Dora’s Housekeeping

What we all need in the middle of a pandemic–if we have the time/energy/attention span–is some light reading. I’ll try to find some for you soon, but for now: Dora’s Housekeeping, by Elizabeth Stansbury Kirkland, is very dull.

You know how Ten Dollars Enough can drag a little when there are too many recipes in a row? Dora’s Housekeeping never stops dragging. I recommending getting your cookbook-in-novel’s-clothing fix elsewhere.

Oh, you want to know what it’s about? Well, Dora Greenwood is a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with four younger siblings. Her mother is sent abroad to recover from an illness, and Dora takes over as housekeeper. She’s got a helpful aunt and cousin next door, but she has trouble finding and keeping a good cook, and she still has to go to school.

I liked that Dora has the capacity to be a bit of a brat–sure, you’re definitely the person most affected by your servant’s mother’s illness–and that her father is a little finicky and not always as nice as one would wish. But Kirkland really looks down on the servants, and there’s too many recipes to too little story.

This is a sort of a sequel to Six Little Cooks; or, Aunt Jane’s Cooking Class, in which Dora’s helpful aunt teaches Dora’s cousins to cook. I think I won’t read it.

The Cuckoo Clock

The Cuckoo Clock is another Mrs. Molesworth, and my first experience with her more fanciful stories. I gather that this is one of her most famous books, but I’m not that into it.

The protagonist is Griselda, a young girl who has been sent by her family in India to live with two elderly aunts. The house is cool, and her aunts are kind, but it’s a cold and dreary winter and she has no one to play with. Then she starts talking to a cuckoo that lives in a cuckoo clock that belonged to her grandmother. The cuckoo is probably really alive — not just in a dream, or her imagination — and he takes her on a series of adventures to places that don’t exist, like a version of China populated by dolls. Griselda is a little inclined to grumble, and the cuckoo is condescending, but they do seem sort of fond of each other.

Honestly, in spite of all the things that happen to Griselda, it feels kind of mundane. She goes places and looks at stuff, but nothing really happens, and she doesn’t talk to anyone. Interaction may be why the real world bits are more fun than the imaginary stuff, even though not much happens in the real world, either.

It’s kind of weird, how I’ve immediately gone from avoiding Mrs. Molesworth to cutting her a lot of slack, but that seems to be what’s happening. I don’t really care about this book, but I didn’t not like it, and even when I don’t like her, I think she’s really good.

 

Ruth Erskine’s Crosses

Ruth Erskine’s Crosses is in some ways my favorite and in some ways my least favorite of the Chautauqua Girls books. Ruth struggles with religion, and her struggle is meaty and complicated and relatable. But it’s also kind of a struggle to read—because of her slow progress and numerous setbacks, and because most of the time you can see exactly what she’s doing wrong and how she could fix it. That’s a big thing for Pansy/Isabella Alden—the idea that it’s a lot easier to see other people’s mistakes than your own. And on one hand, that’s exactly the kind of complexity I enjoy reading about, and on the other it’s very frustrating.

The Chautauqua Girls at Home

The Chautauqua Girls at Home follows Flossy, Ruth, Marion and Eurie as they return home and attempt to live up to their new religious convictions. It’s full of the same kind of detailed soul-searching as Four Girls at Chautauqua, but it doesn’t have the first book’s neat arcs. Four Girls at Chautaqua was a very single-minded book. It had one task: to turn these four girls into Christians. This sequel has, probably, too much going on. Not that there’s anything I wanted left out—this is one of those books that’s packed with interesting things, but doesn’t give many of them enough space.

Four Girls at Chautauqua

I love a good conversion narrative. I think it’s because there’s no other context in which authors go so deep into their characters’ thought processes. Four Girls at Chautauqua is, like, 70% thought processes, and I really, really enjoyed it.

Yes, I have finally read a book by Pansy. I picked one of her books at random last week, and realized a chapter or two in that it was definitely the sequel to something. But I was already intrigued enough to want to start the series from the beginning rather than looking for something standalone to read instead.

The First Violin

When Alisha recommended Jessie Fothergill’s The First Violin, she mentioned Patricia Brent, Spinster and the Williamsons. Based on that, I guess I was expecting something romcom-like. That is not what I got, but I wasn’t disappointed.

The First Violin is the story of May Wedderburn, the middle daughter of an English vicar. Adelaide, the oldest, is the strong-willed ambitious one, and Stella, the youngest, is smart and practical. May herself is dreamy, idealistic, and musical.

Her uneventful life is interrupted by the arrival of Sir Peter Le Marchant (wealthy, older, creepy as fuck). He wants to marry May, presumably so he can make her life miserable, but she wants nothing to do with him. She’s rescued by a neighbor, Miss Hallam, who is going to Germany to consult an eye doctor. She offers to bring May along as her companion and promises to arrange for singing lessons.

Edwardian/WWI-era fiction at Edwardian Promenade

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts floating around lately about what to read if you’re into Downton Abbey. One in particular, which talked about Elizabeth von Arnim apropos of one character giving a copy of Elizabeth and Her German Garden to another, made Evangeline at Edwardian Promenade say, “hey, what about Elinor Glyn?” Which, obviously, is the correct response to everything. And then I read it, and thought, “yeah, Elizabeth and her German Garden was popular when it came out in 1898, but would people really be trying to get each other to read a fifteen year-old(ish) novel by a German author during World War I?” And then we decided that we could probably come up with an excellent list of Edwardian and World War I-era fiction that tied in the Downton Abbey. And so we did.

It’s a pretty casual list, mostly composed of things we came up with off the tops of out heads, a bit of research on Evangeline’s part and a bit of flipping through advertisements on mine, so we’re making no claims to be exhaustive. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, leave a comment.

Mae Madden

I have no idea why I decided to read this book. I clicked on a random author name on Project Gutenberg — Mary Murdoch Mason — and there was one title there — Mae Madden — and I thought, “that’s a lot of initial Ms,” and read it.

I’m not sure how much else I have to say about it.

Mae is a nineteen year old American girl traveling in Europe with her two brothers, her friend Edith, Edith’s mother, and Edith’s cousin Norman Mann, who is presumably named that so that Mae can have an additional initial M when they get married. But first she has to get entangled with a flirtatious Piedmontese officer.

The book is completely fine, I guess. The dialogue is a bit above average, and there are some nifty psychological bits, although I wish the book as a whole had been less down on the concept of young women having fun and taking care of themselves, but: fine. Totally, totally fine.

The Leavenworth Case Redux

It really is pretty.

It’s difficult to know how to write this, because I’ve already read and written about The Leavenworth Case, and, as you may recall, I didn’t like it very much. But last month at BookBloggerCon, when it seemed sometimes like all anyone wanted to talk about was the art of acquiring review copies, I kept thinking about it.

I’d seen on The Bunburyist that Penguin had just put out a new edition of The Leavenworth Case, and that the cover was really attractive. So I guess it was a little bit because of the cover art, and a little bit because I felt like the book was worth revisiting, and a little bit because I wanted to see if someone would really send me a review copy, when all I’ve done in the past is recommend etexts.

The Leavenworth Case

Carolyn Wells apparently discovered mystery novels after having had one of Anna Katherine Green’s books read aloud to her circa 1909. The Leavenworth Case was Green’s first and best-known book, and if it wasn’t the one that Wells heard read, then probably all Green’s books were pretty similar, because The Leavenworth Case reads like a blueprint for all of Well’s mystery novels, mostly in terms of the setting and the general construction of events. Or maybe not a blueprint, because blueprints are kind of spare and simplified, by definition, and The Leavenworth Case is as overwrought as any mystery novel I’ve ever read.

Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy retired businessman, is found dead in his library one morning, shot through the back of the head. His secretary, Trueman Harwell, seeks to enlist the aid of Mr. Leavenworth’s lawyer, Mr. Veeley, in watching over the interests of Mr. Leavenworth’s two nieces, Mary and Eleanore, but finds Veeley away on business. Everett volunteers to stand in for Veeley, and promptly falls in love with Eleanore, who, of course, appears to be guilty of the crime.

Elsie’s Motherhood

Elsie’s Motherhood is kind of weird because it’s sort of all about the Ku Klux Klan. Seriously.

The Civil War is over; Elsie has used her ridiculously large fortune to rebuild not only Ion, the Travilla plantation, but also the plantations of, like, all her friends and family. But only if they’re good Christians, I guess, so the Travillas’ near neighbors the Fosters are forced to sell their plantation to a northern family named Leland and move into a tiny shack. I would’ve thought the price of a plantation, even a post-Civil War cheap plantation, would be enough to pay for a new home that wasn’t, like, a hut, especially since the Lelands are Elsie’s sort of people and would likely have given more than the place was worth. But apparently not.

Elsie’s Womanhood

Elsie’s Womanhood is kind of bizarre and segmented. First there’s the bit where Elsie and Mr. Travilla tell everyone that they’re engaged, and the reactions are an entertaining mix of not at all surprised and disturbed by the age difference. Which, you know, was pretty much my reaction too. This bit also includes Elsie’s uncle Arthur — you know, the one who set Tom Jackson on her — telling her that he wouldn’t mind marrying her himself. It’s as if the fact that her father has allowed her to become engaged has left a vaguely incestuous blank that desperately needed to be filled. And now that’s been done, so let’s move on.

Elsie’s Girlhood

When Elsie’s Girlhood begins, Elsie and her father are traveling with Rose Allison and her brother Edward. Rose had paid a visit to the Dinsmores at Roselands before Mr. Dinsmore returned from Europe, and because they were the only two serious Christians in the house — not counting the slaves, of course — they became very good friends. And since Mr. Dinsmore is now an avid Christian too, and because Rose is very attractive, and because something needs to be done to save him from the designing Miss Stevens, they fall in love and get engaged. Elsie is very pleased, and gladly promises to call Rose “mamma”.

So Mr. Dinsmore and Rose get married and go back to The Oaks, and they and Elsie live very happily together. One day Elsie comes downstairs for breakfast or something and finds her father sitting there alone.

Elsie: Where is mamma?

Mr. D: Oh, upstairs. But look at what I’ve got here!

Elsie: A baby! But where did it come from?

Mr. D: It’s your brother!