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.

When a Man Marries

I’m having trouble putting into words how much I liked When A Man Marries. The is the second Mary Roberts Rinehart book I’ve read, and it’s not much like Dangerous Days. For one thing, nothing particularly tragic happens. For another, it’s mostly pretty funny (I suspect these two things are related). Also, it’s a mystery novel. And at first, I thought  a lot about those differences, but then it occurred to me that the things that make the two books similar–good writing, for example–are at least as important. After that, I got really absorbed, and mostly stopped thinking about anything that wasn’t actually happening in the book for a while.

Her Kingdom

Objectively, I’m pretty sure that Her Kingdom, by Amy Le Feuvre, is a terrible book.But it’s also old and fat and printed on thick, soft paper, and really nice to curl up on the couch with when the weather is beginning to get cool.

Anstice Barrett’s father has just, leaving her almost penniless. She goes to her elderly cousin Lucy for advice, and Lucy tells her to marry Justin Holme, who is a bitter widower with three uncontrollable children. This is a totally ridiculous idea, made more so by the fact that Justin is only home about two months out of each year, that his house is in a very rural area, and also that Justin hates women. It’s so ridiculous that the only reason Amy Le Feuvre can come up with to have Anstice accept the offer is to that she’s haunted by a dream of drowning children. Or something.

The Port of Adventure

"Nick thought her adorable in her gray motor bonnet"

The Port of Adventure is mostly typical Williamsons — part romance, part travelogue, and a dash of adventure — but something about it leaves an Elinor Glyn-ish taste in my mouth. Maybe it’s the girl from Europe (sort of) traveling through the U.S., as in Elizabeth Visits America, or the unhappy marriage to a European prince, as in The Reason Why and Three Weeks, or the villainess’ generally Glyn-ish aspect, or the red-haired, green-eyed writer who seems like she could have been based on Glyn herself. So, yeah, there are lots of reasons, and much as I enjoy the Williamsons, they don’t compare well when they try to edge into Glyn’s territory. They don’t have her flair for melodrama, or the sharp sense of humor that makes it bearable.

Still, I got pretty invested in the relationship between princess-by-marriage Angela, traveling as a young widow, and former cowboy Nick, using his new oil fortune to see more of the country. They really do seem to have things in common, beyond both being rich and good-looking, but it’s hard to believe that two people can simultaneously instinctively understand each other and constantly misinterpret each others’ actions. Also, there’s a scene where Nick rescues Angela from stampeding cattle in the canary yellow car he named after her, which is probably the most hilarious thing ever to happen in a Williamsons book.

Happy House

I read Jane Abbott’s Happy House for the first time in May. It’s different from the other Abbott books I’ve read in that it’s aimed at a slightly older audience, and also in that…well, it seems a bit more formulaic. But I like it a lot.

The main character is a girl who has just graduated from college. Her name is Anne Leavitt, and so is that of her best friend, but the protagonist is usually called Nancy. The two Anne Leavitts, along with their other best friend, Claire, are packing when a porter arrives with a letter addressed to one of the Annes — they’re not sure which. After reading the invitation from Sabrina Leavitt to her niece, they conclude that it belongs to Anne, not Nancy, but Anne is just about to leave for Russia to do something vaguely humanitarian, so she persuades Nancy to go in her place.

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.

The Rose-Garden Husband

I finally followed a long-ago recommendation from Redeeming Qualities reader Elizabeth and read The Rose-Garden Husband, by Margaret Widdemer. And I love it. It’s so completely up my alley that it’s hard to believe it’s real.

Freckles

So, A Girl of the Limberlost is only a sequel to Freckles in the way that Alger’s Phil the Fiddler was a sequel to Paul the Peddler, but the text of A Girl of the Limberlost is kind of aggressive about insisting that the reader read Freckles as well, so I did. (The only thing Alger was only ever aggressive about was insisting that a fifteen-cent plate of meat come with a plate of bread.)

So, um…this is where Slippy McGee came from, I guess. It’s really disconcerting to me to see how much Marie Conway Oemler owes to Gene Stratton-Porter. At the same time, though, it’s kind of nice to be able to catalogue all the ways Oemler was better. But this post is not about Marie Conway Oemler, except in the sense that every post on this blog is a tiny bit abut Marie Conway Oemler. It is about Freckles.

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?

The White Linen Nurse

So, the real reason I keep reading things by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott is that every once in a while, I reread The Indiscreet Letter and fall in love with it all over again–with the Young Electrician, and the alternating pink and blue lisle undershirts, and the Traveling Salesman’s wife and the whole utterly impossible conversation. I reread it yesterday, so today of course I had to read The White Linen Nurse.

I love coming to something new by an author I’m pretty familiar with and recognizing all the things that make it impossible for it to have been written by anybody else. Especially when I realize new things about the author at the same time. So, The White Linen Nurse was like that, and as such I found it really interesting.