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The Lady of the Decoration

I liked Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration, but I don’t have much to say about it. It’s just one of those books about a young woman who goes on a trip and writes letters to someone at home. Nice. Not special. The woman in this particular example is a widow in her twenties whose husband was probably abusive, although she never actually says that, or anything specific about her marriage at all. The trip is to Japan, where. at the behest of her cousin, she has volunteered to be a kindergarten teacher at a missionary school.

The one thing that stood out for me was the entire absence of what I think of as travelogue-ness. No long descriptions of scenery, no detail about Japanese customs or language, no history. I often wish for less of that stuff in other books, but here I wished there would have been a little more. In Frances Little’s favor, though, it makes for some very digestible light reading.

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Andrew the Glad

I really didn’t like Andrew the Glad, which was disappointing. I liked the two Maria Thompson Daviess books I’d read previously, and I liked the ad campaign for this one, but unfortunately neither of those things are actually relevant.

Andrew the Glad came out in 1913, like V.V.’s Eyes, and it’s also set in a city in the South (I think this one is Nashville). Both books deal with the growth of the cities involved,but Henry Sydnor Harrison  was in favor of progress, and Maria Thompson Davies…may have thought she was interested in progress. But the fact is that everything “good” in the world of the book is massed on the side that includes all the available Confederate veterans and their friends, and the way forward is inextricably bound up with feelings of nostalgia; the other side consists solely of corruption and booze.

Snobbery with Violence

I ordered Snobbery with Violence, by Colin Watson, on the recommendation of Cristiane, and on the whole I liked it, but I do have some reservations. Well, a  lot.

Snobbery with Violence is a discussion of some of the most popular authors of crime fiction between, approximately, World War I and the 1960s, when the book was written. Watson’s premise is that an era’s most popular fiction tells you the most about its reading public, and obviously that’s a thesis I can get behind. What bothered me was that most of the snobbery involved seemed to come from the author. Colin Watson may think he likes mystery novels, but my impression is that he hates them and the people that read them.

V.V.’s Eyes

V.V.’s Eyes, despite the silly title, is a Serious Novel, with lots to say about the position of women in society, factory conditions, and charitable giving. But it’s also got a dazzlingly beautiful heroine, illustrations by R.M. Crosby (who usually, and more fittingly, illustrated romance novels), and an inappropriately melodramatic ending. I was never entirely convinced that Henry Sydnor Harrison knew what he wanted the book to be. On the other hand, I was frequently impressed by what it was.

Contemporary reviewers seem to have thought that the central figure of the book is V.V. — Dr. V. Vivian, a lame slum doctor — and I suspect that that was Harrison’s intention. But I was never quite convinced by V.V., who was sometimes a Christ-figure, sometimes a child, and every once in a while a (reluctantly) angry idealist. But I was completely won over by Miss Carlisle Heth, who it seems pretty unfair not to call the central character. She gets the vast majority of the available page space, and we spend most of the book pretty deeply ensconced in her head. And it’s time well spent.

Pleasures and Palaces

This one is for those of you who like fluffy romances.

The Pollyooly books

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to figure out what’s what in the world of Pollyooly.

First, there’s Pollyooly. Or, to be more specific, Pollyooly: a romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them. Then there’s Happy Pollyooly,  the rich little poor girl(The American title — in the UK it was The Second Pollyooly Book). That appears to follow directly on the first book. In it, Pollyooly is still twelve, and the Lump is three. A third book, Pollyooly Dances, takes place rather later, during World War I, when Pollyooly is 19, and it seems like there ought to be other stories in between. There are things that need explanations — the absence of the Lump, the absence of Lord Ronald Ricksborough, the presence of other characters who appear to have some history with Pollyooly and the Honorable John Ruffin, and any number of other things. But I can’t find that there was ever any other Pollyooly book.

Anyway, what I have found, with the assistance of Google Books, is three additional stories published in Pearson’s Magazine. They’re consecutive, and appear to follow directly on Happy Pollyooly.

This is everything I’ve found, in order.

Pollyooly: a romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them

Happy Pollyooly,  the rich little poor girl

“Pollyooly and the Red Deepings”

“Pollyooly and the Lump” (This story has no other title, which is odd, since it’s mostly about the Honorable John Ruffin.)

“The Course of True Love”

Pollyooly Dances

Pollyooly: a romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them

For the past couple of days I’ve had the name “Pollyooly” stuck in my head. Hopefully now that I’ve finished the book, it will go away. Even if it doesn’t, though, it might have been worth it.

I’m theorizing, on pretty much no basis, that there are three kind of people who write about children: those who think they understand kids, those who understand kids a little bit, and those who know that they don’t understand them at all. The second kind is the best, in general, and the first is usually pretty bad. But there’s something to be said for the people who know that they don’t know, and that’s the category that Edgar Jepson falls into.

Not that Pollyooly is a children’s book, really. But it does center around a child, and Pollyooly, age 12, is a lovely kind of fictional child, smart and serious and essentially unfathomable, but not above making funny faces at people when the situation calls for it.

Because we think she’s awesome.

So, I have no idea what happened with my last post.

I wrote a couple of paragraphs about The Social Secretary and saved them as a draft. Then I got distracted by The Bookman. There was a link I wanted to save, and I pasted it into the draft. And then, instead of saving it, I pressed publish.

I unpublished it pretty quickly, but it looks from the site stats like it might have stayed in the RSS feed? If you saw it, I apologize.

If you went to the URL in the post, you probably found a piece about how Carolyn Wells wanted a new word for light verse. Eh. But if you looked around a little more, you might have found the thing I didn’t want to lose track of. It was on the letters page.

A lady in Chicago, who signs her letter “F. E.,” asks a question and makes a remark. We shall consider each of these separately.

(i) Why are you always so respectful to Carolyn Wells?

Because we admire her so much.

I have omitted the remark.

From The Bookman, p. 170

Also, the full post on The Social Secretary is up now.

The Social Secretary

The Social Secretary,  a novel of Washington, D.C. society, is kind of adorable, but surprisingly fluffy to have been written by a muckraking journalist. David Graham Phillips was known for exposing all sorts of corruption in the senate, and I suppose, as far as subject matter is concerned, that senators taking bribes aren’t all that far removed from senators’ wives trying to dominate local society.  I think there must be a pretty big difference in tone, though.

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From Publisher’s Weekly.

Reviews at EP: The Lightning Conductor

My October guest post is up at Edwardian Promenade: The Lightning Conductor, by everyone’s favorite husband-and-wife novel-writing team, A.M. and C.N. Williamson.

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