I have a few more vacation posts in the works, but in the meantime here is something about reading, in lieu of a Booking Through Thursday question.
I bought Jane Austen at Home at a Waterstone's we happened to be passing when out sightseeing in London and I needed to sit down for a few minutes. I did not know about the tempest at the time, but am enjoying the book nevertheless — Worsley writes easily and well, although she does tend to get a bit informal at times, wh. I find a bit more off-putting in print than I mind in person, certainly for books, but this is a small cavil. I do appreciate that she is not afraid to call out the recent spate of biographical ("biographical") movies for indeed being as much invention as biography!
(If like me you did not know about it, there have been grumblings about certain parallels between Worsley's book and Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen. The problem is, of course, that because there is so little known about Austen, there really aren't that many Facts with which to write a biography — and a great many of them come from the comparatively small number of surviving letters, and from now-famous quips from people like Virginia Woolf about Jane at fifteen "laughing, in her corner, at the world" — so that, obviously, it is difficult to write about Austen's life without "quoting" previous biographers. So why write "yet another" book about Jane Austen? Ah, the fascination is always there! and, like with Austen's novels, one must look for and appreciate the subtleties, which are certainly there.)
Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse series of murder mysteries was recommended to me by a friend — my public library had two, this Clerk's Tale and the earlier The Reeve's Tale, which I finished the other day before starting this one. I found Reeve a bit slow getting started, rather dangerously slow in fact and I was tempted to give it up, but once the murders began (!) it certainly gained momentum. I must admit that I hold Ellis Peters' Cadfael books as my gold-standard for mediaeval mysteries, and so far none I have found can match that, but that is something to strive for.
After visiting Sissinghurst — which is one of the things I've yet to post about, sorry — I was interested to read Portrait of a Marriage at last, though I had to go pretty far afield to find a library copy. I must admit that my first impression of Vita, which as first impressions often do has stuck with me, is that she was a rather alarming person. As it happens, though, little of this comes through in her writing, which is elegant and full of beauty. Last summer I read two of her gardening books on my Kindle, and I have loved All Passion Spent for years — ever since finding an audio version read by Wendy Hiller, who also starred in the excellent television series. I am still not far into this book — the mess is just beginning in Harold's and Vita's marriage, and I suspect I'm putting this off a bit in dismay, even though I know what happens.
There was a recording of Vita playing in one of the Tower turret-rooms at Sissinghurst, and I was surprised to hear that her voice sounded nothing at all like the picture I had of her in my head —
