A round-up of some of the things I’ve been writing, reading and doing this month.
Writing
I’ve decided to take a bit of a break from submitting poetry and flash fiction, this year has been high on rejections and I’ve realised that I’m putting unnecessary pressure on myself, so it’s time to go back to writing without expectation and for the joy of it.
This month I added my poem ‘Biography of a wood’ to the website and shared it on social media. I was pleasantly surprised by the positive comments – particularly as it’s a poem that had be rejected several times this year. I loved writing it and was pleased with the result, so it was a real bonus to see readers enjoy it.
I haven’t written much longer form non-fiction lately despite loving the format, so this is something I’m hoping to rectify. I’m currently working on a piece that is a sort of follow up to an essay I wrote on children’s author Arthur Ransome a few years ago.
Work wise I’ve started a new series exploring Bedfordshire’s places, landscapes and history. It’s structured as an A-Z, beginning with ‘A is for… abbey’. The article looks at four Bedfordshire Abbeys with very different histories – Elstow, where the present parish church is partially built from the remains of the Abbey; Woburn where the land was given to the Dukes of Bedford and a new country seat was built; Warden, which is now home to a community vineyard; and Turvey which only became home to a community of nuns in the 1980s.
Reading
I’ve been rereading ‘Next to nature. A lifetime in the English countryside’ which is a collection of Ronald Blythe’s columns for the ‘Church Times’. I binge read it on holiday when it first came out but wanted to return for a slow reread to savour Blythe’s writing. He packs so much into each short piece – nature, history, the liturgical year, faith, books, people – that it always leaves me wondering how he does it! The problem is that each is so good that I end up wanting another, and then another… The book is divided into monthly sections, the themes inevitably overlap so that, for example, you see Epiphany several ways in January. Each month is perceptively introduced by writers like Rowan Williams, Alexandra Harris and Robert Macfarlane.
Much of the joy of reading Blythe lies in following the associative logic that draws together apparently disparate observations.
Introduction to February – Alexandra Harris
I picked up Claire Harman’s biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner whilst browsing in my local second hand bookshop. I didn’t really know much about Townsend Warner beyond the fact her name comes up in literary biographies of the period, so this was fascinating. I will definitely be adding some of her novels to my wish list – which is the sign of a good biography to my mind. Sylvia was born in 1893 and was a novelist, poet and short story writer. She also wrote a biography of TH White, translated Proust and was one of the editors of ‘Tudor Church Music’ published in several volumes by OUP in the 1920s. Harman is good on the contextual background – 1920s London, rural Dorset and the relationship between Sylvia and her partner Valentine Ackroyd. Together they volunteered with the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War and were active in the Communist Party. The book is part love story and part literary landscape, the final section (1969-1978) moves very quickly following Valentine’s death and feels slightly rushed given the earlier depth, but that’s a minor quibble in what is an excellent introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner and her work.
Harriet Baker’s ‘Rural Hours. The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann’ uses a tighter time frame to zoom in on the lives of her three chosen writers. She looks at periods of around two years where each was based in a rural setting to explore the biographical and literary importance of their retreats. For Virginia Woolf, this was Sussex in 1917; for Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dorset in 1930; and for Rosamond Lehmann, Berkshire in 1942. The book therefore spans the two World Wars plus the Spanish Civil War, and there is a sense of encroaching conflict throughout. In Baker’s thesis each ‘threshold moment’ begins with a disruption, illness, relationship breakdown, and is followed by a period of reflection and recuperation. That these periods were crucial to their development as writers sometimes feels like a bit of a strain but if you take the view that you can’t separate the women and the writing then Baker’s contention becomes much more sympathetic. She considers diaries, short stories, lists, recipes, poems, essays and letters to delve into the ways that the gaze narrowed and time was given to observation and reflection. The analysis of Virginia Woolf’s diary felt particularly convincing, giving a quiet rhythm to her life after illness, the authorial ‘I’ disappearing in favour of concise descriptions of nature, village life, domestic events and farming. Of the three Sylvia Townsend Warner clearly prefers rural life, choosing it permanently over London, while for Rosamond Lehmann it’s a bolthole that provides safety but not ultimately security. ‘Rural Hours’ is very readable and enjoyable, it’s beautifully written and provides an illuminating look at the small and the rural, as such it’s a wonderful antidote to the usual London centric commentary on literary life.
(As an aside, I’d be really interested to read a similar volume with a more northern focus – with authors based in say Manchester or Leeds escaping to the countryside.)
I tried to read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf as if I was hearing it as an undergraduate at Girton in the 1920s, which I think helped give it a sense of immediacy and urgency that I might otherwise not have appreciated as clearly. I liked the weaving together of different ways of approaching the topic of women and fiction, and the clear sense of Woolf developing her thinking. As a history graduate I found her thoughts on how women don’t appear in history (outside of queens and nobility) useful in that we have at least made progress on that front, and the lives of women pre 1700 are being uncovered and made into engaging books (e.g ‘Femina’ by Janina Ramirez, ‘Medieval Women’ by Henrietta Leyser to pull two titles from my bookshelf). The call to women to write in all genres of non-fiction as well as fiction, alongside an understanding of how doing so would, at the same time, enrich fiction writing, was something that particularly caught my attention as still feeling like a fresh insight.
My reading resolution for this year was to read more novels that I’d normally dismiss as not my sort of thing. ‘The Music Shop’ by Rachel Joyce was pressed into my hand at the church fete bookstall by an enthusiastic salesperson so I thought I’d give it a try. I’m glad I did. It’s a rather sweet story about the healing power of music, missed chances and tentative relationships. I liked the central characters, the light touch late 1980s setting and the meditations on the nature of community.
Out and about
Breaking a journey north at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, was a chance to stretch the legs and have a bite to eat. Swallows were skitting across the parkland which is home to rare breed sheep and cattle as well as red and fallow deer. A walk through the beautiful wildflower meadow in front of the house takes you to the compact walled garden. The sweet peas and roses were looking (and smelling) wonderful, soaking up the heat from walls. My eye was caught by two displays. The first was a selection of pelargoniums in the auricula theatre.
The theatre is a nineteenth century survival and would have originally been decorated with blinds to create a separate space in the flower garden. These theatres were designed to show off prize specimens in tiers, keeping the blooms in the shade so that they would flower for as long as possible.
In the Gardener’s Bothy tools, cloches, seed drawers and pots give a sense of a working kitchen garden. Along the windowsill cut flowers from the garden were displayed in old glass bottles. The light through the windows illuminated the dim interior and made the flowers and bottles glow, the effect something like a painting of a Dutch interior.
Shelly Dennison 