This year I became involved in three extensive reading and research projects: the first on the Edwardian novelist Ada Leverson; the second on the the first black prima donna, the 18th-century contralto Vittoria Tesi; and the third on the 19th-century women-loving landowner Anne Lister. So my list of favorite books first read this year is weighted more heavily towards nonfiction than usual. The list is alphabetical by author within each category, and titles link to the full E&I post if there is one.
FICTION:
Ada Leverson: The Little Ottleys: Love's Shadow, Tenterhooks, Love at Second Sight (1908, 1912, 1916; Virago/Dial, 1983)
I feared that I would find Ada Leverson's novels of social and emotional dilemmas among the Edwardian privileged classes, who are depicted in all their insularity and entitlement, to be more annoying than amusing. But I needn't have worried: her portrait of the marital constraints that male vanity and obtuseness place on intelligent and deeply-feeling women is quietly devastating. Leverson, an intimate of Oscar Wilde, wrote with sharp wit and keen observation about characters who are torn between observing social proprieties and seizing their fleeting chances of happiness.
Ann Radcliffe: The Romance of the Forest (1791; Oxford World's Classics, 1999)
Honorable mention:
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794; Oxford World's Classics, 1980)
A young heroine is held against her will in a remote, decaying abbey, or mansion, or castle. She is at the mercy of a sinister older man with designs on her fortune, or person, or both. Subject to uncanny occurrences and apparitions, discovering secret documents and hidden doorways, she slowly unearths the fatal secrets hidden in the rooms, vaults, and labyrinthine passageways of her prison. One of Radcliffe's recurring devices is the heroine's ultimate recognition that the apparently supernatural phenomena she encounters all have rational explanations.
This template of the Gothic novel, so brilliantly parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, was not invented by Radcliffe; Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764) and Clara Reeve (The Old English Baron, 1777) had developed its elements first. But Radcliffe brought it to a kind of perfection in The Romance of the Forest.
While The Romance of the Forest made Radcliffe's reputation, it was her next novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), that won her a wide readership. As Austen's hero Henry Tilney says in Northanger Abbey, "'The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.'"
This past year I also read Udolpho, but I confess it took me considerably longer than two days. Udolpho, nearly twice as long as Romance, is padded with many more descriptions of sublime nature scenes. It also has some story lines that end anticlimactically—for example, when the heroine Emily finally manages to escape from the castle of Udolpho and her persecutor Montoni, but decides to give up the escape attempt and voluntarily return to captivity (one of several places in the book where it feels like Radcliffe had second thoughts). There is also the secret of the Black Veil, which is drawn out over the course of the novel to hold the reader in suspense, but whose revelation does not justify 400 pages of buildup. Ultimately I found Udolpho, despite its many effective scenes, to be a less-taut reworking of the elements of The Romance of the Forest.
Biggest disappointment:
Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground (1970; Everyman's Library, 1999)
I first read Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and its sequels about 20 years ago, and found their portrait of the psychopathic Tom Ripley to be weirdly compelling. Over the course of the five Ripley novels—The Talented Mr. Ripley was followed by Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991)—we see Ripley treating everyone he meets as either a means to an end (money, pleasure) or as a threat to be eliminated.
When I found the omnibus Everyman edition of the first three Ripley novels at a library sale, I thought it might be time to revisit the series. And at first I wasn't disappointed: The Talented Mr. Ripley largely held up. There are some unlikely phone conversations between friends of the missing Dickie Greenleaf and Ripley masquerading as Dickie; are Dickie's and Ripley's voices really so much alike? But Highsmith's brilliant technique is to make Ripley her protagonist, so that our readerly identification is with, and our anxiety centered on, a brutal and amoral murderer.
Ripley Underground does enrich Ripley's world: we see him at his obsessively tasteful French country house, Belle Ombre, and learn of his ornamental, rich, bisexual and (probably) promiscuous French wife, Heloise (she is said to have her own "adventures" among her circle of friends). In her absolute self-involvement she seems the perfect complement to Ripley (and suspicions of his criminality may play a role in her attraction to him).
The plot centers on the threatened exposure of art forgery ring that Ripley has masterminded. But implausibilities abound, including oddly incurious police, a rudimentary but magically effective disguise, a miraculous escape from under two tons of wet earth, and the transportation of a blackened, bloody chunk of human remains to prove a death—an act that would surely result in immediate arrest. It feels as though Highsmith simply could not be bothered to imagine more convincing action. In particular, the cremation scene seems to exist primarily to rub the reader's face in gruesomeness; further evidence that Ripley is immune from ordinary feelings of horror or revulsion is hardly needed at this point. A big step down from the first novel in the series.
NONFICTION
Devoney Looser: The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)
All of Jane Austen's novels issued during her lifetime were published anonymously, and in their initial appearance achieved only modest success. After her death in 1817 her novels went out of print until the 1830s. And yet today, as scholar Claire Harman wrote in her own book on the posthumous creation of Austen's reputation, Jane's Fame (Henry Holt, 2009), "her six completed novels are among the best-known, best-loved, most-read works in the English language" (p. xv). How did this happen?
Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen traces her reception and adaptation from the first republication of her novels in the 1830s to modern-day film and television dramatizations. Along the way Looser identifies the first female illustrator of Austen's novels, tracks down a photo of the all-female cast of an 1899 theatrical performance of Pride and Prejudice at Wellesley College, documents the admiration of Austen by the suffragists, and highlights the irony that the suffragists' fiercest opponents were the Austen-loving conservative men who called themselves Janeites. Highly entertaining and informative.
Anne Lister: I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, [1816–1824,], Helena Whitbread, ed. (Virago, 1988/2010 (as The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister)).
Anne Lister: No Priest But Love: Excerpts from the Diaries of Anne Lister, 1824–1826, Helena Whitbread, ed. (New York University Press, 1992).
In 1970 Dr. Phyllis Ramsden, a scholar who had been working for over a decade on the diaries of 19th-century Halifax landowner Anne Lister, published an article in the Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society covering the entire period of the diaries as then known, "Anne Lister's Journal (1817-1840)." The diaries included extensive sections written in code, which Ramsden deciphered and asserted were "excruciatingly tedious to the modern mind. . .and of no historical interest whatever."
Her assertion was contradicted by Helena Whitbread's (re-)discovery and first publication of decoded excerpts from Anne Lister's diaries. They revealed that Lister had engaged in numerous short-term sexual relationships and long-term affairs with many of her female friends and acquaintances, single and married, starting in boarding school and continuing until her untimely death at age 49. While juggling multiple lovers, Lister also managed her estate, engaged in business and politics, and travelled the world (or at least Europe, Russia and the Caucasus). She was a fascinating woman, and for those interested in her—and who wouldn't be?—Whitbread's books are the place to start, in terms both of scholarly precedence and of the chronology of Lister's life.
Emma Donoghue: Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (HarperCollins, 1993)
Emma Donoghue: Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (Cleis, 2010)
Anne Lister is often called "the first modern lesbian." But Emma Donoghue's Passions Between Women and Inseparable offer abundant evidence that in the 18th century (and earlier, and later) there were many women who adopted men's clothing and prerogatives and/or lived more-or-less openly with their female lovers.
In fact, Anne Lister was aware of and even visited one such couple: the Ladies of Llangollen, Sarah Ponsonby and the Lady Eleanor Butler. The Ladies were Irish cousins who, in 1778, had donned men's clothes and eloped together. Pursued, recaptured, and separated by their families, they were ultimately able to win the freedom to move to Wales and live together. By the 1820s they were celebrities, and Anne Lister viewed them as a model of the sort of life she had hoped to lead with her longtime married lover Mariana Lawton. Anne wrote of the Ladies' relationship her diary, "I cannot help thinking that surely it was not platonic. Heaven forgive me, but I look within myself & doubt. I. . .hesitate to pronounce such attachments uncemented by something more tender still than friendship." Donoghue's books are filled with examples of women (both real and fictional) whose attachments to other women were more tender than friendship, outlining a hidden history of lesbian lives and representations.
Celeste Bell and Zoë Howe: Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story (Omnibus Press, 2019)
In my 2011 memorial post on Poly Styrene I wrote, "As a teenager she was the lead singer and songwriter for one of the best punk bands ever, X-Ray Spex. She was a nonconformist even among the rebels and misfits of punk rock: she was short, wore braces, wasn't rail-thin, designed her own clothes (often in bright colors, an anomaly in punk), and was multi-racial. She was smart, wickedly funny (her lyrics are great), and absolutely electrifying onstage. Her voice was and will remain unforgettable."
Dayglo is a biographical narrative that draws on journal entries, interviews, and Celeste Bell's memories of growing up as the daughter of a brilliant but troubled artist who devoted the last three decades of her life to the Hare Krishna sect. Richly illustrated with photographs, posters, and lyric sheets, the bulk of the book focuses on the astonishing three years between X-Ray Spex's formation in early 1976 and its breakup in 1979, including the writing and recording of the single "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" and the album Germ-Free Adolescents (both utterly essential records). It also fills in details of the "missing" years between 1981 and her reunion with the band in the final years of her life. An excellent print companion to Bell and Howe's compelling documentary film Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché (2021), which will feature in my Favorites of 2022: Movies and television.
From the Kowalski brothers' D.0.A.: A Rite of Passage (1980), Poly Styrene leading X-Ray Spex in the rehearsal studio and in concert:
https://youtu.be/31AVd-zCe2Q?t=30
Honorable Mention:
Kelefa Sanneh: Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (Penguin, 2021)
Kelefa Sanneh's book appears at a time when genre may no longer define how popular music is made or heard, at least by people who came of age with YouTube (founded 2005), Spotify (founded 2006), and TikTok (founded 2016). The genres Sanneh chooses as his focus are rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and "pop," each of which receives a separate chapter. Of course, entire books can be (and have been) written about each of these genres, so Sanneh can only provide a broad overview of each. He is an excellent, thoughtful guide to a huge range of music: his taste is broad, and he has interesting things to say about each of the genres he covers.
However, I think his book inadvertently illustrates the truism that the popular music we listen to from the time we enter our teen years (when many of us first start developing our own tastes) until the time we're exiting young adulthood 15 or 20 years later (by which time our tastes have become more-or-less fixed) remains the most emotionally resonant for us. The two most energetic, engaged chapters of Major Labels focus on punk and rap, two genres that were achieving a second (or third) flowering in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Sanneh was a teenager.
In Major Labels developments of recent decades get much more attention than those of the more distant past. For some genres (pop, for example) he omits much of their history and focuses on songwriters, bands and styles that emerged after he started listening around 1985. Another odd omission for a history of popular music: Sanneh doesn't discuss in detail the exploitative economics of the music industry, which have come to the fore once again in recent years as it has become clear that streaming services pay to artists an infinitesimal fraction of the value of their music. It's a rich subject that Sanneh avoids almost entirely.
The sections of the book that deal with his own experiences and enthusiasms are highly engaging. I recommend Major Labels for its useful overviews of the past few decades' worth of developments in popular music, and especially for the experiences of a music obsessive who became a thoughtful critic for cultural arbiters such as the New York Times and the New Yorker at a time of fundamental change in the music industry. For in-depth analysis of specific musical artists and time periods, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
For additional comments and a comparison of the Billboard Top 10 charts for 2021 and 1981, please see my full-length post on Major Labels. If you're interested, the post contains my personal list of the Top 20 songs of 1981, with links; click them while they're still working.
Other Favorites of 2022:
