution to British political thought as Mary Wollstonecraft.

Her personal life was turned upside down by a family secret and a lover. She adored the socialist campaigner and would be playwright Edward Aveling, but he was a cheat and and broke her heart in a series of humiliations.

Episode 1: Beginning with Eleanor’s upbringing in a happy and creative household where she enjoyed the company of her parent’s friends including Engels.

Episode 2: It is 1871 and the Paris Commune is underway. Eleanor and her sisters are caught up in the bloody events. Later, a bid for independent living is hampered by the strictures and social mores of the day.

The Paris Commune was a revolutionary and socialist government that briefly ruled Paris from 18 March until 28 May 1871.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: the first Englishwoman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain, the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first female M.D. in France, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as Mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain.

Episode 3: Today, it is the 1880s and Eleanor falls in love and makes a difficult choice.

Beatrix Potter.

Edward Aveling

Episode 4: Eleanor’s campaigns for equality are making inroads. Later, an unexpected revelation turns her world upside down and leaves her profoundly shaken.

Episode 5: The poignant conclusion finds Eleanor betrayed and humiliated by the man she loves.

Rachel Holmes is the author of The Secret Life of Dr James Barry and The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman. She is the co-editor, with Lisa Appignanesi and Susie Orbach, of Fifty Shades of Feminism.

Read by Tracy-Ann Oberman who is perhaps best known for playing Chrissie Watts in Eastenders for two years. Radio 4 audiences have regularly enjoyed her performances in comedy and drama, and more recently she has written dramas for the network.

Abridged by Julian Wilkinson.
Produced by Elizabeth Allard.

Eleanor with sisters Laura and Jenny, her father, Karl Marx his friend, Friedrich Engels.

The Reading Room at the British Museum where Eleanor and her Bloomsbury friends worked.

Eleanor concluded her speech with Shelley’s invocation “Ye are many – they are few”.

The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke

bookshelves: film-only, published-1976, tbr-busting-2014, austria, spring-2014, women, newtome-author, next, bettie-s-law-of-excitement-lost

Read from January 19 to April 13, 2014

 

Description from MacMillan: One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out together to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne listens to him speak and realizes suddenly yet finally that Bruno will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. And instinctively Marianne knows she must fend for herself and her young son now, before that time comes. She sends Bruno away and settles down to a life alone, at first experiencing moments of panic, restlessly wandering in rooms grown stifling. The stillness of the house wears her down, and she starts taking long walks, or visiting with her close friend, Franziska. Gradually, what began as a selfish escape from the prospects of the future becomes in fact liberation. The environment she’d always hated–a no man’s land of identical houses, with all curtains drawn–recedes; her relationships with those dear to her become less threatening, less necessary; and Marianne finds a new pattern for her life and the strength to go on alone.

A wife dumps her husband, in a very detatched manner, because she has forseen that at some point he will leave her. She comes to love her solitiude. That’s it!

Burning Girls

bookshelves: shortstory-shortstories-novellas, published-2013, e-book, spring-2014, anti-semitic, boo-scary, conflagration, disaster, doo-lally, eye-scorcher, families, fantasy, gangsters, jewish, lifestyles-deathstyles, mythology, newtome-author, ouch, tragedy, women

Recommended to ☯Bettie☯ by: Melki

Read from April 10 to 11, 2014

Opening: When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons. They stowed away on the ships with us, curled up in the small sacks we slung over our shoulders, crept under our skirts. When we passed the medical examinations and stepped for the first time out onto the streets of granite we would call home, they were waiting for us, as though they’d been there the whole time.

‘Within a few years, I was able to help my bubbe as she wrote out amulets to preserve infants from the lilim[..]

Bundism is a Jewish socialist and secular movement that originated with the General Jewish Labour Bund, founded in the Russian Empire in 1897. (wiki sourced definition)

Read online here

Spoilers after the break