Why This Is Hell

What I read

John D MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee, #4) (1964) - pour me out a shot of that cheap whisky.

Change of pace - this was more, this was actually I wanted to be reading something like this, but this wasn't quite hitting the spot, nevertheless I continued and finished: Gail Godwin, A Southern Family (1987), bits of which I remembered and bits of which I didn't.

Have just finished Alba de Céspedes, There's No Turning Back (1938) - for in-person reading group. Young modern women in Rome in the late 1930s - they are modern in that they have left home to study, but they are living in an institute run by nuns (and not all of them are actually studying). A more complex picture of the lives of Italian women in the Fascist era than one perhaps supposed (though the education mostly seems to be with a view to teaching ho hum) - politics is all rather on the margins, though one of the women is Spanish and the situation in Spain affects her.

The latest Literary Review

On the go

Persuasion, for the bluesky daily chapter read-through.

Up next

About to embark on Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage, #5) (1919) for online reading group.

And then, maybe, can get to Vonda McIntyre, The Curve of the World, just posthumously published by Aqueduct.

Queer Non-Monogamy in Edwardian London.

Author of article does point out that this is happening among people with huge amounts of privilege and possibilities of discretion:

[I]t is certainly easy to romanticise the traditions of lavender marriages and queer non-monogamy that were so prevalent in the London arts scene during the Belle Epoch. However, to over-simplify the past in this way would be to overlook the many tensions that existed between queer couples, as well as the growing interest in alternative relationship structures within heterosexual participants in this scene. Most importantly, however, it would be a failure not to take into consideration the considerable inequalities that allowed the rich and the powerful to live by a double-standard of sexual propriety. Provided they avoided relationships that troubled other structures like class and race, this group remained free from the expected social and legal repercussions of queer sex in the early twentieth century.

Does she not realise quite how much This Sort of Thing - negotiating the boundaries of marriages that were made for various reasons of status, money, and politics, to accommodate other relationships - had been going on For A Very Long Time, and has she not seen that movie about the Duchess of Devonshire in the late C18th? (Which included sapphic dalliance.)

Will concede (she concedes) that a) Lords Strachan and Warwick did not seem on-board with their Ladies' sapphic dalliance (see icon), though the issue there does seem to have been they had not been sufficiently Pas Devant the wrong kind of people who would gossip and go away to make satirical prints sold in Piccadilly and b) the whole thing probably got even more discreet in the Victorian era, though when one considers Edward the Caresser's set, did it do so by very much?

I once, in fact, I think, put forward an argument that Bertrand Russell, e.g., in his arguments for free love, was proposing to democratise a way of life his family had been practising for generations.

Take five books off your bookshelf: I took 5 fairly random books from the various piles around the room I am in.

First sentence from Book no 1: 'Two women had arranged to have tea together, in the flat of one of them which was in a rather distant and not so fashionable quarter of the Left Bank'.

Last sentence from page 50 of Book no 2 -- last sentence on page fifty: 'Eleanor wrote that their great difficulty would be in managing their first break with their friends'.

Second sentence on page 100 of Book no 3: 'Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it'.

Next to the last sentence on p 150 of book no 4: 'Because it's true, you know--he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court'.

Final sentence of book 5: 'We have many more evenings before us if we want them'.

Make these sentences into a paragraph:

Two women had arranged to have tea together, in the flat of one of them which was in a rather distant and not so fashionable quarter of the Left Bank. Eleanor wrote that their great difficulty would be in managing their first break with their friends. Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it. Because it's true, you know--he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court. We have many more evenings before us if we want them.

1: Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction of Naomi Mitchison (I skipped the editorial introduction.)
2. Mary Gordon, Chase of the Wild Goose (about the Ladies of Llangollen).
3. Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: an appetite for life
4. Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
4. Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence.