Reading For a Too-Sudden Spring: The Enchanted April

It's May as I write this, and the dust of this drought-stricken state is already rising in little puffs about my feet as I walk my dog along the parched canal.  When breaking out the shorts and the sunblock, it seems wise to cherish what has already been: The most beautiful April in recent memory.  Everything came into flower at once at my house--the crab apple trees shown in the picture at left, the plum trees out back, the lilac and the tiny white stars of red-twig dogwood.  Unusually for Colorado, no sudden fall of snow struck spring dumb.  The kindness of the season has an ominous undertone--we all know that it's not normal, but as my younger son observed just last night, "It's hard to view sunny days as a natural disaster."  His tone seemed to imply that if anybody could do so, however, it would be his mother.

He reminded me, in those few words, of a character straight out of Elizabeth Von Arnim.  Just so did she  skewer her most lovable people--with a comment that revealed far too much of their souls.

She's an author most people no longer recognize, although some would recall the 1992 movie made from her best-known book, The Enchanted April.  I sat through it in a dream of sun-kissed scent, but I'm not going to talk about the movie here--the book is so much more rewarding in its acute celebration of human foibles, human hope, and the terribly human need to be loved.  The time is the early 1920s; the subject is the dreariness of post-war England and the compulsion to escape; and the alternative is a remote and lovely castle on the Italian coast.  Von Arnim sends four women of varying ages and degrees of personal desperation there for a month.  Having got them under her writer's eye, she turns each of them inside-out, with a delicacy and finesse unequaled since Jane Austen.

If summer arrived too soon in your town, too, this year--try The Enchanted April.  Short of buying a ticket on impulse for Portofino, it's the most delicious escape I know.

Stephanie

Friday's Child: The REACH Literacy Conference

So as my sons head off for their final exams this week, I'm thinking about the teachers I'll be talking to on Friday at the 2012 REACH Literacy Conference here in Denver.  The conference is intended for "educators, administrators, parents, middle and high school students, and literacy advocates who want to explore and understand the value of early reading readiness; embrace culturally relevant literature; and gain knowledge, insight and access to useful curriculum resources to create a richer learning experience."  It's being held over two days--May 31 and June 1--at the Kenneth King Academics & Performing Arts Center, on the Auraria Campus.

I'm a bit terrified.  I'm not a trained teacher.  I write novels for adults, not kids.  I know next to nothing about the challenges of literacy in the United States.  All I can do, therefore, is talk about how writers become writers--by starting life as readers.  We're all the sum of our stories, both the ones we read as kids and the ones we write every day.  And we're the end result of a lifetime of teachers, too--both bad and good.  I watch my own boys grow, and know how critical stories are in their lives.  Stories are maps discarded on the road by those who've walked ahead, clues to the terrain, routes for navigating existence.  We'd be lost without them.

Think of me Friday morning.  Introduce yourself, if you're there.  We'll swap a few tales.

Stephanie

My Personal Note From Charles (Dickens, that is)

Yesterday, as various folks around the world gave a nod to the creator of Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Nell--who presumably celebrated his 200th birthday with a glass of Port on some convenient celestial perch--I paused a moment in my guest room to offer Many Happy Returns to Charles Dickens myself.

Framed on the wall is one of the man's letters.  It wasn't written to me, of course--but I shamelessly read it anyway.  It's a small note written on blue-gray paper, with its original envelope, addressed and sealed with Dickens's wax, the color of dried blood.

The framer, sadly, couldn't show both sides of the envelope at once, so the wax seal is hidden from view, a treasure for some future generation to find when they reframe the thing in 2312.  The visible side is some compensation--Dickens signed the envelope as well as the note, and there's a great old penny postage stamp with Queen Victoria pretending to be Caesar's wife in the upper corner.  The ink is faded to a sepia brown.




Here's what the letter says:


Devonshire Terrace
Thirtieth November 1842
My Dear Count D'Orsay


We shall all three be delighted to dine at Gore House on Friday; and, (as you do not mention the hour) we shall take it for granted that you dine at Half past Seven, unless we hear to the contrary.


Always believe me 
faithfully yours
Charles Dickens


He scrawled his signature emphatically across the bottom of the page, and underscored it with a scrolling motion at least ten times.  And yes, that's a comma you see before the parenthesis.  Perhaps our habit of placing it after is hopelessly twenty-first century.  


It's a commonplace note enough.  The Comte D'Orsay was a flamboyant figure in Dickens's day, an artist, a dandy, a wealthy man who loved to entertain.  But who are "we three?"  And what exactly did they dine on?  Did D'Orsay keep the note for decades, or did his valet pilfer it?  And how did it end up in my mother's closet, a hundred and fifty years later?  The devil of it is, nobody in my family really knows.  It's our own little Mystery of Edwin Drood.


There's an import duty receipt for one hundred and forty-five pounds from a dealer named Maggs Brothers, located at 50, Berkeley Square, London, to a dealer in Bethesda, Maryland, dated 1977.  We lived in Potomac at the time; and that was the year my father died.  The story of how he came by Dickens's careless acceptance of a dinner invitation, died with him.  It was only in the last years of my mother's life that the letter was discovered at all--and my sisters kindly passed it on to me.  They figured that as a writer, I'd cherish it.


I do.  I thought about hanging it opposite my desk, where I can see it every day; and maybe at some point I will.  For now, though, it hangs in the guest room, so that anybody transiting through Denver can glance at that sprawling, flamboyant, dramatic fist--and hear an entire world of fantastic characters whispering from the faded ink.


Happy birthday, Charles.


Stephanie

A Toast to January's Quiet

It has been snowing in Colorado, and I'm off tomorrow to ski over the long weekend.  January--a month so many view as bleak and cheerless--is one of my favorite months in the year.  The hustle of the holidays is over; no huge obligations loom; and it's time to hunker down by the fire with good books and snoozing dogs.   I've been dutifully reading Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and finding it disappointing, perhaps because I lived through college in the '80s and my memories of it are much better than his characters'.  (It was brought home to me recently just how long ago that was when a chance acquaintance commented: "You look really good for somebody who graduated in 1985."  We call that a backhanded comment, folks: Nice to know you look OK, given that you've got one foot in the grave.)  So last night I put down the Plot and picked up a Golden Age mystery.  And naturally, I mixed up a Sidecar to drink with it.

The Sidecar surfaces in Agatha Christie novels and only rarely in trendy bars these days.  It takes its name from the little passenger capsule so many motorcycles sported in England in the 1930s, the kind that Lady Mary Wimsey and her pet Communist meant to elope in, during the first chapters of  Dorothy Sayers' Clouds of Witness.  It's a brandy cocktail, which nobody drinks anymore, but it's absolutely delicious.  Here, after much experimentation, is how to make one:

The Wimsey Sidecar

1.5 oz Courvoisier
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
3/4 oz Cointreau
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

Shake all in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and pour into a martini glass--preferably one whose rim has been wiped with a lemon and coated with sugar.  Grab a good dog and a good mystery and settle in while the blizzards howl.

After you drink this, you'll want to be poured into one of those cute little passenger capsules and elope.

Happy New Year from Nessa and Mycroft

Stephanie

Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron: A Fatal Charm

The tenth Jane Austen Mystery, Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron, throws together two of history's literary greats--and the two who seem least likely to have met.  Yes, they were contemporaries; but Jane was "retiring" and George Gordon, Lord Byron, outrageous.  No doubt their conversations, had they encountered one another, must have been compelling.  But would the occasion ever have arisen?

I began to wonder about six degrees of separation in Jane Austen's world when I was researching and writing a very different book, A Flaw in the Blood, which is set in 1864 and concerns Queen Victoria.  In the course of learning about her world, I naturally read David Cecil's excellent biography Melbourne.  Victoria's first prime minister--already aging when she ascended the throne, but a Regency Buck of the First Stare, a remarkable personality and intellect--utterly bewitched the young queen, whose partiality for William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, was so marked that raucous crowds heckled her with cries of "Mrs. Melbourne!" when she rode abroad in Rotten Row.  She was perhaps 18 when this "grand pash" occurred, and not yet married to Albert; and she seems not to have cared one whit for public opinion.  I'd have swooned over Melbourne, too.

Caro dressed as a page

The real Mrs. Melbourne, of course, was long since dead; but Lady Caroline Lamb's storied reputation lived on long after her time.  The author of Glenarvon, she was most famous for her brief affair with Lord Byron, which ended in public scandal because she refused to give up her obsession--becoming possibly the first recorded Celebrity Stalker.  Regency fans will always be fascinated by Caro Lamb--she was a Ponsonby by birth, the daughter of the unfortunate Countess of Bessborough, who was a victim of domestic violence, a friend of Sheridan and Charles James Fox, and sister of that Georgian Incomparable, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.  Caroline Ponsonby grew up in the hectic atmosphere of her aunt Georgiana's Devonshire House and Chatsworth.  Ironically, Byron would eventually marry Caro's cousin, Annabella--his sole disastrous foray into marriage.

Researching Melbourne, reading about Caro, and thinking about Regency personalities inevitably led me to a biography of Byron himself.  Naturally, it's littered with love affairs and remarkable women, none of whom--not even his half-sister, with whom he had an incestuous child--appears to have been able to resist him.  A gallery of some of them may be viewed below.

Annabella, Lady Byron, mother of Byron's
legitimate daughter

Augusta Leigh, Byron's half-sister,
mother of an incestuous daughter

Jane Elizabeth, Lady Oxford

Claire Claremont, Mary Shelley's step-sister,
mother of an illegitimate daughter

A single fact at the end of Byron's life gave me pause: he was refused a public funeral or burial in Westminster Abbey in 1824 due to his scandalous life.  Instead, his biographer tells us, he was laid out for viewing at the London home of  Sir Edward Knatchbull.  Yes, Janeites--Byron's wake was held in Fanny Austen Knight Knatchbull's London house.  How did George Gordon end up in with Jane Austen's niece?  I have never been able to find out.  But the link between the two families was all the permission I needed.  I decided Jane MUST encounter some madness in Brighton in 1813.

One more interesting degree of separation: Byron was always in Dun Territory--always at the mercy of his creditors--and when he finally sold his birthright, a crumbling estate called Newstead Abbey, he sold it to the brother of Fanny Austen Knight's Kentish neighbor, James Wildman, of Chilham Castle.  (For more about the Wildman family, see Jane and the Canterbury Tale.)

Happy Winter Reading!


Stephanie

Past Master: Appreciating Margery Allingham

It has been uncharacteristically cold, gray, and snowy here in Denver.  I took a break from twining greens around the house this weekend to curl up on the couch with an icon of Golden Age Detective Fiction--Margery Allingham.

And found myself wondering, as I always do, why she is so rarely read anymore.

Allingham created her amateur British detective, Albert Campion, at the end of the 1920s, as one of those plausible, aristocratic, deceptively foolish young men who look decorative at weekend houseparties and have a knack for solving murders.  Campion reads like a dangerous foil to Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey--his background is deliberately vague, possibly criminal, and his aristocratic family seems to have cast him off.  His valet Lugg--unlike Wimsey's Bunter--is an ex-con.  It's a calculated inversion of a detective fiction trope; and this sinister bent becomes more pronounced as Allingham's writing career evolved and deepened.  I could talk about the excellent classic fiction Allingham turned out in the Thirties--The Fashion in Shrouds, Dancers in Mourning, Black Plumes--but I won't. It's her later fiction that brings me to my knees.

By the 1950s, Allingham abandoned amateur detection for the police procedural, introducing a series of related characters affiliated with Scotland Yard, who call upon the middle-aged Campion as a sort of eminence grise of crime.  More importantly, in such novels as The Tiger in the Smoke and Tether's End, Allingham abandons completely the mystery novel architecture--in favor of a thriller's arc.  She infiltrates the minds of her killers, carrying the reader along with her, in a deft examination of amorality, luck, calculated and cold-blooded murder, and the happy element of chance that unravels a sociopath's world.  She is masterful at inspiring dread, so that even when you've put down the book her characters whisper quietly in the back of your mind and surface at night in your dreams.  Her treatment of trust and its violation, her exploration of the charm of plausible con men and the innocents who care about them, and the final desperation of her trapped criminals, are timeless; her books retain a depth and power entirely due to their complex characterizations.

Allingham's not available in digital format yet, and this neglect--similarly visited upon another Golden Age great, Ngaio Marsh--is a gap in the market SOMEBODY should exploit.  In the meantime, comb your remaining sources of secondhand mystery fiction and snap up the yellowed paperbacks with the deceptively silly covers.  There are forgotten marvels waiting--perfect for a snowy weekend in December.

For a comprehensive wallow in all things Allingham, check out the official website of the Margery Allingham Society.

Stephanie

Channeling Harriette in Barque of Frailty

Alright, I admit it: there's something of the bodice-ripper in the cover of this particular Jane Austen Mystery--but I love it all the same.  The extraordinary quality of light and movement, the combination of pearl and gold, and the Pauline de Borghese-like quality of the murdered woman's limbs--it all works for a book about sex, blackmail, and power.  And what does any of that have to do with Jane Austen, you ask?

Everything, my friends.

Thinking of Our Jane as a prudish spinster writing in peaceful retirement has always been something of a mistake.  In April, 1811, when Jane and the Barque of Frailty begins, the London Season is in full swing--and Jane Austen is paying an extended visit to her banker-brother Henry and glamorous sister-in-law, Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide.  Jane is in London to proof the first typeset pages of Sense and Sensibility, publication of which Henry and Eliza have generously underwritten.  Impossible, however, for Jane to escape intrigue--given the nature of the Sloane Street neighborhood the Henry Austens inhabit, and the wildly variable nature of their social acquaintance.  Nearby in Hans Crescent, actress Dolly Jordan--the comic genius of her age, the Duke of Clarence's deserted mistress and mother of his ten children--has set up housekeeping; Lord Moira, one of Henry's banking clients and a member of the dangerous Carlton House Set, is enamored of Eliza; and among their friends are the French emigre Comte d'Entraigues and his opera-singer wife--whose curious political activities would destroy them the following year.  Jane refers to all of these people in her letters from London, and describes the whirl of activity she experienced during the Season, with drollery and satisfaction.  She might have been laboring over her page proofs, but she was also having a darn good time.

The year 1811 was pivotal in British history, ushering in the Prince Regent's nine years of caretaker monarchy and the exit in a straitjacket of his father, George III.  The protracted war in the Peninsula was ending in victory for England, and politicians were squaring off to support or oppose the new Regent.  Against this backdrop of political change London pursued its dissipations with abandon--chief among them, the patronage of powerful men for a class of women known variously as lightskirts, fair Cyprians, the Muslin Company, or Barques of Frailty: courtesans of the demimonde offered carte blanche--full funding--in exchange for their favors.

Jane had long been aware of the proclivity of powerful men for entertaining young women of easy virtue--she touches on the theme in Sense and Sensibility through the saga of Willoughby, a young buck on the Town blessed with handsome looks, charming manners, complete freedom and the prospect of future inheritance, who thinks nothing of seducing the ward of his acquaintance, Colonel Brandon, and abandoning her once she is with child.  In Mansfield Park, she gives the charming Crawfords a naval uncle who insists upon his mistress living with him--which drives his worldly and fashionable young niece out of his home.  As Jane knew, such affairs were not limited to Town life--she refers to the Fowle family's patron, Lord Craven, in a letter dated as early as 8 January 1801, as "having a Mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park...the only unpleasing circumstance about him." Lord Craven was the man responsible for sending Cassandra Austen's fiance, Tom Fowle, to the West Indies in 1792, where he died of yellow fever; in 1801, Craven was created 1st Earl Craven (second creation).  He was quite the dashing figure: a military man, an aide-de-camp to the King, Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire, and eventually the husband of a  famous actress, Louisa Brunton, after whom he named his yacht.  When Jane mentions him, he was about thirty-one years old; his Mistress, we now know, was fifteen--and detested Craven's "ugly white nightcap" as much as Marianne Dashwood deplored flannel.  She ran away from Ashdown Park and embarked upon a storied career preserved forever in one of the Great Reads of the Regency Period: Harriette Wilson's Memoirs.

"The debauched coterie": A depiction of some of the famous members of the ton Wilson named in her Memoirs

Harriette was my guide through the demimondaine's world as I set out to write Barque of Frailty.  Never mind that she's a notoriously unreliable witness--she mailed copies of her manuscript to every client mentioned in its pages, offering to remove them for an exorbitant sum of money, which means the public figures she cheerfully pillories are the ones who stiffed her (no pun intended).  However vicious her portrait of the Duke of Wellington, for example--who famously told her to "publish and be damned!"--her depiction of courtesan life is vivid, entertaining, revelatory, and unsparing.  She was a smart woman living by her wits without much sentimentality, determined to present herself and her friends as victims of Tragic Love.  She made money hand over fist, and was as famous when she ventured into Hyde Park as any of the Society ladies who offered her the Cut Direct.  After publishing her Memoirs, however, she seems to have found it expedient to quit London for the Continent.

Barque of Frailty closes with a scene Harriette would have recognized: The Cyprian's Ball at the Argyle Rooms.  I offer here Cruikshank's lampoon of the event, which was as famous among a certain set as anything Almack's Assembly could offer--and much more enthusiastically patronized.

Enjoy!


Stephanie