Strong Poison

I found Strong Poison in this fabulous bookstore in Milwaukee a few weeks ago - I'd probably put that bookstore on my list of top five bookstores, which, off the top of my head are:

1. The Strand, NYC
2. Powells, Portland Oregon
3. Women and Children First, Chicago
4. I can't remember the name, Mendocino, CA
5. City Lights, San Francisco

OK, well, it's definitely in my top ten.

I've been meaning to mark the provenance of all my books, but I always forget. But, I digress... Strong Poison is by Dorothy Sayers, and, by all rights, I should have read it before Gaudy Night (and so should you!)

In it, we're immediately thrown into the trail of one Harriet Vane, a mystery writer herself, who's been accused of murdering her ex. Our hero, Peter Whimsey, watching the trial, decides that Harriet is NOT guilty and also that he would like to marry her.

Despite the sexist overtones of er, our hero, Sayers's book has charming early feminist tones as well - she addresses sexism in the workplace, domestic service and the difficulty of detecting whilst female. A woman finds herself at a loss when, hot on the trail, she doesn't have a conceivable excuse, as a woman, to linger on the street, aside from gazing longingly in shop windows for a certain amount of time. She imagines all the ways a man or a boy could lurk indefinitely.

Vane and her ex-beau (fictional) were part of the (actual) Bloomsbury crowd. The Bloomsburies are a fascinating group of artists who, in this book come off as slightly wacky almost-hippies. In a way, I suppose they were - they were experimenting not just with different ways of creating art, but non-normative social structures and ways of living. These interactions with the aristocratic but easy-going Whimsey are awfully funny.

There's also a hilarious bit having to do with "Spiritualism" - another popular idea of the time, that you could communicate easily with departed souls and whatnot.

Sayers is a very witty writer and her language is just a pleasure to read - Strong Poison is a great example of her work, although, I do have one small complaint, and I'm about to drop a major spoiler, so stop reading if you intend to read it unless you have a really bad memory like I do. OK, seriously. Look away! I'm going to start a new paragraph and then I'm going to drop the spoiler.


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Alright, you're with me? So, what happens is, her ex is poisoned, right? And, it turns out, his last meal was eaten entirely with someone else, and then he had tea with Harriet. But, the someone else didn't get sick, and, it turns out, that person had built up a fuckin' immunity to the poison. Come on! That's annoying. You could never figure that out. So, that was really lame, but, otherwise I couldn't put the book down, it was really great.

Gaudy Night

So, I finally got that Dorothy Sayers recommendation I was waiting for and 'twas Gaudy Night. It was excellent, and I am very happy! Apparently it's the book that distinguished Sayers from a mere genre writer of detective fiction (the horror!) to an actual writer of literature-y fiction (huzzah!)

The main character is Harriet Vane a (wait for it...) writer of detective fiction and really terrific, strong, female character that's reticent to marry the handsome, charming, intelligent (filthy rich) Peter Whimsey because she fears he might not treat her as an equal (amongst other things).

Vane is asked to return to her alma mater, Oxford, where, in one of the women's colleges, a "poison pen" is wrecking havoc on the school. This "poison pen" writes vile things on the walls and sends people nasty and threatening notes. What's really interesting is how Sayers tells a rivoting mystery without that classic event of so many detective stories: a murder. In fact, she manages to tell the whole tale of the "poison pen" without ever actually writing any dirty words herself, leaving the reader is left to imagine what might have been written.

Written in 1936, the book displays a rather interesting pre-war sentiment. Here are two colloquial characters:

"When I was a lad," replied the foreman, "young ladies was young ladies. And young gentlement was young gentlemen. If you get my meaning."

"Wot this country wants, "said Padgett, "Is a 'Itler."

Like her other books, this one is very funny and awfully smart. I love the character of Harriet Vane, and look forward to reading the other books that are about her. She appears in Strong Poison and is also in Have his Carcase (?) and Busman's Honeymoon.

This song comes up in the book, btw. Lovely. Also, thank goodness (and I don't think I'm ruining it) despite the fact that Whimsey is the famous detective, it's Harriet who is respected for her detective abilities and gets herself out of her own scrapes. Ultimately, Gaudy Night examines the sort of clash of pre-war England as people choose a cultural allegiance - progressivism and intellectualism or political and social regressivism (in a 1930s kind of way).

I would highly recommend this book - at 501 pages (paperback), you can really sink your teeth into it, and you'll want to!

Oh, brush up on your latin! And, if you have already read it and are a Harry Potter fan (or not...) check this out! Hilarious.

How to Suppress Women's Writing

How to Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ is a marvelous book that examines the systematic ways that women artists have been suppressed by society and critics. Russ's book is a very readable, accessible polemic against the suppression of women artists (not just writers, but artists, actors, musicians, etc) and explains the various ways that women's work is undermined:

She didn't write it.
She wrote it, but she shouldn't have.
She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
She wrote it, but "she" isn't really an artist and "it" isn't really serious, of the rigth genre - i.e., really art.
She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it.
She wrote it, but it's only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason.
She wrote it, but there are very few of her.

Aside from verbalizing some of the frustrating questions I've been asking myself lately, Russ presents example after example of brilliant women artists and the denial of their place in the canon. She counts representations of women in anthologies, cites old criticism of books, most amusingly when a book is first published under a male pen-name and later revealed to have been written by a woman - like Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights. After the shocking revelation of the artist's sex, her writing was compared "...to a little bird fluttering its wings against the bars of its cage." When it was understood to be written by a man, it was described as "powerful and original", "bestial, brutal, indeed monstrous."

Women's experience (sometimes but not always the subject of women's writing) is often rejected out of hand. Writes Russ:

Many feminists argue that the automatic devaluation of women's experience and consequent attitudes, values, and judgments springs from an automatic devaluation of women per se, the belief that manhood is "normative" and womanhood somehow "deviant" or "special." ... Not only is female experience often considered less broad, less representative, less important, than male experience, but the actual content of works can be distorted according to whether the author is believed to be of one sex or the other.

Naturally, she addresses Linda Nochlin's extremely influential 1971 article "Why have there been no great women artists?" in which Nochlin writes, "There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse..." Russ answers that with, "...there is the statement "no great women artists" in a century that has produced Georgia O'Keeffe, Käthe Kollwitz, and Emily Carr, to name only those I happen to like."

Russ ends the book with a challenge to the reader to consider their own prejudices and rejections, while freely admitting that her own book doesn't adequately address the suppression of other minority writers, particularly black women writers and other writers of color and non-Western artists.

I came away with a long list of writers I want to explore more, here are a few:
The Countess of Winchilsea, Anne Finch
Margaret Cavendish
Jane Marcus, Art and Anger
Eve Merriam, The Club
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Jane Elliott
Lady Anne Lindsay
Lady Carolina Nairne
Aphra Behn
Charlotte Brontë's Villette
And, thanks to Russ, I got that Dorothy Sayers recommendation I've been waiting for: Gaudy Night - review coming soon! Let me know if you're familiar with the writers above.

The Nine Tailors

Riding on the high of my first Dorothy Sayers experience, I went to the "Sayers Shelf" in the library and somewhat randomly chose The Nine Tailors, thinking, How could I go wrong? I love the sewing arts.

Turns out the nine tailors are like bells? And a certain style of ringing like, church bells? I'm not kidding you, beyond boring, but I hung in there 'til almost the end. Peter Wimsey continues to delight (despite his own predilection for bell ringing) but I wouldn't recommend this book, even to Quasimodo himself. (PS, the image I've included isn't the cover I had, in case my old friend Anonymous drops by and has something to say. As he always does.)

Now, I know there are some hard-core Sayers fans out there so I patiently await your recommendations before I return to that shelf. I'm not giving up on you, Dorothy!

Unnatural Death

I picked up a Dorothy Sayers' book in South Beach at a fine little book store on Lincoln Road. I'd heard her mentioned reverently on some of the various book blogs I read and I was not! Disappointed! The book I somewhat randomly selected from her series was Unnatural Death, first published in 1927. It features a Lord Peter Wimsey, this wealthy dude who's really great at solving mysteries. He's kind of like Jeeves and Wooster rolled into one person, with a little Sherlock Holmes (He likes comparing himself to Holmes, as a matter of fact.)

The mystery in question is the death of an older woman for whom there is no sign of foul play and yet Peter Wimsey has a suspicion that she was murdered and sets out to solve it. Apparently the book was quite topical when it was published, relating to a change in inheritance laws which caused me to recall Austen and even consider looking up the definition of an "entail." (Just to consider, not to do, ultimately.)

Well, I thought it was absolutely marvelous and I intend to read many many more books by Sayers. It's very British, very funny, very smart and kind of scary! (I got spooked at the end!) Here's a passage that made me laugh:

"Your friend's going to be left behind," said Mrs. Cropper as the train moved out."

"That would be very unlike him," replied Mr. Murbles, calmly unfolding a couple of rugs and exchanging his old-fashioned top-hat for a curious kind of travelling cap with flaps to it. Mrs. Cropper, in the midst of her anxiety, could not help wondering where in the world he had contrived to purchase this Victorian relic. As a matter of fact, Mr. Murbles' caps were specifically made to his own design by an exceedingly expensive West End hatter, who help Mr. Murbles in deep respect as a real gentleman of the old school.