Cornflower Books

Three by Thirkell

    I have three of Angela Thirkell's books to read over the next few days, and having never read her before I am greatly looking forward to them.

    High Rising (1933) is the first of Angela Thirkell's "brilliantly satirical English comedies set in the fictional county of Barsetshire. Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her boisterous young son Tony set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura's wealthy friend and neighbour George Knox has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village. Can clever, practical Laura rescue George from Miss Grey's clutches and, what's more, help his daughter Miss Sibyl Knox to secure her longed-for engagement?"

    Wild Strawberries (1934) is "a sparkling 1930s English romantic comedy, perfect for fans of Stella Gibbons, PG Wodehouse or EF Benson: Pretty, impecunious Mary Preston, newly arrived as a guest of her Aunt Agnes at the magnificent wooded estate of Rushwater, falls head over heels for handsome playboy David Leslie. Meanwhile, Agnes and her mother, the eccentric matriarch Lady Emily, have hopes of a different, more suitable match for Mary. At the lavish Rushwater dance party, her future happiness hangs in the balance . . ."

    They both sound delightful, and fifty or so pages into the first one, I'm hooked!

    Three Houses (1931) is not a novel but a memoir in which the author recalls "the three houses in which she grew up and the childhood memories their walls contain. Focusing first on ‘The Grange’, where her grandfather, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, set the cultivated tone, Thirkell also reminisces over her parents’ home in Kensington Square and the Burne-Jones seaside retreat, where her cousin, Rudyard Kipling, lived across the green. Her elaborate portraits of the three houses and the lives within provide an invaluable insight into late Victorian life, while the personal recollections of Thirkell’s famous grandfather reveal a loving family man behind the renown. A tale of forbidden explorations, Punch and Judy shows, and adventures in the garden, Three Houses is beautifully evocative of the innocent quality of childhood. Providing a snapshot of history from the busy literary centre of London to the English coast, these stunning memoirs are both reminiscent of the golden days of youth and an interesting vision of a writer and the early influences that informed her later work."

    All three books look like real treats, and for those hungering for more on them, Geranium Cat and The Captive Reader have full posts on the novels.

Watching a book

    I've been watching the film From Time to Time - perfect Sunday evening viewing (half the cast of Downton Abbey is in it), a touching story, a lovely house* at Christmas, ghosts and more ... It's based on Lucy Boston's book The Chimneys of Green Knowe which I haven't read, but apparently it takes quite a few liberties with the story. Still, with Maggie Smith and a lazy Labrador at the heart of things, it's very enjoyable in its own right.

    It's a long time since I've read The Children of Green Knowe, the first of the series of which The Chimneys is the second, but as far as I recall it would make very good Christmas reading. Any fans amongst us?

*Lucy Boston's own house, in which she set her Green Knowe books is The Manor, Hemingford Grey.

A room of one's own

 

    "Then it came to me .... a conservatory, the kind the Victorians had, lean-to, with white-painted brick up to waist level, and ornamental mouldings and gutterings. If I could have that, with a door at one end of it and an electricity supply for heat, a well-insulated, tiled floor, then I should have my room, private, inaccessible from the house, a room in which to work and sit and look out and think, and also where I could try to grow a fig and a vine, and have a lemon tree and some lilies in pots. I would put a bench along one side, for bringing on a few early beans and lettuces and other tender plants (though this was not going to be in any sense a greenhouse), and a desk-height table, running all the rest of the way round, for working at. A sloping roof, with slatted, bamboo shades, and careful ventilation everywhere, and all would be well in every season.... Such a room of my own... is the stuff of dreams."

    That passage is from Susan Hill's lovely The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year, and while she doesn't tell us whether she achieved her dream study at Moon Cottage, I hope she did - I'd rather like something similar. How about you?

(The picture is of a glasshouse on a grander scale: yours - with a castle - for around £2,000,000.)

A few things ...

    - To covet: for sale - houses with literary connections.

    - To be admired: the Penguin English Library (also to be found here).

    - To ban: words! Which would you outlaw?

    - To be judged: the shortlist for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

    - To watch: in case you missed it before, and specially for Freda, the short video Birth of a Book.

A writer's house

    "Belmont House stands 200 feet above sea level, set back 230 yards from the easily visible English Channel, at the southeast corner of Pound Street and Cobb Road in Lyme Regis. Its grand Georgian property incorporates relics of dwellings from medieval and Renaissance times. The elegant façade dates from 1785, when Eleanor Coade, astute owner of the Coade Stone Manufactory in London, adorned the front of her summer villa with serenely classical, ceramic stone faces, samples of the company's fine Adam-style ornaments. John Fowles imagined Belmont as aristocratically feminine, though as they took possession of the house just after New Year 1969, it was more like "an old whore, with its splendid façade and all the mess that lies behind ...

    "In the southwest upstairs corner of the house, Fowles established his writing room, with his well-worn worktable, bookshelves, and space for his New Hall china. Looking seaward over the garden, French doors opened onto a south-facing balcony where vines eventually twined and birds alighted. The pounding of keys on his small portable typewriter thudded audibly through the house."

    That's a passage from John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds by Eileen Warburton, and I quote it as we're to be reading The French Lieutenant's Woman (see below) and because The Landmark Trust has just launched an appeal to raise £2.1 million to restore the house - full details and more pictures (including one of the writing room) here.

Writers' houses

    Many thanks to Ruth who, with reference to last Thursday's post, sent me the link to the lovely Writers' Houses website, "dedicated to exploring writers' spaces and the art of literary pilgrimage". I was pleased to see 'local laddie' Robert Louis Stevenson among the writers listed (the family home in Edinburgh's Heriot Row is here); my picture above is of his birthplace, just a few doors down the road from me, though that's not open to the public.

House-hunting

 

    Following on from our glimpse of writers' houses, I'm drawn to read A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses by Anne Trubek - has anyone read it?

"What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author?" Anne Trubek wonders, and she travels across America visiting numerous writers' homes in an effort to find out.

"With a gimlet eye and indefatigable curiosity, Anne Trubek peers through the veil of domestic veneration that surrounds canonized authors and neglected masters alike. In the course of her skeptical odyssey, she discerns the curious ways in which we turn authors into household gods [... and] carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America".

    Coming closer to home, this book looks like an excellent vade mecum: A Reader's Guide to Writers' Britain by Sally Varlow. Both a practical guidebook, a reference book and a source of anecdote and whatnot, "Essential reading for everyone who loves books and places to visit in Britain," says one reviewer; it's gone on my wishlist, too.

A glimpse of writers' houses

    When I saw the book Writers' Houses mentioned on Eggs on the Roof the other day - and thanks to Oxslip for recommending that lovely site in the first place - I bought a copy sharpish (though I see there are fewer available now and prices are high). It's the sort of book I can't resist, full of fabulous photographs of interiors, and some exteriors, too, rooms full of sunshine or pools of lamplight, books everywhere, desks and treasured possessions, all as though the writers themselves are about to step into the picture at any moment.

    There is Karen Blixen's Danish family home, full of the flowers she loved to arrange, Lawrence Durrell's French house, familiar from some of his writings, Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst, Virginia Woolf's Monk's House, and many more, all discovered by author Francesca Premoli-Droulers and photographer Erica Lennard as they travelled across Europe and the United States in search of the 'spirit of place' or genius loci which influenced those whose houses they visited.

    If you click on the picture to enlarge it you'll see, from the top row, left to right:

- the work table in the glassed-in veranda in his house in Sommières near Nîmes at which Lawrence Durrell would make an early start each day

- Vita Sackville-West's writing room cum library in the tower at Sissinghurst

- the "lighthouse", or study of Jean Giono in Manosque, Provence

- the work shed at the Boat House, Laugharne, home to Dylan Thomas

- Karen Blixen's desk at Rungstedlund in Denmark, with the typewriter she brought back from Africa

- Mark Twain's conservatory in Hartford, Connecticut

- the green sitting-room at Virginia Woolf's Monk's House in Rodmell, Suffolk, its table and chairs decorated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

- W.B. Yeats's Thoor Ballylee in Galway, Ireland

- the drawing-room at Marbacka, an estate in western Sweden which was home to Selma Lagerlöf.