Of Farms and Books

 

The days were long and fine and very warm. They practically abandoned the house. They worked together, all three of them in the hay-field.

- Adrian Bell, Shepherd’s Farm

If Shepherd’s Farm is, as I suspect, typical of Adrian Bell’s fiction, many readers I know would not care for it. I can easily imagine some literary critics calling it a weak novel, if a novel at all. There is little drama; what there is of conflict never boils over. Our main characters work hard and strive patiently and gradually achieve their goals, and while they ultimately lose, in a material sense, all they have gained, it is not through tragic flaws of their own or wickedness on the part of some antagonistic force or other character in the narrative, and they are not driven to despair or madness by their losses. Simply, life goes on.

Since I don’t believe Shepherd’s Farm has ever been published in the U.S. (Bell's stories are set in England), I'll give here what would be ‘spoilers’ if I expected any of my blog readers to be picking up the novel: 

We fear initially that Miriam will choose the wrong man and create tragedy for three people. She does not. When the wrong man marries elsewhere, it seems he may go frightfully more wrong and lose himself entirely. Nothing like that ensues, and his life goes on as it was expected to go on, in conformity with his family values. When Miriam’s uncle, who is her guardian, opposes her marriage to Luke, threatening to have Luke's dear-won farm bought out from under him if she persists in wedding plans, she and Luke quietly agree to wait, not seeing each other at all for the time being. Eventually the uncle dies, and they marry. Again, quietly. Everything is done quietly, without, as I say, drama. The gypsy girl does not seduce Luke. The horse does not trample the child. There are no murders, no suicides, no hatred-fueled feuds. 

I loved the book and only wish it had been three times as long and three times fuller of agricultural and environmental detail, all those descriptive passages that readers longing for action find tedious. 

All summer, market day at Winslowe was desultory and unsatisfactory. People would run in for half an hour and then hurry back to their hay-carting. There was a sense that the centre of gravity was elsewhere. But now winter bore in; the town was cheery; farmers came early and left late. Down the street pigs and cattle went in droves; barley, wheat and oats lay spilled about the steps of the Corn Exchange, where farmers appraised each other’s samples.

Or --

…It was a bad time with the ewes. The weather had been so wet that they had strained themselves heaving their heavy bodies through the mud from the field to the yard, and several lambs were born dead. In the living room of the farmhouse there were always one or two new-born lambs before the fire hand their bleating sounded loud indoors.

On the shepherd’s farm, horses are of prime importance. It’s horses that make or break a farm, and it’s best to have a pair that pull well together, plus a third that can do other jobs when the pair are harnessed together. Feeding the horses is Luke’s first job every morning. Miriam will make the fire, milk the cow, and churn butter. Luke loves the feel of the horses’ oats running through his fingers. Miriam pitches into the hay-making from the start of the book to the end.

A dear, loyal bookstore customer and reader of this blog once mused that perhaps I romanticize farming life, which is in reality dirty, hard, repetitive work, but I don’t see the contradiction. A career in fashion design or event planning would never have suited me, but if I had married differently and had farm work all my life, I don’t think I would have been discontented. Outdoor work that challenges physical strength and perseverance is much more to my liking than housework, although without livestock or poultry and with no field crops, my work life outdoors is limited to mowing grass, planting and tending gardens, pruning my apple trees once a year, picking fruit in season (soon, black raspberries; later, apples), and keeping the dread autumn olive at bay—that last a never-ending chore but one I keep at, year after year, because I will not give over my small piece of land to the invader. There is satisfaction both in the work and in surveying the results, temporary (the grass grows back, and the autumn olive rears its head in new corners) though they will always be. 

The other day I was thinking of books I love and feel are not well enough known, and I realized how many of them have agricultural or at least outdoor themes: Mary Webb’s Precious Bane; Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm; Conrad Richter’s The Trees and The Fields. Richter was awarded the Pulitzer for The Town, the third book of his “Awakening Land” trilogy, but it’s the first two that I love. Even in Mary Norton’s series of children’s books about the little people called borrowers, it’s the second in the series, The Borrowers Afield, that is my favorite, the time in the little family’s life when they live out-of-doors and must live off the land. 

Why would anyone think life has to be easy to be good? Where is the pleasure in not working? In my winters of seasonal retirement with the Artist, our seasons in the Arizona ghost town cabin, my days were filled with hiking, learning the desert vegetation, feeding wild birds, cooking and baking and writing and studying Spanish, all that indoor activity with sun flooding through the windows and, whenever possible, doors open to the air, so that—not in the middle of winter but as winter segued into spring—indoors and outdoors became one.

Indoors and outdoors as a seamless whole, going from one to the other without putting on or shedding extra clothing—that is another glory of summer, along with the outdoor work. “They practically abandoned the house,” writes Adrian Bell, and I smile happily at that sentence, although I certainly do love my porch!

For now, the grass in my yard is mowed (hours of satisfying work for me, my exercise, lots of “steps,” as people say) and Sunny’s jumps set up again so we can keep at our agility teamwork, also. She and I did well at last Monday's session after a winter away from the sport.

Getting there --

Black raspberries are beginning to ripen, and I have warned Tree Guy that soon we will be harvesting berries morning and evening, day after day, filling the freezer against the time of jam-making. In the orchard surrounding me, many varieties of grasses grow tall, and there is alfalfa blooming now, its flowers from deep purple to pale lavender and even a light yellow. Alfalfa is so lovely! Farmers Tom and Kathleen Koch down on South Lake Leelanau (he also has the Polish food truck in Cedar, behind his wife’s wonderful shop of Polish wares) feeds his animals on barley, not corn. It was good to enjoy Polish food and farming talk one evening with Tom. I'll bring photos from Cedar the next time we go.

Grasses in morning rain

Alfalfa, coming back year after year --

Adrian Bell again --

Hill Field was the best of it: this field would grow the finest malting barley, with that delicate almost silky look to the skin and pale golden. And when one cracked a grain it was not steely inside like that which grew on the light land, but white and mealy.

Meanwhile, of course, for me, my bookshop life continues, and lest I grow melancholy over reminders that I am not a farmer and don’t have time left in my life to become one, I thank my lucky stars ever day that I am a bookseller. (Especially, yes, a bookseller lucky enough to live in the country!) Schlepping heavy boxes of books, I think of my graduate school friend James, who when we were graduate assistants to professors called us “donkeys for philosophy” and then of the Artist, who, loving James’s phrase, when joining me in a big book move (such as Tree Guy and I undertook last week), called himself a “donkey for literature.” Bookselling is a much more physical line of work than many casual shoppers might imagine! 

Just as many people claim affiliations to larger groups, groups so large they can never know all the members personally, some political, and others consider themselves related by a sports team or a university (and of course there are many other possibilities), thinking it over I realize that book people are my tribe. 

Ah, yes, book people are my tribe, farmers are my neighbors, and I am a lucky woman!

In the shop

Outdoors

Visual fruits of my labors

P.S. To see some cool barn stuff, visit here.

P.P.S. I come back to add a few lines from Delacroix’s journals written in the 1850s, a page I opened to only because it was a July entry. He notes that man can often take comfort in misfortune, thinking himself so much better than his situation —

...but it far more frequently happens that man is bored in the midst of prosperity, that he even considers himself unfortunate while possessing. LaFontaine’s shepherd, when he had become prime minister and was surrounded in his elevated position by jealousy and intrigue, must have been an object of pity and must have felt himself to be one; he must have experienced a vivid moment of happiness, when he had donned his simple shepherd clothes and when they gave him his standing in the eyes of all men, so that he could return to the scenes and the life where, with this costume, he had tasted the happiness the most genuinely suited to man, that of a simple life devoted to work.

- Eugène Delacroix, Journal, the Walter Pach translation with a new introduction by Robert Motherwell

Smörgåsbord Grazing of the Bookish Variety

Happy holidays with (a few) jingle bells!

 

…There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave and hence is not worth building, but the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat – builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors….

- John Steinbeck, The Log From the ‘Sea of Cortez’

 

I wanted to title this post “Smörgåsbord of Books” and have that title in Swedish. Alas! Search as I might for a Swedish translation of the phrase, all I could come up with was books of recipes for a smörgåsbord, and it isn’t tasty food tidbits that is my subject today but a mode of reading that some of us get into from time to time, which consists of dipping into one book for a few greedy pages and then moving on to something entirely different, until one has bookmarks in half a dozen or so books.

 

This happened recently (once again, I should say, because it is no rare occurrence with me) because – I went to a book sale! Oh, more than that! I went twice, on the first day and again on the third and last day. I took my camera, thinking I might photograph the sale, but what was I thinking? Do I forget who I am? Of course I could do nothing but look at books, pick up books, make piles of books, until I had filled – well, never mind how many boxes! 

 

(How will I get all these books back to Michigan? The Artist and I had already accumulated so many books here in Arizona that the question was hardly a new one, and so, by my logic, it mattered not at all how many I added to an already-problematic collection. I’ll worry about transporting my treasures when the time comes.)

Winnowed through and rearranged #1

Before attending the sale, I was halfway through A Southwestern Utopia, by Thomas A. Robertson, the story of an experimental colony established in Mexico in the latter 1800s, based on Albert K. Owen’s principles of “Integral Co-operation,” but from my Thursday morning haul, I couldn’t resist slipping into the first few pages of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies. Irving made his expedition from the East Coast of the United States to Buffalo, New York, and from there to St. Louis and eventually into what is now Oklahoma, land that had been designated as “Indian country” but was already then, in 1832, being subjected to President Andrew Jackson’s infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Winnowed through and reorganized #2

Thus I was deep in the nineteenth century of North America, with two different books competing for my attention; however, my Saturday’s repeat foray into the gigantic book sale overloaded my table of bookish temptations, and one little paperback in particular, the one quoted from at the head of this post, stole –and broke! – my heart from the very first page. 

 

The Artist and I were both, we had discovered early in our acquaintance, fans of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and found the character of Doc especially enchanting. So imagine my mingled delight and heartbreak to find the first 70 pages of the little volume in my hands devoted to Steinbeck’s reminiscences of Ed Ricketts, the friend on whom he modeled the character of Doc! And then – he and Ed, a.k.a. “Doc,” are going on off together on a boat! The Artist, a self-described “stone Pisces,” although never a sailor, loved boats! Houseboats and rowing boats, mostly, though he didn’t turn up his nose at a quiet trolling motor. 

River Rat's summer abode

But he would read about any kind of adventure on any kind of boat, from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to Melville’s Moby Dick, and I am finding it almost unbearable that he never had a chance to read this book that would undoubtedly have had a prominent place on his shelf of favorites. So when I wake up at 2 a.m. and reach for the little volume, I am reading it for him as much as for myself. 

An Arizona friend had a request, though, and I turned my mind to that on Sunday afternoon. She wanted “something light” for her holiday flight back east to visit family in Michigan. When I found two different Laurie Lee titles at the sale, Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, my first thought was, Perfect! But then I wondered. Maybe that wouldn’t exactly be my friend’s cup of tea. I know that when she reads novels, she focuses more on action and dialogue than description – in fact, she confesses that she sometimes skips over long passages of description. So with that in mind, I went back to my shelves, and when a little paperback edition of The Borrowers, by Mary Norton, whispered, “Take me!” I thought, yes, that’s a good choice. Still playing it safe, however, I went to my Southwest corner, where Lisa G. Sharp’s memoir, A Slow Trot Home, seemed another likely winner. There! Three books – and all together, in volume and weight, less than many a hardcover novel. This way, whichever book she tries first, if it doesn’t suit her mood, she will have backup. But then, naturally, I had to read the first few pages of both the Laurie Lee books! 

 

It was 1934. I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far. As I left home that morning and walked away from the sleeping village, it never occurred to me that others had done this before me. 

    -  Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Also, since I had a lot of work to do, what with de-acquisitioning and rearranging books to make room for those recently acquired, naturally I was looking into several of those “new” books and couldn’t help reading a couple of chapters in Edmund Wilson’s Red, Black, Blond and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations, which reads more like a detailed travel narrative than a sociological tract, I’m happy to say. 

Minimally rearranged; cannot eliminate much from this corner.

Tucked away -- but not completely out of sight like the 17 books in a box in the closet!

 

Well, Sunday was a grey day. Overcast. Chilly. I’d thought I might drive to Willcox for fresh-roasted coffee beans but decided to stay put with puppy and private library instead. Sunny Juliet and I did some more “work” on identifying her various toys (rabbit, skunk, kong, ball, bear), although she would have been just as happy or happier to have me throw the tennis ball from one end of the house to the other, over and over, if we were going to stay indoors. 

Not a reader, but I love her!

Please Mind Your Manners in the Lake District

Sheepdog in her dreams

The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true. Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape. - James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life (NY: Flatiron Books, 2015)

The Shepherd’s Life tells about sheep-farming in the Lake District of England season by season. The reader encounters details and arcane terminology for sheep that are a thousand or more years old. Dogs, too, as should go without saying – smart little border collies, dogs that can make all the difference between a farmer’s success and failure when it comes to gathering the sheep from the fells.

Think you’re not interested in farming? Read on.

Rebanks the farmer and shepherd is a beautiful writer, and whatever subject such a writer chooses is worth reading. My farmer friends (and those, like me, with an inner farmer) will learn from and love this book, but so will my poet friends, world-traveler friends, and anyone curious about the world who appreciates good stories well told. 

Those of us who live, as the author does, in a vacation paradise can draw more particular lessons from the book, because what Rebanks lays before the reader is an entire way of life. This part of England, he tells us, was unknown to the outside world until “discovered” by poets and hikers and made famous by Wordsworth, Thomas West, Beatrix Potter, and Alfred Wainwright. After these people came and fell in love with the region, they told others about it. The Lake District became a famous holiday destination. Outsiders came to buy vacation homes, and these outsiders loved the Lake District in their own way and wanted to “preserve” its wild areas but did not always appreciate livestock on the commons.

Sound familiar?

As a farm boy who had never thought of his home territory “as a place of books or for leisure,” Rebanks one day sat high on a fell neighboring his own family’s land with a Wainwright guide in his hands,

...looking down at the landscape farmed by my father’s friends, and cross-checking it against the guide. It struck me powerfully that there was scarcely a trace of any of the things we cared about in what Wainwright had written. Apart from the odd dot on the map for a farm or a wall, none of our world was in those pages. I am wondering whether the people on that mountain see the working side of that landscape, and whether it matters. In my bones I feel it does matter. That seeing, understanding, and respecting people in their own landscape is crucial to their culture and way of life being valued and sustained. What you don’t see, you don’t care about. 

 It is a curious thing to slowly discover that your landscape is beloved of other people. It is even more curious, and a little unsettling, when you discover by stages that you as a native are not really part of the story and meaning they attach to that place. There are never any tourists here when it is raining sideways or showing in winter, so it is tempting to see it as a fair-weather love. Our relationship with the landscape is about being there through it all. To me the difference is like the distinction between what you felt for a pretty girl you knew in your youth, and the love you feel for your wife after many years of marriage. Most unsettling was the discovery that the people who thought about this place in this way outnumbered us by many hundreds to one. I found that threatening to our very existence....

That’s a lengthy quotation, but I didn’t feel I could cut it any shorter, because it speaks of the shepherd’s life in all its aspects: the farm families, their committed attachment to the place and way of life, the invisibility of that way of life to holiday-makers, and the feeling that the newer kind of love threatens the survival of the older.

Readying Leelanau fields

I am not a farmer, as you know. (Farming is yet another youthful dream path, like music, that my life did not take.) People say, in the Lake District, that it takes three generations to make someone a local. Well, at that rate, I can hardly even call myself American. One of my grandfathers was born in Ireland! My mother was born in California, father in Ohio, and I was born South Dakota, growing up (insofar as I ever did) in Illinois, coming to make a home Michigan only in 1967.

A recent meeting of the village planning commission grew tense when an audience member pointed accusingly to “newcomer” faces on the board, prompting several of those “newcomers” to defend themselves with statements of how many years they’d been “coming up here” (i.e., on vacation or for summers) and how many years they had now lived in Northport fulltime. Native American people make wry faces over such discussions, as well as the common statement, “In America, we’re all immigrants.” I had a customer once in my bookstore looking for a book about “local Indians” but not, she specified, modern-day Indians. She wanted anthropology, history, legend, not current real life.

Who counts? Who is visible? Whose lives and ways of life matter? 

More than a few locals here in Leelanau County sport bumper stickers that read, “My home is your vacation.” (I think that’s how it goes. I always felt it would be punchier as “Your vacation is my home,” but we all get the point.) I remember a t-shirt from a couple decades back that warned, “Don’t mess with me – I’m a local!”

Bees at work in Leelanau orchard

I live here, but there have been a few winters (we can’t afford to do it every year) when my husband and I have fled to an easier clime. A couple of my farmer friends themselves (one a fourth-generation local) are world travelers. And here’s what I want to say. If we travel  at all – any of us -- wherever we travel (unless it’s to Antarctica, the only continent on earth home to no historical or traditional human culture) we will be visiting someone else’s home. And if we move to make a home in a new place, we’re going to live where other people had lives before we got there.

When the irate local at the meeting called newcomers on the commission “an invasive species, like star thistle,” I touched him gently on the arm (he’s a friend) and said, “That’s me, too. I didn’t grow up here.” “No,” he said earnestly, “you can be a transplant without being an invasive species.” His distinction, as I understand it, is between newcomers who try to fit in and those who try to take over. Like the shepherd in the Lake District, he feels his existence threatened. But those he perceives as a threat felt threatened by his anger and became defensive in their turn. They feel they are helping the local community -- bringing it "up to speed," into the modern world.

Must everyone, everywhere, be goaded into a faster and faster way of life – everything high-tech, “branded,” and magazine-slick in appearance – or shoved off to the side of the road?

It’s a touchy subject.

Not only in England’s Lake District, but in our own country, from Hawaii to Alaska and in all the forty-eight contiguous continental states, everyone’s vacation – or new home – or chosen retirement community – was already someone else’s home. Those who can afford periods (or lives) of leisure bump up against those working for a living. Because wherever you go, there will be people working, or life there would not be possible!

“Respect people in their own landscape.”

That sounds to me like nothing more than a particular application of the Golden Rule. If we think of it that way, it’s pretty easy to understand, isn’t it?

Beech buds in Leelanau woods

Well, I’ve barely touched on the wealth to be found in The Shepherd’s Life -- have only focused here on one of its many topics. Fathers and sons is another major theme. Economic vicissitudes and cycles. Livestock breeding. Schooling as preparation for life – or not. Oxford University. Town, gown, and farm. There’s plenty here for every reader’s interests. After all, the best memoirs present life much as do the best novels – in its particularity and its universality, through personalities never before encountered and yet familiar in many aspects, showing a way of life not experienced by the reader but shared by the writer. And this is one of those best.

I do want to say, lest you be put off by a shepherd’s resentment of invading writers, that James Rebanks came to an appreciation of Wordsworth and others, the more he learned of their appreciation for his way of life. His favorite, not surprisingly, was Mrs. Heelis, who also bred and showed sheep from her Lake District farms. You know Mrs. Heelis by her other name: Beatrix Potter.

Book Review: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, 
and Jane Austen,

by Charlie Lovett

NY: Viking, 2014

Hardcover, $27.95

On sale October 20, 2014

Like a wary horse led toward a new and unfamiliar horse trailer – i.e., suspiciously, nervously -- that’s how I approach modern fiction claiming inspiration from Jane Austen’s work. My mind is not closed but is definitely guarded. At the same time, I’m also prepared to be won over. That’s it, though: I’ll be passing judgment on every page with a standard set 200 years ago by Jane Austen herself. How could it be otherwise?

Charlie Lovett did not win me over on the first page or even in the first chapter of First Impressions. I found fault with his adjectives and even his verbs.

Her first impression was that he was the picture of gloom—dressed in shabby clerical garb, a dark look on his crinkled face, doubtless a volume of dusty sermons clutched in his ancient hand.

But Jane Austen herself is the main character in that and every other chapter, so Lovett has given himself quite a challenge. Attempting to imitate Jane Austen! It is all too easy for words to fail: he who attempts and she who critiques had best tread carefully here. And so I read on.

After only four pages of his fictional Jane and her fictional and purely invented friend and mentor, our modern author shifts to the present day, introducing us to young Sophie Collingwood, and you’d think Sophie would seem easier to accept than first-chapter Jane, but maybe I’d allowed my skepticism to deepen over the previous four pages, because I did not immediately cotton to Sophie, either. Reading ostentatiously as she walked along, looking down on the strange young man for being American and casually dressed but then speaking to him of her father in a manner seemingly designed to invite the development of a relationship -- that is Sophie as we first meet her. “Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘He likes to shoot things.’” Is she trying to give Eric the brush-off or encourage revelations? Maybe she’s not sure herself, and maybe our first impression of Sophie will not be a lasting impression.

Back to Hampshire, 1796, in the third chapter, the Reverend Mr. Richard Mansfield gives the fictional Jane the first suggestion of many to follow as to the development of a story she has in progress.

“I only felt that if Sir John Middleton were a more affable sort – the type to throw parties or host picnics – your younger characters might be thrown together with more frequency.” 

 “I confess I had not yet given much thought to the character of Sir John,” said Jane. “But I think you are right. And it should not take much rewriting to set him on a course to host picnics and balls aplenty.”

Now the horse is asked to walk up the ramp to the trailer, and this horse plants hooves squarely on solid earth and digs in! Stiff legs, ears laid back! Jane Austen needing literary guidance from an older man? One whose own writing is pedestrian in the extreme? What kind of liberties are being taken here with one of my favorite writers of all time?

The structure of First Impressions is two stories, however, one historical fiction and the other modern mystery. Eventually the two will intertwine. And fortunately my second impression of Sophie was more favorable than the first, the revised view beginning where Lovett starts cashing in the promise of “old books” in his subtitle. Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, I learn to my great delight, was a book collector. Soon Sophie finds a job in a secondhand bookshop! She gets to know a customer whose passion is early printing, and this intrigues her (though she’s never been interested in the printing aspect of books before), as her family is descended from an early English printer. She learns to question her own first impressions of everyone and everything.

There is a lot in this book for bibliophiles. My part-time bookstore helper, Bruce, will love the beginning of this chapter (page 79):

Almost without thinking ... Sophie had walked to Cecil Court, a short pedestrian lane between Charing Cross Road and St. Martin’s Lane that was lined on both sides with bookshops. Cecil Court, with its rows of tall glass windows framed by green painted woodwork and filled with displays of every type of book imaginable, was the heart of London’s secondhand book trade. The world seemed to move more slowly here....

And Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, expounding to her on the beauty of rare books:

“If you mail a rare stamp it becomes worthless. If you drink a bottle of rare wine, you’re left with some recycling. But if you read a rare book it’s still there, it’s still valuable, and it’s achieved the full measure of its being. A book is to be read, whether it’s worth five pounds or five thousands pounds.”

Because that’s the kind of collector Bertram was, a reader rather than a trophy hunter. It’s impossible not to love him, so I was grateful to have so many encounters with him in flashbacks, despite his death early in the novel.

Death? Uncle Bertram? Did he fall, or was he pushed? Is Sophie’s imagination running away with her, as did young Catherine Morland’s in Austen’s Northanger Abbey?

Whatever will be discovered later on, Sophie’s impression that Uncle Bertram’s death is suspicious constitutes a mystery for her. The second mystery has to do with a couple of very specific 18^th-century books and the relationship between the fictional Jane Austen (remember, this is a novel Lovett has written) and her aged mentor. Sophie is determined to solve both.

Jane’s mentor, Richard Mansfield, is mirrored in Sophie’s life by her Uncle Bertram and later, in lesser fashion, by the bookseller, Gusty Boxhill. Sophie’s loving relationship with her sister Victoria mirrors that of Jane and Cassandra. Eric and Winston, Sophie’s “suitors,” seem to have no parallel in the fictional Jane Austen’s story. Are we to believe and trust either one of them, or do the older men hold all the truth and devotion cards?

For me, the modern chapters of this book worked better than those with Jane Austen, although I enjoyed brief two-century-old glimpses of the fictional printer. As for the mysteries, they felt contrived, and I could have done without them, whereas the world of old books, bookshops, bookselling, printing history, and primary source research had me spellbound. But this is, as always, a subjective response: I am a bookseller, and I live in a world of books. It’s also no small matter to me when a writer undertakes to re-invent one of my favorite authors.

The bottom line, though, is that First Impressions is an entertaining book and makes enjoyable reading. It will be irresistible to Austen fans and bibliophiles, and mystery readers and book club members will enjoy it, as well. The discussion possibilities are endless.

Leave a comment and become eligible for a give-away copy of this book! Sorry, U.S. mailing addresses only.

A Novel I’ll Be Re-Reading For Years to Come

One of my favorite meadows near home

Months ago a friend recommended that I read Longbourn, by Jo Baker, but summer is a busy time, and books and weeks fly by at a dizzying pace, so I didn’t pick up the book that had been waiting patiently for me until a few days ago. That’s all it took—picking it up and reading the first page. I was hooked.

The main character, Sarah, is a maid in the Bennet household, that family of five daughters famous among English-language readers for 200 years from Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Hill and her husband run the house with the help of maids Sarah and young Polly, and as Polly, only about 12 years old, has a hard time waking up early, it falls to the more responsible Sarah to rise in the dark on washday and go out into the cold morning to begin the hardest day of the week.

The air was sharp at four thirty in the morning, when she started work. The iron pump-handle was cold, and even with her mitts on, her chilbains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail. A long day to be got through, and this just the very start of it.  

All else was stillness. Sheep huddled in drifts on the hillside; birds in the hedgerows were fluffed like thistledown; in the woods, fallen leaves rustled with the passage of a hedgehog; the stream caught starlight and glistened over rocks, Below, in the barn, cows huffed clouds of sweet breath, and in the sty, the sow twitched, her piglets bundled at her belly. Mrs. Hill and her husband, up high in their tiny attic, slept the black blank sleep of deep fatigue; two floors below, in the principal bedchamber, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet were a pair of churchyard humps under the counterpane. The young ladies, all five of them sleeping in their beds, were dreaming of whatever it was that young ladies dream.

From Austen’s book we already know Longbourn (the house) and the Bennet family and their neighborhood and the nearby town of Meryton, the relatives and the officers and dozens of letters exchanged by the gentlefolk. We’ve made a visit of several weeks with Elizabeth when she goes to stay with Charlotte Lucas at the parsonage after Charlotte has married Mr. Collins, and we’ve accompanied Elizabeth again into Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle. Her parents’ foibles are as familiar to us as those of our own family. But without Baker’s book we hadn’t the barest acquaintance with the servants at Longbourn, Netherfield, Lucas Lodge, or Pemberley. As the author says in her note at the end of her book,

The main characters in Longbourn are ghostly presences in Pride and Prejudice; they exist to serve the family and the story. They deliver notes and drive carriages; they run errands when nobody else will step out of doors—they are the “proxy” by which the shoe-roses for Netherfield Ball are fetched in the pouring rain. But they are—at least in my head—people too.

So a great part of the pleasure in reading Longbourn is coming back to a familiar fictional place and adding a new dimension to our experience of it. Jo Baker goes places with her characters that Jane Austen never went. It is as if the servants and those whom they serve inhabit completely different worlds, as of course they do, from a social and economic perspective. Seeing Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their daughters through the eyes of their servants, therefore, gives a very different picture from the one painted in Austen’s original novel.

But another source is pleasure in reading Longbourn is simply Jo Baker’s beautiful writing. The housekeeper at Hunsford Parsonage peers into scoured pans with her “head cocked like a hen.” When Sarah goes out one night, she stumbles through “cow-churned fields.” We are in the country, in the English countryside, and see and hear and feel it all around us—the old drovers’ road near Longbourn and the stone steps of the boundary wall at Pemberley, “treads ... glossy with the years.”

Not everything is lovely and pastoral in this world, however, and Baker also brings in the muck and the blood of it, along with the far-off slavery that brings sugar to England and the plight of orphans and unwed mothers and country boys off to war in strange lands and widows and orphans in those strange lands. All this she manages with brilliant economy of language and without ever losing the focus on her characters. For instance, when collecting gossip from their aunt in Meryton, the girls learn, in passing, that “a private had been flogged,” and no more is said of the flogging by Austen. Baker has Sarah come unawares upon the scene in Meryton:

Her senses, briefly, could not accommodate the image.  

Then it was a pig. A carcass. A great slab of meat waiting to be skinned.  

Then her perceptions shifted again, true patterns formed: she saw the shape of human muscle, shoulder blade, a dark slick of hair, the cable-twist of neck.  

In the instant that she saw, she looked away, but by then it was too late. ...His skin was lurid in the dull light, his cheek hazed with greying stubble and flattened against the dark weathered wood. His eyes were wide and rolling, his jaw clenched. His body, held immobile by the bonds, was fiercely at work: his arm muscles shifted and twisted, his feet trod and braced against the cobbles like a horse’s.

It is a horrible scene, shocking to Sarah and to the reader, but the detail in it is not gratuitous, and the images are those of a masterful writer: “his feet ... braced against the cobbles like a horse’s.”

Somewhere I read a review of Longbourn that took issue with Baker’s mentions of chamber pots and night soil and women’s bloody napkins and babies’ stinking nappies. Well, this is the servants’ world: what the gentry would never mention and can pretend does not exist must be dealt with by the servants, and Baker does not dwell on it unduly. It’s just that in Pride and Prejudice, we share Jane and Elizabeth’s sheltered, privileged world; in Longbourn we are in Sarah and Polly’s world, the one that props the other up and makes it possible.

But there is another dimension, and if the “necessary house” takes us down a level from Austen’s world, the political and military realities Baker includes take us up to a bird’s eye view of England at that time—again, while always staying focused on her characters. History barely intrudes on the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, but the Longbourn cast know its pinch and fear its chill winds.

Jo Baker loves Pride and Prejudice and has been re-reading it for most of her life, a love I share. When a good friend of mine said in our reading group that she “loved the language but didn’t like the characters at all,” my heart sank. Not like Eliza Bennet? No, my friend was impatient with Eliza and with all the rest because none of them knew what it meant to work; instead, they led what she considered superficial, pampered, frivolous lives. Now I can’t wait for my friend to read Longbourn. She will love both the language and the characters and will be drawn irresistibly into the drama of their lives.

I believe a reader coming to Longbourn without any knowledge of Jane Austen’s novel could still be bowled over by the story and the writing. Despite Baker’s inspiration, her work can stand on its own. I’m also sure readers like my friend who found Pride and Prejudice boring (!) will have a more positive reaction to Longbourn, finding it more “realistic.”

As for me, I will go on loving and re-reading Pride and Prejudice, only now I will also have Longbourn to love and re-read. My experience of the English countryside in the late 18^th century has been deepened and broadened and enriched, especially as it pertains to one small English neighborhood, my love for that faraway, fictional place a reflection of my love for my own home.

Wild grape and willow at water's edge

“Wordsworth in Our Very Legs”

There’s so much I haven’t been able to show you lately – new sights in Northport and in the countryside – owing to technical difficulties. But then I thought, the natural world looks pretty much the same as it looked last year, so maybe I can find an old picture. It was old pictures I used recently to illustrate my post on Mary Russell’s book of Northport reminiscences. I’m still trying to work through the logjam preventing me from transferring photos from my camera to laptop and thence to blog, but for today, again, I have no new images.

What I do have is some wonderful writing to share, going back and forth as I have been doing in the evenings between J. B. Priestley’s English Journey, first published in 1934, and Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island, first released in 1996. Two different worlds, in many ways, the intervening decades having wrought such changes to English cities, towns, and countrysides, but continuities and similarities, too, I find. Yesterday morning I finished the last couple pages of Bryson, so after my arduous evening of mowing I settled down on the porch once more with Priestly, at that part of his book when his travels took him near enough his home town of Bradford that he spent several days there, visiting old friends and old haunts and comparing 1930s Bradford to that of his boyhood. Here is a wonderful passage I will indulge myself by quoting at length:

...Bradford is a city entirely without charm, though not altogether ugly, and its industry is a black business; but it has the good fortune to be on the edge of some of the most enchanting country in England. A sharp walk of less than an hour from more than one tram terminus will bring you to the moors, wild virgin highland, and every mill and warehouse will be out of sight and the whole city forgotten. However poor you are in Bradford, you need never be walled in, bricked up, as a round million folk must be in London. Those great bare heights, with a purity of sky above and behind them, are always there, waiting for you. And not very far beyond them, the authentic dale country begins. There is no better country in England. There is everything a man can possibly want in these dales, from trout streams to high wild moorland walks, from deep woods to upland miles of heather and ling. I know no other countryside that offers you such entrancing variety. So if you can use your legs and have a day now and then to yourself, you need never be unhappy long in Bradford. The hills and moors and dales are there for you. Nor do they wait in vain. The Bradford folk have always gone streaming out to the moors.

Priestley’s paragraphs are long. The one from which I’m quoting does not stop where I stopped but goes on, so let’s go on with it, shall we?

In the old days, when I was a boy there, this enthusiasm for the neighboring country had bred a race of mighty pedestrians. Everybody went enormous walks. I have known men who thought nothing of tramping between thirty and forty miles every Sunday. In those days the farmhouses would give you a sevenpenny tea, and there was always more on the table than you could eat. Everybody was knowledgeable about the Dales and their walks, and would spend hours discussing the minutest details of them. You caught the fever when you were quite young, and it never left you. However small and dark your office or warehouse was, somewhere inside your head the high moors were glowing, the curlews were crying, and there blew a wind as salt as if it came from the middle of the Atlantic.

Is the paragraph finished here? It could end on that lofty note but doesn’t. It continues,

That is why we did not care very much if our city had no charm, for it was simply a place to go and work in, until it was time to set out for Warfedale or Wensleydale again. We were all, at heart, Wordsworthians to a man. We have to make an effort to appreciate a poet like Shelley, with his rather gassy enthusiasm and his bright Italian colouring; but we have Wordsworth in our very legs.

Well, there is every so much more in this wonderful old travel book of Depression-era England, but just for a lark let’s dip into our contemporary’s book and see what Bill Bryson has to say about Bradford, 60 years later.

Bradford’s role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well. Nowhere on this trip would I see a city more palpably forlorn. Nowhere would I pass more vacant shops, their windows soaped or covered with tattered posters for pop concerns... or more office buildings festooned with TO LET signs. ... Such life as there was had mostly moved indoors to a characterless compound called the Arndale Centre. ... But mostly Bradford seemed steeped in a perilous and irreversible decline.

Another Depression clearly hit Bradford since Priestley’s time, this more recent one doubtless brought on largely  (though this cause doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bryson) by the advent of synthetic fabrics. Old Bradford was a wool town, dominated throughout by the wool trade. Bryson does allow that “Bradford is not without its charms,” and he cites the old Alhambra Theatre, “built in 1914 in an excitingly effusive style with minarets and towers” and now “suptuously and skillfully renovated.” And he adored the film museum and the old travelogue being shown there, “This Is Cinerama.” The magic of movies!

And then it was over and we were shuffling out into the drizzly twilit bleakness of Bradford, which was something of a shock to the system, believe me. I stood by a bronze statue of J. B. Priestley, who was a Bradford lad, and stared at the bleak, hopeless city before me and thought, Yes, I am ready to go home.

What a pity Bryson did not escape to the moors!

Lest we end on a sour note, however, it’s worth following old Bill to the Lake District, where he joined friends in the Wordsworthian pursuit of a “walk” to the “fabled summit of Bow Fell, at 2,900 feet the sixth highest of the Lakeland hills.

Walkers ahead of us formed well-spaced dots of slow-moving color [wearing modern clothing made of bright, synthetic fabrics, I’m sure) leading to a majestically remote summit, lost in cloud. As ever, I was quietly astounded to find that so many people had been seized with a notion that struggling up a mountainside on a damp Saturday on the winter end of November was fun.

The weather gets worse and worse, the higher they climb, and once they lose the path and become briefly lost, but at last they reached the summit, where their party joined in a more general party:

I counted thirty-three people there ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks, and wildly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I could explain this to a foreign onlooker – the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountaintop in an ice storm – and realized there was no way you could explain it. We trudged over to a rock, where a couple kindly moved their rucksacks and shrank their picnic space to make room for us. We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hard-boiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought, God, I love this country.

Perhaps this shows that no matter how bleak the town or how wretched the weather, getting out in it energetically refreshes the human spirit. Do you think so?

Sarah and I did not have wretched weather this morning for our outdoor play time and woodland rambles, merely an overcast Michigan sky and a mild breeze. But then, we don’t need an ice storm to take refreshment in nature. Michigan is not England. But I do think my dog and I have Wordsworth in our legs.