Reading Challenge: Short Story Challenge

At the beginning of the year I condemned myself for not reading as many short stories collections as I should have. Unfortunately, I haven't really rectified that problem this year so when I came across a reading challenge from the Library of Clean Reads blog specifically to encourage reading short story collections I knew I had to participate. More details about the challenge can be found here.

I'm going for the 'Tales Galore' category which is seven to nine books, mainly because I already have seven collections sitting on my bookshelves. Here is the list so far:

1. Night Shivers - Charlotte Riddell
2. Sensation Stories - Wilkie Collins
3. Wish I Was Here - Jackie Kay
4. The New York Stories - Edith Wharton
5. The Collected Stories - Katherine Mansfield
6. Daughters of Decadence - Various
7. Touchy Subjects - Emma Donoghue
8. ???
9. ???

I'll add the final two collections later and the list is subject to change. I'm looking forward to delving into these collections, several of which have been festering on the shelf for quite some time. Although Riddell and Collins have links to my PhD work, I promise that this is all fun reading.

Book Review: Women Who Did ed. Angelique Richardson

The full title of this collection is Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women 1890-1914. The individual stories by authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy and Kate Chopin examine the 'new woman', the turn of the century female who was beginning to demand and expect equality with men. The introduction by Angelique Richardson is well worth a read as it sets up the context nicely. There are also short biographical notes at the end of the book for the twenty-five authors included.

Most - if not all - of the stories in this collection can be described as exquisite. Even the satirical 'She-Notes' by Borgia Smudgiton (Owen Seaman) was charming because of, rather than instead of, its satire. Many of the stories have a didactic tone and the occasional lighter moments offset that quite nicely. Some of the stories I'd encountered in other collections but as a whole they point to one huge shift in the way women viewed themselves and were viewed by others.

I didn't dislike any one particular story but there were some I enjoyed more than others. 'The Yellow Drawing Room' by Mona Caird tells of a woman who has painted a room this disgusting shade of yellow but is nevertheless attractive to the male narrator who wants to marry her and change her. He courts her sister to make her jealous, something which the object of his affections could never forgive him for. A couple of the stories deal with race and the 'taint' of black blood. The most striking of these for me was 'Desiree's Baby' by Kate Chopin. A man rejects his wife on the basis of their baby obviously having a black ancestor, prompting her to walk into a river with her son. Thomas Hardy's 'An Imaginative Woman' was a story I was already familiar with but fitted into the collection perfectly. It tells of a aspiring female poet who develops an attachment to a man she has never met and the grief this causes both her and, later, her family. George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) supplies several stories, my favourite being 'Virgin Soil' where a young married woman condemns her mother for hiding from her the truth about married life.

My absolute favourites from the collection are two of the shortest. Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour' tells of the reaction of a woman when learning of her husband's death. It was so potent that it stayed with me long after I'd finished the two pages it covered. My second favourite was Katherine Mansfield's 'Leves Amores', primarily because of the lesbian content and Mansfield's intense use of imagery, despite the small space in which to do so. I'd read this before, in relation to Claire Tomalin's biography of Mansfield, but included in this collection it certainly had a new resonance for me.

The most famous piece included in this book is probably Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. I have to say, that story never bores me. To be honest, I think that sums up my view of this entire collection - none of the stories bored me and all I would want to read again.

The twenty-five authors included in this book are: Mona Caird, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Colmore, Mary Samuel Daniel, Ella D'Arcy, Rudolph Dircks, George Egerton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Meynell, George Moore, Clarence Rook, Saki, Olive Schreiner, Evelyn Sharp, Borgia Smudgiton, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Zitkala-Sa.

Book Review: Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life by Claire Tomalin

I've always been fascinated by Katherine Mansfield, despite never knowing much about her. I came across her when writing my undergraduate dissertation on poet, Charlotte Mew, and promptly bought Mansfield's The Collected Stories at Waterstones. It's an epic volume and I'm sorry to say I haven't yet had the discipline to get through it (for my musings on my short story reading habits take a look here). Nevertheless, after reading Tomalin's book I may be inspired to return to the collection.

Published in 1987, this book followed two other biographies of Mansfield by Jeffrey Meyers and Antony Alpers in 1978 and 1980 respectively. Throughout, when drawing different conclusions about certain events, Tomalin is just to their research. That's important because in some cases when biographers ignore each other the end result can feel artificial, as though the subject is being seen through a lens. Tomalin's account avoids that by her outright admissions on why she's differing from her predecessors. She also doesn't either sentimentalise Mansfield or turn her into a hate figure, both of which are possible with the material available.

Mansfield is probably most famous (outside her writing) for dying at the young age of 34 from tuberculosis. Tomalin attributes her other health problems to complications stemming from gonorrhoea and demonstrates how these debilitating illnesses affected her throughout her life. The image portrayed here is of a woman physically tortured but unwilling to submit to the pain. Tomalin also analyses many of her friends and acquaintances in-depth. The friendships with D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are shown in the light of her relationships with other people, particularly her second husband, John Middleton Murry.

Murry is not portrayed very sympathetically, though his actions both during her life and after it suggest the negative attitude is justified. Tomalin generally documents without judging, especially when Murry's relationships with other women are concerned. The same can be said when she describes Mansfield's complicated relationship history. However, the feeling that Murry hindered Mansfield shines through the biography, although her connection to him was unshakable until the end.

The person I found most intriguing in this book, almost more than Mansfield herself, was her lifelong friend, Ida Constance Baker, whom she met at school in London. Baker's devoted attitude towards Mansfield, despite being the victim of frequent quarrels with her, is both a joy to read and quite painful. On the one hand, Mansfield desperately needed the stability of friendship Baker offered; on the other, Baker was treated as something of a servant on occasion and certainly deserved more affection than Mansfield showed her at times. Baker was sent away from her friend by her father earlier in life due to their 'unwise attachment'.

Mansfield had relationships with both men and women in her youth, though she developed a dislike of lesbianism later in life. There are mentions of these attachments, including those towards Martha Grace and Edith Bendall. An interesting appendix to the book is a fragment, 'Leves Amores', which is homoerotic and very striking as an example of this 'other' aspect of Mansfield's nature.

There is far too much in this book to be condensed into a review. It's very readable, not exceptionally long but detailed enough to satisfy curiosity. The second appendix offered is an account of Mansfield's apparent plagiarism of Chekhov provided in the form of argumentative letters. This is a wonderfully clear biography that doesn't shirk from showing Mansfield's selfish, careless and occasionally malicious personality, but Tomalin shows, rather than tells, things to which some of her behaviour can be attributed.

As Tomalin sums up: 'At her least likeable, she adopted sentimental postures, and used them as a shield for treacherous malice. Yet how much there is that is admirable about her. She was always more interested in the external world than in her own suffering. She was a worker to her bones, and prized the effort required by craft. She fought, bravely, stubbornly, tenaciously, against two terrifying and incurable diseases that finally destroyed her. If she was never a saint, she was certainly a martyr, and a heroine in her recklessness, her dedication and her courage.'

I read this as part of the LGBT Book Challenge 2011 (see sidebar for details).

The book can be purchased here.

Reading Short Story Collections

As I was reading Catherine Chanter's enticing collection of short fiction (which I would again urge you to read!) I realised something about my reading habits.

I currently have bookmarks in four separate short story collections. Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women 1890-1914 and Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siecle both have page markers around about story one. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield dispensed with the bookmark for some reason unknown to me, although I think I was about half way through the mammoth 779 pages and The New York Stories of Edith Wharton has a nice solid receipt marking page 230 out of 459. Add to this the fact that I'm reading three separate collections for my PhD and it seems I'm drowning in short story collections.

I think it stems from the fact that I only allocate myself an hour of pleasure reading per day. Eleven until midnight is the only time I really switch off and allow myself to do something fun. Not that PhD research and writing my socks off isn't fun, it's just it's... work. So during my hour I like to bury myself in a story and, unfortunately, short stories don't drag me back for more. If I finish one tonight then where's the incentive for me to return to the collection tomorrow? More to the point, why should I pull myself away from whatever I may be doing at eleven o'clock when I'm not anxious to know if Person A betrays Person B? There's a reason serialised fiction in periodicals was intensely popular in the nineteenth century. (Note PhD encroaching on my blog posts now!)

Do I have a solution? Well, I think short stories are the most delicate and intriguing form known to writers. Writing them is so difficult that I want to marvel at the ingenuity of Catherine Chanter or the expressive detail of Edith Wharton or the quiet contemplation of Katherine Mansfield. I think that somewhere in my schedule I need to allocate 'short story reading time' and enjoy one collection at a time.

Suggestions on where I can fit that into my full schedule happily received on a postcard.