Year chases year, decay pursues decay … except for the detective heroine

My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)

Dear friends and readers,

Half-way through January and I have some news. The good includes my two new chairs, which arrived this past Monday: the front room chair, a recliner, is deliciously comfortable. There is Ian trying it out. It’s miraculously engineered to hold up my back and head while I can still read and stretch my feet out. I love the upholstery too. The desk chair is not as obviously wonderful, but it is strong and also has a good back which I can lean into, no pillow needed. It was a bit high, but Izzy managed to bring it down sufficiently so I can type, write at my desk without over-hunching, and be seen by my zoom camera. Poor Ian has to jump higher, and I endure more scratches so we can be comfortable together on it too.

These are the first pieces of furniture I’ve bought since Jim died — barring three bookcases, 2 2/3s the way up and wide for the enclosed porch, and one small one for the part of the hall.

Not too soon, for I’ve had bad news about my back and walking. Two years ago I began to have sudden soaring pain from the back of my waist to my hip when I walked too long or fast; then about a year ago I couldn’t walk as long without my lower back starting to hurt, and I’d have these sudden stabs, and now they occur at random just walking about the house. I said that magic year number, 1946 (“what year were you born?”), and got an appointment quickly with Dr Wiltz and then a physical therapist. Arthritis, degenerating disks and osteoporosis are the terms. These translate into I am losing the cushions (all metaphors now) between my disks (bone or cartilage) around the right side of my lower back to the point that two of them rub together — there’s almost no cushion. He told me I ought not to take long walks, for that just inflames the area. While I no longer enjoy long walks, especially as almost all the time I do it alone, this morning as I went out to pick up my paper I felt a yearning for the fresh chilled air.

Driving to and from a gym is stressful, time-consuming; most of them are anonymous, no socializing I could see, decent ones not inexpensive. Great anonymous barns, soulless, worse than modern hotels if you can imagine that. (Years ago Jim took me to a luxurious one, very expensive, and then said we were too old, and would not fit in as it was for socializing.) A cold water pool is torture. So now at home twice a day I’ve started exercises designed to strengthen my “core.” I once tried yoga, which I found just ridiculous — not the stretching itself but all the inane talk, words, rituals around it, including the special music. But I have left-over a mat. My knees hurt when they hit the hard floor — and at other times too. It aches my shoulders to lay flat down and the upper part of my back while I lie on the floor. I do the stand-from-a-chair and stationary bike too. I listen on my ipad to Pandora channels for Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nancy Griffins, Joan Baez. It all takes over 20 minutes. I am more careful about picking anything up — I could not pick up the tree to take it out of the house when Christmas (the tree) was taken out – Izzy did it.

Poor lonely Ian. Izzy and I have decided we will not go anywhere together for more than a few hours, no days on end until we find him a companion cat. He and I are becoming closer, and she tells me that when I am out for a couple of hours, he starts to prowl about looking for me, and then will go into the hall near my workroom and then howl. Like he is doing right now from the living area — I call it clamoring. I will not be able to cope with the websites Laura showed me: run by enterpreneurial foster mothers, I’ve no idea what to do (like the photo websites where I can’t figure out how to order framed photos of Clarycat), if she does not help me, by later spring I’ll go to the Alexandria animal shelter and get us a rescue cat … and/or maybe a dog. Dog walking would not be overlong, get me out and eventually provides companionship. I am very lonely for Clarycat. Ian does not sleep with me, he does not stay close all the time the way she did; he’s not there in the same way. I find myself crying when I try to talk of her.

Resolutely turning to good things: Laura did come over and all of my three blogs now have a modern appearance: they had hitherto been using a “retired” template and it was beginning to develop glitches with new aspects of wordpress software: if you step back and look at Under the Sign of Sylvia II or all around what you are reading, and you will see what a pretty set of blue hues, with my profile picture, Rose Williams as Charlotte Heywood off to work as a governess in the Andrew Davies & company free adaptation of Sanditon. Go to Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two, and you see shades of dark pink and maroon lettering; this time my profile picture is Olivia Williams as Jane Austen meditating the water sadly in Gwyneth Hughes’s Miss Austen Regrets (out of Austen’s letters, especially as interpreted by David Nokes); finally, go to Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two, and the space is soft greens and a sort of hazel-colored lettering, with the profile picture, a still from a movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw several years ago at the Folger, an actress playing Puck looking into the horizon — the blog is to be on the creative spirit in all the arts. Here are these two pictures in full:

Nothing without its flaw: Izzy and I have not managed to make my links visible as a blogroll any more. The “happiness engineers” will not help people out individually, and four different sets of instructional videos have gotten us nowhere. I have the links inside my software so they are not lost to me at least.

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From Gaudy Night — both people under strain

My courses have started at Politics and Prose, and OLLI at Mason begins next week, which includes me teaching Women’s Detective Fiction. More on the last tomorrow at Austen Reveries. For now I’ll say I am so enjoying the four Dorothy Sayers books I’ve read or am in the midst of over the past few weeks, the pleasure is akin to what I feel when I read Jane Austen. I’ve gone through at least 3 bouts of reading Sayers: once at age 18-20 when I read two of her books from Dante’s Commedia (Hell, Purgatory), which three yellowing aged books I still have: my first introduction to the poet in this Edmund Spenserian verse. I did understand the poem – there are more notes on a page than verse. I was in my first years of college, basically living alone. I can remember reading Five Red Herrings and Nine Tailors at the time (with my father disparaging Lord Peter as “not manly,” “not believable”), but find I own copies of Unnatural Death and Busman’s Holiday. Then in my later 30s and 40s, when PBS aired the Edward Petherbridge-Harriet Walter series of three Lord Peter-Harriet Vane stories when I read for the first time Strong Poison and Gaudy Night, and just loved them. My original pseudonym so long ago when I first came onto the Net was Miss Sylvia Drake! And now again. Kara Keeling’s course in Clouds of Witness, Unpleasantness at Bellona Club, and Murder Must Advertise is very enjoyable, intelligent, informative, pleasant. I am by the way enchanted by Ian Carmichael’s Lord Peter, and Sayers’ too.

So I’ve decided for Spring 2025 to do a course on Dorothy Sayers. It will spare me new work — all that I’m doing now will go into that. At moments I get so enthusiastic I begin to think of a book.

For Sayers there are three biographies at least, so many editions of all her books, but not much close reading and literary criticism. Her Lord Peter Wimsey is not truly taken seriously except by those writing about mystery-thrillers by women in the 1930s. Not a very wide category. For PD James whose books are equally but differently works of genius, there is much literary criticism, and hardly any biography beyond her own autobiography. The third woman I’m “covering for my course, Elizabeth Mackintosh aka Josephine Tey has a marvelous biographer, Jennifer Morag Henderson but essays about her are about her Scottishness and Richard III. She wrote far more plays than novels, had two pseudonyms (Gordon Daviat the other)’ her Richard of Bordeaux, a great hit, disagreeing (wrongly) with Shakespeare’s interpretation of the man as a troubled neurotic, made John Gielgud’s early fame. But I’m not compelled for she lacks the variety and brilliant literary facility and intriguing depths of Sayers.

77 people have registered for this course at OLLI at Mason — I don’t recognize a lot of the names and I’ve a hunch those showing up who’ve never had a class with me may not stay long if they think they are there to be frivolously engaging in superficial games. For me these authors and their books improve each time you read them, for each time you get far more out of their worlds. I’ve started Singing Sands by Tey (later book where her detective has had a nervous breakdown and returns to the Highlands to recuperate); I’ve now started, read and seen so many by P.D. James I must write a separate blog. I do think this is the first time in years I’ve come across a literary figure I’m drawn to about whom I would truly enjoy writing a book. FWIW, there’s been several in my life: Anne Finch, Winston Graham of Poldark fame; not Diana Gabaldon but her Outlander books (still her), Austen, Trollope, and now Dorothy Sayers.

A dream image of myself as Fanny Price (Sylvestre Le Tousel, one of the great actresses of our time) writing, here in the library of Mansfield Park to her beloved brother (Mansfield Park, 1983)

Out of my course in Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance with Michelle Simms-Burton, I’ve been watching the film adaptation of Nella Larson’s Passing. Done deliberately in black and white. It is a very faithful adaptation about the agonies of a black person who looks white in the US and has chosen to lead a life of a white — cutting herself off from family, original friends and ever living a lie. The characters are all black middle class is part of the movie’s originality — and book’s — not that there aren’t such books, but white people don’t know about them when they are not very angry or masterpieces (James Baldwin) or aesthetically revolutionary (Toni Morrison). For a white person you learn so much about what black people go through in the US society that you never thought of. Or I never did. Strongly recommended as well as Jessie Redmon Fausset’s Plum Bun, about which I also must write a blog of its own. As with Forster’s Maurice, I loved that Plum Bun had a happy ending. I’ve begun a supeb biography by George Hutchinson; as far-reaching in implications about such trauma, hardship and unhappiness as Isabel Wilkinson’s Caste. What does it mean to live a life based on a color line?

So I have been busy in the raison d’etre of my existence, literary (and nowadays) film study.
The pleasantest zoom of them all have been my poetry reading sessions with a group of serious readers of poetry. One poem by Louise Gluck I understood for the first time.

The Night Migraines:

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

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I don’t want to go on for too long. So I’ll end on the theme of detective heroines I’ve been so engaged with for weeks, nay months, about which I put on face-book my time-line this review of TLS and a specific article on the republication of some older detective “classics” this morning:

A couple of years ago I was lamenting how TLS was now turning into a tasteless super-slim supplement which didn’t understand the previous audience and appeal to a mythical new audience (which apparently never appeared) was counter-productive. They were striving for the ugly offensive images so loved by Tina Browne when at the New Yorker.

No longer even if the articles are now mostly very short and when political the bias is sort of (disguised) conservative. There are often excellent reviewers who seem able to say a lot in a shortish space (and if they need more room are given it) on subjects of real interest which are also intellectually sound. They address concerns of right now. I wrote about the January 5th review of the Penguin reprinting of mystery stories where all but 4 are by men, and said that the reviewer condemned this — though she took time to get there (see comment).

They are more successfully feminist than the now defunct Women’s review of Books or the new Liber (which is not succeeding) which came to take its place. Probably this is a matter of money: TLS still has sources of income.

So four more pieces from January 5th:

Opens with an explanation of the Assange case and an excellent defense of him on the principles of a free press and what is press is for. Charles Glass sometimes writes for LRB. A good review of a Norwegian woman artist by Lucy Davies (yes the translator): Harriet Backer, about the interior worlds suggested by Backer’s art and use of light and architecture. An essay on the biography and new edition of Anthony Hecht reviewed by Andrew Neilson – A Wound that Will Not Close Janet Todd on Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic Last Man. A new edition, Mary Shelley’s attitudes towards the coming calamity and revolution about which Todd manages to suggest it’s not very readable — Death Marches on. A new non-fiction book by Philippa Gregory, trying to praise and show how “Normal Women” (the title is unfortunate as well as some of what is asserted — like suffragettes killed people when they didn’t kill anyone, not one, and were it not for these “elite” women no one would have paid attention) worked hard to survive and what the great cruel odds were.

The gothic heroine glides into the book …

In particular, given my interest in women’s detective fiction just now – for some time to come too:

I’d like to vindicate Muireann Maguire in her article for TLS, Cherchez la femme, on the new reprinting of a bunch of older (perhaps out of copyright) books, most of them apparently mysteries. I had the impression the author herself condoned or pretended not to notice that all but 4 of the books are by men, and that the 4 themselves anything but feminist. Not at all.

Maguire does describe this as the situation — after she gives a flowery introduction about the original Penguin publication of books like this and other subgenres. What colors they came in &c What she doesn’t say (I think) forcefully enough is that at the turn of the century there profit-making motive of publishers was less in evidence and they really did produce books where they of course meant to make money but also meant to serve the public decently. This makes me remember the original Everyman series, and the later Modern Library ones.

But then when she goes on to reveal how few women were originally published, how then they are presented in denigrating non-serious ways, she brings out forcefully that this attitude is still going on in this new and seriously distorting misogyny. If women were treated condescendingly and if all of the books, but especially those by men contained centrally misogynistic and sexy-violent (low grade porn) incidents, books by women were nonetheless printed in large numbers and were probably “the leaders” in the field. Now she says by not publishing them at all you lose their words, you lose the social context, you marginalize women’s contribution to our society.

I love how she ends on a kind of somber joke or pun — since she is talking about detective fiction, she says what’s happening is criminal. Well it is — the corollary of this is erasing women, depriving them of existence, and in the US right now if you get pregnant in some states if you have a miscarriage, you can be arrested, if your pregnancy goes badly and you are in danger of death you can be let to die. It’s a felony if you mishandle your miscarriage …

I’ve gone out with a few friends to museum shows and lunching, renewed an old friendship with Diana Birchall who I first met as Miss Schuster-Slatt from Gaudy Night. The odd thing I’ve discovered about so many friendships is that people don’t necessarily or at all have to like one another, but I do like Diana and hope she likes me. Still, suffice to say I remain bereft inwardly. Only with Adele do I laugh. I am ever learning that lesson from Anne Finch’s poem, “I on Myself Can Live,” which was the title of the literary biography I tried to write about her and put here on the Internet. Shall I try for a book on Dorothy Sayers, especially after teaching a whole course on her next spring (2025)?

Ellen