bloodygranuaile

For Christmas I got a beautiful set of hardback Jane Austen books. I intend to read them in publication order, and to that end first reread Sense and Sensibility. I had read this before but not for a very long time, I think in college or possibly even high school, and I know I’ve seen the movie but that was also many many years ago.

As her debut novel, this is not Austen at her peak, but it still hits all the classic Austen hallmarks–open talk about money, dryly witty but very mean descriptions of basically all the secondary characters, genteelly prospect-less heroines, problems that would be solved quicker if British people were ever allowed to talk about their feelings, general domestic shenanigans, and at least one person getting gravely ill or injured as a key plot point.

Our main heroine here is Elinor Dashwood, an extremely no-nonsense and scrupulously polite young woman with formidable emotional self-control, especially for a nineteen-year-old. She does most of the sense-having in the Dashwood household, as her mother and sisters are both much more emotionally expressive and inclined toward the romantic. The ne plus ultra of emotional sensitivity is the middle daughter, Marianne Dashwood, a seventeen-year-old who seems determined to embody every stereotype about over-emotional teenage girls that currently exists, although I don’t have much of an idea about how prevalent those stereotypes were in the 1810s or if it’s just Marianne.

The final romances in this one seem a little underdeveloped compared to her later works, but overall that’s OK, because the friendships–both real and the ones that are developed under polite duress and therefore sort of faked, like the one between Elinor and Lucy Steele–take center stage in a way I really enjoy. Colonel Brandon’s friendship with Elinor, which causes several people to think those two should get engaged, is a really lovely and rare example of a strong, selfless cross-sex friendship between two people who are both in love with other people and are able to become really good platonic friends without anything getting weird. The relationship between the girls and Mrs. Jennings, who is vulgar and frequently misreads situations but who does turn out to be a truly good-hearted and reliable person, is also great, and frequently very funny.

When Austen’s books were first published people were really scandalized about how economic they were, and while I think that is very funny because in a society where women weren’t allowed to have jobs, of course economics would be a critical consideration for marriage. But this upset people anyway. I love it, not just because it’s a more realistic way for the characters to talk–honestly, some of them are so blunt about it that I find myself thinking Austen may be laying it on a little thick–but it’s also very funny, because clearly some of these characters are telling themselves the same self-flattering but ludicrously un-self-aware things that the scandalized reviewers were.

Anyway, after many convoluted disappointments and scheming and general domestic shenanigans, Elinor and Marianne both end up happily and comfortably married, and then a movie was made about it with a truly excellent cast, which I should maybe rewatch.

Pride and Prejudice is next! I am much more familiar with that story, as it’s one of the only two Austen novels that I have read more than three times, so I don’t think I will be as surprised as I was in this one (I genuinely did find myself wondering what happened next, or how our heroines were going to get out of this one, because I couldn’t remember how the plot went), but it should be enjoyable all the same.

I have read Treasure Island before and have, in fact, owned a copy of Treasure Island before, but I made the amateurish error of loaning it to somebody back in the day and then never got it back, so on one of my fits of coveting Peebles Classic Library editions I bought another copy on Etsy. I had thought that my prior batch of Peebles Classic Library books included it but apparently I’d been mashing up in my head the three I did have–Robinson Crusoe, also about an island in the Caribbean; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, also about maritime adventures of dubious legality, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, also by Robert Louis Stevenson, so you can see how I got confused.

Anyway, apart from some deeply cringey period-typical casual racism, the book does hold up. The characters are memorable, the plot is exciting, the sense of Going On An Adventure is palpable. I ripped through the whole thing in one afternoon by the side of the lake and it was 100% what going to the lake is all about. Much of what goes on in this book has since become cliche, because this is the Foundational Text of fictional pirate adventures (it’s almost single-handedly responsible for the extremely ahistorical trope of burying treasure instead of immediately blowing it on booze and floozies), but at the time it was written it wasn’t cliche yet, and you really see why these things have gotten ripped off so many times: here, they really work. A lot of English children’s classics have essentially no value to the modern world except as a cautionary tale about how early you can start teaching children to be hideously racist; this one, on the other hand, has about a half-dozen unfortunate sentences scattered through it and the rest of it falls squarely into the “This is a classic for a reason” category. Reading it made me feel like an adventurous little kid again.

I have spent the last six months once again reading Dracula via email! I didn’t realize I didn’t have to sign up again to do another go-round of Dracula Daily; next year I think I will unsubscribe and follow along in my weird old annotated copy. (I am also being threatened with another round of The Beetle Weekly and that I think I simply could not survive.)

Anyway, Dracula continues to be a great story, about which most pop culture tropes and certainly nearly all film adaptations are a tragedy and a waste. Lucy and Jonathan especially are consistently done dirty. All the humor is stripped, a thing I think is more and more a problem every time I read the book and run across the corn speech, or Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat. Reading this book in small chunks with a bunch of insane Tumblrites is both a lot of fun and really ends up highlighting how a lot of mainstream and even academic Dracula discourse is at least as bonkers and wrong-headed as your average Tumblr-dwelling ball of mental illnesses.

Anyway it’s just. So good. The character work is so good. The horror is so good. It’s got a bunch of fucked-up Victorian English shit but unlike a lot of fucked-up Victorian English lit it’s got so much heart. This one is a classic for a reason.

So apparently when I am sick that is when I like to read nineteenth-century poetry, and I’m not quite sure what’s up with that, other than that the books are short and have the appropriate Being An Invalid vibes. But anyway, while I was waiting for Network Effect to be delivered I decided to read Essential Blake, a short volume of selections of William Blake’s poetry that I acquired in college.

The most important things to know about Blake are a) he was heavily involved in all sorts of mysticism/occultism/alchemy stuff and b) most of his contemporaries thought he was insane. I’ve had a soft spot for Blake ever since I read In the Forests of the Night as a preteen just beginning her vampire obsession, and I maintain that “The Tyger” is a fantastic poem. I’ve enjoyed the Blake I’ve read in various English classes throughout the years, as well. But there is something about sitting down and reading a whole volume of Blake, short as it is, to really drive home that, stuffy and terrible as most nineteenth-century Englishpersons were, probably the main reason Blake’s contemporaries thought he was insane is because the man appears to have been off his rocker. He also appears to have really, really hated Rubens, and the “miscellany” section at the end of the volume contains no less than three poems about how much Rubens sucks and how dumb everyone is for commissioning him. There’s also a whole section of epigrams titled “Proverbs of Hell” and most of them are just dumb, I’m sorry. So it turns out his most famous poems–mainly the ones in Songs of Innocence and Experience–are his best-known ones for a reason. Sometimes the poems veer into the political, which tends to be of mixed success artistically, and also Blake unfortunately manages to mash up his social conscience about child labor with some really unfortunate attempts at racial solidarity that do not do the thing he seems to have been trying to do, in part due to a chronically English-poet attachment to figurative language around the colors white and black. The results are, as the kids say, cringe! It becomes a relief to get back to something like “The Sick Rose,” which is actually good, and reminds us why we’re still reading this absolute weirdo 200+ years later.

At the end of 2020 I read Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, which I liked so much that the very next time I went to a bookstore I picked up a copy of her first and most famous novel, Tipping the Velvet, which then proceeded to sit on my shelf for a year and a half (this is actually not a particularly long time for something to sit on my TBR shelf, all things considered). I finally started reading it last week because I was in the mood for some theatrical gay shit, and this promised to be both very theatrical and very gay.

Tipping the Velvet follows the (mis)adventures of our heroine Nancy Astley, sometimes known as Nan King, an oyster girl from Whitstable in Kent, as she falls in love with a music-hall performer, a male impersonator named Kitty Butler. This results in her moving to London where she becomes Kitty’s secret girlfriend and performance partner in a drag double act; when they break up, she becomes a rentboy, then the kept plaything of a terrible rich middle-aged lesbian, then the housekeeper for a family of socialists. The book is much hornier than Fingersmith but otherwise has a similar vibe of late 19th-century English demimonde nonsense with lots of bonkers slang. Personally I found the last section of the book where she falls in with a bunch of socialist organizers–half of whom are apparently also “toms,” i.e. lesbians–to be the most fun to read. Some things haven’t changed all that much in the past 130 years, it seems, except that now we have Signal.

There isn’t really one overarching plot, it’s just Nan’s life story getting into and out of scrapes related to being extremely gay in late 19th century England. It’s an exciting enough series of scrapes; she should have died several times over, and is periodically saved by the skin of her teeth through run-ins with souls much more kindly than she is (Nan can be kind of a dick). Its real triumph is that it’s very immersive and beautifully (over)written. The edition I got has an afterword written by the author 20 years later, which gives some hilarious critiques–much funnier than any critiques I’d be able to make–which include some critiques of the overwriting, but in my opinion if you’re going for “19th century memoir,” longwinded is the name of the game. The effusive first-person narration also gives it big “sensation novel” vibes, which is probably deliberate given that it is, in short, a story about an innocent English country girl running away to the big bad city and getting all kinds of ~debauched~.

The overall verdict is that there seems to be a very specific Sarah Waters novel sort of vibe and I enjoy it very much when I am in the mood for that kind of vibe, which I will keep in mind next time I am in a similar mood.

Back in the before-times I was at a real live in-person convention and attended a kaffeeklatsch for Catherynne M. Valente, whereupon I bought a copy of The Glass Town Game. All I knew about it was that it was about the Brontes, and since I like the Brontes, that was about all I needed to be interested.

The Glass Town Game is a novel about a fictionalized version of the game that the Bronte children actually played together. It is, in many ways, a classic children’s portal fantasy, with strong The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland vibes and very similar illustrations. It’s got the same long winding sentences and twee capitalizations and charmingly pun-based humor, and lots of references to British history and literature. It’s nominally for younger readers but full of references to things that most likely only adults will get, so it was very charming to read as an adult, especially one with a degree in English literature. I can’t quite decide if I like it with the same part of me that likes the Muppets or the same part of me that likes Cold Comfort Farm, but it definitely goes in a very different direction from most of the 19th-century-Gothic-novel fanfiction I’ve seen, and I appreciate that.

Despite clocking in at over 500 pages (which is one of the reasons I picked it up now), it’s a very fast read, since it is written more or less at a middle-grade level. I’m not sure it was real deep–themes include the importance of storytelling, and that Branwell is a sexist little shit–but it was a very charming, Anglophilic way to sink a February weekend.

For 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.

I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.

The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.

No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.

I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.

The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.

I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.

To kick off my vow not to read any more goddamn politics books until after Readercon, I picked up a copy of Theodora Goss' European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman from the library. It's the sequel to The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, which I read when it was first published and loved. I had somehow completely missed it when the sequel was published, but having recently had it brought to my attention, it was difficult to forget about again.

Another museum weekend; another batch of books procured from museum gift shops. I have a problem, maybe.