The Jessica Letters

The Jessica Letters sounded as if it ought to be a good book: a young woman from Georgia starts writing book reviews for a paper in New York. After traveling to the city and meeting the paper’s editor, they begin to correspond, and eventually fall in love. Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with it. In practice, it’s pretty awful.

Philip, the editor, is smug and condescending and talks a lot about how man has a dual nature and woman a single one. Jessica is arch and stereotypically feminine, and the authors have tried to make her at once intellectual and an angel in the house type, and it doesn’t really work. And then there’s a whole melodramatic thing with Jessica’s father not allowing her to correspond with Philip, which mostly serves to show us that he’s even more self-involved that he originally appeared.

And you know the bit at the end of Jane Eyre where Jane and Rochester apparently communicate telepathically? There’s a thing like that in The Jessica Letters, too, only more so.

I think I might have found it all very interesting on some level if I hadn’t been so busy cringing.

At least it was short.

American Bestsellers, 1900-1917

I’ve spent some time lately looking at lists of bestsellers from the early twentieth century. I probably won’t ever read all of these books, but the list seems like a good source of recommendations. And Project Gutenberg, as it turns out, has the list handily formatted with links to the available etexts. So here’s that, with the non-fiction sections deleted and maybe a little bit of commentary.

The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers, is a spy novel from 1903 about two Englishmen who know they’ve stumbled upon some kind of secret regarding Germany’s naval plans, but aren’t quite sure what it is.

Carruthers, the narrator, is a clerk in the Foreign Office. As the book begins, he’s stranded in London after the social season has ended, and he’s pretty bitter about it. His vacation comes too late to join any of the house parties to which he’s been invited, so he ends up accepting a dubious-sounding invitation from Davies, an acquaintance from college who is yachting in the Baltic. When he arrives, Carruthers is shocked to find that Davies’ yacht isn’t shiny and adored with lots of brass fittings. Also, although he went to some effort to find a bunch of things Davies asked for — a stove, rigging screws, a prismatic compass — Davies says he probably won’t need them, and Carruthers comes to suspect that Davies only asked for them so that he could indulge his passion for throwing things overboard.

Happy Captain Blood Day!

So, September 19th is the day Peter Blood is sentenced to slavery in Barbados — if he’d been tried any sooner, he would have just been sentenced to death, instead of having the opportunity to become the coolest pirate ever. So you should celebrate, preferably by reading — or rereading — some Sabatini. Here are a few suggestions.

Four Girls and a Compact

Four Girls and a Compact is short and predictable, but not in a bad way. Four girls — Loraine, Laura Ann, Billy, and T.O. — are four working girls who share an apartment they call the “B-Hive” because all of their last names begin with B. Loraine is a teacher and an aspiring writer, Laura Ann is an artist whose job has something to do with photography, Billy teaches music, and T.O., the “Talentless One,” sells handkerchiefs in a department store.

All four are tired and overworked, and they decide to go spend the summer in the country. They’re determined to be completely selfish while on vacation, and they sign a “Wicked Compact,” which states that if any of them do anything unselfish during their trip, they will be evicted from the B-Hive.

A Girl of the Limberlost

I’d read A Girl of the Limberlost a long time ago, and although I remembered the basic outline of the story, I don’t think it really made much of an impression on me. This time around — well, mostly it just reminded me of Marie Conway Oemler. Enough to make me feel like I don’t need to reread A Woman Named Smith just yet, but not so much that I do feel like I need to reread Slippy McGee.

There are some fairly obvious similarities, from the character list at the beginning to the preoccupation with moths — things that make me think that Oemler, who was writing about ten years later, was definitely aware of Gene Stratton-Porter. Certain details in Oemler’s stories, especially The Purple Heights, show some deeper similarities, but while Oemler owes a lot to Stratton-Porter, I don’t have to switch favorites just yet — nothing in A Girl of the Limberlost made me grin to myself like a crazy person — although I did, at one point, say, “Oh no, not brain fever!” out loud. Why does it always have to be brain fever?

Somehow Good

I haven’t finished Somehow Good yet, but — well, as absorbing as I’m finding it, I’ve been reading it on and off for a couple of weeks now, and I’m still less than halfway through. I’m not convinced that I ever will finish it.

Until I came across this book in the Project Gutenberg catalog, my main associations with the name “William De Morgan” were ceramics and this painting by his wife Evelyn, which I loathe. I had no idea that, around the turn of the century, he began a successful career as a novelist.

Somehow Good is a difficult book to define. The plot, in almost anyone else’s hands, would be unforgivably melodramatic — the New York Times reviewer (PDF) says “the plot of it might well in other hands have served to furnish forth all the thrills that melodrama is made of.”

More Christmas Stories

While I was away on vacation, I read four more Christmas stories: Little Maid Marian, by Amy Blanchard; The Christmas Child, by Hesba Stretton; Rosemary, by A.M and C.N. Williamson; and The Romance of a Christmas Card, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. And I think I have a pretty good idea now of what a Christmas Story is supposed to involve.

First, and most obviously, there is the moral. There is no point to a Christmas story without a moral. Usually the moral has to do with forgiveness.

Equally important is the happy ending, although there is a way around this: if your story is really miserable, you can get away with an ending that’s a bit of a downer.

There also seems to be a sort of age requirement. Apparently, by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was no longer acceptable to write a Christmas story about an old guy. Sorry, Scrooge. The protagonist must be either a small and adorable child, or a young man or woman of about the right age to be falling in love.

Finally, as much of the story as possible has to be set at Christmastime. But not necessarily the same Christmastime. I think of it as the fourth classical unity. This has become one of my favorite things about Christmas stories. I really like it when they skip from one Christmas to the next, and then spend half of the second one recounting what’s happened during the course of the year.

A Versailles Christmas-tide

I meant to read and post about a whole lot of Christmas stories before I go on vacation, and I may yet, but schoolwork has got in the way, and so far the only one I’ve finished is A Versailles Christmas-tide, written by Mary Stuart Boyd and extensively illustrated by her husband, A.S. Boyd.

The Merryweathers

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I finally got a chance last week to read The Merryweathers, the last book in the Three Margarets series (thanks to Elizabeth’s prompting — I’m not sure when I would’ve gotten around to looking for it again on my own).

This one requires a bit of explanation. The Margaret series is sometimes considered to be the second half of the Hildegarde-Margaret series, because while the Hildegarde and Margaret series are each capable of standing on their own, they each feature the Merryweather family pretty prominently in their later books. In the Hildegarde books, the oldest Merryweather daughter, Bell, becomes Hilda’s best friend, and Hilda ends up marrying Mr. Merryweather’s younger half-brother Roger. Meanwhile, the rest of the family, especially the oldest boys, twins Gerald and Philip, inject some much-needed lightness into Hilda’s too-serious world-view.

Margaret Montfort is even more serious-minded than Hilda, and therefore even more in need of Gerald Merryweather, so it’s fitting that he falls in love with her. Peggy, on the other hand, is thoughtless and scattered, so when she goes off to boarding school, sheet meets Gertrude Merryweather, AKA the Snowy Owl, whose ideals are higher than Peggy’s and whose personality is more down-to-earth.