Just arrived, two books whose writers - coincidentally and quite by the way - were Edinburgh-born.
Jane Robinson's Bluestockings is subtitled "The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education", and it tells of the progress of higher education for women in Britain. This is an account of "... defiance and determination, of colourful eccentricity and at times heartbreaking loneliness, as well as of passionate friendships, midnight cocoa-parties and glorious self-discovery." To think that at one time doctors warned that if women studied too hard "their wombs would wither and die"; how far we have come.
Unlike the ladies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have had little difficulty gaining admission to the medical school of Edinburgh University, but it was there in the late 1870s that he encountered Dr. Joseph Bell, on whom he is said to have based the character of the world's most famous detective. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - with a foreword by Ruth Rendell - contains the four novels and fifty-six short stories which form the Holmes canon, and I am really looking forward to starting them and to "... a close study on the printed page of Holmes' deductive methods", for while familiar with Holmes and Watson through numerous television adaptations, as Ruth Rendell says, "Doyle's fiction needs to be read."
Lovely! I picked up Bluestockings from the library last week and my boyfriend is currently finishing The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (the orange and white boxset) that I gave him as gift.
Posted by: Claire (Paperback Reader) | 08 December 2009 at 12:47 PM
Am going immediately to search local library database for Bluestockings. Perhaps a copy will even appear in my Christmas stocking?
Posted by: Louise | 08 December 2009 at 07:08 PM