84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

My TBR pile is out of control and this year I endeavour to make a dint on it.

I've been going gang-busters so far. The year long #LesMisReadalong counts as one book (although I acquired a second edition of Les Mis so that I could compare translations, so it also counts as a fail!)

I've read two of my Iris Murdoch books in the huge a Murdoch-a-month #IMreadalong with two more to be read in 2019 (May and September). But again, I'm in the process of acquiring a 5th Murdoch...2 steps forward, 1 step back!

84 Charing Cross Road is my first read from my Personal Challenge as voted by you, my devoted readers :-)

Given the number of books on my TBR pile, for 84 Charing Cross Road to receive FIVE votes was extraordinary, so I went into this book with very HIGH hopes.

My first surprise was that it's an epistolary story and my second surprise was that my edition actually contains two stories. The second one is titled The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and it takes up the bulk of the 230 pages.

I read 84 Charing Cross Road in two reading sessions. The back cover describes it as 'delightfully reticent love affair', but I never felt like I was reading a love story, unless you count the love of books as a love affair.

The relationship between Helene and Frank and between Helene and many of Frank's colleagues and also his wife, Nora are all about friendship and shared interests.

It's 1949 and Helene is a New Yorker desperate to find copies of her favourite books that aren't 'expensive rare editions, or in Barnes and Noble's grimy, marked-up school-boy copies.' Frank is the buyer at Marks & Co antiquarian book-sellers, charged with responding to her letters and tracking down her book requests.

He begins by signing off with his initials, then Frank Doel and eventually (after 8 years) just Frank.

Helene is extraordinarily generous. When she discovers via British neighbours that Londoners are still struggling under strict post-war rationing, she sends food hampers. This sparks off a flurry of letters from the other staff of Marks & Co who simply have to thank her for her thoughtfulness.

Daily lives and individual personalities are gradually revealed, letter by letter. It made me sad for the lost art of letter writing. The depth of feeling and character development that evolved with time was so gorgeous and done without the use of one single emoticon!

***SPOILER ALERT***

It's also sad because Frank suddenly dies and Marks & Co eventually closes before Helene has a chance to visit England. Twenty years of correspondence finished just like that. Helene obviously still had some contact with Nora and her daughters, but without the shared interest of books and Frank, the relationship may have waned. Helene's decision to write a book changed all that. With Nora's permission 84 Charing Cross Road was born and a way finally opened up for Helene to visit London.

Which brings us to The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

It is now 1971 and Helene is jetting off to England for the very first time. The Duchess is written more as a diary story and takes us, chronologically, through her extended visit.

I responded to Helene's mix of excitement and apprehension about finally seeing all the sights of England that she had dreamed about for so long. Her high expectations were met and confounded in equal measure. But this second story lacked the warmth or heart of the first. Helene herself explained some of the difference,

Not till I got home did it dawn on me that they and I had completely reversed roles. Coming abroad, where nobody knew them, Eddie and Isabel had rid themselves of a lot of social inhibitions. Coming abroad, where nobody knows me, I've acquired a whole set of inhibitions I never had at home.

The letters in 84 Charing Cross Road are so appealing, charming and funny, in large part thanks to Helene's BIG personality that jumps and bounces off every page.

The Duchess was a lovely way to round off the story and for anyone who has had the experience of turning up in London for the first time after a lifetime of reading books set there, it will resonate strongly.

A BIG thank you to Jean, Mary R, Jillian, Jennifer & JoAnn for the voting recomendation. It was a beauty!

I now plan to hunt down a copy of the movie and hope to one day see a stage production.

Love and Freindship (sic) by Jane Austen

My Jane-ite credentials will hopefully be confirmed by my declaration that I have two copies of Love and Freindship (sic) on my bookshelf!

One is in my lovely cloth bound Penguin Classics (2014); the other is part of my treasured Folio Society Jane Austen boxed set from 2003. Between the two books, I believe I have the entire collection of Jane Austen's teenage writings plus the various half-finished works that she left behind when she died.

Love and Freindship is a juvenile story written by Jane Austen in 1790. She was only 14 yrs of age at the time (which may explain why she misspelt friend and friendship throughout the story)! It was supposedly written for the amusement of her family. According to Christine Alexander who wrote the Introduction in my Penguin Classics edition,

Literature was a shared activity in the Austen household; it was fun and enlightening.

I like to picture the Austen family sitting around the fire together, reading stories aloud to each other, trying to impress and make each other laugh with their cleverness and wit. I suspect Love and Freindship would have produced plenty of chuckles and quite a few guffaws.

Love and Freindship: Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love is a laugh out loud parody of many of the romance novels in vogue at the time. It features elopements, exaggerated reversals of fortune, long-lost relatives, outlandish coincidences, pathetic deaths and lots of ill-timed faints!

Beware of fainting fits...Though at the time they may be refreshing and Agreeable, yet believe me they will, in the end, too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your constitution... 

Beware of swoons, dear Laura.....A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is, I daresay, conducive to Health in its consequences - Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint - .

Laura is our hapless heroine. She is sentimental to the max and proud of it! Her friend Isabel, has asked Laura to give a detailed version of the 'Misfortunes and Adventures of your Life' to Isabel's daughter, Marianne, to satisfy her curiosity and to 'prove to her to be a useful Lesson.'

What follows is a series of hilarious, ridiculous letters full of the trials and tribulations of Laura's attempts at, well, love and friendship.

Unlike Lady Susan, who you end up feeling a grudging respect for, Laura is just too silly for words. Her naivety and shallowness are a danger to society and all those around her.

You may perhaps have been somewhat surprised my Dearest Marianne, that in the Distress I then endured, destitute of any Support, and unprovided with any Habitation, I should never once have remembered my Father and Mother or my paternal Cottage in the Vale of Uske. To account for this seeming forgetfullness I must inform you of a trifling Circumstance concerning them which I have as yet never mentioned - . The death of my Parents a few weeks after my Departure, is the circumstance I allude to.

We see in Love and Freindship that Jane Austen's views on sensibility and romance were formed at an early age. She was aware, as Alexander reminds us, of the 'false values and absurd conventions of sentimental fiction'.

Elinor Dashwood and Anne Eliot's rational, sensible approach to life and love is something that Jane clearly favoured all of her life. It's pleasing to be able to trace the more mature, sophisticated exploration of these ideas in Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion from this earlier, lighter story.

Love and Freindship is a high spirited, fun read and instructive, in more than ways than one!

#AusteninAugustRBR

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

Lady Susan is an epistolary novel written around 1794 when Austen was in her late teens (although it was not published until 1871).

Lady Susan, herself, is an amoral, self-serving coquette, but it's hard not to love her just a little bit. She has a happy knack of twisting the facts to suit herself and an even happier knack of believing her own bullshit. Lady Susan brings to mind the magnificently monstrous Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil from Les liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos). Susan is less vengeful than Isabelle, although it doesn't mean she's any less conniving or duplicitous. Her motivation appears to be one of carefree fun and getting what she wants, rather than meanly and deliberately plotting another's fall from grace.

Les liaisons dangereuses was first published in 1782 and translated into English two years later, it caused quite a scandal because of its erotic plot and nefarious protagonists. I assume that Austen, who had unfettered access to her neighbours library, would have come across this novel or at least heard about this book by the time she was 19.

Claire Tomalin in her biography of Jane Austen, says -

although Eliza may well have owned a copy of Les Liaisons, it is hard to believe she would have shown it to her unmarried cousin. Its cynicism was one thing; its outspoken sexual element quite another. But she could have talked about the book.

This is not meant to be a critical put down. Early Jane was known to parody or emulate writing styles and in this particular instance, it is easy to say, that imitation was indeed the sincerest form of flattery.

If you're an Austen fan you'll be charmed and delighted by Lady Susan. But like me, you may also wish that she had developed this story further as a mature writer. Perhaps we can take heart from Lady Susan's obvious influence in some of Austen's later characters - Lydia and Wickham, both artless, selfish, flirts in Pride and Prejudice, the self-serving rake Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park and the less than honest, manipulator, John Thorpe, in Northanger Abbey.

Confusingly, Kate Beckinsale starred in a movie last year called Love and Friendship (the title of another Austen short story) that was actually based on Lady Susan. It looks rather delicious, and now that I've (re)read the story, I can't wait to watch the movie.

Speaking of movies, we watched Clueless on the weekend for the first time in 20 yrs or so. I had forgotten how much fun it was. The modern day Elton had us in stitches! I had also forgotten that 'whatever' and 'my bad' dated from this time too.

Whilst researching some of the dates and facts surrounding the writing of Lady Susan, I came across, for the first time, the whole debate surrounding the authenticity of a certain painting claiming to be that of a teenaged Jane Austen.

Is this or isn't it Jane?

Called The Rice Portrait of Jane Austen by Ozias Humphry, the painting is supposedly one done of Jane when she was 13 or 14. The story goes that the painting was commissioned by Jane's great Uncle Francis during a family visit to The Red House at Sevenoaks, Kent in 1788. Various modern provenance tests have been done on the painting in recent years, with no definite answer being given, one way or the other.

Wouldn't it be exciting if the painting was proved to be real?

If you'd like to know more about the history and provenance of the painting click here.

Jane Austen as drawn by her sister Cassandra c. 1810

And a modern colour reproduction of the same.

#AusteninAugustRBR

Yours Sincerely, Giraffe by Megumi Iwasa

One of my recent #readathon reads was the delightfully eccentric Yours Sincerely, Giraffe by Megumi Isawa. When my eyes started to get tired and words began to blur on the page, the simple but fun illustrations from Jun Takabatake were just the eye candy I needed.

The premise of the story is simple - Giraffe is bored. Until, that is, he spots a sign on a tree from an equally bored pelican who has decided to start up a postal service, 'willing to deliver anything anywhere'!

Giraffe decides to write a letter. He gives it to pelican with the instruction 'give it to the first animal you meet on the other side of the horizon.'

What follows is a rather absurd, but oh so charming tale of mistaken identity and misunderstanding as giraffe and his new penpal, penguin, try to imagine what each other look like and what it would be like to live on the other side of the horizon.

For teachers and parents, the added bonus with Yours Sincerely, Giraffe is the chance to discuss letter writing, difference and perception with your emerging reader. It's also a fabulous book to read aloud together.

New Zealand based Gecko Press have become renown for their promotion of unconventional, diverse and humorous books for children. These include Rose Lagercrantz's My Happy Life books and Ulf Nilsson's Detective Gordon series. Yours Sincerely, Giraffe is another quirky addition.