Catching up, 6/21/17

After three separate failed attempts at writing a review of The Owls of St. Ursula’s, I looked at my list of books read and decided I had enough for a catch-up post, even though I feel like all I’ve done lately is reread the Hildegarde-Margaret books.

The Christmas Bride

I don’t actually want to write a review of Grace Livingston Hill’s The Christmas Bride, but I do want to say:

• Those of you who were like, “okay, but sometimes the religious stuff is way too much”? I didn’t get it before. I get it now.
• Apparently what’s wrong with the world is that I am not in Israel.
• The hero will not give any of his vast fortune to charity because it stops people from being self-reliant.
• GHRHHRA;GHGHDGASDLLGF

The Story of a Whim

I reread The Obsession of Victoria Gracen the other day, and it left me wanting a very specific Grace Livingston Hill thing: Good people doing things, and triumphing over bad people who are overtly small-minded and cruel. Victoria Gracen is firmly in that category, and so is Aunt Crete’s Emancipation, but her other books I’ve read only have it in small quantities.

Anyway, I poked around on Google Books, and chose The Story of a Whim for its title. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted–for one thing, there are no bad people–but it’s a cute religious romance and I enjoyed it.

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 Brown Study

I have this embarrassing secret, only it’s not particularly secret and I don’t know if I’m embarrassed: sometimes I really like religious fiction. Yes, sometimes it’s cloying, and I’m not into that. But sometimes it’s Amy Le Feuvre being weirdly mystical, or G.K. Chesterton doing whatever the hell he ever thinks he’s doing. And sometimes it’s the kind of thing Grace S. Richmond writes, where religion is about firm ideals and practical good deeds and it’s almost not condescending. I’ve never had a particle of religious belief, but those ideals are compelling, and I don’t need religion to (to a certain extent) share them. Also, you know what else is compelling? Passionate, tortured, hidden self-denial. And The Brown Study is, like, 70% that.

I’ve read so few of Richmond’s books, but they’ve all featured attractive young clergymen, so I’m forced to assume that’s a thing for her. The Brown Study’s variation goes like this: Donald Brown was the minister at a fashionable city church, but he had to take some time off for his health. He moved to a poor area and offers unofficial spiritual support to his neighbors. He realizes that he can do more good there than at his fancy church, and also that his new work makes him a better person, but his old friends all want him to come home, including the girl he loves.

It’s all spiritual pining and being nice to the neighbors, and I enjoyed it thoroughly–although I might regret the nice plates and carpets and things Brown has to leave behind almost as much as he does.

There’s a second, unrelated story to fill out the book. In it, young Julius Broughton schemes to get his sister Dorothy and his engineer friend Kirke Waldron to meet. Once they’ve done that, though, they don’t need his help–they’re perfectly capable of carrying their romance through as straightforwardly as possible.

Christmas Stories: On Christmas Day in the Evening

Grace S. Richmond wrote a sequel to On Christmas Day in the Morning, and it’s called On Christmas Day in the Evening. It’s pretty religious, but mostly in a cute way. It takes place two years after the events of On Christmas Day in the Morning, and it revolves around the village church, which has been standing empty for several years after a series of disagreements in the congregation.

The Fernald kids, led by Nan, decide to open the church for a one-off Christmas service, hoping to bring the villagers together. They enlist Guy’s brother-in-law, a minister in a fashionable city church, and he in turn enlists a retired minister who hasn’t given a sermon in fifteen years, but knows all about the local quarrels.

Everything winds up exactly as you’d expect, and even the family grouch gets in on the Christmas spirit action, but the story didn’t move me. I think it’s because all of the Fernalds are totally fine, and nothing is at stake. Even the Fernald parents, the only ones who still live in the village, aren’t involved–they’ve stayed out of their neighbors’ quarrels. The characters who are involved serve as country stereotype comic relief, so they don’t help much either.

I think Richmond is trying to bring in exactly the kind of firsthand emotion the story needs when she introduces Elder Blake, but he’s not central enough. She might have done better to give On Christmas Day in the Evening a brand new setting and not bother with the Fernalds at all. I like them, and was glad to encounter them again, but nothing about them is essential to the story.

 

Catching up

I’ve been reading a fair amount, I think. Some of it’s been re-reading–the usual suspects: The Amazing Interlude, Pam Decides, etc.–but I’ve also read a few new things, and I don’t think I can remember what all of them are.

Anyway, here’s a roundup of the things I can remember, so I can get caught up and back to writing actual reviews.

The Loudwater Mystery, by Edgar Jepson. 1920.
From my Edgar Jepson phase. This is sort of the most English of English mystery novels, but not in a particularly interesting way. I didn’t like any of the characters very much. I would prefer to have Jepson stick to books about precocious children. Still, I always enjoy it when he describes his characters in extremely specific art historical references.

Jan and Her Job, by L. Allen Harker. 1917.

I enjoyed this story of a young woman going to India to take care of her sister’s children and eventually returning home with them, but I sort of wished Jan’s job had been more, you know, job-like. The nephew and the love interest are both very appealing, and I enjoyed the villain’s unrelenting awfulness.

Tenant for Death, by Cyril Hare. 1937.

I think I really liked this, sort of, maybe. It took a while to grow on me. It’s a very technical, measured mystery novel, sort of in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman. If you like the drier kind of golden age detective fiction, you will probably like this.

The Obsession of Victoria Gracen, by Grace Livingston Hill. 1915.

I think I get Grace Livingston Hill now? She can get caught up in stuff you don’t want–like, this is obviously an author who doesn’t know what’s appealing about her own work–but there are things she does really well: materialism, hitting villains when they’re down, finding people their proper places in the world. And when those things are mixed together in the right proportions, she’s pretty great. This one was a little heavy on religion and inexplicably light on Victoria Gracen’s nephew in comparison to the other boys, but it’s very enjoyable.

 

Cloudy Jewel

I’m sorry to report that I didn’t love Cloudy Jewel. A bunch of people recommended it, and it definitely sounds as if it should be right up my alley, but I’ve never met a Grace Livingston Hill character I liked more than a little, and if I had, Julia Cloud wouldn’t be it.

She should be. She’s a capable, unselfish spinster left at loose ends after her mother dies. She doesn’t want to go live with her genuinely awful sister and brother-in-law, and fair enough, but she hasn’t got enough money to do anything else. Enter her orphaned, almost grown-up niece and nephew, Leslie and Allison. They’re bound for college, and they want her to live with them and keep house and be a substitute parent with a salary. They find a house and furnish it at length, with nice rugs and modern appliances and kind of a lot of homemade curtains. And I don’t know what French gray enamel furniture looks like, but somehow it sounds really appealing.

Dwell Deep, or Hilda Thorn’s Life Story

So, apparently Grace Livingston Hill’s brand of religion makes me want to go read about Amy Le Feuvre’s brand of religion. And I suppose it serves me right that Dwell Deep is more Hill-like that any Le Feuvre book I’ve read to date. It’s the story of Hilda Thorn, a young woman who moves in with her guardian’s family, who have little tolerance for her religious scruples.

I think the fact that she was converted before the story begins was part of what bugged me, although I guess it saved me one of Le Feuvre’s weirdly unsatisfactory conversion scenes. I also wasn’t wild about the first person narration, although I eventually got used to it.

Olive Tracy

So. More Amy Le Feuvre. This one is called Olive Tracy, and follows the title character over roughly the span of the Boer War. At the beginning, she’s the de facto housekeeper of her family’s home, which she shares with her mother, her younger sister Elsie, and Osmond, the invalid son of her dead eldest brother. The oldest sister, Vinny, is unhappily married and living in London, while another brother, Eddie, is in the Army, and not behaving as his family would wish him to. Then there’s their neighbors, Sir Marmaduke and Lady Crofton, and their two sons: Marmaduke is a captain in the army, and in love with Olive. He’s also steady and reliable and not super attractive in a way that made me think of Lord Algy from Pretty Kitty Herrick. Mark, the younger brother, is even more dissolute than Eddie, and seems to have been given up, even by his parents, as a bad lot.

Olive’s troubles begin when Marmaduke — Duke for short, thankfully — goes off to South Africa to keep an eye on Mark. He proposes before he leaves, but she turns him down, and only afterwards realizes that she might have feelings for him after all. Then her mother dies, and the Tracy household is split up, with Elsie going one way and Olive and Osmond another. Also the Boer War begins, and is omnipresent and awful in the background. Somewhere in there, Olive finds God in the same way that everyone finds God in these books, which is, I don’t know, either the most weirdly flat conversion I’ve ever read, or pure mysticism. Or both.

The Carved Cupboard

I am in general, not a huge fan of religious fiction, but Amy Le Feuvre is my weird, inexplicable exception. I have just confirmed this by reading a book called The Carved Cupboard. I’ve read a couple of other things of hers, but they were full of angelic dying children and dead dogs, and…no. No angelic dying children for me. The Carved Cupboard, like Her Kingdom, is about young women, and its religious focus is a vehicle for the larger theme of their finding their places in the world.

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 died, 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.