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Text of the page (random words):
was keen to alter the ending which she felt was too conventional and unconvincing one if the young ladies rides off into the sunset with a man in the end a compromise was reached in the form of an afterword sarah dunant suggests in her introduction to these reissues that the same criticism of an imposed happy ending could be levelled at return to night but i m inclined to disagree reading the friendly young ladies a decade ago the ending suggested that the heroine was still exploring herself in return to night it s a bit more complicated it s 1938 and dr hilary mansell is in her mid 30 s with a stalling career after a job she wants in london goes to her lover david she clears off into country practice where she s somewhat bored by the slower pace and more routine work when julian fleming is admitted with a head injury hilary s experience saves his life but she also manages to make an enemy of his mother later the pair meet again julian is extravagantly attractive intelligent charming 10 years younger than hilary and has an uncomfortable relationship with his mother despite herself she falls in love with him and he with her julian s sexuality is arguably ambiguous but i think this is a red herring beautiful young men who want to be actors and are uncomfortably close to their mothers do not have to be gay but it s a convenient suspicion for the reader to hold whilst they try and decipher the tension between mother and son and tension there is mrs fleming is one of those terrifyingly horrible mothers that crop up all over the place in books of this vintage do they still i don t read enough contemporary fiction to really know her relationship with julian is desperately manipulative she controls him by deliberately withdrawing her favour and affection there is never anything as vulgar or openly expressed as anger or frustration never any discussion just a pervasive sense of disapproval or disappointment which is utterly corrosive julian is undeniably damaged but then how many women don t want to fix a man at some point in there lives this book works now because one taboo that remains firmly in place is that of an older woman having a relationship with a younger man eleven years is enough for the reader to know that hilary is right to fear being made to look a fool to worry about the condemnation of her family and to dread local gossip none of these are calculated to help a relationship she s right too to wonder how much she can trust in the continuing love of a still very young and inexperienced man and how as a woman with a profession can she go on respecting a man who has none or as a woman who fought her own parents to get into that profession how does she find the patience to accept a man who hasn t yet worked out how to do the same and then julian wants marriage which make all of hilary s considerations so much more acute it would after all be so public in the end marriage or at least an engagement becomes necessary despite hilary s doubts or julian s reservations about his mothers reaction for hilary it s hardly a conventional happy ending she understands that she s as much replacement mother as lover and by the same measure julian is in part the child she s unlikely to have but war is on the horizon written in 1946 it s made clear that we know the war has happened even if it s set in 38 39 julian is going into the airforce and hilary is a surgeon as well as a gp survival is hardly assured so having found love even messy far from perfect love why not take a chance on any happiness that s going there are clearly parallels between renault s relationship with another woman and hilary and julian s situation discreet affairs might be tolerated but an open relationship would be a scandal that 70 years later same sex marriages should still be a contentious issue is a disgrace in which case the happy ending is that this book bought renault a huge wedge of cash from mgm which allowed her and her partner to move to south africa where they lived together until mary died more than 30 years later there are things about the book which aren t perfect it s a bit too freudian in places underground caves especially make for quite heavy handed symbolism but it s a hell of a page turner and she nails so much about loving that it shouldn t be missed posted by desperate reader at 9 31 am 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday august 23 2014 august folly angela thirkell i first read august folly almost exactly 3 years ago i guess it s the august in the title that makes it seem like the right time to do it looking back i didn t seem to have much to say other than to have finally been able to pick up on the trollope references but as ever or so it seems to be turning out thirkell repays re reading the trollope references still amuse me there is a dramatic incident with a bull which is the making of the fortunes of both young richard tebben here and young johnny eames in the small house at allington and i still think this is a good stand alone book despite it s barsetshire setting in fact it s a pretty good place to start with thirkell for a couple of reasons the thing with thirkell and this is in part why this is a good book to start with is that she can be a terrible snob there are moments here when that snobbishness comes out moments i thought i d made a note of but it turns out hadn t so i hope i m remembering correctly the point being that if you can t warm to thirkell here than she s probably not for you a much better reason to start here is that it s a charming funny book exactly the sort of thing to lift a person out of the kind of flat mood to be found after their flat has been flooded or at least significantly leaked into twice in the space of a week that s my flat people and i m not happy about it august folly has two families at it s heart the tebben s and the dean s the tebben s are a scholarly couple with not much money and a brace of grown up children who are rather a worry at the start of the book how are they to be started out in life richard tebben has just come down from oxford with a third class degree and margaret has returned from being an aupair in grenoble both are slightly embarrassed by their parents especially their mother who s inclined to wear shabby clothes and fuss a lot and both are uneasily aware that they need to find jobs without being particularly qualified for anything or well enough connected to get a helping hand the senior tebbens are genuinely the sort of parents who might be a trial to their offspring and at the same time a couple who the reader really feels for mr tebben is a civil servant who lived for academic argument about the norse saga s mrs tebben who took a first in economics supplements the family income by writing textbooks on the subject it s the money she s earned that has built a house just a little to small in the country where her dear family least want to be thirkell s characters can be a little two dimensional but not the tebben s which made me wonder if they were based on real people the dean s are a family of nine children ranging in age from mid twenties down to about five only six of the children feature mrs dean despite her many children and being almost 50 is a woman still beautiful enough to be a suitable object of infatuation for a young man richard tebben her husband is a vague kind of a figure and the childre fill their various places in the plot most satisfactorily but they don t come alive in quite the same way that the tebben s do but then the dean s have money pots of money their lives are charmed and easy in comparison to others and that s the point of them as it goes the love story between margaret tebben and laurence dean is more convincing than some i ve found in thirkell and margaret s situation calls for genuine sympathy but the real point of reading thirkell for me is her humour this is a book that can raise a smile in the face of considerable domestic disasters on this readers part through a well described pair of ears in the moonlight there s something utterly charming and extremely english about it all i thoroughly recommend it posted by desperate reader at 11 00 pm 7 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday august 19 2014 sweets made simple miss hope over the last few years i ve amassed a small collection if books about confectionary some of them are specifically chocolate based but quite a few of them cover more general sweets of all of them my favourites the ones i keep using and the ones where i ve learnt actual skills from are the trio of hope and greenwood books i have because of this i was mildly excited to see they have a tv series bbc2 friday nights now 2 episodes in hope and greenwood started as the sort of shop you find in london or brighton and not in leicester retro vibe and thoroughly thought out design in every detail all that style charms me and makes me mildly suspicious in equal measure but the acid test is the quality of the product hope and greenwood are more than satisfactory on that score eventually the books came along i ve posted about them all in the past with the same mix of fun design and thoroughly reliable as well as delicious recipes the instructions are clear specific and generally need to be followed to the letter boiling sugar is not the thing to mess around with and chocolate is temperamental in short these are good books and making your own sweets is first if all very satisfying and secondly means you know exactly what you re eating nothing brings sugar and fat content to life like measuring it out and this way there are no hidden or mysterious ingredients the bbc2 series is great there s a charm about miss hope and mr greenwood that i m finding genuinely irresistible no suspicion this time the dynamic between them really works on camera and the recipes are fabulous there is a book to accompany the series sweets made simple which looks to be a conglomeration of the first 2 life is sweet and miss hope s chocolate box as such it is a bargain in w h smiths this weekend it was even more of a bargain at half price their vanilla fudge recipe is the best i ve ever found the book would be worth it for that alone but this week i ve been trying the pecan maple fudge it took me 3 attempts to get it right first time i used to dark a sugar which was okay but the flavour profile was all wrong the maple was over powered second time i inadvertently took the pan off one hot ring only to put it down on another so the fudge burnt entirely my fault but the third time was the charm the book calls for a chocolate covering which was more than i wanted so i didn t bother with it but the fudge itself is perfect ostensibly destined for my boss who has been very accommodating about me waiting around for plumbers and electricians after my bathroom was flooded twice in a week by an upstairs neighbour who i cannot currently feel charitable towards great flavour and nice crumbly texture i would include the recipe but think it would be much better if interested parties bought the book recipes included in the series so far are on the bbc2 website it turns out that even very good fudge is a poor choice for breakfast no matter how early you ve had to get up for an electrician and feel a treat is called for or how small an amount you eat so looks like my boss will get most of the it after all posted by desperate reader at 10 33 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday august 17 2014 h is for hawk helen macdonald h is for hawk feels like one of those books which has come from nowhere and is suddenly everywhere i saw a particularly pretty cover on twitter a couple of months ago and commented on it on the back of that shiny new books asked me if i d write about it for them the answer was obviously yes and in due course an uncorrected proof arrived it sat around for a few weeks and then just as i was thinking i ought to get on with it it was published waterstones book of the month reviewed everywhere and a best seller i ve checked and whilst this isn t helen macdonald s first book there s an earlier one about falcons and a collection of poetry there s nothing to suggest that something like this was in the offing either seeing success like this is beguiling it sheds a particular sort of glamour about it when macdonald s father dies suddenly and unexpectedly he s out working when he has a heart attack she has something of a breakdown to cope she turns back to an earlier career as a falconer feeling compelled to train a goshawk it partly works though a later diagnosis of depression makes it clear that there are no shortcuts to dealing with grief in a nutshell that s what the books about grief falconry identity oh and t h white author of amongst other things the goshawk and the once and future king the beauty of it is that it s got a lot of other things in it too and that it s capable of drawing a deeply personal response from the reader i sometimes think the victorians had it right with their highly codified approach to mourning rules and routine can be so very helpful in times of extreme distress one of macdonald s problems is that she has no partner no children and no 9 5 job so very little to distract her from what she s feeling a hawk will provide distraction or at least it ll demand concentration and impose a routine give time for the bereaved mind to readjust to this changed status and order of things the choice of a goshawk is for macdonald an indication of how much the order of things have changed it s not her normal bird and they have a very specific reputation history and symbolism initially it seems the hawk is doing what the reader hopes it might helping macdonald put herself back together the process of building up a working relationship with the bird is enthralling a slow winning of a certain amount of trust from the animal based on a mix of familiarity and food there is always a sense that it can all be lost in a moment if for any reason the hawk decides it s had enough tame isn t really a word to describe a bird of prey however long it s lived with people meanwhile there is also the question oh t h white his the goshawk is a classic of nature writing his story of an epic battle with a bird he calls gos the first he attempts to train i know it s a classic because i ve heard of it even if i haven t read it i haven t read it because it s always sounded a little bit to macho to really appeal macdonald discovered it as a falconry obsessed child already one who knew white was getting it wrong but to young to appreciate what might have been going on behind the training an adult macdonald finds more in the book and to such an extent that she becomes a little bit obsessed or haunted by white in a way that will be familiar to any reader who s ever found themselves talking to a book not the ones you want to throw acro...