costume drama – Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two

Category: costume drama

For Jane Austen’s birthday … The two pictures of Austen by Cassandra — all we have for sure


Jane facing Cassandra by Cassandra (circa 1810)


Jane looking out at the landscape

Dear All,

For Jane Austen’s birthday I usually try for something special (see these various blogs), something which relates directly to her birthday or something about her personally, e.g., poems she wrote, poems in her honor, her attitudes towards historical women. Today I am proud and happy to have a guest blogger joining in with me: Nancy Mayer, long-time moderator of Janeites now @groups.io, who maintains a website from her research on things about the Regency.

Her topic for today is the vexed one of Jane Austen’s portraits:

December 16th is the anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. One on-going debate about Austen is, Is there an authentic portrait of Jane other than the ones that Cassandra drew? One of those is a back view, and the other doesn’t satisfy because Jane looks either angry or impatient [both just above]. A sort of modified view is on the 10-pound note. There are, however, three other portraits that people claim are portraits of the author Jane Austen.

People are finding portraits in different places and claiming they have to be of Jane Austen of Steventon, I don’t agree. I think Cassandra’s drawings of her sister are the only authentic ones.

One is of a young girl about 15. The question that first comes to mind is why would the family have an expensive portrait made of a young girl when the family didn’t have that money to spare? At least the portrait should have been of the sisters. No one knew she would become famous two hundred years later. The style isn’t the style that would have been in fashion in 1790. Fashion experts have argued both sides of this, I am with those who say it is unlikely that a young miss of 15 having a portrait made in 1790 would have worn this style dress.


Known as the Rice portrait

Then there is a very fashionable sketch the Regent’s librarian made in the margin of a book. This lady is dressed in a very stylish dress. Jane Austen met him in 1814. None of the clothes that we know she wore have the slightest resemblance to the sketch. The reasons that people want to say it is Austen is that it is a beautiful sketch and she met the man.


Said to be a portrait of Austen made by James Stanier Clarke, with whom she was acquainted [for my part I doubt it is her because she did not dress this way]

The third portrait is of a woman sitting at a table looking out of a window in Westminster. She is older than the previous portraits — much older than the one by Clarke, I think. Why this is thought to be of Austen, I don’t know. Again, why anyone would have paid to have her portrait painted– something she never mentions, btw-I don’t know. My objections are that why would she be painted in Westminster instead of Chawton? She appears to be richly dressed. Though Jane paid attention to clothes and fashion, she dressed within her means. Also, I do not see any resemblance between this portrait and that of her by Cassandra. [This is Paula Byrne’s theory]


See my blogs where I argue against the identification and describe a talk where the presenter asked the audience to decide ….

This question of authentic portraits has been a cause of much dissension I know. For many people [nowadays], the picture of Jane Austen that will be the one they remember will be the one on the 10-pound note in England.

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Nancy omits a sixth image — the one that James Edward Austen-Leigh used for his memoir of his aunt. He hired someone to doctor the sketch of Austen that Cassandra drew so as to make her face rounder, smoother, not troubled (no dark lines under her eyes, no sour look — perhaps from headaches she suffered), basically expressionless and to make her arms hang more loosely from her side. The akimbo arrangement where she is creating a barrier between herself and the world gave as aspect to her character he did not want associated with her.


Jane Austen, by James Andrews [circa 1870]

The above is not ludicrous; it’s the colorized engraving that began to circulate that is embarrassingly bad and false:

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In a recent issues of the New York Review of Books, we can see at work the same impulses that led to the doctoring of Cassandra’s sketch and the attribution of the three unauthenticated images. Kathryn Hughes uses the occasion of the publication of Hilary Davidson’s book on Austen’s wardrobe to herself create an image of Austen she prefers to imagine.


A small image of this pelisse

In brief, I see a few telling contradictory elements in Hughes’s musings; the explicit idea seems to be that Austen just loved to immerse herself in fashion, and keep up to date on the very latest whatever, but alongside that we see how poor she and Cassandra were as they attempted to make the same garment do for years, the same piece of cloth essentially turned and resewn, recolored, with new fasteners put in too. She quotes one of Austen’s occasional asides on how she wishes she could buy dresses off a rack, plus Austen’s discomfort with body-exposing undergarments. Hughes’s to me distasteful conclusion that when Austen made her small amounts of money (not little bits to her I know but nothing near what she might need regularly to live independently in any sense) that the first thing she did was “head for the shops” comes from this explicit “official” — conformist and conventional discourse. Hughes has made Austen someone who would have rushed out to see the Barbie movie. Perhaps, then, a different self wrote the fiction books.

I also demur at the description of Austen at tall and thin. I’ve read descriptions of her by the relatives who lived at Godmersham Park which suggest she was just “above the middle size” (so 5 feet 5 say) and Cassandra’s portrait show a chubby woman, someone who did not go in for regular exercise beyond walking.

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Finally, Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen in a coming adaptation of a fictionalized biography by Jill Hornby (Miss Austen)

The book begins many years after Jane’s death: so Hawes looks like a Victorianized 18th century woman

Given her world-wide reputation, it’s to be expected Austen (and Cassandra too) have become a marquee characters (in one film Anna Maxwell Martin plays Cassandra) in books, and beyond the many biographies is the subjection of fictionalized ones too. I’ve written about the bio/pic, Becoming Jane (where Anna Hathaway played Jane Austen) — I cannot tonight find my blog or essays on my website (if that’s where it is). I’ve ordered Hornby’s novel (if that is what it is) and will read it as a sequel (or post-text). From what I’ve read about it thus far (and felt looking at some other images of Hawes now circulating) I fear (the right word since I care) that the book is from the conventional (philistine is the older word) POV anti-Jane — the world thinks to be social and conform is important and I see from others if anyone criticizes Cassandra as she emerges from Jane’s letters (very conventional) they are “up in arms.” I am aware the makers of a film can reverse or alter or sufficiently qualify a book, and the acting crew is made up of some fine actors, and women are centrally involved in writing, directing and so on. I am willing to hope for a portrait which stays true to and is sympathetic Austen’s unconventional unsocial character.

But women can be bought too, pressured to produce stories and characters that are mass-audience pleasers. Witness the recent or 2022 Persuasion — the undertext for Dakota Johnson, the actress playing Anne Elliot is a semi-porn figure.

Ellen

Halloween/Samhain & a talk on Bookstore fiction: includes ghosts, historical fiction, mysteries


Opening episode of Outlander: Frank in the rain sees a ghostly highlander looking up at Claire through a window, he enters the room which feels haunted … (Outlander s1:E1, Sassenach)

Fantasies of the Bookstore: combine community & retail space, with meaningful location; you know you are in one when you walk in. Where it is on the planet, what’s across the street matters. The staff, which kinds of books, the atmosphere, language behavior of everyone … (see below, 2nd half of blog)


Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan and Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in a Bath bookshop, Northanger Abbey, 2007, scripted A Davies)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to write a blog for ever so long — on a foremother poet, Anne Stevenson (1933-2020), whose poetry tribute to Jane Austen I’ve put here more than once (“Re-reading Jane,” scroll down), but it is taking me time to read through her collected poems, essays on her, and essays by her (on Elizabeth Bishop, the biography of Sylvia Plath). Tonight I am only ready to share one poem by her, which relates to my eventual topic for this blog: bookstore fiction

Paper,

the beauty of it,
the simple, strokeable, in-the-handness of it,
the way it has of flattering ink,
giving it to understand that
nothing matters
until it is printed or written down
to be cherished on paper.

The way old paper levels time,
is the archive’s treasure,
is evidence talking to your fingers
when passion, two hundred years dead,
filters through the ink-net that,
pen in and, a lover once spread for his mistress,
ignorantly scooping the archivist
into his catch.

The connoisseur of wine
keeps company with the connoisseur of paper,
as the typesetter, rag-testing, rice-testing,
escapes from the glaze of the computer
to explore with a fingertip
an elegant topography
reserved exclusively for types he likes
and faces that delight him.

All the same,
the virtual truths of the TV
and the on-going game of what happens
sluice through the global drain
in a torrent of paper.
Throw it away or save it,
every day as it dies
instantly becomes news on paper.

Why, say the silicon people,
keep house in a paper graveyard?
The future is digital, clean indestructible,
the great web’s face book and bird’s nest.
No fingerprint can be lost,
no fact of identity missed.
All’s for the best
in the best of all paperless worlds.

The afterlife? To live on, on line,
without a mind of one’s own?
I can’t love these fidgety digits!
I want to go home,
I want to keep warm in my burrow
of piled up paper —
fool’s passion, dried grief, live hands of dead friends,
story I’ll keep turning the pages of,
until it ends.

You cannot have a bookstore without paper.

I had been thinking — as appropriate to Halloween — to write on the connection of ghosts to historical fiction, how the deep roots of historical fiction is the ghost, a desire to bring to life revenants who once lived and the world they inhabited, so author and her readers can take refuge there too. The best historical fiction writers, and in my view, these include Winston Graham, Diana Gabaldon (who Anne Stevenson wrote a short column in praise of), Hilary Mantel and Penelope Fitzgerald, are aware of this, discuss it, exploit it.

Only the second writes nothing but historical fiction, but all discuss ghosts in, and sometimes while they as author-narrator, are in their historical novels. Thus it is at Halloween, Samhain in Outlander that Claire is spirited away to the mid-18th century in Inverness, Scotland by means of an ancient or neolithic circle of stones. In the third episode of the first season, Claire listens to a bard sing in Gaelic, the core of the journey story she has just begun as one repeatedly met with:

[audience muttering] [singing in Gaelic] Now this one is about a man out late on a fairy hill on the eve of Samhain who hears the sound of a woman singing sad and plaintive from the very rocks of the hill.
[eerie music] [Gaelic singing continues] “I am a woman of Balnain.
“The folk have stolen me over again, ‘ “the stones seemed to say.
“I stood upon the hill, and wind did rise, and the sound of thunder rolled across the land.
” [singing in Gaelic] “I placed my hands upon the tallest stone “and traveled to a far, distant land “where I lived for a time among strangers who became lovers and friends.
” [singing in Gaelic] “But one day, I saw the moon came out “and the wind rose once more.
“so I touched the stones “and traveled back to my own land “and took up again with the man I had left behind.
” [applause] She came back through the stones? Aye, she did.
They always do.
It was a folktale, madness to take as fact, and yet half of what Gwyllyn had described had actually happened to me.
Why not the other half, the part where the woman returned home? What had Geillis said? As I told you, there’s many things in this world we can’t explain. (Outlander S1:E3, The Way Out)


Elinor Tomlinson and Aiden Turner as dream figures, Demelza and Ross Poldark (2016 Poldark season)

I know more than a couple of times Winston Graham has thoughtful discussions of how difficult it is to know the past, how much of what we think we know about it is more than half-imagination, and dreaming imagination at that. See my paper called “After the Jump.” Historical Fiction and Films seem to exist at a kind of cross-roads of remembered and researched revenants and today’s analogous worlds — sometimes inhabited by sleuths and book writers and lovers (as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession). See my blog quoting a wonderful evocation of this by Caryl Phillips (on Crossing the River).

How I love especially to go back to the 18th century and Scotland: I reveled in Naomi Mitchison’s Bull Calves and the movie, Chasing the Deer (about Culloden). I told of this in my blog on a paper (linked in) and conference and (would you believe?) actual real trip to Culloden.

Yesterday afternoon I was much stirred by books on Mantel’s fiction by Lucy Arnold: Haunted Decades and a collection of essays gathered by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter where spectral realism is the terrain re-imagined. Thomas Cromwell becomes more crowded in by ghosts as we move through his life, and that of Mantel’s stealth heroine, Anne Boleyn, whom Henry Fielding wrote a ghostly history of in his A Journey from this World to the Next. Haunted all her life, says a Slate column.


Mark Rylance and Natasha Little as Thomas Cromwell fearful as he walks up the stairs to where Elizabeth Cromwell now dead has become a ghost (Wolf Hall, the serial)

My previous blog is about my friend Tyler Tichelaar’s fiction and non-fiction, which moves between historical and gothic supernatural stories.

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Early important writer of these books in series forms

But today I was stirred by a talk I heard (on zoom) with a Book History group, the WAPG (Washington Area Print Group) I’ve long attended (though the last three years online): by Dr Eben J. Muse, who has recently written a study of the bookstore novel, Fantasies of the Bookstore. His book is partly a bibliographical tool for finding these books, for which he provides two sites on the Net: a full bibliographies of bookstore novels: https://bit.ly/bookstore_novel
And a bookselling Research Network: http://booksellingresearchnet.uk

And now I finally have a topic for blog fitting for the autumn season — and Halloween.

His talk was about the other part of his book: in “In her Own Right: Women Booksellers in the Bookstore Novel” he described what he said was a intertwined set of tropes found across bookstore novels, especially when they are owned or managed by women, which motives seemed to me are all found in one of my favorite of all books, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop: I’ve taught the book and film more than once, and written about it here too.

What is a bookstore today? why, it’s a cultural interaction space, combining a community with retail space, whose location, kinds of books, atmosphere, staff and customers’ behavior matters. They are usually indie stores, with the subgenre beginning in 1917, becoming more widespread in the 1980s, and reaching a high peak of numbers first between 1985-1995, and since then multiplying especially 2016-17. They are often series, combine mysteries with ghosts (Fitzgerald’s book has a spiteful poltergeist). What happens is the heroine invents an identity for herself by becoming a bookstore owner and manager, who knows how to make a profit from books, how to sell them, make them appealing. She often herself does not care for them herself as reading matter (Fitzgerald’s Florence Green does). The bookstore becomes her way of integrating with the community at a distance, and is often an act of defiance (which in the case of Florence, she tragically loses), but can also be her sanctuary. When there is a murder, it may be that the bookstore becomes a place where someone abusive is killed. There is a deep intimate tie between the place, the space, and the heroine’s role in the story. They are frequently literary fictions, often romances too. We should ask why is the central figure repeatedly a woman?


It’s in the last 30 years that women authors have begun to dominate this subgenre — though it would seem the bookseller character has usually been a woman

Afterwards the talk ranged far and close. We talked of how Victorian got Their Books (the title of someone’s paper published in a book on Victorian bookselling, buying, reading. Bookstores on Cape Cod recently where one kept a map of other bookstores. Someone mentioned The Ghost of Mrs McClure by Cleo Coyle, pseudonyn of Alice Kimberley. Peter Shillingsburg’s formidable sounding Textuality and Knowledge was mentioned: if you don’t know the original form the book took when printed (unabridged, uncensored) you are not grounding yourself in reality. So much for what passes for a book with so many people now. The way we read now.  Shorter, easily more entertaining try this book chapter: Schillingsburg, Peter. “The Faces of Victorian Literature.” The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998. pp. 141-156.

Well, Muse just made me want to rush over to Amazon and buy some of these — in practice I have read a few — the apparently early Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (the grimness or “grumpyiness” as Dr Muse characterized its aging bookseller is another trope of such books), but mostly non-fictions, which seem not to count as they do not have this mythos at their center, though they may well tell a tale of publishing, what books are, the bookish life which has many elements found in the fantasy book. For example, Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir. They may tell a cultural anthropology tale.


While this bookshop name was cited as the title of a book by Deborah Myler (Stephanie Butler our heroine) — this does look like a real bookshop in Lyme Regis


And this its inside

In practice I also used to be a constant visitor of bookstores. Hours in second hand bookstores were the delight of my life here in Alexandria, in DC, in New York City, and in many places in England. I remember those blocks on Fourth Avenue, in lower New York, ancient, filled to the brim with books, some of which were rotting. The Argosy is a rare one still to be found in business (59th Street on the East Side). Blocks in Edinburgh harbored stunningly expensive ancient tomes (Renaissance) normally found in research libraries. How few are left in London; our recent visit took us to one small store, beautifully culled books, but it was the same one we visited the last time we were in London, 4 years ago. Can London be reduced down to one or two (Foyle’s) bookstores when it comes to independent ones? I enjoy the chains but the ambiance and feel and purpose of the store is quite different: they are more for casual visitors, tourists; they do not function as a home away from your library home.

My happiest hours have been spent in bookstores (as when I find a book I didn’t know existed but when I saw it, knew I would enjoy it so mightily) — and yes libraries. My favorite place in Washington DC is the Folger Shakespeare Library (or was, as I’ve no idea what it’s like in the new renovated building). It was my idea for Izzy, my daughter, to become a librarian. And she loved when she was an intern in Fairfax and worked in the children’s area of the library.

Someone at the WAPG asked if there is a subgenre of books about a heroine in a library: he said the problem is the library is usually an institution, and right away it cannot be the expression of just one person’s character or outlook, but of course (thought I) it can have a “body” in it (as do an early Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers book). There seems a link between the amateur woman sleuth and the woman bookseller.


This is one Prof Muse recommended — I didn’t catch the heroine’s name

So these bookstore fictions may be included in all my favorite kinds of books, first of all heroine’s fictions, second gothics and ghost stories beyond the traumatic uncanny kinds, from M. R. James to Edith Wharton about which I’ve written much here in these blogs too. And most recently women’s detective fiction. This week I’m rereading P. D. James’s even profound A Time to Be In Earnest.

Our WAGP used to meet at the Library of Congress itself, the concrete building at 3:30 and by 5 walk over to a nearby Asian restaurant and eat together. We are hoping to do that for the first time in three years this coming spring.

Ellen

Three gothics by Tyler Tichelaar

“Haunted Marquette deftly weaves history, urban legends, and unexplained phenomena into a kaleidoscope of ghostly hauntings … Founded as a harbor town to ship iron ore from the nearby mines, Marquette became known as the Queen City of the North for its thriving industries, beautiful buildings, and being the largest city in Upper Michigan. But is Marquette also the Queen of Lake Superior’s Haunted Cities?” — Sonny Longtine

Dear friends and readers,

My good friend, Tyler Tichelaar’s remarkable book tracing the history and contextual circumstances (often historical) of ghost and other paranormal experiences in Marquette, Michigan, is now an audiobook, read in its unabridged form by Brandy Thomas.  I write this blog to tell other lovers of the gothic about the audiobook and Tyler’s other gothic books.

Faithful readers of my blogs may remember how much I like the gothic and how many blogs I’ve written over the years on gothic books & films; one of these a number of years ago was about his first book, a superb literary study, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. As his title suggests, the book is a survey, history, analysis of the Christianizing gothic, mostly male-centered books, politically conservative; The Gothic Wanderer often centers on lesser-known (nowadays) Gothic classics (Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni), interpreting the more famous ones (Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities) in unusual ways.

This summer I read what I’d call a continuation of this book, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897. In this book, Tyler demonstrates the close alliance and influence that exists between long narrative, once famous (and sometimes still read) fantastical and visionary urban books in French and English. Authors covered include the still famous, Byron, Scott, Hugo, Dumas (many of his books are covered), Stoker (the book ends on his work leading up to and Dracula); the lesser known, William Ainsworth, Eugene Sue, Paul Feval, Bulwer-Lytton; to the all but forgotten but important for a book, e.g., George Croly. We move from books about secret societies (racist diatribes in some of this), to radical re-castings of the French revolution, ending in the era vampires.  Seamless literary history.

The book is chock-a-block with very useful retellings of the stories like Eugene Sue’s Wandering Jew and Mysteries of Paris, extended literary analyses like Paul Feval’s Les Mysteres de London, accounts of the lives of writers as well as eloquent defenses of their books (George M. W. Reynolds), letters of editors, source studies. Categories include Marie Antoinette books. I was startled by some of the connections of melodramatic plays of the era; even Gilbert and Sullivan finds a place here (Ruddigore). We reach truly popular material rarely treated so seriously. There are extensive bibliographies for the reader to explore when he or she finishes the text.

Tyler quotes extensively from his chosen texts and conveys the quality and experience of them. There are women authors (Radcliffe) with some unusual qualities pointed out: in possibly Elizabeth Caroline Grey’s The Skeleton Count, or the Vampire Mistress), we discover “the homoeroticism of the female vampire preying upon members of her own sex” (p 346), hitherto only seen in Coleridge’s Christabel, and not again until Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). As a reader of Scott, I appreciated his earnest analysis of Anne of Geierstein. I never read anything about this later book of Scott’s before and here it emerges as important and interesting.

Yet the book does not read like an encyclopedia. Tyler loves many of these books, is enthusiastic about nearly all of them, and occasionally writes in a personal voice and vein, “As I grow older, I personally feel more and more like the Wandering Jew, watching the world I knew as a child disappear and all those I love dying off, leaving me alone to wander through life and wondering why so many ill events must be part of my and all of humanity’s fate” (p 192).

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Tyler’s most recent novel (see review by Mack Hassler)

Still it makes sense to me that the first of his books to be reproduced in audio form is not one of his many novels nor the academic books on the gothic, but his Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City. I read this one during the pandemic. It is well-written, absorbing and entertaining reading and looking — at the many pictures.

On one level, Haunted Marquette is a probing (and intellectual) history of the region from a popular standpoint, taking legends that arose when terrible crises or catastrophes, public and private occurred, forms of consoling redemptive explanation, of oddly uplifting survival, and parsing them — showing how they arose, developed, now linger. On another, it’s an art book: it’s just chock-a-block with black-and-white (and grey) photos of people, places, landscapes, animals too, which could almost be artful illustrations, giving the book a feel ancient history — ordinary people across the era, dressed up in strange outfits, and buildings galore, places people made a living, many of them with unconventional histories retold. Here and there faint depictions of glimpsed ghosts. You learn in detail the constructions of cathedrals over time, the post office too. It’s an ethnography, a study of a culture from a fanciful perspective. Chapters are named after these structures, with addresses given and their headers to the chapters questions: “Does the captain who saved many lives still watch over the lake a century after his death?” “Who is the little girl staring out of the lighthouse window?” “Broom and mop in hand, the deceased man continues his work … ” Lots of evocative nouns and verbs, like Cottages, Storms, Lighthouses. Harbors and Lanterns. I’ve no doubt many of these places are haunted by the same local tourists over and over again.

I enjoyed the book as a travel account — you don’t have to believe in the ghosts; it’s the penumbra surrounding them that intrigues.

Click here and you’ll get a publisher’s synopsis, learn about Tyler (a seventh generation resident of Marquette), and hear some of Haunted Marquette read aloud.

Ellen

Upon being newly charmed by Dorothy Sayers


Dorothy Sayers as established writer (1920s)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been exploring — reading and watching Dorothy Sayers’s novels and the two BBC series, the first featuring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey (1973) and the second Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane (1987) — for many weeks now. I began before Izzy and I went away to the UK, I took with me on our journeys Sayers’s Nine Tailors and Barbara Reynolds’s Dorothy Sayers: Her life and Soul.  I had just re-read for the first time in 20+ years her Gaudy Night (long a favorite book of mine) and I think now I’ll go on to finish Five Red Herrings (takes place in Scotland further north around Inverness, so clearly “my kind of thing”) where Lord Peter fishes while Bunter paints, and David Coomes’s Dorothy L Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life. Reynolds knew Sayers and can tell intimate truths about her life but Reynolds’s book is too much of a hagiography, too upbeat, and it’s patently obvious that she leaves unexplained connections if gone into could illuminate the fiction.

I’m in a new phase or stage in my new interest in detective fiction (mystery, sometimes thriller), especially when written by women, or with women detectives or central characters. I am at the same time reading P. D. James’s novels, the one I’ve just finished The Skull Beneath the Skin, and books and articles about her and by her on detective fiction and herself. I am regarding the spy story as almost a different species or sub-species (see Andrew Marr); ditto, the “hard-boiled detective,” which against the skrim of what I’ve been reading is not the detective book from a socialist angle (one might wish from Dashiell Hammett), but rather from a misogynist one.

Tonight I’m thinking that after all I prefer Sayers to James because she seems more playful and varied (or thus far and I admit I’ve not read enough James). Sayers’ books do not grip with the same intensity of emotion as James’s; they are less grim, alas far far more snobbish, class-inflected and (probably unconsciously) racist.  There is a deep melancholy not to say pessimistic vein in the depiction of Galgliesh and I just loved James combined with Austen as adapted by Juliette Towhidi (Death Comes to Pemberley). PD James seems to equate a crime-mystery novel with death.

Sayers is weaving parts of her autobiography and experience into the stories in her women’s tales, and feel as if I’m watching Sayers mirrored in several ways all at once. She is interested in crimes that don’t reach death. And she is not only Harriet Vane, and in love with Lord Peter; she recurs in various of the women characters, and aspects of her own experiences directly reworked. Her style is more literary.  Probably I need to read more about P.D. — a biography by someone else (I’ve read her autobiography, A Time to be in Earnest). Both are excellent literary critics, Dorothy also a wonderful translator from the Italian. But in the meantime James has failed to charm me, and I’m finding too many awful women in James’s stories and sympathetic ones in Dorothy’s.

What I did not know is that the Harriet Vane books were not written after the Peter alone/or with Bunter ones, but alternatively. So Strong Poison is her 4th novel (1930), and its “sequel” (in the 1987 TV series), Have His Carcase, the 8th (1932), with Five Red Herrings 1931) emerging in between, and Murder Must Advertise (1933) afterwards. Nine Tailors (1933) is just before Gaudy Night (1934). Nor that she stopped writing the Lord Peter/Harriet series in her last couple of decades, and her translations from the Italian of religious poetry and her own devotional plays (I’ll call them) came later in her TV (!) career.


Bluntisham, St Mary’s church, where her father presided, and the core of Nine Tailors too

Lord Peter no matter how beloved by his creator, is only a short phase, and his space is also quickly occupied by Harriet Vane and Bunter too.

So my theme tonight might be, From whence the charm? it’s not a word I usually use. I began to feel it as I watched and re-watched the Ian Carmichael series (much underrated because using old-fashioned dramaturgy); when after I had read about her checkered love life (used and abused all too often, including having to keep herself apart from her illegitimate son by one of the men she could least have endured as a husband), about her friendships in The Mutual Admiration Society by Mo Moulton (how Dorothy and her friends attempted to re-make the world for women) and allowed the humor, eagerness for life’s enjoyments (from landscape, to food, to drink, to theater) and literary allusiveness in all her books (felt in the TV series) to make me glad. The Nine Tailors has a sublimity of religious outlook; Gaudy Night, deep memories of education with and through other women (Somerville College! where I now have been). The earlier books seems to me intricate, have busier stories; the later are simpler with a stronger emotion coming through the threads.

I should mentioned I enjoyed a two session course online with Kara Keeling (from Politics and Prose) where we read Whose Body and Nine Tailors. Whose Body was her first (1931) and I could see too transparently, that Lord Peter was a semi-fatuous comic and parodic fatuous play off Bertie Wooster types of males. In her own half-starving state in a small flat in London as she worked in advertising, she was indulging in luxuries,and she clearly didn’t know what to do with her own semi-unconventional desires in life for roles other than those given women and justified distrust of toxically masculine men — there is a lesbian vein in her work, as there is a homoerotic one between Lord Peter and Bunter (played because by Glyn Hunter in the earlier series, and somewhat too sarcastically by Richard Morant in the later one). But the discussion of her life growing up in Oxford in a privileged beloved environment and cross-over to the world of the fens and church architecture as symbolic of community deeply felt was inspiriting. Several of the women (there was nary a male) were strong fans and brought to bear their memories of other of the books.


Carmichael as Lord Peter, and with Glyn Hunter as Bunter

So what is charming? as usual, as I’ve discovered true of all detective series, it inheres in the central detectives: Lord Peter is deeply compassionate, a moral man; it pains him (don’t laugh) to have to hurt people and I’ve discovered now in 4 of the books (Clouds of Witness, Unpleasantness at Bellona Club, Five Red Herrings), a sympathy for the person driven or tempted to murder, identification with women who get a raw deal (there is an abused woman committing adultery in Clouds of Witness, a poignant artist type, Ann Dorland, isolated partly from lack of talent in Bellona, a true tragic figure, Mary Deacon Thoday in Nine Tailors), he seeks to integrate and to use his wealth to help others escape bad situations. Quietly he has affairs of his own: Phyllida Law when young and every so pretty, as Margary Phelps in Bellona. He is witty, imaginatively melancholy, does enter into the lives of people of another class, living different lives from himself. Harriet is for me a kind of ideal, perfectly embodied in Harriet Walter — whose image forms my gravatar in my original blog. I have written an actress blog celebrating her career (she also directs and writes). As with the Foyle’s War series, I feel better when I’ve come to the end of one of Sayers’s tales.


Petheridge and Walter by the sea (Have His Carcase)

I note there is the third figure of the trusted police officer, Mark Eden as Chief Inspector Parker (needed for the various functions of quest) in the first series (there is an equivalent in Foyle, i.e., Anthony Howell as Milner; in Dalgliesh, his West Indian sergeant, Caryliss Peer as DS Kate Miskin; Sergeant Lewis to Morse is another), lost to view. Apparently it is harder for a woman detective to be seen with the woman sidekick (there is a changing individual in the Helen Mirren-Jane Tennison stories).

They do differ significantly from male-written detective stories: we have the features of l’ecriture-femme, the cyclical stories, the stealth heroine in a male-centered story, the imagery from women’s lives, yes a tendency to invent an ideal male (rather like a cross between Mr Knightley and Frederick Wentworth), women who reflect their own lives and aspirations, their memories, who must escape in the earlier books (pre-later 20th century).

I do not want these blogs to become too long again so leave off here, contenting myself with referring my reader to good essays online, books and essays elsewhere on the Sayers’s series and her place in the history of detective fiction and feminism. I will probably go on to another literary biography, but books about Sayers’ art are as important, her immediate era (Lucy Worseley).

I believe at one point she lived in Bloomsbury Square too.


High Spirits acting out a play and singing in 1915 at an all-girls’ school

Ellen

Summer syllabus: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives & Daughters

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Wednesday mornings, 9:45 to 11:05 pm,
June 21 – July 26
6 sessions On-line (location of building housing the office: 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va, Tallwood)
Dr Ellen Moody


Mr Gibson (Ian Patterson) introducing Molly Gibson (Justine Waddell) and Cynthia Kirkpatrick (Keeley Hawes (1999 W&D, scripted Andrew Davies)

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives & Daughters

The class will read and discuss a novel some scholars argue is Elizabeth Gaskell’s finest literary masterpiece, Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story. A seeming Jane Austen-like local story about growing up, courtship, marriage, and careers in two families is set in the mid-19th century. Its extraordinary depth of psychology and social realism that brings into play issues like science, medicine, class, and everything having to do with family life and sexuality and marriage, makes the book arguably Tolstoyan or an equivalent of Eliot’s Middlemarch. I will set the book in the context of Gaskell’s life and career. If there is time, we might read or just discuss a couple of short stories by Gaskell (from Cranford or one of her realistic gothic stories). There is a superb BBC serial (1999) that the class will discuss

Required Text:

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Wives & Daughters: An Everyday Story, ed Pam Morris, most recent reprint 2009, ISBN 978-0-14-043478-1; or the Oxford Classic paperback, Wives & Daughters, ed Angus Easson, also 2009, ISBN 978-0199538263.

The movie we’ll discuss (available as a DVD to rent from Netflix, as a Region 2 DVD to buy on Amazon and streaming online):

Wives and Daughters. Dir. Nicholas Renton. Script. Andrew Davies. Perf. Justine Waddell, Keeley Hawes, Francesca Annis, Ian Patterson, Michael Gambon, Tom Hollander, Anthony Howell, Ian Carmichael, Penelope Wilton (et alia). BBC, 1999.

There are two superb readings aloud of the unabridged text, one by Patience Tomlinson for Naxos audiobooks but you have to be careful to get the unabridged one; and one by Nadia May for Blackstones (just exquisite, there is no abridged on).


Patience Tomlinson reading aloud

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

Jun 21: 1st week: Introduction: Gaskell, her life and career. Wives and Daughters, please have read up to p 104 (through Chapter 9, “The Widower and Widow”). We begin the book.

Jun 28: 2nd week: Wives and Daughters, pp 104-212 (through Chapter 18, “Mr Osborne’s Secret”)

July 5: 3rd week: Wives and Daughters, pp 213-281 (through Chapter 25, “Hollingford in a Bustle”)

July 12: 4th week: Wives and Daughters, pp 281-394 (through Chapter 35, “The Mother’s Maneuver”). We’ll discuss the Andrew Davies movie and other books by Gaskell and movies of Gaskell’s novels and are readily available in good editions and/or streaming or as DVDs.

July 19: 5th week: Wives and Daughters, pp 394-524 (through Chapter 48, “An Innocent Culprit”)

July 26: 6th Week: Wives and Daughters, pp 524-652 (through to the end, “A Note by the Cornhill Editor”) in the context of 20th and 21st century feminisms.


From paratexts for Cranford movie by Posie Simmonds

Recommended outside reading or watching (if you want to go further):

Ballinger, Gill, “Adapting Wives and Daughters for Televsion: Reimagining Women, Travellers, Natural Science and Race,” Adaptation 15:1 (2021)84-99.

Billington, Josie. Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy: A comparative Study. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2002

Birtwhistle, Sue. A Cranford Companion. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Wonderful companion to the series, includes scripts with illustrations by Posy Simmonds

Cranford and Return to Cranford. Dir. Simon Curtis. Scripted Heidi Thomas. Perf: Judy Dench, Eileen Aitkins, Philip Gleniston, Michael Gambon, Philip Gleniston, Francesca Annis, Claudie Blakeley, Lisa Dillon (et alia). BBC, 2010-11.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson and Charlotte Mitchell. Oxford UP, 1998; My Lady Ludlow. Booksurge, 2004. The life of Charlotte Bronte, ed. Angus Easson. Oxford UP, 1996

Hughes, Linda and Michael Lund. Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work. Univ Press of Virginia, 1999.

Jung, Sandro, ed. Elizabeth Gaskell: Victorian Culture and the Art of Fiction: Bicentennial Essays. Belgium: Academia Press, 2009

Marroni, Francesco and Alan Shelton, edd. Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context. Tracce Pescara, 1999.

Matus, Jill, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Cambridge UP, 2007.

Nestor, Pauline. Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Oxford UP, 1985.

North and South. Dir. Brian Perceval. Scripted: Sandy Welch. Perf. Daniela Denby-Ashe, Richard Armitage, Brendan Coyle, Anna Maxwell Martin. BBC, 2004.

Rendall, Jane. The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780-1860. London: McMillan, 1985.

Salis, Loredana, ed. Adapting Gaskell: Screen and Stage Versions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.

Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Bloomington: Indiana UP Press, 1987. Insightful feminist reading.

Uglow, Jenny. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1993. Superb, a masterpiece of a literary biography.


Justine Waddell as Molly

Politics & Prose classes on women’s fiction & authors; genre fiction for, by, about women; Lot’s wife re-seen


Hilary Mantel’s superb non-fiction essays, a selection from the London Review of Books


A rare almost Radcliffean female gothic fiction for Oates

Dear friends and readers,

For about 12 weeks now I’ve been taking on-line courses at Politics and Prose and the quality and level of the discussions, the information and insights offered have been as excellent as those I’ve been taking now online from Cambridge, early evening British time, early afternoon East Coast on Saturdays and/or Sundays.  These have occurred across the pandemic and I chose mostly women and mostly Bloomsbury era women (exceptions include a session on E.M. Forster, and a session each on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Christina Rossetti’s poetry).

At Politics and Prose I can’t recommend highly enough Helen Hooper, Elaine Showalter, and at Cambridge University in their programs just about every Literature professor I’ve been privileged to listen to and watch (as these are video zooms). I’ve read books I’ve never read before by Mantel, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates — including Black Water, the astonishing tour-de-force retelling of the drowning and suffocation of Mary Jo Kopecknek at the close of her mad drive with Ted Kennedy down unpaved roads over an unsteady bridge. I’ve now a rounded point of view on Mantel, a way of putting her works together coherently for the first time. Maybe my favorite session from Cambridge in the last few months was on Vita Sackville-West by Alison Hennegan. I discovered Sackville-West’s love of animals.

The question I asked myself about Mantel was how much of her fiction was an escape for and protest against her from her fraught family life, traumatic health problems, and religious ways of thought (especially her interest in seance mediums). Paradoxically it’s not her imaginative fiction-writing self that is most aggressive in building a new identity, but her non-fictional arguments and the first two of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  For Shirley Jackson she takes on the type of the older woman alone, unable to navigate herself in a deeply hostile world (“The Bus”); she cannot escape cruelty it seems. To me Joyce Carol Oates in much of her fiction is herself living vicariously thrills and adventures at whatever price these cost her heroines (death, fearsome rape), with no concern for safety – so often so central to women’s stories. There is something troublingly irresponsible in Oates. It seems to me that American female gothic as practiced by these two women almost avoided the supernatural in order to make concrete to women readers what the life of an American woman is today. By contrast, Mantel is drawn to it in her contemporary British gothic comedic novels.

At the same time I’ve been going further in my popular genre books by, for, about female characters and discovered I can enjoy P.D. James’s Cordelia Grey books (detective fiction), Italian women women’s fiction: I just began Alba de Crespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, as translated by Ann Goldstein:

This last, perhaps not as well known in English-readers’ circles as I hope it might become is about a woman who after WW2 decides to keep a prohibited notebook. The closer word in Italian is prohibited. (Another instance of Goldstein’s inadequacy). The whole set of attitudes Valeria has to get beyond to even purchase and then hide her notebook brings home the inner world of Lila when she keeps a series of notebook and the profound betrayal Elena enacts when she throws them in the river in Florence. Purchase laws are against her, she has no space for it, little time because she hasn’t a maid and she has a job (this money is why she can buy it); she’s afraid to tell her husband who might suggest she give it to her son. I can see that the tragedy might be that she discovers herself … Very modern tale. Jhumpa Lahiri provides an insightful contextual introduction, and Elena Ferrante is quoted urging us to read it

For a couple of weeks I immersed myself in the fiction of Natalia Ginzburg, and the poetry and life of Elsa Morante in the course I’m teaching on Italian memoirs and novels and poetry of the 20th century — more than a couple of weeks because this was a culmination of several months on and off.

With my friend and mate over on Trollope&Peers, Tyler Tichelaar, a historical novelist, I read the whole of Devoney Looser’s very long study of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two early historical fiction (and other genre) writers around the time of, or just before Jane Austen and the Brontes: Sister Novelists: Trailblazing Sisters. The Porter sisters left a huge treasure trove of candid letters from which Looser constructed their hard and fascinating lives as independent women writers. Their courage, stamina, ability to network and live on very little, their romances and enormous amount of fiction produced puts before us a new angle on the world Austen lived in, a lot freer sexually than is usually supposed: the question was did they invent historical fiction or did what they call historical fiction lack a deep consciousness of the past (and real research into it) as shaping force of what was and is, such as we find in Scott.

As I found myself thinking about the archetypal heroine’s journey, so I’ve been looking to see if when women take over popular genres, there is some subset or continuous underlying themes, tropes, norms that cross these genres (each having to conform to readers’ expectations). An image one sees on many of the covers of their detective fiction is the typewriter:

I’ve not come to any conclusion that will allow me to concretize the l’ecriture-femme elements in these books but the topic is on my mind and I’m not alone as I pursue it.

I’m neglecting no one; I’m now watching serial dramas based on Agatha Christie’s famous series of Miss Marple: two nights in a row found me really engaged by one of the original episodes with Joan Hickman (The Body in the Library) and tonight I began a brand-new one: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which includes Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent in a hilarious scene as our amateur female sleuth’s parents.

At night I’ve re-begun Christie’s Autobiography, read by me 40 years ago and still remembered.

So this is some of what has been occupying me over these past weeks — some eighteenth century matter in Looser’s book while I listened to David Rintoul’s exhilarating reading aloud of Scott’s Waverley (very entertaining tones and Scots accent). I will end on a poem by Anna Akhmatova as translated by Annie Finch. The poem was brought to mind by Graham Christian’s writing of postings about poets daily for this month of April on face-book

Lot’s Wife

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” –—Genesis 19:25-26

The righteous man followed where God’s angel guide
shone on through black mountains, imposing and bright —
but pain tore his wife’s breast. It turned her aside
and said, “Look again! There is time for one sight
Of towers, and Sodom’s red halls, and the place
Where you sang in the courtyard or wove on your loom
By windows now empty — where you knew the embrace
Of love with your husband—where birth filled the room —.”

She looked. And the sight was more bitter than pain.
It shut up her eyes so she saw nothing more;
She shimmered to salt; her feet moved in vain,
Deep rooted at last in the place she died for.

Who weeps for her now? Who can care for the fate
Of someone like that—a mere unhappy wife?
My heart will remember. I carry the weight
Of one who looked back, though it cost her her life.

I like this one because the POV is not the implicitly masculine POV or Lot’s male POV. We begin with an impersonal verse; at “it turned her aside” we move into the woman’s perspective (whose name we are still not told. Then we move into the second person, “You” and the last three lines are the torture she’s feeling — just for wanting a sliver of freedom within enslavement unto death.

Just arrived! and this was a hard one to find for a reasonable price ($9.99 at WorldofBooks): The other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Mary at last)

And Isobel completed this beautiful puzzle: that’s Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Nora Zeale Hurston and Virginia Woolf

Ellen

By way of Richard III: A post-modern praise of Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time & the film The Lost King

Truth is the daughter of time, not authority — Francis Bacon

A very enjoyable film I saw this afternoon! The Lost King, an account of Philippa Langley’s successful push to get many authorities to dig up Richard III’s remains in a parking lot near Leicester Cathedral. Also an unusual, actually strange mystery book also about Richard III (did not kill nephews is the foregone conclusion) which consists of a detective scrutinizing types of history writing in bed. I describe the real merits of the book and defend the film against its now legion of detractors (lamenting what a shame such a good film should be so marred …) all the while discussing R3 too.

Dear Friends and readers,

Over the past month I’ve been reading on and off a curious and strange or unusually written mystery story, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (one of the two pseudonyms of Elizabeth MacKintosh)

The above one of its many covers (having been published in many editions) captures the action and (for me) what’s central to the interest of the book: its self-reflexivity and presentations of different ways of telling supposedly truthful history in at first a playful way. The way the story is for about half the tale conducted. The level of language in which the book is written feels very simple but not the thoughts implied inside Alan Grant’s mind nor his and Tey’s narrator’s descriptions and imitations of kinds of history books. I chose this book as one of those I’d read for a planned course I’d teach in mystery-thriller-detective stories by women: see my A Tangent I cannot Resist: Women’s Detective Stories

The story is that Grant is a policeman-detective from Scotland Yard who has been badly hurt chasing a criminal (down a manhole?). He is bored in the hospital and looking for something to do. He is drawn towards Renaissance and Tudor history and after canvasing several fascinating figures (all women, Lucrezia Borgia, Elizabeth Tudor versus Mary Stuart), lands on the unsolved (as he sees it) mystery of of who killed the two young sons of Elizabeth Woodville by Edward IV — heirs to the throne upon his death. This is an old problem. As he puzzles this out, with main candidates being at first (but not for very long) Richard III or Henry VII (who took over the throne after Richard III was killed); we go through the whole Plantagenet York group (Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and wife, their grown sons, grandsons, various wives), not omitting the Lancastrians (Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, Margaret of Anjou &c).

Tey’s book’s story is told through characters, his friends, bringing him books of different types — each of which gives Josephine Tey and opportunity to imitate it — first silly history offered to children with child-like motives and pictures, all personalities, and then the opposite, fat tomes of small print where only large abstract causes and realities are discussed (hardly personalities), then one of his historical fiction-romances centered on Cecilly Neville, Duchess of York (wife of the above Plantagenet), entitled The Rose of Raby said to be by Evelyn Paine-Ellis (typical pseudonym down to not allowing the first name to be narrowly gendered). That’s the kind of title Philippa Gregory might give a book; in fact these kinds of books can be better than one thinks — as Tey through Grant implies. And then he gets to the “sainted” Thomas More’s “much respected” life of Richard of Gloucester. The fun is comparing the different kinds of truths and un-truths.


Sally Hawkins again, this time as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, wife to the Duke Humphrey (Hugh Bonneville) — from The Hollow Crown

But you have to know the history to enjoy this kind of thing — partly because otherwise you would get immersed in notes at the book thick with names and differing explanations. Not entirely by chance I just happened to be re-watching the three Hollow Crown plays, TV productions made up of selections from Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays and most of Richard III, here called The Wars of the Roses — a really excellent close and yet accessible rendition, often shot on location. And I do know this history from previous reading and watching of costume drama, and at one time deciding to do my graduate work in the early modern period. I also happened to have been reading a book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Tyrant where he argues that one can read Shakespeare to learn about politics when a political order is falling apart. The Hollow Crown focuses on the Joan of Arc material in Shakespeare; Greenblatt focuses on Jack Cade’s rebellion and it’s striking how many parallels there are with January 6th …. Shakespeare wrote dramatic forms of historical fiction. And it’s historical fiction I’m interested in for real — for a book say. That’s probably why I chose Tey’s books as one of my candidates to teach for a course in women writing detective stories. But I digress in several ways at once.

For me the book began to fall off towards the end when I could see its thrust was to defend a thesis begun around the time of Horace Walpole and become a fervently believed in “truth” by Ricardians (they are called), especially in The Richard III Society. It is a daring book to make it about a man reading in bed, but the matter for me not endlessly intriguing enough. Suffice to say I am not convinced and found a good deal of special pleading and strained emphases. And nowadays, since Richard’s hacked-away and curved skeleton (he has scoliosis it is now felt) was found and re-buried in pomp, there has been a great deal of push back against the Ricardians, e.g., Tim Thornton, Jennifer Ouellette, “New Evidence Richard murdered his the princes in the tower.”; on the other hand, there’s The Vilification of Richard III by Vanessa Hatton.

One could go on very easily to many more essays on various POVs and the many involved characters/people. But I want tonight to again keep my promise to keep these blogs shorter and here dwell on a mostly upbeat film that just delighted me this afternoon, The Lost King, based on the life, character and books by and about Philippa Langley, the amateur historian, archeaologist and fervent fan of Richard III, who was the driving force responsible for digging up the remains of Richard III from a car park not far from Leicester Cathedral.

*****************************************************

Philippa standing up to Richard Buckley who does not want to dig in Trench 1 (where she thinks and it turns out Richard III’s remains are)

I am now prevented from praising it as strongly as I want to because in the spirit of all previous authorities like Thomas More, a new authority, the University of Leicester, and the central people (e.g., Richard Buckley, played in the film by Mark Addy) there who worked with or for, or ultimately dominated over Langley has come down hard against and pervasively complained loudly that the film falsifies their role. They name several untruths, like Buckley had just been unfunded by the university when Langley came to him with her fervent faith, like Richard Taylor (played by Lee Ingleby), a deputy registrar, who is presented as at first obstructing and in the end unfairly marginalizing and taking credit from Philippa — there is a list of these, as doubtless one can do for many a biopic (among them, Spike Lee’s epic heroic Malcolm X). The film, we are told, underplays the number of women involved. It seems most, maybe nearly all of the major news outlets is carrying this slant on the film, with strong laments that now we cannot enjoy it as we would have, were it not so marred: “Cracking film totally tainted,” “Legal action likely,”, from the University, “Setting the Record straight,”, and “Sally saves the day.” Who can like a film that defames real living people who meant very well?


Deep fantasy

I began to wonder if Steve Coogan has enemies (joke alert); he indirectly defended his film in one of the videos released showing the principals doing promotional shots as about a “humble ordinary person” challenging authorities; she is conceived as a disabled woman (with ME) whose first identification with Richard III comes from her having been demoted because she cannot do the things others can; we see her husband is living with another woman when the movie begins — as the trajectory of her success moves on, he moves back and begins to support her. She starts out as fitting with misfits (the way the Richard III society members are at first presented). This is a common role for Hawkins — she was a nearly hysterical Anne Elliot, twisted with grief, rejection, isolation, put-upon, underdog (parallel with Fanny Price) — I loved it myself.

Here, as in those Austen heroines, but not so poignantly, she wins out, almost, and in the academic world, archaeological or historical-literay in my experience, those w/o titles, the right school and “mentors” behind them are erased, at best condescended to. My instincts and 27 and more years of experience of university people lead me to distrust their account however in what can be documented theirs might win out in a court of law. I can see from wikipedia and the accounts of Langley’s publications and networking, she is far more middle class, self-assertive and altogether entrepreneurial – which would make sense. Philippa Langley have had to be to have gotten various people to dig up the parking lot. The film exaggerated at both ends — as well as providing her with a (as the actor called the ghost king) an imaginary friend for support she desperately needed.


Richard III’s revenant (Harry Lloyd), imaginary supportive companion to Philippa Langley (our Sally)

So in order to praise the film if you are not to be disrespected you’ve got to cope these (ugly?) departures from truth; what interests me is other biopics have as many and yet are not attacked — The Lost King film-makers made the mistake of attacking an university whose presence in the world is not dependent on money but respect and reputation for integrity.

But I also think they are going after this film because they think they can — because Langley was/is an eccentric woman. The whole thesis that Richard III is this unfairly maligned king is very weak even if Thomas More was writing propaganda on behalf of the Tudors. So the way to write it up if you want to praise it is to begin there, an ironic parallel between R3 and Langley. Another is to take a post-modern stance: let us be sceptical of all assertions, and all individual certitudes, all of them slanted by self. There are several suggestions in the material on Richard III, The Daughter of Time and now this film that it was suspected for quite a time that the body-skeleton was in that vicinity so Langley’s thesis was not some wild dream no one ever thought of — all writing just now are all insisting that the very improbable event that Langley’s instinct the body was beneath an R for reserved was absolutely true. They are happy to give her full credit for that. So since no one is attacking that I wonder about that equally.


John Langley (Steve Coogan) and Philippa walking and (she) anxiously talking

It is a very enjoyable film. Beautifully filmed, buoyant with relief and release when Philippa is vindicated, Hawkins and Steve Coogan manage to convey a couple slowly coming together once again, and when we hear that hint that Benedict Cumberbatch Himself who played Richard III in The Hollow Crown) will be at the funeral ceremonies, just that needed thin frisson comes through.

Ellen

Talene Monahan’s Jane Anger — a play featuring two almost silenced women: @Shakespeare Theater Company, Klein Theater DC


Amelia Workman as Jane Anger


Talene Monahan as Anne Hathaway

Gentle friends and readers,

Talene Monahan’s Jane Anger is not a great play; after an initial superbly delivered monologue by Workman as Anger in front of a stage-size title page (Jane Anger), we (or I) was puzzled to be confronted by a farcical and static treatment of an apparently arrogant callow Shakespeare (Michael Urie) and his newly hired servant, Francis (Ryan Spahn) acting out a (to me) senseless comic routine worthy Jack Benny and his valet, Rochester (Eddie Anderson).  Remember him? Rochester was superb in his way and so too in this same raunchy sycophantic yet self-assertive way Spahn.  We learn that poor Will is experiencing writer’s block over an apparently plagiarized King Lear, that there is a previous version of this Celtic legend in a book Will is copying from. Perhaps we were to surmise Francis is gay.  This play makes great visual hay with Shakespeare’s sonnets which are addressed to a young man Will is in love with and a dark lady.

This took a lot of time, but somehow I felt this play wasn’t going anywhere and couldn’t figure out what we the audience were there for, even if (as we were reminded) below the room through a window we were made to feel a mob in the streets experiencing plague, and remember many doors were X’d.  Then suddenly climbs up and over the window sill, Jane. She is dressed wholly in black with a Venetian style bird mask.

The character, Jane Anger (her pseudonym) is modelled on a woman who lived and wrote one of the earliest feminist defenses of women. Monahan wrote the play during time of plague, our own, Covid-19, in 2020 (see Thomas Floyd’s story of the origins of the play).  The central life of the play is provided by the extraordinary performance of Amelia Workman who presents herself as a survivor in the “soft power” working class mode, laundress, prostitute, barmaid, whatever fell to hand (cook?), and has come to Will to ask him to sign her pamphlet, for without his signature she will never be able to persuade any printer to print her polemic. It quickly emerges she and Will have been sexual partners; she has a kind of rival in Francis (so my speculation about the sonnets has some evidence), and these three proceed to squabble until interrupted by drama’s fourth player, Anne Hathaway, also seemingly climbing up and over the window sill. Monahan plays the part in a stylized “bright comic” mode.

Colleen Kennedy has done justice to the tone and quality of the dialogue. Though it’s not quite as hilarious as Kennedy makes out, the characters discuss the plague (with obviously modern allusions thrown out), play-making, and become physically aggressive.  It is in the mode of other more brilliant crude riffs on masterpieces, history (as told seriously), and issues of the day. We witness how the men treat the women with contempt, and how they and Francis take out an almost embarrassing revenge on a thoroughly dislikable Will: he shows himself to be idle, lazy, a plagiarist who sneers at his long-suffering wife (left at home to cope with the children, one of whom died at age 11 or so). There was hearty spontaneous laughter at the slapstick, of which there is a good deal more; the use of sprayed blood all over a supposed painting of Shakespeare as backdrop especially.  Both Will’s arms are hacked off, as his penis (mockingly), which is thrown about. So the old banana routine really works. The language was as demotic as I have seen it in crude costume dramas on Starz (lots of reiterations of the word “fucking”) but this did not seem to bother the audience. Of course all the old rumors and printed words are rehearsed, including how Will left Anne the second best bed. Early on we had heard a lot about the dark lady; now the question is, was she Anne?  Anne claims this.  Spahn managed to dominate the stage and for that matter the whole theater when the actors turn to include the audience in their conscious antics. Spahn gave out photos of himself and told us that he was looking for an agent.

I admit to feeling disconcerted by this utterly irreverent emasculating of someone all of whose plays I have read, as well as the poetry (the sonnets form part of what is quoted from Shakespeare’s works) – and loved and respected very much.


The pair of men as morons

I like to remember John Heminge and Henry Condell, the friends who worked so magnificently to produce the astonishing first folio and professed themselves worried lest we not understand and appreciate their beloved noble-hearted colleague. So this was a low point in the proceedings for me.

But the play picked up when Will leaves the room in order to work for real on his coming play (I don’t remember what happened to Francis), and we were left with Hathaway and Anger. Why it took so long and was in comparison with the rest of the play so short I know not but the last twenty or so moments of this play had these two women telling each other of their lives. The death of Hamnet brought in earlier to point out how Shakespeare has not come home to see them die was now recounted. The friend whom I was with told me some of the lines were taken from Maggie O’Farrell’s sequel historical novel, Hamnet.  So now maybe I should buy that and read it.  And finally Anne reads aloud Jane’s pamphlet and (I was once, still am, an early modern literature scholar) it seemed to a real Elizabethan text was being read:

This was (I felt) the high point in the proceedings; the men did return, inexplicably chastened, and a quiet mood of respect for the previously silent and dismissed women ended the play.

It has been played elsewhere and I gather there is hope for other stage productions. This one is directed by Jess Chaynes. Other people could choose to do it differently. So I’d say if you are living near this or another production, or there is a video made of the play and it is eventually streamed on the Internet, Monahan’s play is very much worth sitting through.

Ellen

Christmas in the Poldark World brought back (or forward) from December 2017


Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) singing, after Christmas dinner (2015 Poldark, episode 4)
Someone — a Latin poet — had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come — last chapter of Ross Poldark)


Ross (Aidan Turner) with Aunt Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) at dinner (again end of Ross Poldark)

Gentle Friends and devoted readers,

I have said I mean someday or time to return to the Poldark novels and write half a book on them (the other half to be on the first four Outlander novels). One of the deep pleasures of Graham’s series is his recreation of the rituals of the era in terms of feelings then and feelings now. There was nothing he enjoyed better to do than recreate Christmas as a way of marking time and showing the community getting together in however compromised terms. So this year instead of bringing back (as I have in other years) Jane Austen Christmas blogs, I’m bringing back one (2017) from the Poldark novels. Here is a second (2018).

I’ve been rereading the novels again, and have confirmed an old memory that while Christmas is in itself not valued for any kind of religious belief, a number of the novels end around Christmas time with the characters gathering together to enact a yearly ritual, and memories, and talk emerges far more for real at moments than other times of year. Some of these endings are melancholy sweet, strained, or near breaking point: Ross Poldark, Demelza and Warleggan (1st, 2nd & 4th Poldark books) respectively. At the close of Demelza:

“They watched the scene on the beach.
‘I shan’t have to finish that frock for Julia now,’ she said. ‘It was that dainty too.’
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you will be catching cold.’
‘No. I am quite warm, Ross. Let me stay a little longer in the sun.

Some are bitter, and then the emphasis is on winter itself, December into January, dark, cold, bleak or wild: The Angry Tide (the 7th) when Elizabeth has just died.

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask … Demelza to Ross (last page of The Angry Tide).

Some are quiet-reflective, The Miller’s Dance and The Loving Cup (the 9th and 10th books). In The Twisted Sword (the 11th), the deep tragedy of Jeremy’s death continues to the end, only lifted somewhat by the birth of Lady Harriet Warleggan and then Cuby Poldark’s baby, while Demelza keeps the festival.

Deliver us from swords & curs — The Twisted Sword

Lastly, Bella (the 12th) just after Valentine’s death and Ross’s nightmare, the characters all return to Cornwall for Christmas. We pass a bleak Christmas in the second half of the novel Jeremy Poldark, but it is not emphatic, just part of the year made much harder because of desperate conditions during this festival time, and we observe Christmas more emphatically in The Black Moon during the birth of Clowance when the news comes to Nampara that Dwight Enys is still alive.

I’ve only followed the devices and desires of my own heart … Demelza, again the close)

So only four novels do not end in December/January or Christmas: Jeremy Poldark (a christening), The Black Moon (very bitter at the close), The Four Swans(very uncertain, all the women having been forced into bad choices), and The Stranger from the Sea (an uneasy unsettling).

A painting of Cornwall, the shore for fishing, early 20th century impressionism (photographed from a visit to a Cornish museum, summer 2016)

As important, all the novels are carefully keyed to seasonal time-lines, from autumn to winter, winter to spring and summer again; attention is paid to the relationship of what’s happening to daily customs, agricultural and other rhythms, the weather, and Christmas is part of this, and made more of when it coincides with some crisis. I conclude the natural world as central to human existence (and Graham’s love of Cornwall), and holiday rituals meant a good deal to Graham for their creation of a sense of community and humane comradeship, for their enacting memory and for hope of renewal.


Stanhope Forbes, Fisherman’s wife (Cornish painter, 1890s – 1910s)

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Even among my nearest and dearest there is no transference — can be no transference — of experience. One can feel empathy for someone suffering, but one cannot feel the suffering. We are all alone —- desperately alone. What are we in this world? A conjunction of subjective impressions making up something that is accepted as reality — Graham, Memoirs of a Private Man

One reason these patterns may not have been noticed is they are not observed in the either the older or newer serial drama. When Christmas does emphasize something special in the story at the moment (new marriage, desperate poverty, worry over the life of an imprisoned friend), then it’s there. But not the seasons and no sense of a sequence of customs to which Christmas belongs for themselves. The interest in Cornwall is decorative; in the older, there is reveling in the place, in the recent they attend to the workaday world.

We don’t have adaptations past The Stranger from the Sea for either series, but looking at the older 1975-76, 1977-78, the only transitional moments from one novel to the next where this kind of coda is observed is in a mid-book, the bare bleak half-starving Christmas from Jeremy Poldark, complete with a family dinner, caroling, Demelza wanting to ask the Brodugans for money).


Bare strained family dinner (1975-76 Poldark, Part 11, Episode 3)


At Nampara, Demelza (Angharad Rees), pouring port, asks Ross (Robin Ellis) why cannot they ask other friends for money (1975-76, Poldark Part 11, Episode 4)

One could cite the mood and bleak outdoors in the final episode of the second (and as it turned out) last season (1978), The Angry Tide, which ended, with Demelza and Ross looking at their children holding hands, and George grieving at the window from which the camera takes us to gaze at wild waves and rocks. Except it is not Christmas nor December as it explicitly is in the novel. A good deal of the original series was filmed on sets, and the focus was strongly on particular personalities in a story. So even just two scenes from the older Poldark show the intense attention paid to interweaving a Christmas piece with the realities of the characters’ dispositions, circumstances at each moment.


Christmas dinner at Trenwith (2015 Poldark, episode 4)

The recent 2015-16, and now 2017: in the first season (2015), the fourth episode near the end corresponds closely to the end of Ross Poldark, Ross and Demelza now Poldark go to Trenwith for a visit and (as it turns out temporary) reconciliation, and details from the book are dramatized, such as Demelza’s singing (above), though not Elizabeth on the harp.

Then again in the second season (2016), scenes corresponding to the observation of Christmas during a hard time in Jeremy Poldark, and the third season (2017), scenes corresponding to The Black Moon and placed just before the rescuing of Dwight Enys where there is a quiet Nampara Christmas and Caroline and Demelza and Verity seek funds at a party.

For all the rest while we might have a funeral at a close of an episode (we do twice, Jim Carter and then Julia), nothing is made of the year’s seasonal patterns nor Christmas. The perpetual coming out on the cliffs is not keyed to any season, any activity but the openings of the episodes at the mines. Scenes are not complexly nuanced in quite the way they were in the older series.

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Elizabeth Adele Armstrong Forbes, later 19th century woman painter in Cornwall, a Ring of Roses

What this suggests is how different are the rhythms and internal structures of the episodes of both Poldark film series from that of the novels: the exception in the series is Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the first iteration (1975, 1977), and Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the second (2016, 2017). But also how important season, time, holiday ritual was to Graham and has not been to the any of the film-adapters of his work thus far.

A curtain of mist hung over the Black Cliffs at the further end of Hendrawna Beach, most of it caused by spray hitting the tall rocks and drifting before the breeze. There was a heavy swell which reached far out to sea, and a couple of fishing boats from St Ann’s had gone scudding back to the safety of the very unsafe har¬bour. Gulls were riding the swell, lifting high and low as the waves came in; occasionally they took to the air in a flurry of flapping white when a wave unexpectedly spilled its head. No one yet expected rain: that would be tomorrow. The sun was losing its brilliance and hung in the sky like a guinea behind a muslin cloth.
Clowance squinted up at the weather. ‘Have you got a watch?’ ‘No. Not one that goes.’ — Bella

It might be objected, Does any movie? some do, and some film adaptations. One set that comes to mind are the film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, especially the 1996 ITV by Andrew Davies (with Kate Beckinsale as Emma, Mark Strong as Mr Knightley, Samantha Morton, Harriet) and the 209 BBC Emma by Sandy Welch (with Romola Garai as Emma, Johnny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley, Tamsin Grieg as Miss Bates), keep to seasons and emphasize Christmas or the winter holiday, snow. Have a look here: Jane Austen’s Perception of Christmas. And now Graham:

So they all went to look, at least as far as the stile leading down to the beach)· further it was unsafe to go. Where the beach would have been at any time except the highest of tides) was a battlefield of giant waves. The sea was washing away the lower sandhills and the roots of marram grass. As they stood there a wave came rushing up over the rough stony ground and. licked at the foot of the stile) leaving a trail of froth to overflow and smear their boots. Surf in the ordinary sense progresses from deep water to shallow) losing height as it comes. Today waves were hitting the rocks below Wheal Leisure with such weight that they generated a new surf running at right angles to the flow of the sea) with geysers of water spouting high from the collisions. A new and irrational surf broke against the gentler rocks below the Long Field. Mountains of spume collected wherever the sea drew breath) and then blew like bursting shells across the land. The sea was so high there was no horizon and the clouds so low that they sagged into the sea (from The Angry Tide, quoted by Graham at the opening of Poldark’s Cornwall, 1983 version).

This matters because these books are in the peculiar position of fake knowledge. A lot of people think they know them because they’ve seen these film adaptations. Others may read the books after the adaptations and have their understanding framed by the films. What they remember is what the film emphasized. There is a long respectable history of publication for the first four books from 1945 to 1953; and the second trilogy (the novels of the 1970s, Black Moon, Four Swans, Angry Tide) have been in but watched partly as a result of the films and seen through the films. The last five are much less well-known.

Many classics are in effect in this position: far far more people saw the film Wuthering Heights in 1939 than had read Emily Bronte’s book in the previous 150 years of publication and availability. But the Brontes have true respectability and people went on to read WH and other Bronte books; they have now gotten to Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the film adaptation was made as a result of Bronte popularity. That’s not the case with Graham’s books. For my part I’d love to know what sales of the books have been like over the past 60 years and have a way of measuring how much that reflects actual readership.

To return to the book’s several Christmases; this first one has the depth of particularity and realism. I have not begun to go into the feeling Ross Poldark and Elizabeth have for one another, how suddenly embittered Ross appears because life has not gone as he had wished, and the hurt Demelza feels, caught up in these two stills from the 1975-76 serial

Real feelings during these ritual times as are found in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale

On New Year’s Eve I will recreate the 2018 blog I wrote concentrating on just two of the Christmases across the books.

Ellen

She Said is an insightful, absorbing and (as such a movie must be) painful movie about the #MeToo movement


Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) in She Said (directed Maria Schrader, script Rebecca Lenkiewicz), telling of what happened 20+ years later


Young Zelda Perkins (Molly Windsor) and young Rowena Chiu (Ashley Chiu) in She Said (immediately afterwards)

Dear friends and readers,

I’m writing this in a spirit of mild indignation. It’s not that no reviews have acknowledged the excellence and power of She Said: Ryan Painter in a Salt Lake City news report not too long after beginning gets round to the power and importance of this film (and accompanies the review with stills that demonstrate what is meant by “stride”), Alexis Soliski of the New York Times gives strong praise (albeit warning the reader that the film is “discreet” and “stealthy” — nothing to trigger you here, potential viewer is part of the idea), but often they are curiously truncated (Ebert’s column). Nothing like damning something with faint praise, e.g, Molly Fischer of The New Yorker. I fail to see why it is a limitation of this film that our two intrepid reporters talk with compassion and understanding neither Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) found necessary when dealing with Deep Throat. We are made to fear for them as Carey Mulligan as Megan Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor receive death threats on the phone, are followed ominously by cars, find themselves confronted by an aggressively hostile husband who finds his honor about to be besmirched.

And then there is the vehemently insulting, to me a review all the more appalling because the New Statesman is a left-of-center publication, and the review by a woman, Ann Manov who labeled it “myopic, timid and trivial”. I almost didn’t go; I felt so angry at the review when I came home I almost cancelled my subscription

Like many perhaps most women I have a #MeToo story too. In my case it’s one I’ve yet to be able to put into coherent words. The experiences occurred over a period of time, between the ages of 13 and 15 when through hysteria and retreat I managed to put a stop to it. I know this time connects it o a suicide attempt I made at age 15, years of anorexia (ages 16 to 21), and my attempt to shape my existence into a safe retreat. I tried once on my original political Sylvia I blog.  But I can no longer reach it by googling for it as I wrote it so long ago. I am cheered to see the outstanding performances of Samantha Morton (whom I have so long admired and now finally subscribed to Starz just to see her in The Serpent Queen — alas she is the only element in the serial worth watching) and Jennifer Ehle (as Laura Madden) singled out. I cannot find a still online (available to public of her telling of her experience) only this one of her as first seen with her children living in a small village in Cornwall.

Ashley Judd plays herself. We hear Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice on the phone. Patricia Clarkson is the female supervisor, with Andre Braugher as the tough male “the buck stops here” impressive deep voice on the phone and presence in group discussions

Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson), Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) in She Said, directed by Maria Schrader.

Here is Angela Yeoh (as Rowena Chiu) many years later: it is this woman’s husband who stands as a threatening wall between her and Jodi Kantor

It’s not discreet — I agree we don’t have the scene where Harvey Weinstein actually bullied Laura Madden into agreeing to squalid sordid sexual activity with him, but as in Greek tragedy, a brilliant messenger conjures up the scene for us. I’d like to see the film again because I found myself remembering and reliving fragments of what happened to me so not taking everything in — as in most recent films, this one moves very quickly, with epitomizing dialogues (the lawyers for Weinstein, two of them importantly ex-lawyers, played by Zach Grenier and Peter Friedman) for many of the scenes. Not all. Not the descriptions of what these women endured. It was for me at times painful, especially when Ehle as Laura Madden confessed she had allowed Weinstein to rape her — she did not say no exactly; the anguish ever after was that she felt she had consented. She blamed herself. Much is brought forward to show why women are unwilling to go on record and what is won at the end is this team of women, and these stories eventually brought in over 80 women. There is now a law before Congress which would make illegal some of these silencing contracts employees sign before they are allowed on jobs.

As The New Yorker and New York Times reviewers state early on, the model for this film is All the King’s Men: with Twohey (who has a baby during the early phase) and Kantor (who has a family of children she must care for) we are seeking verifiable documents, women willing to be named on the record, with the difference that this time many of them have signed “settlement” agreements whereby they agreed never to tell anything and hand over all evidence upon being given a huge sum of money (the amount also kept secret). Deep Throat never was paid off, never was silenced by a court decision. There is also a bestselling book by Kantor and Towhey (She Said, available in several ways).


Megan Twohey


Jodi Kantor

So the emphasis is on the chase, and the turns are those of “thriller-mystery” formula: as in spy fiction, this kind of subgenre has come to be used for socially conscious TV serials (Sherwood) and films (Suffragette). Andrew Marr has talked in one show about how the spy thriller is a key political text for our time. The worst that can be said of it is what can be said of too many American-produced films: it’s suffused by a sentimentality at moments (particularly family scenes for our two heroines), is at moments unsubtle (again the family scenes seemingly exonerating our heroines from militant feminism), broad, with an insistence on upbeat feeling at the end.


Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison and Jonny Lee Miller as Anthony Field (“Keeper of Souls” — a sardonically ironic title)

One might compare the ending of many of the 1990s Prime Suspect episodes (Helen Mirren achieved broader fame here); I thought of episode 3 about a pedophile ring as I watched Samantha Morton and remembered a young Jonny Lee Miller in an unforgettable 10 minutes electrifying that season with his rendition of a young man remembering his years of being raped in prisons and “centers for boys”: at its end we are still not sure the key figure (played by Ciarhan Hinds) will actually be nailed down by evidence and sent to jail; all we know of the publication is that it will bring the horrible stories to the public eyes, and that is how She Said ends.

In Prime Suspect because another lower-level murderer-bully is also going to be put away for many years, we feel at least this ring of cruel ruthless males is going to be destroyed; granted Harvey Weinstein did get a sentence of 23 years. But there is nothing truly feel good about the ending, only relief that the intensely dangerous work done may be rewarded by justice (as people are exposed) and our heroine (Jane Tennison) getting promoted.

An interesting aspect about the art and plot-design of this movie is this movement back and forth between the time an assault/rape occurred and the time this investigation is taking place. In the last couple of months, I’ve seen no less than 4 serials where the film moves from past time at least 20 years ago to near now: Sherwood, Karen Pirie, Magpie Murders, and now She Said. In all of these two sets of actors do the roles, in some cases more successfully because the actors playing the younger parts really look like the older actors (the first film I saw of this type was Last Orders, with J. J. Feilds playing the Michael Caine role and Kelly Reilly the Helen Mirren role). Magpie Murders, as befits am Anthony Horowitz product adds a level of complexity and dwells also on using the same actors as characters in a novel occurring 40 years ago and characters in present time (but only some of them so our credulity is not asked too much of).

Unfortunately, in this movie some of the actors playing the younger selves do not look enough like the older actors but I can quite see that Jennifer Ehle does look much older and am glad no computer tricks were played upon her present face. And sometimes the younger actress, Lola Petticrew, is so immediately vivid in her terror, shock, and shame:


Lola Petticrew as Young Laura Madden in She Said

What more can I say? read the book, see the movie. I will be identified as an over-the-top feminist if I say I think some of these lukewarm and uncomfortable reviews derive from the reality that the patriarchy is still firmly in place (capitalism reinforced by male hegemony and male-derived values), that a female aesthetic such as is found in this thriller (the stories are cyclical with the woman repeating roles as mothers and wives they anticipated as girlfriends), with female imagery and females playing subordinate roles when it comes to some final decision as to what to print does not yield visceral consent from male critics and women primed to want male structures. Helen Mirren managed to become a central dominant presence in her series because the series had 5 years plus a 2 year reprise (1991-96, 2003, 2006) for us to see her rise to become boss, and she did play the role as (apart from her private life where we see her cry, have an abortion [very daring], lose partners stoically) as hard, unemotional, and as one of the “guys” who uses alliances with women (prostitutes to reporters) rather than becoming one of them which Mulligan and Kazan do.

But in this film our heroines are not aging mature women (like Patricia Clarkson is — about whose private life we know nothing) but presented as young women reporters themselves with a career to make — and courageously chancing it and their private lives. It is telling that this film’s norms are such that we believe they have good lives because they have supportive husbands.


Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor in She Said — chasing down people as far away as Cornwall


Carey Mulligan — filmed in Bryant Park, her career is studded (as gems) with important feminist films

Ellen