I can hardly believe that I have read this enormous tome not once, but twice. The first time was in 2002, when I read it for an online Literary Biography book group, and this second time was for my former-CAE bookgroup (which I nicknamed ‘The Ladies Who Say Oooh’, which is what my daughter used to call us). The CAE has disbanded its bookgroups and farmed out its book collections to groups, no doubt to save themselves the hassle of getting rid of thousands of books. None of us actually chose this book, but we were happy to read it. That was before the group members realized how long it was, and how small the font was. I think that I was the only one to actually finish it, largely because I knew that I enjoyed it the first time. But I think that I was more impatient with it this time.
Richard Ellman’s biography of Wilde won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It has been described as the ‘definitive’ biography, and I certainly don’t think that another Wildean fact could possibly to be dredged up that hasn’t been included in this exhaustive and exhausting book.
The first time I read it, I was largely unaware of Wilde and his story. I knew that he wrote plays, that he wrote ‘The Happy Prince’, that he was homosexual and that he ended up in jail. Perhaps my enjoyment of the book the first time was that it was all new to me then, although I have since watched Stephen Fry’s wonderful performance in the movie ‘Wilde’, seen an excellent local performance of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss and read Fanny Moyles’ Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde.
Ellmann certainly leaves no stone unturned, starting right back with Wilde’s birth and and going through to rather graphic details of his death. He draws parallels between Wilde’s writing and his own life, and then (as now), I found myself regretting that I have never read The Picture of Dorian Gray. The courtcase that led to his downfall does not appear until about 4/5 of the way through the book, so there is plenty of time for Ellmann to establish Wilde’s large circle of artistic friends – including even Australia’s Charles Conder and Dame Nellie Melba- and Wilde’s conscious creation of ‘aestheticism’ as a cultural movement. In the late 1880s-early 1890s, he seemed to be everywhere: in print, on the stage, amongst the wealthy, the glittering and the cognoscenti. Ellman’s sympathies are clearly with Wilde, although he shows us his fecklessness (especially in relation to his wife Constance), his recklessness and his odd mixture of weakness and doggedness.
This second reading, however, found me impatient at the denseness of the prose and overwhelmed by the minuscule level of detail. It is as if he could not bear to leave a single fact out, and if he couldn’t squeeze it into the text, then he would carry it on in the lengthy footnotes at the bottom of the page. (That said, I was grateful that he included translations of the French in the footnotes as well). I read now that Ellman completed the book just before his death with Motor Neurone Disease in 1987, and that he was not able to revise it or correct errors which have since been corrected by another writer. Perhaps, had he had more time, he might have stripped the book back a bit, which would not have harmed it in any way and indeed may have enhanced it. As it is, Ellmann has covered Wilde’s life so exhaustively that any further biographers could not compete in thoroughness, only in incisiveness.
I had heard about this book during the COVID pandemic, and no wonder. Published in 2014, some six years before the world locked down, it describes a world where 21st century Western industrialization has collapsed in the wake of a virulent influenza that has wiped out 90% of the population. What cheering reading during a pandemic!
However, reading it ten years later and with those COVID years behind us, does Station Eleven stand on its own two feet? I think it does. Right from its opening chapter, which starts with a Shakespearean actor, Arthur Leander playing King Lear, collapsing on stage, I was hooked.
As Arthur falls to the floor, a member of the audience, Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic rushes to give him CPR, watched by a little girl Kirsten Raymonde who stands in the wings. Returning home, he takes a phonecall from a friend who is a doctor, who warns him that the Georgia flu is rampant, and to take his girlfriend Laura and his brother, and to get out of town.
The narrative then jumps ahead twenty years and takes up again with Kirsten, now an adult, with only scattered memories of that night at the theatre, before everything changed. She is now part of the Travelling Symphony, a rag-tag group of actors and musicians, who move from settlement to settlement to perform music and plays. Electricity, gasoline, the internet and all the things enabled by these had ceased, and in the first years after the pandemic, life had reverted to a light-governed, subsistence struggle against other frightened groups, who were themselves fighting for existence. After twenty years, things had stabilized, albeit at a stagnant level, but a level of menace had been recently introduced by the rise of the Prophet, drawing on a mixture of messianic religion and violence to consolidate his power.
If this sounds at bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is. I certainly had the same feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach as I read. But unlike The Road, there is not the same relentless hopelessness. This is a world that is trying to hold onto the best in music and literature, and trying to collect as many artefacts from the old world as possible so that the ‘before’ world is not completely lost. The world still looks for beauty. The book’s ending, while ambiguous, is hopeful.
It is beautifully written with strong control of the narrative, as Mandel slips back and forward between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ worlds, moving from one character to another. How prescient she was, and how chilling it must have been to pick up this book in the early days of COVID. But as a piece of writing, it doesn’t need the experience of the last few years to give it strength: it’s a very human, well-crafted book that celebrates creativity and the best of being human, giving hope without sentimentality.
This book, edited by Clift’s biographer and former daughter-in-law Nadia Wheatley, is marketed as ‘selected essays’. More properly, they are a selection of 80 of her 225 newspaper columns published mainly in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald between 1964 and 1969, when they came to an abrupt halt with her suicide.
The newspaper columnist was (is?) a curious beast. Although there are innumerable bloggers and sub-stack writers, there seemed to be something rather special about turning over the page of a print newspaper, and seeing an article by a regular columnist, in its accustomed place on the page. I used to enjoy the columns of Sharon Gray (who I see is actually Adele Hulse), Pamela Bone and Gillian Bouras who ended up living in Greece – all women- and Martin Flanagan in the Age. I know that Anne Deveson wrote a regular column, but I only know of her through her daughter Georgia Blain. The only physical newspapers that I still receive are the Saturday Paper and The Age on Saturdays and although they have a stable of staff writers and comment columns, the only one who comes close to my perception of the ‘newspaper columnist’ in the Charmian Clift mould is Margaret Simons with her gardening columns in the Saturday Paper, and perhaps Kate Halfpenny and Tony Wright in The Age. Somehow you feel as if you know them, and that you could plonk down beside them in a coffee shop and just take up talking with them.
Of course, it’s all artifice because despite the appearance of confidentiality and intimacy, columnists project a particular view of themselves, and one that is often quite removed from reality. This is the case with Charmian Clift whose columns brim with confidence and warmth, when instead she had lived, and was still living, a life that was far removed from the suburban Australian life of many of her readers. She and her husband, writer George Johnson, circulated in an artistic and intellectual milieu on the Greek island of Hydra that could simply not be found in Australia (barring, perhaps, the communal living at places like Heide in Bulleen). There’s little sign in her columns of the infidelities and arguments that wracked her marriage. She never mentioned her family members by name, and referred only obliquely to her husband’s long hospitalization with TB. The birth of an illegitimate, and relinquished, daughter when she was 18 years old was coded as “a wrong road…that led me to disaster”.
I could find only one mention of her alcoholism:
A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, and despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.
One can only read with hindsight her essay about her husband’s forthcoming semi-autobiographical second book Clean Straw for Nothing, which she had not dared read, for fear of what he might reveal about her through the character Cressida Morley
I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made, is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and … have felt differently because I am a different person …
Indeed, several commentators have linked her apprehension about the publication of this book with her suicide in July 1969 at the age of 45- a suicide that seems so paradoxical with the fiesty, intelligent personae that she had curated through her columns.
Wheatley has titled this book ‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’, echoing a rather condescending but also self-effacing comment that Clift made about her own columns to her publisher in London:
I have been making my own sneaky little revolutions …writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who don’t know an essay from a form guide but absolutely love it….
Some of her essays are disarmingly suburban, but there are many others that are subversive and indeed, “little revolutions” for the mid-1960s, deep in the midst of the Menzies-era. She resisted the smugness of white-Australia that expected her gratitude for returning to comfortable Australia from a ‘foreign’ country; she supported the rights of women and decried their ‘second-class’ status; she said “sorry” some forty years before the Australian government did; and she revelled in young ‘protestants’ (i.e. protesters) who challenged the complacency of the 60s. In an essay that was not published at the time, she criticized the contingency and unfairness of the National Service draft, which left some men untouched and diverted the life course of others.
As a middle-aged (who am I kidding?) woman myself, I loved her essay ‘On Being Middle Aged’.
…the middle-aged drag time around with them like a long line of fetters, all the years that they cannot escape, the mistakes that can never be undone, the stupidities that can never be uncommitted now, the sames and humiliations and treacheries and betrayals as well as the prides and accomplishments and happinesses and brief moments of wonder…. I often think that middle-aged people have two lives, the one they’ve lived, and a parallel life, as it were, that walks around with them like a cast shadow and lies down with them when they go to sleep, and this is the life they might have lived if they had made different choices in that time when time was so abundant and the choices were so many.
There is a run of essays in the volume about her trip to central and northern Australia. At a time before cheap airfares and mass international travel, her beautiful writing brought to life a view of Australia from above- something that not all Australians had seen. In ‘The Centre’:
Pitted pores. Dried out capillaries of watercourses. Culture slides of viridian clotting thick creamy yellow. Wind ridges raised like old scars, and beyond them the even, arid serrations of the Simpson Desert, dead tissue, beyond regeneration. And yet, the tenderness of the pinks, the soft glow of the reds, the dulcet beige and violet seeping in.
She has a distinctive voice, although one that is not completely unlike my own with her colons and lists and parentheses and made-up words. The genre of the newspaper column does impose a straitjacket of must-haves: an engaging introduction, a set word length, and a rounding-off last paragraph. I found myself longing for a longer essay than the requisite six pages in my e-book and something more thorny and less self-contained.
Is there any point to re-publishing seventy year old newspaper columns? Yes, I think there is in exceptional cases, and few newspaper columnists have that honour bestowed upon them. I think that it rescues some good thought, good thinking and prescience from the flow of ephemera and evokes a humility in us to remember that many others have held certain political positions and made similar observations in the past.
I must admit that this book was nothing like I imagined it would be. From the front cover (yes, I know don’t judge etc etc) I assumed that it would be a historical fiction but instead found that it was a detective story, and a not terribly satisfying one at that.
We meet the victim in the opening pages of the novel as a young woman’s body is being examined in the presence of the Inspector (who is never named) who, steeped in the methodology of crime investigation and influenced by the ideas of psychoanalysis swirling around early 20th century Vienna, calls in his wife, the Hungarian artist Erszébet to make a painting of the 18 year old Dora’s body in the morgue for later reference. Erszébet and her young friend, British governess Wally, embark on their own investigation, separate from and deliberately kept from the Inspector. The two investigations run in parallel, the Inspector’s being dominated by his theories of investigation and the role of the investigator, and Erszébet’s drawing on Hungarian folk tales and tropes. The ending seems to go off on a frolic of its own, straining credulity and it seemed to be an abrupt way of bringing the story to the end.
The book is set in Vienna in 1910 and the book has a detailed map at the start of the book. The text makes specific reference to particular places in Vienna, which can be seen on the map, although without an index, locating the buildings and parks was rather tedious, and I eventually realized that locations were rather incidental to the plot. Despite the care with which Shields has delineated the city, the Vienna location itself does not play an important role in the plot, unlike for example Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. There are many details in the book about figs, folklore and photography, and I began to suspect that the author was unable to let go of the research she had undertaken, and was going to put it in the book regardless of whether it actually added anything.
It was only when reading the notes that came along with the book (it was a bookgroup choice) that I realized the resonances between the victim Dora, and Sigmund Freud’s patient, Dora, on whom he based much of his theory of psychoanalysis. This clever resonance was clearly intended by the author, and yet she left it implicit in what is otherwise a very didactic book.
The relationship between the Inspector and Erszébet is a complex one, and I was pleased that she didn’t overlay the young Wally’s infatuation with Erszébet with a lot of anachronistic gender ideology. She had a light touch here, which could have been highlighted by a more overt interweaving of Freud’s theories, and their destabilizing of ‘reality’ and relationships.
The book was only 352 pages in length, but it felt much longer than that. All in all, not a particularly satisfying read.
My rating: 6/10
Sourced from: a former CAE bookgroup book. To liquidate their stock, they sent boxes of books to the disbanding bookgroups and we’re reading our way through them.
In my quick and rather shallow dive into Korean literature to accompany my visit there in April 2025, I feel as if I have come full circle with this book. Matthew Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom is written in two parts, separated by 290 years. The first section is set in 1652 when Dutch accountant van Persie is shipwrecked on Jeju Island en route to a trading post in Japan. Six other sailors survived too, and were sent to the Emperor in Seoul. Van Persie is captured too and taken to a shaman, who slashes his tongue (not permanently) before he is handed over to a fisherman Hae-Jo who is charged with taking him to the Emperor Hyojong of Josean to join the other six sailors. Before embarking on the journey, his wounds are tended by one of the diving women of Jeju Island, and he carries this vision of his healer with him, as he is forced to place his fate in the hands of Hae-Jo as they traverse the kingdom on route to the emperor. The present tense narrative is told by three narrators: Van Persie, Hae-Jo and Emperor Hyojong himself.
The second part of the book is set in 1942, and it too is told by three narrators in the present tense. One is General Macarthur, impatient to take the fight to Korea after being forced to withdraw by his American commanders( I saw one of his corncob pipes in the Seoul War Memorial- I didn’t realize that it was ACTUALLY a corncob!)
The other two narrators are Yoo-jin, a young woman who uses her healing skills to treat a young villager with blue eyes, Won-je, who has joined the resistance to the Japanese occupation. Yoo-jin is captured by the Japanese (who have already been in control of Korea for the past 30 years), who use ‘insurgent’ women as ‘comfort women’ for the Japanese troops. In the chaos of the immediate post-war period, as Yoo-jin travels south to return home, Won-je continues to look for this woman healer.
Now, as it happens, two of the Korean books I read dealt with several of these themes. In Simon Winchester’sKorea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, he traverses South Korea following in the footsteps of Hendrick Hamel, the shipwrecked Dutch sailor, on whom the character of Van Persie is based. The Mermaid from Jeju dealt with the insurgency against the Japanese which then transformed into an insurgency against the post-war Nationalist soldiers, many of whom had fought with the Japanese previously. Yoo-jin’s family has come from Jeju Island, and it is there that she had learned her healing skills from generations of healers in her family.
Hooten’s depiction of the life of the comfort women was confronting and well-written. I was slightly surprised that a man was writing about the comfort women’s experiences, and I was impressed that he captured so well the rawness and physical pain of rough and unwanted sex. The abandonment of the ‘comfort women’ after the Japanese surrender led only to more danger as men’s allegiances shifted through self-interest and opportunity.
I found the second part of the book more – what to say? engaging, compelling, affecting- than the first and I wondered if the first part of the book was even necessary, given its distance from the events in the second part. But on second thought, there is a slight narrative link between the two section, and the events are a mirror-image of each other. In both, there is a woman who heals and in both there is a search to find the healer again; one narrative heads up towards Pyongyang, the other heads south back to Jeju Island. This is probably of more structural, rather than narrative, interest and perhaps added an extra dimension to the book. However, I felt that the second section was the stronger, and could have easily stood alone. It was certainly better written than The Mermaid from Jeju, although I found the consciously literary opening paragraph of many of the chapters a little too performative. That’s a small quibble: otherwise the narrative was well handled, the pace moved well and the landscape was rendered carefully.
It makes even more aware, though, of the complexity of the strained relationship between Korea and Japan, two countries that we tend to conflate as ‘Asia’ but which have a long and bloodied history.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: e-book from Yarra Plenty Regional Libary
Read because: I visited South Korea.
Other reviews: Lisa from ANZLitLovers enjoyed it (her review here) and Rohan Wilson reviewed it here.
As preparation for my trip to South Korea earlier this year, I read books with a South Korean setting, which is why I ended up reading this book. As it turns out, I read two books based on Jeju, a large island south of the South Korean mainland. It is an oval shaped island, with a large mountain Hallasan in the middle. The Jeju people are indigenous to the island, and have been there since Neolithic times. It is famous for its haenyeo, traditional women fishers who free-dive to gather molluscs and seafood in a semi-matriarchal society, where their wages formed the basis of the family income. Shamanism remained an important part of social and religious observance. Jeju was annexed by the Japanese (as was the rest of Korea) in 1910, and it became a hotbed of independence: a stance that remained when the US-sponsored South Korean government took over from the Japanese after WW2. It was this desire for independence and reunification which led to the South Korean government, led by Syngman Rhee, to see it as a potential hotbed for Communist insurgency. In 1948-9 the government led an ‘eradication campaign’ against these supposed insurgents, arising from the April 3 Incident in 1947, resulting in between 14,000 and 30,000 people (10 percent of Jeju’s population) being killed, and 40,000 fleeing to Japan.
This is the political background of the novel, which focuses on a young girl Goh Junja, who is coming into her own as a haenyeo diver. She encourages her mother to let her travel inland to swap sea produce for a pig, and on this journey she meets Yang Suwol, the son of a wealthy family on the mountain. They are instantly attracted to each other, but on her return from the mountain, she finds that her mother has died from injuries which at first she believed came from a diving accident. As the political situation intensifies, Yang Suwol becomes involved in insurgent activity, and Junja realizes that her own family is more politically involved than she realizes. The whole community is endangered by political currents at a world level that are manifested through cruelty and repression as it becomes increasingly difficult to work out whose side anyone is on.
The book is told in two parts. The first part commences with Mrs Junja Moon in Philadelphia in 2001, wife to Dr Moon, who is about to suffer an embolism. The story then backtracks to Jeju in 1944 as Junja nearly drowns while diving, then jumps ahead to 1948 and Junja’s meeting with Suwol. Part Two returns to Philadelphia, and as a reader you are wondering how Junja ended up being married to Dr Moon. Who’s he? What happened to Suwol? Dr. Moon decides to return to South Korea for the first time in many years, where he meets up with his old friend Dong Min. The book then alternates between 1944, 1948 (when Dr Moon- or more properly- Gun Joo were sent to the island as conscripts) and 2001 as the two men consult a Shaman and return to the mountain to learn the truth of what happened there some fifty years earlier.
The book starts with a timeline of political events, which is important as it frames the story. Unfortunately, it is a fairly sketchy timeline and it does not mention the word ‘nationalist’, even though it is used frequently during the book. The author does give political information, but it feels rather didactic, and I didn’t ever feel that I really understood the politics. The dual timeline, which is becoming rather hackneyed in historical fiction, made the book feel as if it were two separate books- as if she started writing one book, scrapped it, then started on another.
That said, the relationship between Junja and Suwol was well-handled and I found myself caring about what happened to them both, and pleased that it wasn’t tied up with an easy ending. However, the book seemed to be lacking something and I doubt that I would have persevered had I not had an interest in the setting.
My rating: 6/10
Sourced from: ebook borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I was going to South Korea. I’m a little sorry that I didn’t go to Jeju now.
I was going to Korea: I like Simon Winchester. So of course I was attracted to reading this book which was originally published in 1988, and has been recently republished in its second edition. However, there is little evidence that the book has been re-edited in any way, and so it was a very dated travel description of South Korea by an English writer, who spoke minimal Korean, and who reflected the sexism and anti-Americanism of the time.
The premise of the book is that Winchester decided to follow the path of Hendrick Hamel, the Dutch soldier who was shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653 on his way to Japan. He was prevented from leaving by the isolationist policies of the Josean emperor, and spent 13 years in what is now Korea, before escaping back to the Netherlands and writing the first western account of Korea. Winchester followed Hamel’s route up into what is now North Korea, but he could not cross the Demilitarized Zone at that time (even though, as he tells us in the preface to the second edition, he did manage to visit later). His route takes him up from Jeju Island to the central and western side of South Korea, where he meets mainly with monks and US servicemen, as well as some ‘ordinary’ South Koreans.
I found the book very dated in its outlook, and I felt uncomfortable about his pontifications on South Korean life and national characteristics from such an Anglo-centric perspectives. Although I am usually a magpie for interesting details, especially when I am travelling in a country that I have read about, I didn’t really gain much from the book to bore my fellow-travellers with (“Hey, did you know that…..”)
At our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, I usually volunteer to take the March service because March is Women’s History Month here in Australia, and I like to look at the stories of significant women and groups- some Unitarian, others not- who have grappled with living our their commitment to social justice and yearning for spirituality. Over the years I’ve looked at Martha Turner, Catherine Helen Spence, Mary Montgomerie Bennett, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and this year I decided I’d look at the Peabody Sisters- three Unitarian women born in New England during the first decade of the 19th century.
I had vague memories of visiting the Peabody Museum in Salem (same family, different branch) and other than that I knew nothing about them. I’d heard them mentioned in passing in a course on Unitarian Theology (yes, there is such a thing), and a reference to the book by Megan Marshall, so I chose them as my Women’s History theme for the month.
Marshall’s book The Peabody Sisters starts and finishes with a wedding. It starts with Sophia Peabody’s wedding to the author Nathaniel Hawthorne on July 9 1842, and it ends with her sister Mary Peabody’s wedding to the politician and education reformer Horace Mann on May 1 the following year. All three sisters were to live to beyond middle age (indeed, Elizabeth the eldest was to live to the age of ninety) but Marshall has chosen to end her book here. Perhaps it’s because a married woman’s life was so easily obscured by her husband’s, especially if he was prominent in political or literary affairs, as was the case here. Perhaps there was a drying up of the source material at this point, or perhaps Marshall’s interest was more in the sisters as a unit: she doesn’t make it clear.
The three girls had three brothers, but the brothers seem to have been a rather lacklustre group, perhaps because of the tepid example of their father, Nathaniel Peabody, who struggled to make a living as a doctor, dentist and later, farmer. The girls, on the other hand, were spurred by their mother Eliza, to become teachers or to earn their living in some way. Their mother Eliza conducted a boarding school in their home for the daughters of the local town, and was herself a creative and progressive teacher in her own right. The family was on a downwardly mobile trajectory, but Eliza herself had memories of her grandfather’s house at Friendship Hall and the library that was available to her to educate herself. The strong matriarchal influence in the household dynamics put Eliza’s daughters in good stead.
The eldest was Elizabeth, born in 1804, a brilliant linguist, teacher and conversationalist. Her mother came from a Unitarian background, but the young Elizabeth was transfixed by Unitarian luminary William Ellery Channing, known as the ‘Father of Unitarianism’ who preached at her church when Elizabeth was about 8 years old. She threw herself into Unitarian literature and a wide range of reading with such enthusiasm that one summer she was banned from reading anything but the Bible, which she did, reading the New Testament thirty times over a summer, each reading directed towards a different aspect of doctrine. She developed a close friendship with Channing, and as the group that came to be known as the ‘Transcendentalists’ forged links with, and then sometimes broke away from, Unitarianism, she and her sisters were brought into the heart of intellectual life in Boston. She learned ten languages, and through her translations of European texts, she introduced men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau and others to Continental and Romantic thought that fed into Transcendentalism. She was loud, gregarious and talkative, but heedless to her personal appearance and dress, much to the chagrin of her mother.
She was a strong sibling to contend with, but her youngest sister Sophia (with emphasis on the ‘i’ when pronouncing her name) was a strong personality too. She did not compete directly with Elizabeth, but instead took to her bed, prostrated by headaches, and the family came to a silent halt so as to not distress her further. She warned her sisters to have no expectations of her, and they didn’t, thus relieving her of the need to financially contribute to the family on a regular basis. Eventually her family, fearing for her life, turned to William Ellery Channing’s physician brother Dr Walter Channing. His interests were in women’s health, and particularly the ‘bed case’ of young women whose poor health confined them to their bedroom. He was skeptical that there was any physical sickness. He was more critical of the medical establishment for letting young girls like Sophia linger in bed for decades, and less critical of Sophia the patient. It was interesting watching Marshall negotiate this issue of female illness and its relationship with emotional and power relationships. She notes that neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote at length on migraines, also suggested an emotional bind that is set up in the ‘situational migraine’. As seemed to occur repeatedly with the sisters, once Sophia had the handsome Dr Walter Channing as her confidante, she became infatuated with him, and later infuriated with him when she sensed that he was judging her.
In between these two strong forces was Mary Peabody, the quintessential middle sister. She was said to be the most beautiful of the sisters, but the remaining photograph of her doesn’t show her in a particularly flattering light. She was often swept along in Elizabeth’s plans to re-establish her school in different towns after the school had failed to make money through economic downturns or as the result of scandalous gossip. Elizabeth took up all the oxygen in the room, and although she may have been interested in the conversation, Mary had no wish to be in the centre of it. However, when she was called upon to accompany her sister Sophia to Cuba in the hope that the climate would improve Sophia’s health, her social conscience was assailed by the sight of enslaved people working on the plantation, sparking her interest in social justice.
The relationship between the sisters was at its most fraught and tense when potential partners came onto the scene. Elizabeth competed with both her sisters over men that they had fallen in love with, although she channelled this into a more ‘sisterly’ vein once their sisters had landed their catches. That said, I wouldn’t trust Elizabeth at all.
She threw herself into the intellectual milieu surrounding the Transcendentalists, becoming a writer in her own right (although the little bit of her work that I read was turgid and indigestable) and editing the sermons of William Ellery Channing and writing up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures. She was involved as a teacher in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School, and wrote a book that publicized it, although they fell out over it later. She is credited with the establishment of kindergarten education in America. In 1840 she opened a bookshop in Boston- the first woman to do so. It was bookstore, a lending library, and a place for scholars, liberal thinkers, and transcendentalists to meet. It stocked transcendentalist material and foreign books and shipped books to interested readers. Margaret Fuller began holding ‘conversations’ there in her discussion group comprising both men and women. Elizabeth recorded those too. She began publishing in her own right as well, and became the publisher of ‘The Dial’, the journal of the Transcendental Club.
Group biographies can be difficult, especially family group biographies where one family member may be perceived to overshadow the others. Elizabeth is best remembered by history, but Marshall has worked very hard to provide a family context and bring forward the achievements of the other Peabody sisters beyond marrying prominent men. The book was well received, earning Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Marshall paints a vibrant picture of intellectually engaged, active women who, although not as well known as the men with whom they socialized, were contributors to Transcendentalism, and American society more generally, at a time when women’s roles were becoming increasingly circumscribed.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Kobo e-book via subscription
Read because: I gave a presentation at my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship to celebrate Women’s History Month.
There’s a particular frisson of delight when you’re reading a novel set in your own town. You recognize the streets and you have a mental landscape painting of the setting, even if it is set 160 years earlier. Jane Sullivan, herself now a Melbourne resident after emigrating from England decades ago, takes us to post-Gold Rush Melbourne, and in a way not unlike Kerry Greenwood with her Phrynne Fisher novels, introduces us to a feisty, intelligent amateur detective who is less sidekick and more spur to her co-investigator Magnus Scott, a journalist who styles himself as ‘The Walking Gentleman’.
The novel starts in a bedroom, as a doctor tries to revive a beautiful young actress Marie St Denis from what appears to be, and is later characterized as, an accidental laudanum overdose. Her closest friend, aspiring actress Lola Sanchez, is not satisfied by such a neat explanation, and she enlists the help of journalist Magnus Scott, one of the few people who wrote a sympathetic obituary for Miss Dennis, to investigate. Fired up by the techniques and success of the detectives in the penny-dreadful crime literature she enjoys, Lola undertakes some amateur sleuthing to uncover multiple footprints in Miss Dennis’ room- but to whom do they belong? Lola devises a list of possible suspects, many of whom belong to the highest echelons of Melbourne society, and disguising herself as a young boy, breaks into houses and sneaks around bedrooms looking for clues. In the meantime, Magnus himself is on a rollercoaster of financial events, and it seems that indeed, there are shadowy forces at work, who may or may not be the same men that Lola is suspecting.
I was thinking about 19th and early 20th century crime fiction, and its reliance on plot, coincidence and red herrings, especially compared with the detective stories of the 21st century and their emphasis on the character and motivations of the detective, just as much as of the perpetrator. This book is truly in the former category, complete with cliff-hangers and diversions that at times strain credulity.
For the historian of Melbourne, it is gratifying to see that Sullivan has done her research, and acknowledges the assistance and friendship of writers like Lucy Sussex, whose recent Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George is dealing with a similar time-span and genre. I found myself thinking of Barbara Minchinton’s work on Madame Brussells and The Women of Little Lon, although these both look at a later date. A couple of times I found myself raising a sceptical eyebrow, only to find that Sullivan was right: cold cream in 1868? ( Yes, and before then too), the Menzies Hotel? (Yes, opened in 1867) and so, yes, Sullivan has done her work.
I enjoyed Sullivan’s playful tweaking of real-life characters in creating her own Lola Sanchez and Magnus Scott. The name Lola Sanchez of course evokes the Gold-Rush performer Lola Montez, and Magnus Scott as ‘The Wandering Gentleman’ and editor of the New Bohemian bears more than a passing resemblance to Marcus Clarke. She integrates historical figures as well, most notably the enigmatic Redmond Barry, patriarch of Melbourne’s cultural scene but with his own domestic ambiguities, and Dr Nield, the coroner. She takes us to Redmond Barry’s house in Rathdowne St Carlton that later became integrated into the Royal Childrens Hospital, the Theatre Royal, Chinatown and the eponymous Punch Lane, running between the current-day Exhibition and Spring Streets. And as Sullivan explained in a talk that she gave to the Ivanhoe Reading Circle in April, there was indeed an actress Marie St Denis who died of laudanum poisoning, and the story sprang from historical events, with equally heavy doses of research and imagination.
I wonder if this is the first in a series? There’s scope, and plenty of other Melbourne murders to explore…
I visited South Korea with my son and his family, so I thought that I’d embark on a bit of South Korean literature before I went. Other than Pachinko, which is partially set in Korea, I don’t believe that I’ve read any other books set in or about Korea.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but My Brilliant Life ended up being a completely different from what I thought it would be. As it turned out, I was reading it in Large Print edition (the only one I could find) which gave it an air of being a rather light, speedy read. It is narrated by sixteen year old Aerum, who is suffering from progeria, a rare inherited disease that causes premature aging. As his body gradually shuts down, he decides to write his family story, drawn together from what his parents have told him about their lives in a rural village, their meeting and early marriage and his childhood. He is a lonely child: he cannot attend school, and has no friends of his own age – for what indeed is his age in a body that is accelerating towards a premature death? The family is not rich, and the hospital bills are mounting up, and so he decides to make a paid appearance on a television show, which alleviates the financial pressure and launches him into a rather voyeuristic celebrity. Following the program, he receives many emails, and he begins corresponding with Seoha, who is suffering from cancer, and in the absence of other age-appropriate relationships, he becomes infatuated with her.
I will not divulge the end of the story. It is sad and inevitable. It’s a book about life, love and presence.
Although this is book was in Large Print format, it could possibly be an interesting Young Adult book- after all, there’s no shortage of books about teenagers dying of incurable diseases. I don’t know that I learned much about South Korea from it, but I did learn about progeria.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 