Recently a friend who has had trouble with enforced isolation asked
What was your most memorable meal?" I thought I might as well type it up for BVC and see if anyone wanted to share theirs.
Doing lots of writing (and will probably serialize it at the turn of the month, and am also contemplating starting a Patreon for that), so more later.
Reading, too! For my face to face book group recently, we read Sir Walter Scott's
Waverley to middling success. I think two of us liked it, a couple more found it hard going, and several bombed out at various points during the first half.
I found it fascinating for a bunch of different reasons. First I enjoyed the story, even though the two main women in it were pretty much paper, as most heroines are in those tales, and not always written by men. Female writers could be just as determined to lift the novel out of the mire of trashiness like the immensely popular but male-het-id-vortex
The Monk (I think the author was nineteen when he wrote it?).
In
Waverley, the cast is mostly male, and what a variety of complex figures! Scott sets out to put an ordinary fellow, Edward Waverley, through the '45. Which was in living memory for many. Scott keeps referring to Sixty Years Since, meaning sixty years in the past. He talked to a bunch of vets, and the research shows. He also knows Scottish dialects, and that shows. This is where a lot of readers bog down. But I've been listening to Scottish folk music for a long time, so I could parse most of it fairly quickly, though there were plenty of words I stumbled over--but I could always get the gist.
I could see why this kicked off the modern historical novel form in earnest. Historical novels had been around. As 17-year-old Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey says at one point, she isn't sure why she finds historical fiction so tiresome when events were so big, but it had something to do with the dullness of the speeches put in the mouths of famous characters, and either no women or they were all good-for-nothing. Austen wrote the first draft of that in 1793, if I remember right.
I think the problem is the preachiness of those well-meant novels. It is true that Jane Porter wrote
The Scottish Chiefs early in the nineteenth century, and it remained immensely popular as a kids' book for the next century or so, but wow is it eighteenth century. In fact, it's pretty much what Catherine is decrying. It's the story of William Wallace, complete to virtuous speeches, for the Scottish hero is an absolute saint all the way through, including to his saintly martyrdom. It's pretty much a kids' book, with the heroes and villains black and white, and plenty of inspiring speeches at every turn.
In contrast, Scott's book breathes
tolerance all the way through. His characters are complex, some are comical, everyone has actual human motivations for what they do, and there is a lot of grace on both sides. The characters talk to each other, they don't stand and pontificate. He does whitewash Charlie Stuart a bit--but even the bonnie prince's foibles are hinted at pretty strongly, meanwhile Scott demonstrates Charles Edward Stuar's immense charisma--and some of the problems it brought him. (One thing you can say for him, he inspired some terrific folk songs!)
The narrative voice is wry, observant, witty. There are some great comic bits, and some vivid action. The main character is pretty much a stand-in for the author (in the journal he wrote later, he uses the same language for his early education as he does for the hero) but this hero has to grow up during the course of the novel. I can see why Scott rocketed to popularity right off the bat--and also how this novel began to lift The English Novel out of the general lack of respect with which it was regarded by society.
Another read, as it happens, at the same period but in utterly every respect totally different:
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.
These selections from the four million words of coded diary Lister wrote over the course of her life reinforce the notion that gay and lesbian life was very much a thing all along, but people dared not talk about it other than to their journal, or to a very trusted few.
Anne Lister had coded words within coded words. Such as 'kiss' meant sex or orgasm. None of the terms people used then got handed down because everyone had to live two lives, and the secret life was seldom detailed the way Lister does here.
She was born to the upper level of the gentry, though the family was running out of money. Through the diaries I gained the impression of a woman very proud of her class, and who thought of herself as a woman--but at the same time she thought nothing of getting out there with the men to do hard labor around the estate. And she ordered, and wore, masculine garments, such as a leather waistcoat, etc. She liked to dress male, and she also loved her femme finery.
She was also a staunch member of her church, and some entries indicate her inner struggle to reconcile to societal expectations, but she finally resolved that God made her that way, so it had to be okay, and anyway, most of the biblical references against same sex were aimed at men, not women. Because she was upfront to the aunt and uncle she lived with: she would never marry, and she "liked the ladies."
What's more, she had no trouble finding ladies who liked her, and who were willing to experiment, at least a little. She carried on an affair with a married woman--the woman having to marry because however else would she live? The choices were so few, and most of them pretty bleak if you did not have family money.
Anne Lister also struggles with crushing on women of a lower class. She is conservative, proud of her rank in life--a snob, in our terms, but at the same time she was gender-fluid in a way that many assume reserved for the 21st century. There are plenty of other Anne Listers through history, their voices just aren't heard for various reasons.
The rest of the diary is about her daily doings. She was not famous for anything, she created no great things, but she was clear-eyed about her own life, and how she wanted to live it. She also records how local men reacted to her, sometimes following her to offer themselves as a husband, and once, a man asked if she had a male member. So we get glimpses of how she was viewed in the community (she was known as "Gentleman Jack"), which again makes it clear that at the local level, gender fluidity was shrugged off in her particular community. This particular woman lived an otherwise ordinary life, suggesting that many others did as well. They just had to do it in secret.
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