Happy Birthday Mrs. Gaskell!

I first discovered Elizabeth Gaskell via the miniseries adaptation of Wives and Daughters. Having now read Wives and Daughters, North and South, and Cranford, I think Elizabeth Gaskell stands as my favourite Victorian writer. There is some indefinable, wonderful quality about her writing. Her stories are told lovingly and humourously. Wives and Daughters, my first love, remains my favourite, though I think I'm nearly due for a reread--it's been four years since I read it. And I find on looking at my Elizabeth Gaskell tag, that I had just finished North and South when I first began this blog, over two years ago.

Today is Mrs. Gaskell's 200th birthday. To celebrate, I may have to venture into new territory and read one of her three novels or numerous shorter works that I have yet to encounter. Or perhaps a biography. The internet in general is celebrating with a blog tour. You can find an introduction to the tour over at Austenprose.

It's also my first day of classes. Wish me luck!

A quick book meme

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - most of middle school was devoted to these, and I still have a whole shelf of Tolkien and related books.

2. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice - One of my very favourite books, which will probably always be able to remind me of high school.

3. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff - I've talked about this recently enough that I needn't say why it's on this list, but it is a lovely book.

4. Tam Lin by Pamela Dean - my favourite book of all.

5. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman - The whole trilogy, really, but I probably remember this one the best. They're thoroughly wonderful.

5. Sandry's Book by Tamora Pierce - All of Tamora Pierce's novels, especially the earlier ones, stick with me, but I always loved this one especially well.

6. Emma by Jane Austen - need I say more? I've spent enough time on this one lately.

7. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling - I'll always be glad I had the good timing to grow up with these books, and they really are wonderful stories.

8. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley - I need to reread this, but it did have a big effect on me when I read it, and I remember it extremely fondly.

9. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell - I don't even know why I love this one so much, but Elizabeth Gaskell has an indefinable quality that makes me love her.

10. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - I read this a little too late to have a childhood fondness for it, but I love it nonetheless.

11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - this used to have fights with Tam Lin over being my favourite book, and I still love it.

12. On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder - I had to include a favourite children's book, and this is the one I was always fondest of.

13. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransom - I loved these when I was a child, and they are some of the few books that I love in exactly the same way as an adult.

14. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - this just has some really rather magical qualities to it.

15. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt - it's enormous and vivid and lovely, is all.

Mrs. Gaskell

I've never said much about Elizabeth Gaskell here, have I? I had just finished reading North and South when I started this blog, and I must have read Cranford after that one, but I seem to have never talked about it. I was inspired to write a post about Mrs. Gaskell, however, when I randomly decided to read dovegreyreader's interview with Adele Geras. I wanted to read the interview because I read Adele Geras's book Troy years and years ago and very much liked it, but that's sort of besides the point (though I should read some of her other books). In the interview, Adele Geras mentions that Virginia Woolf once said of Elizabeth Gaskell that she writes as though she had a cat on her lap.

From Virginia Woolf I'm not sure that's particularly a compliment, but I think it's true, and less cozily sentimental than the image implies. Some of her books are pretty cozy, but certainly not all of them. North and South, though it ends well and is generally regarded as a romance, is not cozy. But all Mrs. Gaskell's books have a unifying quality regardless of subject--they are satisfying, in the same way sitting in a squashy chair with a cup of tea and, yes, a cat, is satisfying. You can be as generally miserable and uncomfortable as you like while sitting in this chair, but it's still satisfying. Elizabeth Gaskell's books are like this.

I've read three: Wives and Daughters, North and South, and Cranford. I said in a comment to someone else's blog a while ago that I think Wives and Daughters is my favourite. I say this rather tentatively, mind you, but in any case it's the book that springs to mind if I have to choose. It's, to my mind, the most satisfying of these three. It was never finished, unfortunately, but that doesn't stop it being satisfying (though it was rather a shock when I first read this and didn't know beforehand that it was unfinished).

All three books have been made into very good miniseries. Of these, Wives and Daughters is definitely my favourite, though I know a lot of people prefer North and South; I find North and South a little too colourless for my tastes, though of course the story's still good. Cranford was also very good, but a little too hodgepodge; the miniseries has plots from a couple of different books.

I'd like to read more of Mrs. Gaskell's writing, particularly her biography of Charlotte Bronte. I'm also sort of feeling a reread of Wives and Daughters coming on. At any rate, she's one of my very favourite authors.

Books purchased

So, a day later than intended, here are my purchases yesterday at Couth Buzzard.

Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham (J.R.R. Tolkien), The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate (Nancy Mitford), The Enchanted April (Elizabeth von Armin), Wives and Daughters (Elizabeth Gaskell), Stories (Katherine Mansfield), Villette (Charlotte Bronte).

The Nancy Mitford one has been on my to read list for a while, as was Katherine Mansfield, and partially The Enchanted April (I was looking for Elizabeth and her German Garden, but I saw the film of this one a while ago and have been vaguely meaning to read it). I already own Farmer Giles, but not Smith, and it's such a neat little copy of it. Wives and Daughters I've read already and just thought I ought to have, and Villette I definitely want to read, since I love Jane Eyre and I think I've heard people say they like this one even better.

I'm almost done with The English Patient (and loving it), so once I'm finished with it I'll head on to this lot.

In other news, I finished my novel today.

Man can do nothing without the make believe of a beginning.

It does seem a little silly to start blogging about one's favourite books with George Eliot, whose writing I don't enjoy very much. I've read about half of Daniel Deronda, and would like to finish it, and I rather admire George Eliot for writing the thickest prose I've ever come across, but it's not something I jump up and down about. There are, however, a couple of great quotes from her that I tend to use liberally. At least one of them I don't think I use with the meaning she intended it to have, but it's brilliantly apt if I use my own meaning.

So, I already have a livejournal, which I do post in with some semblance of regularity. But livejournal somehow is not Blogging, and there is something appealing about Blogging. At any rate, here lies literary squee, philosophical rambles, and probably my amusing forays into language (Example: in the French translation of Harry Potter, lemon drops seem to have become 'lemon Eskimos'. I haven't the faintest idea why, unless it is some strange idiom).

I have finished four books in the last two days, which seems highly creditable. These being Tam Lin (Pamela Dean, and about a fourth reread), The Summer Book (Tove Jansson, who is also creator of the Moomins--did you know they started out as an anti-Fascist political cartoon?), North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell), and Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis).

Tam Lin, is, as always fabulous. Probably at some point I will post at length about it. The Summer Book was short and sweet, and in an interesting manner not at all my feeling of summer. It does convey summer very well, but it doesn't convey my summer at all, and it's interesting to find one that feels so different. The book is a sort of rambling series of vignettes about a six-year-old called Sophia and her dying Grandmother, who live on an island in Finland. I was rather amused to find the foreward was written by Kathryn Davis, who wrote that book called Versailles that I keep meaning to finish and that I just discovered I have two copies of.

North and South was lovely. I was not at all expecting it to end in quite the way it did. I don't mean in terms of plot, but it always rather interests me to see how people choose to wrap up a book. Whether in a long happily-ever-after sort of paragraph, or a vaguely pretentious sounding philosophical statement (my usual ending of choice), or a bit of rather amusing but apt dialogue. And I was surprised to find North and South going the way of the dialogue. It doesn't strike me as something that usual appears in Victorian literature. Anyway, I am quite confirmed in my fondness for Elizabeth Gaskell, who even when writing about grey dreary Milton, still seems to make everything terribly charming.

Once again, I find myself not particularly entranced by Narnia. I listened to Prince Caspian on tape in one go while sewing, and kept being completely astonished by how fast it went by. Yes, it's a short book, but most books that short take more time to do everything. I can just imagine what Tolkien would have done with it, and seem to remember that he never much liked Narnia. He had the same sort of complaint I do. After the vast mythology behind Lord of the Rings, Narnia comes off as flat. I think I would have liked it better had I read it when I was eight or nine.