Annes and Islands, Dogs and Dog

 

A Different Anne, a Different Island

 

Anne of Green Gables was one of my mother’s favorite books (others in the series among that group), and I have written before of my copy of Anne's House of Dreams, once my mother's own, but I have long wanted to read the story of a different fictional Anne, a novel not set in Canada’s Maritime provinces, but, at the beginning, at least, right here in Michigan – that is, up in the Straits of Mackinac, on Mackinac Island. Constance Fenimore Woolson, great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, born in Massachusetts in 1840, was a great traveler. Besides visiting the Great Lakes, she also traveled to Florida (her mother lived in St. Augustine), England, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and was buried in Rome upon her death (possibly from suicide) at age 54. Stories in Woolson’s collection Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches are set predominantly in the Great Lakes, where the author had a particular attachment to northern Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Mackinac Island. 

Anne, a novel often identified as feminist fiction, opens with the eponymous young woman’s life on the island, her mother and stepmother both having died and her father having faded into a dreamlike, unremunerative idleness. Still in her teens, Anne is in charge of a household that includes four little half-siblings, three boys and a strange, fey little girl. When the father also dies and Anne learns for the first time how perilous is the family’s financial situation, she realizes also that she must prepare herself to make a living, and so, several chapters into the story, she enrolls in a private Eastern school for girls.

Woolson describes characters' looks and dress in detail, as she does the landscapes and worlds of her fiction. The glories and riches of the fur trade are already past by the time of Anne’s Mackinac Island, but the fort is still manned, island economy restricted to fishing and subsistence farming (both seasonal occupations), while shipping is conducted by sail and steam. The novel, Woolson’s first, was published in 1880 and is a window into late 19^th-century America, in general, as well as into its main character’s life and character. 

 

Reading about Woolson and her work, one regularly encounters quite subjective notes. An article in The New Republic, for instance, leads off with this sentence below its title:

 

Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote bitter, morbid, and severe fictions, but her devotion to James was her undoing. – Max Nelson, “Betrayed by Henry James,” March 1, 2016

 

(Well, Henry James -- there was a cold fish, eh?) Lehigh University, on the other hand, notes that “Woolson was a literary success almost from the start,” while Britannica emphasizes that the author’s works of fiction were “particularly notable for the sense of place they evoke.” That last comment captures my reasons for wanting to read this book.

 

I am not yet halfway through Anne so cannot say if I will find the novel “bitter, morbid, and severe” in its later chapters. Anne’s great-aunt, to be sure, is a horrid person, but the Frenchwoman who heads the school Anne attends is a darling and manages the great-aunt (who has agreed to pay for a single year of Anne’s education, with no added frills!) with Gallic charm and diplomacy. I’m wondering at this stage in my reading if Anne’s fiancé will prove true to his promise – but also wondering if Anne herself is really in love with him or if she will find someone else. And what will be the role of the sly little half-sister as the story unfolds? 

 

If you have read this novel, please do not answer any of the questions I have posed above!

 

 

Northport Dog Notes

Northport Dog Parade 2021

Dog Parade is this Saturday! No, Sunny Juliet (a.k.a. Naughty Barker) will not be in it, but if you want to participate with your dog and be eligible for prizes, please don’t wait until Saturday morning to register! At least, don't try to register at Dog Ears Books on Saturday, because registration forms I have will be picked up at the end of Friday afternoon. Pre-registration is $5 per dog, and registration on Saturday is $10 per dog. That's if you want to be eligible for prizes. 

 

(More) Dog Notes

 

Sunny and I did much better this week at our agility session. That is, Sunny was a star, a champion, and I didn’t make as many mistakes as usual, which helped her shine. We have some new routines to work on at home, where fun with tennis balls is as much of a reward for her as dog treats. How she loves to leap for tennis balls! Now, if only she could work up the same enthusiasm for a Frisbee – and maybe in time that will come, too. 

Field Notes

 

My meadow is gay with dancing daisies and swaying grey-headed coneflowers, apples are reddening on the trees, and ripening blackberries tempt Sunny Juliet to harvest them one by one with her dainty dog lips. Mornings are quieter, August (unlike June) not ringing with dawn birdsong as summer begins to wind down.

Invasive but beautiful loosestrife is blooming in ditches and narrows. It really is lovely and can’t help its nature, and who can resist the name? Loose strife! Begone, dull care!

Traveling with Travel Books

These little guys will be moving on soon, leaving Northport's harbor for warmer waters.

"What are you taking to read?"

That's a question that comes up in our household when bags are being packed. It matters to each of us what the other is taking, since reading aloud (usually at bedtime, occasionally in the car or on the beach or wherever) is part of what we do on a trip. On the recent getaway to Mackinac Island and the U.P., it turned out, purely by coincidence, that both of us had brought books about (1) travel (2) in Eastern Europe and Greece (3) in the 1930s. What are the odds?

BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, by Anglo-Irish Patrick Leigh Fermor, is the second volume of his foot travels from Holland to Constantinople. My friend Kathie introduced me to this wonderful book. (Actually, she loaned me the copy I'm taking so long to return to her. Thanks, Kathie, and sorry!) This second part of his trip begins in the town of Esztergom on the Danube, and he hurries from there into Hungary as a spring dusk falls. Before we left home on our own very brief (but totally delightful) trip, I read to David, by kerosene lamp (a storm had knocked out our power), the third chapter, in which Fermor rides a borrowed horse across the Great Hungarian Plain from Budapest to Gyoma. Here are a few lines from that chapter:

"These long un-desert-like stretches have left a memory of dew and new grass and Malek's hoofs trotting through woods and flowers while the climbing sun showed so clearly through leaves and petals and grass-blades that they seemed alight. The woods flickered with red-starts and wheatears, newly arrived after amazing journeys, their giveaway rumps darting through the tree-trunks among birds with their nests already built, and in the open, crested larks flew up from the grass at our approach and sang as though they were suspended about the sky on threads. There was not a single way in which life could be improved."

I love that last simple sentence. I also love the way Fermor refers to himself and Malek, his mount, as "we," e.g., "We stopped and ate in the shade...."

Picking this book up again on the island, a chapter or two further in, I read: "Wherever horses and mares with their foals moved loose about the grass, a few ragged tents were sure to be pitched. Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty." What a lovely scene to imagine from our rented room in a small island motel, next door to a stable! When I paused in my reading, we could hear the shifting feet of horses in their stalls as they settled down for the night.

(My friend Laurie wants me to say here that readers who enjoy Fermor's travels may also appreciate Jean Auel's CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR series, set in the same part of the world but in prehistoric times.)

David's book for the trip, from which he read to me the following evening, was Henry Miller's THE COLOSSUS AT MAROUSSI. Miller's enthusiasm was a match for Fermor's, and as enthusiastic travelers ourselves we were well served by these books. And so we moved through time as well as through space, backwards as well as forwards, through fall and spring at the same time, simultaneously enjoying Michigan, Hungary (or Greece, depending on which of us was reading), our life a many-layered, rich and moveable feast.

Getaway

This isn't the most glamorous shot of Mackinac Island, even on my camera, but it's one of my favorites. Our island getaway surpassed expectations. Two of the best smells in the world, we agree, are the fresh-fishy smell of the Great Lakes and the warm, earthy, pungent odor of horses. With preferences like that, how could we fail to be happy on Mackinac Island? Is it the "real world"? There we disagreed. David thought that what he perceived as artificiality would become cloying after a while. (Certainly the crowds in July and August would be a trial.) I maintained that the island residents are living real lives, even if theirs is a tourist economy. After all, there are people who think Leelanau County isn't the "real world" and that those of us who live here live in La-La Land. I say that wherever people have their lives, make their living, spend their days, pay their bills--that's the real world.