Mary S. Lovell, “A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby”

So why should you read the biography of someone you’ve never heard of? Because you’re interested in the period, I suppose, or in the place where that person lived. Because you admire the work of the biographer, certainly. Or a biography may simply be a terrifically good story — and that’s the case with A Scandalous Life. I came across this book because on my recent Smithsonian Journeys trip to England we met the 12th Lord Digby who has brilliant blue eyes and industrial-strength charm. He is Pamela Harriman’s  brother, and I suggest you keep that fact in mind as I tell you about their ancestress.

Portrait miniature of Jane by Sir William Charles Ross. Courtesy of Paul Fraser Collectibles

Jane Digby was born in 1807 to an aristocratic naval hero and the daughter of an earl. The Digby family enjoyed plenty of money, a Dorset estate, and an affectionate network of powerful relatives. Jane’s London debut was like something from a Georgette Heyer novel, complete with balls at Almack’s and handsome young men in pantaloons vying for another waltz with the lovely young lady. Since Jane was spectacularly beautiful and charming, it wasn’t long before she was married to the staid Lord Ellenborough. She was seventeen.

We would neither know nor care about Jane if it weren’t for two other outstanding characteristics: she was immensely headstrong, and had a prodigious libido. I’m not going to confuse you by running through a list of the men with whom she had affairs or by whom she had children or to whom she was married. There were quite a few, which is all the more startling considering that this story plays out across nineteenth-century Europe. Jane very quickly left the polite circles she’d been brought up in, though she was able to maintain relationships with her exasperated (not to say despairing) family. She did abandon several children, but she believed each time that the child would have a better future with its father.

I suppose you could summarize Jane Digby’s story by saying that she roamed around the Continent being a mistress to various men, which is certainly true, but the last act of her life was both dramatic and satisfying: she met, married, and stayed with a bedouin sheik who was twenty years her junior. This, at the age of 46. It was the relationship of her life and made her immensely happy. She died in Damascus 28 years later and her heartbroken husband led her favorite white mare and white mule in the funeral cortege, as part of the mourning.

I’ve heard it said that the best biographers fall in love with their subjects and there’s no mistaking Mary Lovell‘s affection for Jane, who was generous, loyal, curious, and energetic. Lovell was also lucky to find very rich sources for this book: it was the era of letter-writing, after all, and many of Jane’s survived. What’s more she was a diarist, recording her secrets in code that Lovell managed to crack.

I read a profile of Pamela Digby Harriman shortly after her death. A reporter asked her to reveal her secret for attracting and keeping such attractive men as Gianni Agnelli, Randolph Churchill, Leland Hayward, and of course Harriman. She proclaimed, “There are no secrets! There is only enthusiasm!” I suspect Jane Digby would have agreed.

Countess of Carnarvon, “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey”

Actually this post is a twofer, because I also just read Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. Now why do you suppose I would read these two volumes back to back?

I’ll give you a minute.

Maybe if I add a photo of my passport?

Yes! You got it! I’m heading to  Highclere! Not only that — I’m going on a tour billed as “At Home with the Edwardians: A Tour of Downton Abbey Film Locations.” And I am the “Study Leader.” So I’m studying — hence Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey.  

I must admit I had avoided Lady Almina, largely out of envy, because this book outsells my own To Marry an English Lord and because its author, the Countess, gets to actually live at Highclere. But it was an entertaining and informative read. Almina Wombwell was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild. In a very sophisticated arrangement, her parents stayed together and Rothschild bankrolled Almina’s dowry as well as numerous subsequent expenses. The two appear to have been very happy together, which creates a challenge for the author. Much of the early part of the book is devoted to the running of Highclere, both upstairs and down; Carnarvon clearly had access to excellent records but even anecdotes about the castle’s inhabitants don’t quite add up to a story. Far more interesting was Almina’s devotion to medical care during World War I — she set up a rehabilitation unit at Highclere and later in London. And there’s fascinating material about her husband the Earl of Carnarvon’s Egyptian obsession. He bankrolled Howard Carter’s excavations in the Valley of the Kings, and the two opened King Tut’s tomb together. Almina was there. It’s quite a spell-binding moment, and Carnarvon does a great job with the historical context and the competing political agendas.

As for A Night to Remember, surely you remember those first moments of Season 1, Episode 1, when Lord Grantham takes up his freshly-ironed newspaper and reads that the Titanic has sunk? Evidently Walter Lord’s book about that event is still authoritative. He interviewed scores of survivors and put together a deceptively simple moment-by-moment narrative that makes for amazingly suspenseful reading, considering that we all know more or less what happened. It’s the fascination of the horror movie, when you see the monster creeping up on the campfire where all those innocents are cluelessly toasting marshmallows. Lord speculates that the Titanic tragedy still exerts fascination as a kind of precursor to the loss of innocence brought about by World War I. He doesn’t press the point, but the sinking of the unsinkable ship does make for an excellent metaphor. The assurance of the 19th century gives way to the jittery insecurity of the 20th — and all because we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

Joanna Trollope, “The Soldier’s Wife”

I always enjoy Joanna Trollope’s books, though I can’t usually tell them apart retrospectively. Is that a bad thing? It didn’t used to be. I imagine Trollope’s heyday featured legions of female readers — of a certain age, naturally — reflexively buying and enjoying “the new Joanna Trollope.”

Entrance to Horne Barracks, Larkhill, England; photo Trish Steel. A world apart.

But the book business has changed, as I never cease noticing, and moderately well-known writers like Trollope have gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle. Her books now lack that essential quality, “discoverability.” Which is a horrible word, but useful, since it stands for something we writers didn’t used to worry about: the potential for a book to appear on a reader’s radar. I would have thought that Trollope had retained legions of loyal readers even in the US, but I’m not sure that’s true since even I, a loyal fan, stumble over them by accident. (So much for Amazon’s algorithms.)

I was a little bit apprehensive about The Soldier’s Wife; afraid it might be more of a polemic than a novel. And Trollope obviously did do a lot of research about family issues in the military. But I should have trusted in her ability to transform research into a fictional world, and above all to create believable characters. So Alexa Riley’s apprehension about her husband Major Dan Riley’s return from deployment in Afghanistan is utterly convincing, as is Dan’s disorientation. So are the wives on the base, so are Dan’s commanding officers and colleagues. Trollope has always had a special gift for writing about children, and the three-year-old twins, Flora and Tassy, are practically scene-stealers.

Trollope’s perennial source of conflict is the differing needs and desires of her appealing characters. In The Soldier’s Wife, as you’d expect, the stresses of Army life are laid out in detail: the impermanence, the lack of control, the rigid hierarchy, the old-fashioned assumption that a military wife must subordinate her career aims to her husband’s. Dan, returning from the violence and unpredictability of Helmand Province, is jumpy and preoccupied. Alexa, who loves him, is overwhelmed and resentful. Dan is a good officer, likely to be promoted, and the Army is his identity. Alexa’s thirteen-year-old daughter Isabel, from a previous marriage, precipitates much of the action by running away from a despised boarding school. Maybe the resolution feels a little bit rushed. Maybe if you’re not a total Trollope fan, you’ll feel the book is formulaic. I still found it very absorbing.

And do admit: aren’t you curious to see what Trollope is going to make of Sense and Sensibility?

Barbara Trapido, “Temples of Delight”

It’s kind of a bold title for a book, don’t you think? If you call your novel Temples of Delight, you are either being harshly sardonic or you’d better deliver. Fortunately with Barbara Trapido doing the writing, delight is indeed forthcoming. Along with some confusion, I  have to admit.

An 1815 set for “The Magic Flute,” by Karl Friedrich Schinkel

As we know, the border between the literal and the fantastic isn’t a very comfy place for me. The same is true of earnest, hardworking young Alice Pilling, who when we meet her is a third form student in a mediocre girls’ school. Into the school, and Alice’s life, erupts Jem McCrail, a brilliant and iconoclastic life force, even if she is only thirteen. Trapido lays out her premise in the first sentence: “Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice.” And even though Jem disappears from school after a few months, her influence shapes Alice’s response to life for years thereafter. I can only give you the barest bones of the plot because it’s quite rambunctious, for a story about a clever girl’s coming of age. There are deaths and births, seductions and betrayals, three suitors for Alice… oh, golly. Do I see an allegory appearing? Does it mean something that Alice’s first boyfriend is named Roland? Or that Mozart’s The Magic Flute keeps shuffling in and out of the narrative? Of course it does.

And what, exactly, is Trapido driving at, with an infant named Pamina and a devilish-looking love interest named Angeletti, and nuns everywhere? I didn’t even try to sort it all out. For me, Trapido’s strong suit is charm, and Temples of Delight provided several hours of delicious reading.

Elly Griffiths, “Dying Fall”

Another mystery with one of those baffling meaningless titles that I can’t quite relate to the narrative — but never mind, it’s the new Elly Griffiths. And that means time spent with Ruth Galloway, the forensic archaeologist who can read bones. And, this being a fairly conventional mystery, that also means readers get another dose of Ruth’s hopeless love for Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, who is fairly happily married even if he is the father of Ruth’s child. Oh, and of course there is a death, too.

Griffiths manages two unusual achievements in  Dying Fall. The first is transferring her cast of characters to a new setting. Ruth, Nelson, and the Druid Cathbad are usually found in Norfolk. But in Dying Fall, they head north to Lancashire. All of them. Ruth goes on a semi-academic quest, Nelson and his wife Michelle go on a family vacation. Yes, of course they meet up. Sometimes mystery series rooted in a certain locale lose energy when they’re uprooted (as in Craig Johnson taking his protagonist Walt Longmire to Philadelphia). Not the case here, though. Ruth and her entourage work just fine off their home turf.

Imagine an amusement park filled with people wearing Simon Cowell masks…

Which brings me to the second achievement: in this novel Griffiths delicately and successfully bridges mayhem and humor. Here, for instance, we’re in the head of Maureen, Nelson’s redoubtable Irish Catholic mother, in church.

Now, Maureen prays angrily for her favourite child. Please, God, let him see the error of his arrogant ways. Keep him safe, Lord, and let him realise his many blessings. At the sign of peace she holds Michelle’s hand tightly. Though she doesn’t know why, she suddenly feels very protective towards her daughter-in-law.

‘Peace be with you, my darling,’ she says huskily.

‘Thank you,’ says Michelle, who can never remember what she’s meant to say in return.

In fact there’s quite a bit of material about belief systems in Dying Fall. Readers of Griffiths‘ previous books will be familiar with the slightly loopy quality of Cathbad the Druid, who was originally Michael Malone. (He verges on New Age-annoying, but his sincerity and kindness, as well as his devotion to Ruth and Kate, make him sympathetic.) Then in addition to Maureen Nelson’s Catholicism we encounter a skeleton that may be King Arthur’s, which is of great interest to a group of white supremacists operating around a small Lancashire university. That, obviously, is where Ruth and Nelson’s mystery-solving capacities come in handy. But Griffiths also alludes to a contemporary faith in celebrity. The climactic scene of the novel takes place in an amusement park where, for some obscure reason, many of the visitors are wearing masks with the likeness of Simon Cowell on them. It’s as nightmarish as any of the more conventionally creepy scenes in this satisfying book.

John Galsworthy, “The Forsyte Saga, Vol. 2″

Soames is dead! Oh, dear, oh, dear. I didn’t see that coming. Nor did I anticipate the sense of regret I feel. John Galsworthy created Soames as the embodiment of Victorian bourgeois values. He was going to die sometime. What startles me is my affection for him. He behaved like a terrible jerk way back in The Man of Property. But over the succeeding thousand-some pages, he’s managed to redeem himself.

Goya’s “Vendimia” — Soames owns a copy and thinks the girl resembles Fleur

Are you confused about what I just read? I’m confused and I’ve got the book on my desk. The cover says The Forsyte Saga Volume 2. The three novels in it are The White Monkey; The Silver Spoon; and Swan Song.  I think some of my confusion stems from the fact that the individual novels of the original trilogy are better known; people have heard of The Man of Property. But by the time you get around to The White Monkey, you’re not reading a stand-alone volume. You’re in it for the long haul. And the long haul is deeply, deeply satisfying.

For one thing, it’s got more narrative tension than the original trilogy. Soames is still the central character but the defining relationship is really between him and his headstrong daughter Fleur whom he loves with all his heart. As Soames personifies the nineteenth century, Fleur personifies the twentieth. She is the pretty, capricious, quicksilver woman who cannot find contentment. As Soames says toward the end of the novel — speaking about his other passion, painting –

‘I remember the first shows in London of those post-impressionists and early Cubist chaps. But they ran riot with the war, catching at things they couldn’t get.’

He stopped. It was exactly what she — !”

What Fleur wanted that she couldn’t get was her cousin Jon, who is also the son of Soames’ first wife Irene. My, that is complicated. It’s not incest, really, but given the intense bad feeling between Soames and Irene and consequently the rest of the Forsyte family, the Fleur/Jon romance is doomed. Which is of course a lovely plot for a novelist and Galsworthy spins this out over his three volumes, allowing plenty of time for the ramifications to develop. On the rebound from her first romantic episodes with Jon, Fleur marries Michael Mont, an appealing  young politician who knows that he is her second choice. Michael’s age, aristocratic connections, and parliamentary career give the novelist scope to dramatize many of the cultural questions of the day, from World War I to the General Strike to slum clearance.

But we always come back to Soames and Fleur. He knows — as does the reader — that she’s spoiled. He knows he’s partly at fault. Inarticulate as always, he does his best to protect her from her mistakes, as any parent would, and as no parent actually can. Fittingly, Soames dies protecting Fleur from yet another of her destructive impulses. And though it’s a perfectly appropriate ending to this volume, I still want more Forsytes. Maybe the best story-telling is always addictive?

Peter Dickinson, “The Last House Party” and “Death of a Unicorn”

We don’t tend to think of our escape fiction as following literary fashion, do we? But it does, friends! This became very clear to me when I recently re-read two murder mysteries from the 1980s, The Last House Party and Death of a Unicorn. A friend once handed another one of Peter Dickinson’s novels back to me, saying, “The plot was just like origami. Once you unfolded it, it was just a piece of paper.” He found this annoying: I did not. But I have to admit that I didn’t follow either of these plots especially carefully. And the “origami” criticism was accurate, because both of these novels were energetically cast in a post-modern mold, jumping back and forth in time and point of view. Remember that? The impulse to constantly remind the reader that she is reading fiction? I don’t think I heard the word “immersive” applied to fiction much in the 1980s, did you?

I do remember, though, that many of the writers who engaged in this kind of fractured story-telling — like Dickinson –are  very skilled, and that each time the fictional rug is jerked from beneath your feet, there’s a small shock. In those days Dickinson seemed especially interested in the way new information can solve old puzzles, so you can see how the technique works well in suspense fiction. The Last House Party isn’t even strictly a murder mystery, though there is a death: it focuses on a baffling episode of a molested child. That bit takes place in an English country house in the 1930s, during the gathering of a clique of proto-Fascists. (Think Cliveden set.) The present-day narrative includes letters that drop the reader into the African desert in World War II, as well as details of running Snailwood House as a contemporary Stately Home. I have to admit that I am not even entirely sure I know what happened: Dickinson’s exposition is so very oblique that I may have missed a few key points.

The same is true of Death of a Unicorn, but in that case it’s because the central ugly behavior involves post-World War II currency controls. The narrator is Lady Margaret Millett, heiress to another big English country house.  In the contemporary segments, she’s the iron-willed chatelaine and author of immensely popular historical romances, but the roots of the story are in the London Season long ago. Wonderful social history, of course — reminiscent of both Julian Fellowes’ Past Imperfect and of The Pursuit of Love, especially in the way it de-glamorizes the aristocracy at play. So if you wanted a faintly jaundiced view of the state of English debutantes from roughly 1935 to 1970, you could read Mitford, Dickinson, Fellowes in that order. Now there’s a project for a rainy day!

Lisa Hilton, “The Horror of Love”

I keep telling myself I don’t care about the Mitfords, but that is evidently a lie. Because not only did I buy The Horror of Love but I actually finished it, despite not really liking the book very much. How did this happen? I suppose I was curious about Gaston Palewski, the great love of Nancy Mitford’s life and the model for Fabrice de Sauveterre, the womanizing duke at the center of The Pursuit of Love.

No one loved Palewski for his looks

I do now have the facts about Palewski straight, though I don’t expect to remember them for very long. Much of The Horror of Love is devoted to his career in post-World War II French politics and I’m sorry to say I flipped through that business pretty quickly. It’s the kind of history I can only absorb through spy novels, apparently. Perhaps it would be accurate to indicate that Palewski was a kind of pilot-fish or consigliere to De Gaulle; the fellow who communicated the Great Man’s ideas to the wider public. I do remember that Palewski ended up as French Ambassador to Italy in the 1960s, blissfully inhabiting the Palazzo Farnese. One of the interests Palewski and Mitford shared was traditional, aristocratic European civilization. (Late in the book, after Gaston has married the Duchesse de Talleyrand-Perigord, he semi-apologizes to a friend for his social climbing by saying, “What do you want? I’ve always loved high ceilings.”)

Lisa Hilton has a good sense of the clever quotation or the picturesque detail, quoting some of the more entertaining or outrageous Mitford slang or behavior (to curse someone, the sisters would write a name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. I plan to try this soon). She is also a staunch Nancy partisan, which befits a biographer. She admires Nancy’s courage and wit, defending what might appear to contemporary readers as malice or coldness. Nancy’s method for handling setbacks was always to maintain her composure and make a joke, but this sometimes makes her look cruel. Hilton sees it otherwise.

Nancy, on the other hand, was lovely

Fair enough. There’s an elegance to the stiff upper lip. But I found Nancy’s intense nostalgia and distaste for the modern era snobbish and distasteful, while her anti-Americanism made me furious. I’ve enjoyed  her biographies of 18th century figures like Madame de Pompadour and Frederick the Great, but after reading The Horror of Love I have a lingering sense of Nancy pulling aside her New Look skirts so as not to be smirched by the populism of the 20th century. And Hilton’s portrayal of Gaston Palewski fades next to Nancy’s fictional version, Fabrice. In the end, the affair could be described in the French aphorism that Hilton quotes: en amour, il y a toujours l’un qui embrasse, et l’autre qui tend la joue. Nancy kissed, Gaston held out his cheek.

Ruth Rendell, “Tigerlily’s Orchids”

OK, here’s a question. You pick up a new Ruth Rendell mystery, let’s say Tigerlily’s Orchids. The first character you meet, Olwen, is lucidly determined to drink herself to death. And furthermore, “On the whole Olwen was indifferent to other people or else she disliked them…” Do you find that attitude refreshing, or are you aghast? I’m not giving much away by telling you that Olwen eventually has her way and that the process, described with Rendell’s customary calm, is not attractive. So now you’re warned.

Cross-section of a Parisian apartment house by Edmond Texier, 1852

One of qualities I enjoy about Rendell’s work is exactly that calm. She doesn’t editorialize about Olwen. Nor about the incredibly handsome but vapid Stuart Font. Nor about Wally Scurlock, the venal caretaker for the North London apartment block called Lichfield House where the novel takes place. Watch out for the names, though. They tend to supply auras for characters, like the wealthy young girl named Noor, rumored to be dating an Indian prince. (Reminds you of Queen Noor of Jordan, perhaps?) The funny thing is that most rumors in Tigerlily’s Orchids are wrong. Most of the judgments made by the characters about their fellows are also wrong. This is a novel of miscommunication and misapprehension. Oh, yes, it’s also a murder mystery, but that’s easy to forget. There are various feints at physical mayhem and various skullduggery and bad behavior and certainly a puzzle that needs to be solved. But the victim had almost slipped my mind when the solution to his death presented itself.

I got a big kick out of the structure of the novel. The link among the characters is the apartment block itself, placing Tigerlily’s Orchids in a tradition that goes back into the nineteenth century. For instance, Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (usually translated as Pot Luck) follows the entwined lives of a group of apartment dwellers. In Rendell’s hands the device feels like one of those clever cartoons exposing a cross-section of a multi-dwelling building and catching the inhabitants in private moments. For instance:

Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.

Olwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and, when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin… In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the second time.

See? Fun! Oh, and by the way, no character is named Tigerlily, and there are no orchids.

Deborah Crombie, “The Sound of Breaking Glass”

There are few things I love more than abandoning myself to fully satisfying escape reading. It’s pretty harmless — relatively cheap, no calories involved, I respect myself in the morning — yet carries a tinge of the illicit. Is there something I should be doing besides lolling on the sofa, speed-reading? Yes. Absolutely. This is me kicking over the traces.

Happily, Deborah Crombie’s The Sound of Breaking Glass was just the right book at the right time. I’ve written before about her series of police procedurals involving Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. I wasn’t totally crazy about the last one, No Mark Upon Her, but The Sound of Breaking Glass seems to correct the flaw of the undigested background material. In this case, several characters are involved in the world of contemporary pop music but it meshes better with the plot.

Which is quite conventional, but satisfying in every respect. We have our bodies, but the folks who died are pretty unsavory. We have a shifting cast of possible suspects, but the nice people are largely spared. There’s a little bit of romance, some domestic issues between Duncan and Gemma, all tied up neatly. Yes, as the title indicates, there is even broken glass.