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| Books roundup: Self-help From workplace advice for women to the best advice for de-cluttering your home, here are four new titles that you might want ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
The Magnificent Mrs Tennant | Book review Miranda Seymour enjoys a detailed insight into the daunting life of a Victorian hostessGertrude Tennant, a centenarian born in 1818, was one of those formidable 19th-century hostesses whose names surface today primarily due to their unremarkable encounters with other, more eminent, Victorians. Heavy-browed and scornful-eyed, her chin supported by one of those lace swaddling bands favoured by dowagers in the 1880s, the widowed Gertrude looks – in an unfortunate choice of cover for an otherwise splendid book – like the kind of woman who expects all entertainment to be provided by her guests. And so, as we learn from David Waller's lively, well-researched account, she did. And heaven help those guests who let their hostess down.Here is Gertrude on Gladstone (about whom she later softened her view): "the very dullest man I ever met". On Austen Chamberlain (about whom she stuck to her guns): "very very tiresome". And, more astonishingly, on an afternoon spent with Oscar Wilde (and Edward Burne-Jones): "Oh how bored! Vexed." Henry James, for whom Mrs Tennant expressed no disdain, appears to have returned the favour: I draw this inference from a cluster of (hitherto unpublished) letters which express, with mellifluous insincerity, Mr James's regret that he will be unable to lunch that day at Mrs Tennant's elegantly appointed Richmond Terrace home . . . or to take tea . . . or to dine.Gertrude's life as a hostess prompts interest chiefly for her subsidiary role as the devoted mother of Dorothy, a talented painter of ragamuffins who was described by Henry James as "the delicious Dolly, one of the finest creatures I have met". James took a dim view, however, of Dolly's marriage in 1890 to the celebrated explorer Henry Stanley: Gertrude (as was usual with this formidable woman) took swift control of the situation. "She is yours, and so am I," was how one facetious cartoonist pictured Mrs Tennant greeting Mr Stanley's request for her daughter's hand. And so, bizarrely, it turned out to be. Gertrude, Dolly and Stanley took up residence together, a cosy but improbable threesome, in Gertrude's smart London house. Until, that is, on Stanley's death in 1904, the pragmatic Dolly decided to marry her late husband's doctor. Gertrude was a widow of the shrine-keeping kind and made no secret of her disapproval of this alliance with a mere physician: relations between mother and daughter, for the 16 remaining years of Gertrude's life, were chilly at best.Waller writes exceptionally well, and with a wonderful eye for social detail, about the dauntingly regimented life of an ambitious London hostess. (I've never known the weirdly fascinating etiquette of calls, and cards, and thank-you notes, and appropriate conversational banalities, to be so lucidly explained.) Nevertheless, the long passage of Gertrude's life as a devoted wife and reverent widow can prompt the occasional yawn.The first half of the book – the description of Gertrude Collier's upbringing and girlhood – is quite a different matter. She was brought up in France by impoverished but enterprising parents who sought a better life across the Channel than they could find at home in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Their young daughter received her education less at school (from which she was hastily removed following an outbreak of headlice) than by lying under the family sofa and listening to the gossip from a stream of Parisian visitors. Her life – so vividly described that the young, lively, large-eyed Gertrude seems to spring out into the reader's room – was volatile. Her father struck his little daughter to the ground with a blow so hard that she ruptured a blood vessel; yet she was invited to dances with the royal family, was allowed – on one memorable occasion – to touch the preserved head of Charlotte Corday, and (awkwardly underdressed in a cotton frock and straw bonnet) was permitted to drop a curtsey to Victor Hugo.Hugo was the hero, back then, of every young Parisian of an impressionable age. Gertrude remains better known for another, and more enduring, literary friendship. Visiting Trouville with her family in 1842, the 22-year-old was entranced to glimpse a splendid figure who looked, she later wrote, "like a young Greek" as he emerged from the sea clad only in a pair of the newly fashionable striped flannel shorts. (These precise details are the sort at which Waller excels.) Aged 20 – torn between his desire to be a writer and his father's wish that he should become a lawyer – this young Achilles possessed sea-green eyes, flowing hair, a golden beard and a tremendous physique. His name? Gustave Flaubert.Gertrude and her invalid sister were smitten; their feelings were returned. Marriage was discussed. It would be a shame to give all of that beguiling story away, but it is pleasing to read how, half a lifetime later, the couple met once more. The old enchantment was restored, although Gertrude's daughters, baffled at their mother's delight in the company of a shuffling, corpulent old man, warmed to Flaubert only when he arranged an introduction to Turgenev, their hero.Flaubert's letters to Gertrude (some of which are published here for the first time) are alone worth the price of Waller's book, but The Magnificent Mrs Tennant deserves our attention as a graceful, engaging and meticulous study of a fascinating age – and of an occasionally remarkable woman.Miranda Seymour's Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill is published by Simon & Schuster.Henry JamesGustave Flaubertguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Writing on the wall for libraries? The latest stage in the 'modernisation review' of library services is nothing but waffle. Time to get out the boxing glovesIt is now more than three years since I first began writing our imperilled libraries. I can't say that this is always a pleasure. Yes, occasionally, I'm able to bring good news. In October, I celebrated the fact that Wirral council had performed a stunning U-turn, and would keep open 11 libraries it had wanted to close. Mostly, though, it's incredibly wearying. So much bad news. Today is no exception. Last Tuesday, you see, some 14 months after Andy Burnham, then culture secretary, announced that his department would carry out a "modernisation review" of the library service, a document was finally published. Unfortunately, it did not contain, as one might reasonably have expected, the findings of the review; they won't now appear until "early spring". This was just a "consultation document". Which means? Well, that depends. Margaret Hodge, the minister with responsibility for the review, calls it a collection of inspirational ideas and provocative questions that will fire the starting gun on a further eight weeks of debate. But I call it a disgrace: a complete waste of time and money.The document has a title so hilariously nebulous, not even the writers of The Thick of It could improve on it. "Empower, Inform, Enrich" – sounds like a scented candle – consists of 30 essays by various interested parties whom Hodge bizarrely invited to rattle off their thoughts a few scant weeks ago (among them are the novelist Tracy Chevalier and the chief executive of the British Library, Dame Lynne Brindley). These are followed by a series of supposedly pertinent questions. At the Southwark library where it was launched, I flicked through its 85 shiny pages and, faster than you could say 'Dewey Decimal System', my blood pressure began to rise. Most of the essays – surprise! – simply reiterate the suggestions many campaigners have been making since, oh, forever: the launch of a national library card; longer opening hours; improved book stocks. Fine. Some things can never be said enough. Then I got to the last contributor: Darcy Willson-Rymer, UK managing director of Starbucks. Why did Hodge ask him? Since when has he been an expert on libraries? Actually, he isn't. His essay, which begins, enragingly, with the words: "How much time do you spend buying your coffee at Starbucks in the morning?" (Answer: none at all – I avoid it like the plague), is just one long advertisement. The best way to save libraries, he asserts, is to put coffee shops in them. Funny, that.Then I turned to the last few pages: the consultation questions. This section is, if anything, even worse. The issues we are now being invited to consider – how we measure a library's performance, for instance – are so blindingly obvious, it's embarrassing. What else does Hodge think library campaigners and professionals spend their time thinking about? As for question 20 – "Is it important that libraries remain a statutory obligation for local authorities?" – if the government is seriously suggesting that it might not be, this is a grave development indeed. But if it isn't, and I don't believe that it is, raising it is just meaningless space-filling.At the launch of "Empower, Inform, Enrich", Hodge devoted most of her speech to praising an e-reader she'd borrowed. Like many politicians, Hodge is obsessed with showing that she grasps the concept of digital; listening to her talk about it is like watching your dad disco dance. Afterwards, though, she sought me out, and shook my hand (politicians are trained to love-bomb their enemies; her smile never faltered). At last! I thought. Alone with the minister. But when I said I was bewildered that the review was taking so long – likely to be lost in the scrum of the general election, it will also arrive too late to influence councils now setting their budgets – she insisted, yet again, that this was down to her absence from the department for personal reasons, as if a vast department of state with all its mandarins, spinners and press officers, could not possibly have continued the thing without her. Her smile intensified. Why was I looking so sceptical? The review would be published. "I promise it will," she said.But I'm not holding my breath. It is now clear that the library review – which could have been such a force for good – is slipping quietly away from us. The contributions of five expert "workstreams" established by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 2008 seem to have disappeared altogether, so even if, by some miracle, a report is published before March, you can bet it will be inconsequential: more last-minute waffle and prevarication. Meanwhile, encouraged by a lack of leadership from above, councils will cut services. In Northumberland, 12 libraries were last week earmarked for closure. The pity of it is that "Empower, Inform, Enrich" was not even the most feeble of the DCMS's utterances in the last seven days.In other news, the report of the Wirral libraries inquiry was published. Sue Charteris, its author, concluded that had the council proceeded with its plan to close 11 libraries, it would indeed have been in breach of its statutory duty under the Public Libraries Act. Given the chance to throw her weight behind this report, however, Hodge ducked out. Her attitude: Wirral did the right thing in the end, no harm done. But it only did the right thing because the government intervened and launched an inquiry, and the government only intervened when the pressure to do so from the public and the media grew sufficiently intense. What can we take away from this mess? Only that it continues to be up to us – the people who love libraries – to keep our beady eyes open, and our boxing gloves always at hand.LibrariesRachel Cookeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Out of the Shadows In this muted and gently probing novel, Charlotte Brontë finds liberation through her dauntless, self-reliant heroine and fictional alter ego, Jane Eyre. feeds.nytimes.com |
The unvanquishable book pile If, like mine, your reading habits are governed by sudden obsessions and thematic crushes, then your back-up store of books will never get any smallerThe minutes after turning the last page of a novel should be a time for contemplation and absorption, a time to let the words settle. But if you're a greedy reader as I am, there's a tendency to immediately start thinking about what to read next. There's something ever so slightly unsteadying about being between books – and the balance needs to be swiftly restored.While it would no doubt be sensible at this juncture to turn to the pile of books in the corner that are patiently waiting to be read (mine is sizeable and currently doing double duty as a bedside table), this pile tends to get overlooked because invariably during the course of my reading I will have alighted upon something that demands, in a manner too forceful to ignore, to be followed up; a hole that needs to be filled. These small sparks could arise via the mentioning of an author whose work I've yet to encounter or through the description of a place or period that I realise I know shamefully little about. Either way, before I've even finished my current book it has become quite, quite vital that I try and read more on a particular theme or idea and then, having been inspired to go in a certain direction by one book, the next book creates an entirely different fire of its own and another path of inquiry beckons. The pile, meanwhile, remains untouched.As a result, I tend to read in thematic chains rather than, say, working my way through the works of one particular author. So Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney led to a journey through the 18th century, taking in some Tobias Smollett, biographies of the surgeon John Hunter Wendy Moore's fascinating The Knife Man and Captain Cook, before ending in a curious – and ultimately very satisfying – dip into Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. Before that there was a spurt of Bloomsbury-related reading, and before that there was a bit of Aldous Huxley/Sybille Bedford back and forth. While there's something liberating in letting one's reading be steered by the books themselves, in being carried into unexpected places, sometimes I wish I was more systematic in my reading habits if only for the sake of the pile. What I'm interested in knowing is what sparks people in their choice of reading material; how do you decide what next, where now? Is it obligation, inspiration or some other more particular and personal system?Natasha Tripneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |