A good 7/10 (still unhappy with and resistant to the inadequate 5-star system), I enjoyed most of Susannah Stapleton's The Adventures of Maud West, LaA good 7/10 (still unhappy with and resistant to the inadequate 5-star system), I enjoyed most of Susannah Stapleton's The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime. 'Secrets' because there was a private woman behind the name-change to Maud West, that of Edith Maria Barber, married as Elliott, private detective from ~1905-1939, and mother of six children; and 'lies', because she seemed to have invented a lot of thrilling stories à la mode of Conan Doyle, as she undertook largely humdrum and tedious detective work (waiting, watching, divorce cases...) during the Golden Age of the whodunnit - so you can't blame her for her adventurous advertising in frequent articles in weeklies and newspapers, some of which must have added another source of income, and much publicity.
Apart from some tall tales and the emerging picture of a busy and complex character, the book demonstrated the enormous amount of research required in historical non-fiction and biography, made significantly easier since the age of the internet, but still nonetheless required the collation of vast depositories of information that must have seemed to those involved of little use to anyone outside of family. What emerged was the re-creation of a family living through particularly troubled times, with two world wars, the fight of the suffragettes for (at least) greater equality, as well as the ordinary lives of struggle and survival in an age without the NHS and modern conveniences.
It is, of course, a detective story in itself, and while the structure of alternating chapters named after titles of prominent golden age authors (Christie, Allingham, Sayers, Doyle, Tey�) with short pieces by Maud herself was also a record of the journalistic research journey, it meant that, necessarily, there could never be a smooth storyline woven throughout, but each chapter revealing a little more of the character of the industrious sleuth, while concentrating on thematic issues such as types of crime (divorce, blackmail, drugs) and the detection methods (disguise, shadowing, and so on).
Naturally, with a personality like Maud's - self-publicist and part-adventurer - the author was as often confused as I was about what was truth and which fiction, but in the end it's another look at a period which in the imagination, at least, removed from the horrors of those wars and the living conditions of the time, is as much romanticised by us, authors of historical fiction, film-makers and TV studios, as Maud romanticised her profession. We're not too interested in the grime beneath the surface colour, even if the subject is crime in all its indignities. What emerges is a patchwork of pentimenti, but a nonetheless fascinating look at a period and a personality that fills in certain gaps between the whodunnits and mysteries of a golden age of the genre, which create a very personal map of the era in our minds.
I enjoyed the journey - but I must say, I could never undertake such hard work over so long for such a work, of historical non-fiction. I'll stick to the made-up stories. It seems so much easier....more
A delicious insight into the personalities that made up the famous Bloomsbury Group, of which we would be hard-pressed to name a handful. Here, there A delicious insight into the personalities that made up the famous Bloomsbury Group, of which we would be hard-pressed to name a handful. Here, there are twenty, 12 of whom formed the core of the band of artists, writers, philosophers and diverse intellectuals who belong to a time when Modernism developed out of the New Hedonism of the dying embers of the Victorian period, and new ideas of subjectivity and sensibility in art and writing were borne on the wave of Freudian darkness and the new scientific enlightenment spearheaded by Einstein.
Since few academics can agree which period Modernism covers (1890-1939, or 1900-39, or as late as 1910 onwards), so too with when the Bloomsbury Group throve. Frances Spalding, with her own biographies of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, and so a bit of an expert on the Bloomsbury Group, puts the date at 1904, when Vanessa and her brothers and sister relocated to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. But its origins also lie in the Cambridge Apostles of 1899, when the Stephen sisters' brother Thoby and his coterie of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf met up, and to which Fry, MacCarthy, Forster and Keynes were also subsequently invited. It all gets a bit confusing, but that's not least because they were nearly all interrelated either through family or marriage. It needs a proper family tree.
However, the group is most relevant to me as a lover of Virginia Woolf. To The Lighthouse (1927) is my favourite novel and her diaries are a sensational read. The woman was unique, and drew me in with her siren poetic voice onto the dunes of her imagination, and appalled me in her diaries with her snobbishness while beguiling me with her perceptions. There are examples of both voices in this biopic series of the personalities belonging to the group, and I read in her diaries of her affection for Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, as well as her mixed feelings for Ottoline Morrell.
'It is not our province, who onely (sic) gather his works, and give them to you, to praise. It is yours thaA true treasure full of eloquent treasures.
'It is not our province, who onely (sic) gather his works, and give them to you, to praise. It is yours that reade him.' - Heminges and Condell, fellow member's of Shakespeare in the King's Men, who collected and collated Shakespeare's 36 (at the time, minus Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsman) plays into what we now know as the First Folio of 1623, in their opening letter to the greatest portfolio of work the world will ever know (including counting Blake and all his predecessors, and Dickens, too).
There are three things only that principally contain and sustain all our lives: the word, time and love. All else is entailed in these three great properties of our universe, and their infinite combination makes up the promise of our days. We might now, in modernising this definition, change 'time' to 'spacetime', for they are, we are reliably informed, one and the same. Yet in the infinite minutiae which these three things encompass, a trillion treasures are hid.
Neil MacGregor - art historian and Director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015 - takes but 20 symbolic items of seemingly pedestrian worth, and gives us something which is invaluable not only to our understanding of the trials and tribulations of the time of Shakespeare's England, Europe, and the globe, but which is invaluable to the literary perspective of Thing Theory.
Never would I have assumed I would be saying that Thing Theory could be fascinating, but in MacGregor's 20 essays based on 20 key items, we encompass Shakespeare's portfolio, the world and the history behind so many of its influences, acts and actions. It is not merely a record of the times but a conjuration - like Prospero's magic - of immersion in and wonder of the history of the fraught Elizabethan and Puritanical Jacobean eras when Shakespeare wrote his 38 plays, 5 poems and 146 sonnets.
Each item used to portray a particular aspect of the history and the plays - from the 7cm silver coin in Chapter 1 which showed the route taken by Drake in 1577-80 in his circumnavigation of the then-known charted world (and the two successive creations it spawned I'll not give away here, are like historical poetry), to the First Folio of 1623 in Chapter 20 - has a symbolic aura which resonates with us even now, and teaches us ways of seeing the plays which we otherwise may well not have passed a thought. An invaluable perspective.
And it is funny, both deliberately and incidentally:
'France lost so many kings to the knife that it began to look like carelessness.' (p.154) - on the chapter (11) on Treason And Plots.
Beware the oysters, groundlings!
'Here you may both see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes.' - Thomas Coryate's travel guide, espousing Venice and denigrating foreigners (p.162, Ch.12, Sex and the City).
Framed with catchy and even on occasion saucy titles, illustrated with apposite illustrations, each chapter is truly a gem, giving you an insight into this strange, ill-humoured, filthy, lice-ridden, plague-beset, plot-infested world of high regency and high treason and high art, from the apprentice's cap to the lofty heights of Elsinore's battlements, and I could not envisage reading a historical account of the times otherwise, yet this book is a gift that fell in my lap at just the right time - while ordering Richard III [1592-1594] from the RSC shop. And it was only £10.50 - for a hardback, yes.
MacGregor quotes his professional peers as well as the plays aplenty, including colleagues from the British Museum and the British Library to European academics, historians, curators, and Shakespearean directors, and touches on 31 of the plays as well as other contemporary playwrights' works, and on the poems and sonnets. The illustrations alone fascinate and inform.
There are invaluable snippets of information which were state of the art at the time: clocks began to show the minute hand in the 1590s, but the second hand was not introduced until 50 years later - and nowhere in Shakespeare are seconds mentioned as marks of time. Hierarchy and position are defined by the type of hat or cap one wore, the quality of clothing, the type of dagger or sword slung, and the position obtained in the theatre. The world order of London knew of Moors because of the combined Moroccan-English freeing of African galley slaves, but they were soon expelled because of public disapproval. Ships were symbols of great state, because of Drake's and Raleigh's foreign ventures, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the commemoration of James I's marriage to the Danish princess, Anne - their travels through storms causing Christian IV to offer a large wooden model in honour of their successful journey. The Union Flag was in its initial design stage on James I's accession to the throne. Did you know that the plague spawned the tobacco industry? The world is lit by the examination of the relevance of so many things we take for granted which were symbolic in Elizabethan and Jacobean life as complete novelties or innovations.
But MacGregor also provides us with exemplary use of the 3,000 word essay, both as uniquely novel informative exercise and fascinating entertainment. A 1st class with honours.
Absolutely brilliant, in both senses of the word....more
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