Biographies written in the nineteenth century tended to be hagiographic or, at least, selective in what they told the reader. Think of Elizabeth Gaskell on her friend Charlotte Bronte, for example, or the way William Rossetti frustrated later biographers by destroying his sister, Christina’s letters and papers after her death in 1894.

Then, a generation or two later along came Lytton Strachey and he was having none of it. There’d been a war which changed attitudes for ever and his 1918 mould-breaking Eminent Victorians looked at the lives of four famous, widely idolised “heroes” of the century – Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold and General Gordon – and debunked the mythology, thereby, probably, changing the nature of biography for ever.

Strachey came from an accomplished family. His brother James is still read widely as the translator of Sigmund Freud and his sister, Dorothy Bussy was a novelist and artist.  His forebears achieved military distinction. Lytton was a founder member of the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant et al) who busily smashed every convention they could in the first half of the 20^th century. As Dorothy Parker quipped – they lived in squares, loved in triangles and painted in circles. Michael Holroyd’s 1967 biography (revised in 1994) of Strachey – who died in 1932 – is a masterly account of his life if you want the colourful details.

Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington (with permission from National Portrait Gallery)

Of course Strachey’s four Victorians were inarguably high achievers in four different fields but each of them also had flaws – lots of them –  and his are well researched, warts-and-all accounts. Thus we see Machiavellian Manning, about to convert – Shock! Horror! – to Catholicism –  picking apart the language of the 39 Articles by playing absurd logistical games which would have put WS Gilbert to shame as he schemes his way, literally, to eminence.  And if Mrs Shuttleworth, wife of the Bishop of Chichester, wasn’t the model for Trollope’s Mrs Proudie then she certainly could/should have been.

How exhausting Florence Nightingale must have been to know – issuing orders, writing reports and dogmatically refusing to listen to anyone else for the 54 years she lived on after the Crimean War. She would, for instance, have nothing to do with the germ science of Pasteur and Lister. For her, hospital hygiene began and ended with open windows and clean sheets.  Dr Arnold, meanwhile, is credited with reforming “public” school education during his tenure at Rugby School – part of which was the invention of the prefectorial system which formally allowed children to beat and bully other children, without actually doing much to improve the traditional, narrow curriculum.

As for poor General Gordon, he really was, according to Strachey, abandoned by the British government to his gory fate at beseiged Khartoum. Months of shilly-shallying meant that the rescue force arrived too late. But he was in many ways his own worst enemy. A profoundly blinkered man, he believed that Britain should stand fast in the Sudan and therefore he disobeyed orders. Gordon was sent there, a most unsuitable man for the job, to hand the area over and retreat. Instead he insisted on doing his own thing. Reading Strachey’s account makes you want to nip in with a helicopter and forcibly remove this well meaning but fatally stubborn bloke to save him from himself before it’s too late.

Strachey’s tone is often sardonic, never reverent and always compelling.  He is frequently laugh-aloud funny too.  Given that Eminent Victorians is a famous “historic” text, written 123 years ago it remains remarkably and entertainingly accessible. If you’ve never read it or haven’t looked at it lately then it’s well worth a revisit. As for me, I’ve dipped into it in the past but don’t recall ever before reading it right through. I’m jolly glad I have now – not least because it has, for me, finally laid to rest a terrible 1966 film, Khartoum, in which Charlton Heston played Gordon, Ralph Richardson Gladstone and Laurence Olivier blacked up as the Mahdi. Oh dear.  Enough said. Lytton Strachey is much better.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Dangerous Women by Hope Adams

Last summer I caught up with two former teaching colleagues over a congenial lunch when we were being encouraged to “Eat out to help out” (which seems a hazy memory now). Inevitably it wasn’t long before conversation turned to books as it always did over staff room coffee when we were all members of the same English department. “The Thornbirds is a marvellous book” declared D simply and without irony.

“The Thornbirds!” I spluttered in disbelief, shocked into rudeness. “But it was pulp tripe!” Intrigued by this conversation, later that day, I sat at my PC, discovered that Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel is still in print and downloaded it very cheaply. Then I reread it. And since I started from a basis of expecting to think it was twaddle, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it is and shall apologise to D next time I see her.

Of course I read it – along with tens of millions of others worldwide – when it was first published and seem to remember quite enjoying it as a colourful example of romantic fiction. But then that was, I think, overlaid  in my memory by a TV adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain in 1983 which really was an utterly dire travesty. My kids dubbed it “The Yawn Birds” – with good reason. No doubt McCullough, who died in 2015, made a lot of money out of it but she can’t surely really have felt it served her novel truthfully?

Anyway, back to the real deal – the novel and how it reads nearly 40 years later. The large Catholic Cleary family are living in plausibly evoked poverty in rural New Zealand when a rich but manipulative aunt in Australia sends for them because she wants her brother to manage her estate, Drogheda, in a remote north western corner of New South Wales.  And that’s when Meggie, still a child, first meets Ralph de Bricassart, the local priest. He escorts them to Drogheda and becomes a close friend. As Meggie grows up, a complicated mutual attraction develops. To the 2021 reader the most worrying element is probably that Ralph could be said to be grooming her. Actually I think the author’s intention is more to explore the horrifying challenge of the celibacy required in the priesthood – either way there’s a lot of will-they-or-won’t-they tension in a novel which starts in 1915 and ends in 1969 and it’s not often predictable. In some ways it’s the old “forbidden love” story like Romeo and Juliet – one of the world’s seven great fictional options.

There are various things I like about The Thornbirds now. The characterisation is strong. Meggie comes from a whole family of brothers each of them with a distinct and convincing personality – especially poor, troubled Frank. Meggie’s mother Fee is a tight-lipped matriarch and I love the way McCullough presents the senior priests in Rome with whom Ralph eventually works. It’s full of rounded, interesting minor characters with stories of their own too – and all quite tightly plotted.

The estate – Drogheda – is effectively, another character which centres the novel and allows McCullough to paint a very graphic picture of outback New South Wales between the wars with its heat, horses, bush fires and all the rest of it – while the main house is incongruously, vulgarly European.

So set aside your snobby prejudices (if like me, you are silly enough to be harbouring any) and reread it. Or, if you’ve never read it, then trust me, you have a treat in store in The Thornbirds.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

When the teenaged me first read Tess of the D’Urbervilles she emerged from it fizzing with fury. She wanted to yank hypocritical, cruel Angel Clare from the pages of fiction and sock him in his pretentious face. For that matter she’d have told dim, misguided Mrs Durbeyfield a thing or two as well. And as for Tess’s feckless father well, he wouldn’t have got off lightly either. Even longsuffering, pretty Tess would have come in for a shaking. Does she really have to be quite so passive and accepting – until she finally flips that is?

Many more mature readings since have made me realise that I was, of course, reacting in exactly the way Hardy wanted me to. His 1891 novel was a deliberate challenge to the old Victorian morality which conventionally demanded purity of women in thought, word and deed but which allowed men to do what they liked and to snatch their pleasures where they fancied. Double standards and all that. Of course, in practice, it was usually more nuanced than that but I’ve summarised the prevailing attitude pretty accurately, I think.

There’s no doubt it’s Tess, his heroine, that Hardy wants us to sympathise with – fornicator, adultress and murderer that she technically is. There can be few people in fiction “more sinned against than sinning” apart from King Lear, maybe.  Five years later Hardy went even further with Jude the Obscure (1896) which suggests that it’s possible for an unmarried couple to live together happily and unpunished. The public reaction to such condoned “immorality” was such that he vowed to write no more novels. Thereafter (and he lived until 1928) he wrote only poetry thus becoming a nineteenth century novelist but a twentieth century poet and that’s probably unique.

Back to Tess. In short, for anyone who hasn’t read it or has forgotten the plot: Tess, a farm worker’s daughter, is seduced by  sophisticated Alec Stoke-Durberville who’s a proper old fashioned cad with phallic cigar and a habit of pressing strawberries into Tess’s mouth. She eventually cuts loose and goes home where the inevitable consequence follows. When the baby dies, the local clergyman refuses to bury him in consecrated ground, thereby becoming another character I took strong exception to when I was 15. She takes a job on a dairy farm where she meets a clergyman’s son, Angel Clare, a sort of drop-out, who’s training to farm rather than heading to university. Eventually, after their marriage she confesses the truth about her past and, although he has told her of a regretted weekend of debauchery of his own, he is horrified by her story and insists on separation which may or may not be permanent. Thereafter Tess’s situation goes from bad to worse and Alec keeps appearing. Utterly desperate now that her mother and siblings are homeless in the end she succumbs and goes to live with Alec at a hotel in Sandbourne where the contrite (sort of) Angel traces her. And that’s what pushes her over the edge so that she signs her own death warrant.

Well, this may not be the conventional view but it struck me afresh yet again when I reread Tess recently, that I have a lot more time for Alec than for Angel. Again and again he offers to support her struggling family – yes, of course, that’s only because he wants Tess back but Angel never does anything to help them in any way. Alec takes dastardly advantage of Tess at the beginning but he doesn’t treat her with the cruelty that Angel does. And I’ve never read the novel without being really annoyed that at the end Angel saunters off, scot-free with Tess’s younger sister.

Read it again and see what you think. Don’t be distracted by Roman Polanski’s 1979 film. The plot is reasonably true to the novel in an abridged way but the setting grates terribly. Polanski, was (and is) persona non grata in Britain, following his flight from the US criminal justice system two years earlier, so the film had to be made in France. It doesn’t look remotely like Dorset and the mock up of Stone Henge is a travesty.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough

There was a lot of John Wyndham around  at home when I was a child and teenager but I didn’t try it because I thought it might disturb me too much. A sensitive soul, I couldn’t even cope with Doctor Who and I was 16 when it launched. Fast forward 15 years or so and I was in a new teaching job where there was a set of The Midwich Cuckoos in the stock cupboard. “Bite the bullet, Susan,” I told myself “You’re grown up now.” Well of course, I was hooked and went on to read everything Wyndham had written before his death in 1969.

Successive lockdowns have, of course, prompted me to a lot of rereading. Which Wyndham should I return to initially? In the end I plumped for The Chrysalids (1955) and I’m glad I did. Not only is the concept fascinating – and topical in the 21^st century in a way I doubt Wyndhan foresaw fully – but it’s an extraordinarily compelling page turner.

Ten years after Heroshima, Wyndham is imagining a world almost destroyed by a nuclear war.  We’re an unspecified number of centuries into the future. Pockets of people have somehow survived to breed on and the story is set in an enclosed community in Labrador. Strict, merciless religion rules – the Bible has miraculously survived from the world of the “old people”. Other rules have emerged too. No deviation – in plant, animal or human being – from the “perfect image of God” is allowed to survive. This means that a baby born with an extra toe, unusually long arms or, crucially, the ability to telepathise is sterilised and cast out into the wild fringes. “Deviant crops” are burned and farm animals ritually slaughtered as “blasphemies”. There is no space whatever for evolution, development, change, tolerance or kindness. And of course there are an unusual number of “mutants” because the world is still affected by radiation and nuclear fall out.

David,  the narrator, and a small group of others like him can communicate via “thought pictures” an ability they keep secret, obviously. Then life-threatening things happen and they have to take action, discovering as they do so that the world is bigger than they thought. I’m not giving away much because apart from the intriguing ideas the book is discussing, it’s a really exciting story – with masses of suspense –  and I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t read it.

Today we worry a great deal about including people who are in any way different and huge efforts are made to accommodate and welcome them in all fields of life – at least in the Western world. Diversity is, today, a very positive thing. And that’s what stuck me forcibly on rereading The Chrysalids. It is a horrendous and frightening idea ruthlessly to ban people from society because of their differences. Of course that’s partly what Wyndham meant in 1955 too but, although the journey isn’t yet over, we’ve come a long since then – thank goodness.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

I had never heard of Lucia Berlin or her posthumous collection of 43 short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women until it was mentioned, a few weeks ago, by someone in my U3A Zoom gardening group (I am not making this up). My gardening friend was about to read it for the book club she belongs to and was joking with the rest of us about the title. I was intrigued and bought it – and I have now learned a great deal about Lucia Berlin, mostly from her stories, many of which are transparently autobiographical, but also from a bit of supplementary research.

She was an American short story writer who died in 2004 and that’s interesting in itself. Some authors (Katherine Mansfield, Saki) make the short story their own single means of expression. Others (Roald Dahl, Daphne du Maurier) wrote some powerfully memorable short stories but also lots of good novels.  Berlin, it seems, was firmly in the former camp. And anyone who can come up with “Our leg chains made the sound of oriental instruments and the prisoners in orange jumpsuits swayed together like Tibetan monks”  gets my vote.

Her colourful, often troubled, life ranged across New Mexico, Texas, California and Mexico – among other places. She married three times and had four sons. She suffered from scoliosis  – like Richard III and Princess Eugenie. In Berlin’s case there was a double bend in her spine which meant wearing a painful back brace. It also led to a punctured lung so that for many years towards the end of her life she was never seen other than attached to an oxygen cylinder. She came from a family of alcoholics and it took her decades to overcome her own alcoholism. (I had to look up “Jim Beam” which she frequently refers to in the stories: Kentucky bourbon whisky, like Jack Daniels, apparently.) Along the way, between 1971 and 1994, Lucia Berlin worked variously as a high school teacher, a switchboard operator, a hospital ward clerk, a physician’s assistant – and, briefly, as a cleaning woman.

The title story is a witty, rueful account, written in the first person. from the point of view of a newly widowed cleaner in financial need, about working in other people’s houses bearing in mind that  your employer has no idea what you’re thinking.”Try to work for Jews or black. You get lunch” she says sardonically. Her accounts of the bus journeys between jobs are colourful and sad – and it’s all part of raw anguished grieving for her husband.

The stories range across nursing a dearly loved sister through terminal cancer, childhood with an appalling dentist grandfather, chatting in launderettes, going to huge lengths to get alcohol and consorting with “alkies” on the street. At other times she’s describing humane work with very sick people and  cheerfully managing awkward doctors. She has a habit of alternating narrators in stories, which once you’ve tuned into it,  makes for perceptive characterisation.

The story which moved me most was “Mijoto” about an abused young Hispanic girl with almost no English, alone, misunderstood, pregnant and terrified. The narrative switches between her and a medical professional (probably Berlin herself or closely modelled on her) and it’s clear that the baby is in great danger. The writing is so vivid that you ache to reach into the pages and take both Amelia and her sick, crying baby to a place of safety.

Berlin published several books of short stories in her lifetime which achieved only modest success. This volume published in 2015, with a foreword by Lydia Davies and introduction by Berlin’s friend Stephen Emerson, is a collection drawn from her earlier books. And it seems to have taken off – rave reviews in newspapers such as the New York Times, and on this side of the Atlantic The Guardian have led to high sales and many personal recommendations. Including this one.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

I am a sucker for good detective fiction. It ticks every box for me when I want something not too demanding but interesting, well written and with something new, topical, witty or thoughtful to say – preferably in good long series so that I can gobble them up as eagerly as I once did the Famous Five.  I’m a great fan, therefore, of Elly Griffiths  (Ruth Galloway series), Peter May (Roy Grace) and Val McDermid (Karen Pirie) among many others.

Black River is the third in a series. And it might be best to read the preceding titles –  Dark Pines and Red Snow – first although they each work perfectly well as standalones. Will Dean, the author, is a Brit who lives in Sweden the extreme north of which – where he author lives in the heart of an elk forest –  provides the setting for these novels. I’ve never been there but I find his atmospheric account of the freezing, unforgiving ever-dark winter forest totally convincing. In Black River it’s midsummer – a national holiday amidst much celebration in Sweden, apparently. The light is as relentless as the dark six months earlier and it can be sinister.

Dean’s protagonist is a journalist named Tuva Moodyson. At the opening of Black River she has recently left the local paper in the fictional northern town of Gavrik for a bigger job in  Malmo. Then she hears that her friend Tammy is missing and immediately drives hundreds of kilometres north to try to find her. Tammy was born to  Thai parents but she is Swedish as Tuva repeatedly reminds people who tend to racist thoughts.

Black River is studded with strange people and events in, or near, this small, insular town where everyone knows everyone else except that they don’t really. There is a woman who breeds snakes, both constrictors and venomous ones. She produces snakeskins, does taxidermy and eats the by-products. But does that make her a kidnapper or murderer? Then there are the sisters who live in the forest where their business is carving deeply disturbing trolls and the taxi driver who once tried to rape Tuva – and who is a single parent raising a very troubled little boy. The whole town bristles with suspicion, meance and, apparently, untrustworthy people, although Tuva has a wonderfully warm relationship with her former boss and with the local frontline police officer. Then there’s Noora, another police officer to whom Tuva is drawn in a different way and Dean handles this with understated delicacy.

The other thing I really like about Black River and its prequels is that Tuva is deaf and uses hearing aids. Dean presents this with such sensitivity and understanding – I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have first hand experience of it. She is never defined by her deafness she just gets on, undaunted with what she has to do but as a first person narrator she quite often comments casually to the reader that a particular conversation or situation was difficult and explains why. It’s pretty affirmative writing.

Tuva is also gloriously, determinedly passionate, Not everything she does is sensible.  But Tammy simply must be found, dead or alive – along with another young woman who has disappeared at about the same time. Sometimes Tuva struggles to make people understand that Tammy matters as much as the other girl. Then there’s news from a search in the forest … no spoilers.

You really can’t travel at present but if you fancy an armchair trip to Sweden, Will Dean is the person to take you.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin