(A poor substitute for a) Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen 2024

Well, obviously this blog hasn't exactly become a hive of activity since my "return" last month. The rather sweltering Lisbon summer should have made staying indoors and furiously blogging a natural thing to do, but instead on many days it seems to leave me incapable of anything but draping myself across the furniture and reading. (In all fairness, the heat here is at least dry, so it could be much worse, there are absolutely gorgeous days interspersed with the hottest ones, and the payoff of it all is that by evening it's generally a delight to sit outside—as opposed to San Francisco where one would very often freeze one's tits off if you tried to dine al fresco.)

But now, casting my mind back to our distant, chilly San Francisco days, and reviewing my list of books read, it seems I did do quite a lot of good reading last year, albeit less focused than in previous years. When the anticipation of the move was too much for serious reading, I devoured some quite good mysteries. In addition to those in the list, BRUCE GRAEME's Seven Clues in Search of a Crime (1941), the first book of seven in his series of bibliomysteries about bookseller Theodore Terhune, was a delight, and I've since read a couple more in the series. I continued my on-again/off-again obsession with EDITH CAROLINE RIVETT, better known as E. C. R. LORAC and/or CAROL CARNAC. My days of access to San Francisco's interlibrary loan treasures are over, but I made hay while the sun shone and still have a considerable number of scanned books from those glory days, including a number of Rivett's books. The highlights for last year would include Murder in Chelsea (1934, Lorac) and The Striped Suitcase (1946, Carnac). (Terribly excited to note that later this year Lorac's Still Waters is being reprinted by the British Library, set in the same locales as my 2023 fave, The Theft of the Iron Dogs.) I also continued my enjoyment of some of CLIFFORD WITTING's leisurely, character-focused village mysteries—some find them dull, some delightful, but his debut, Murder in Blue (1937), which I enjoyed very much last year, might be a good test case to see where you fall along that spectrum. And I had had KATHLEEN HEWITT's wartime mystery Plenty Under the Counter (1943) on my shelf for ages, and when I finally got round to it, I ate it up like candy—funny, well-paced, with plenty of wartime interest right on top of the counter. Definitely recommended.

My long-overdue reading of some "classics" is in full swing now, but was just getting started last year. I did quite enjoy IVAN TURGENEV's A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), which I've meant to read for a good three decades or so because Hemingway was always mentioning it. I've chilled to most of Hemingway now, and Turgenev may have limited appeal for some readers for some of the same reasons, but I loved the slices of life of rural 19th century Russia.

I spent a lot of time in 2024, in anticipation of our move, reading history and travel with a European slant. JUDITH HERRIN's Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (2020) stimulated my curious but ongoing passion for old churches and made a Northern Italy trip a must as soon as we can make it happen. CORRADO AUGIAS's The Secrets of Rome (2005), a random find at the library sidewalk book sale, proved a riveting look at Rome at various times in its history, and CHRISTOPHER WOODWARD's In Ruins (2001), though not focused on Rome alone, provided excellent fodder for a future Southern Italy trip… (Most fascinating tidbit: when botanists visited Rome in the 17th and 18th centuries, they discovered species of plant life in the overgrown Colosseum that existed nowhere else outside of Africa or the Middle East; the possible explanation? That the seeds had arrived in the digestive tracts of wild animals imported to Rome to be killed in ancient spectacles. Mind blown.) I'm usually well behind the times when it comes to new books, but something inspired me to read SEBASTIAN SMEE's Paris in Ruins (2024) hot off the presses, and the tale of the Impressionists involved in and influenced by revolutionary unrest in 19th century France was an engrossing read and enriched my enjoyment of those artists. And finally, learning more about the art we hope to see on our travels led me to JONATHON JONES's Earthly Delights (2023), a lovely history of Renaissance art. The interest it aroused in art of all kinds has since become a bit of an obsession (I haven't made an art database yet, but I have made a spreadsheet…).

For the long-overdue Dozen itself, I tried to select the more "on topic" titles that I particularly enjoyed last year. 

12) JOSEPHINE BELL, Total War at Haverington (1947)

This would have been a perfect novel to blog about when it was fresh in my mind, but … woulda coulda shoulda. This is the first of Bell's non-mysteries I've read and I enjoyed it tremendously. Tracing the fictional mid-sized town of Haverington through the war, beginning to end, it offers a fascinating glimpse, á la Winifred Holtby's South Riding, of the practical logistics of wartime—accommodation of refugees, rationing, bombs, and all. Its flaw for me, probably introduced by a publisher who felt the logistics themselves wouldn't sell books, is a melodramatic romance element that's rather drab, but it's nevertheless a fascinating read.

11) E. H. CLEMENTS, Bright Intervals (1940)

I actually blogged about this one! A sort of mystery novel, complete with detective but missing a murder—just a delightful, quirky family's adventures on holiday in Devon. More mystery writers should take a break and show us their detectives' holidays. Vera on holiday, anyone? Sherlock Holmes (in rehab, perhaps)? 

10) ANNE HEPPLE, Scotch Broth (1933)

An author who has floated around my periphery since I started blogging, this is the first of her books I've actually read. Apparently most of her books tend toward melodramatic romance, but I happened across Scotch Broth, which is (mostly) a cheerful comedy about two sisters who, despite having homes elsewhere, take a country cottage for a getaway. It was just what I needed, but she must be unable to leave melodrama behind entirely, as there remains a dog-shooting, an episode of madness, and a suicide mixed in (!!). They didn’t bother me overly—the shooting occurred "off stage", and the madness and suicide are loathsome characters, so I breezed on by—but some readers would likely be put off.

According to Mary Rawnsley's bio of Hepple, this is the most autobiographical of her novels, which leads me to speculation. Hepple had two half-sisters, Agnes Ancroft and Jane Hukk, both of them novelists as well. The sister in Scotch Broth is named Jane, and Jane Hukk is known to have settled in Berwick after her return from India with her husband, so that makes sense. Agnes was living in London by 1939 at least, and seems to have remained unmarried. Whenever I look at this family, I always wonder about Maud Batchelor, author of the wonderful novel The Woman of the House, who was herself née Batty, as were Anne and her sisters (Ancroft was a pseudonym for Agnes, not a married name). Could she have been related as well?

9) JOAN COCKIN, Villainy at Vespers (1949)

Several years ago, I came across mention of the three mystery novels written by Joan Cockin, but could never track them down until Galileo Publishing reprinted them in the past couple of years. (In a delightful working of irony, Galileo also reprints the mysteries of Joan Coggin, and one wonders if there's a slightly careless reader somewhere who thinks all the books are by a single author.) I've read all three of Cockin's books and this one, in which her detective, Inspector Cam, must solve a case while on holiday with his family in Cornwall, was my favorite. 

8) HARRIET LANE LEVY, Paris Portraits (2011)

Admittedly, this is a very slight book (just over 100 pages including illustrations) and I only came across it because of my interest in Gertrude Stein (new book about Stein by Francesca Wade is arriving today or tomorrow at a Lisbon bookstore that does special orders—my cup runneth over!). But it's a lovely, quirky little thing that made me wish Levy had written many more books (she did write one other, about her youth in San Francisco, 920 O'Farrell Street [1947]). Levy was a childhood friend of Alice B. Toklas, and was with Alice on her first visit to Paris, where she met Gertrude. Her account of the other Steins is delightfully ambivalent ("I hated myself for not being able to tell them to go to hell"), and her wry observations about the talented and famous are entertainingly down-to-earth and unimpressed. Though it belongs in a  proper review, I'm going to squeeze in here Levy's summation of the "retirement" of Mildred Aldrich, another friend of Stein whose memoir A Hilltop on the Marne (1915) is a favorite of mine:

And so she bought the home of a peasant in Huiry, about thirty miles from Paris, furnished it with her belongings, dissolved all her Paris connections, and settled in the village.

Came the First World War.

The village of Huiry was evacuated under the order of the British commander. Along with the other inhabitants Mildred Aldrich was advised to leave. The hill on which she lived was in the direct line of march of the German army. British officers explained to her that her home stood between the fire of the Germans and the British.

Mildred refused to leave. She said that she would be of some service to the British.

All the foreigners left Huiry except Mildred Aldrich.

The Battle of the Marne was fought in front of her cottage.

That was her retirement from life.

Paris Portraits can be enjoyed in an hour or two as a medicinal antidote to the nightly news…

7) EDITH WHARTON, Roman Fever and Other Stories

Can you believe that my only previous Edith Wharton reading was Ethan Frome?! I really like that novella, bleak and despairing as it is, but it's hardly representative of Wharton's work, and picking up this collection (for fifty cents!) was an eye-opener. I expected something very much like Henry James, who was a friend and influence on Edith, and that may apply to some of her work, but I didn't expect the delightful and sometimes vicious sense of humor that comes through in these stories. The title story, along with its Roman setting and its two older women reminiscing about earlier visits to the city, has one of those endings I've talked about before—where you feel like shrieking with joy at a surprise twist. And "Xingu," about one of those characters who like to make others feel intellectually inadequate and how she gets her come-uppance, has an ending like that too. Some of the stories are more serious, and some of the endings don't work as well as these, but good heavens, what I've been missing not reading Wharton!

6) DOROTHY LAMBERT, A Present for Mary (1952)

5) DOROTHY LAMBERT, Harvest Home (1950)

I've already announced, in my previous post, that Dean Street Press will be reprinting an additional four novels by Dorothy Lambert, and the fact that one of these delights is going to be reprinted and the other isn't (yet) indicates how torturous the selection process was. A Present for Mary is a charming comedy with gentle thriller elements, when a stranger convinces a young girl to take a parcel through customs for her, with unexpected results. And Harvest Home is a humorous tale of a group of eccentric Londoners who find themselves helping with the harvest on a friend's family farm. Both are as charming as you'd expect from Lambert, but so are the other three we selected, so Present will have to wait a bit longer.

4) MRS. PHILIP CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY, The Missing Piece (1927)

An amateur detective in the form of a chatty spinster—I mean, could anything be more ideal for me? And that it's as charming as it sounds was a joy. Celia Gaythorn investigates the murder of one of her niece's friends, and must try to out-logic the surly Inspector on the case, who has settled on the local baker as his scapegoat ("I only hoped the inspector had not yet put his threat into effect and arrested the poor man—and if he had what on earth should we all do for bread in the morning?")

3) WILLA CATHER, Not Under Forty (1936)

This was another bargain find in a thrift store in Berkeley (oh, Friends of the Berkeley Public Library Bookstore, how I miss thee!), and it set me off on a Willa Cather reading craze last year which included Shadows on the Rock, which I'd never read before and quite liked, and My Antonía, one of my all-time faves. This is a short book of six essays, not all of them memorable, but two are absolute delights. In "A Chance Meeting," Cather describes her encounters with a formidable old woman in a hotel in the South of France, who turns out to have considerable literary credentials of her own (I don't want to give it away, as it makes such a wonderful impression when you read it). And in "148 Charles Street" Cather writes of her friend Annie Adams Fields, whose husband, James T. Fields, was a founder of the Ticknor & Fields publishing house. The two therefore entertained a host of literary elites, and when Annie was widowed she became a close companion of author Sarah Orne Jewett, who was also a friend of Cather's. The essay is a memorial to Fields, but it made me want to read Fields' own book, Memories of a Hostess (1922), compiled after her death from her extensive diaries.

2) RACHEL COHEN, A Chance Meeting (2004)

I love when one book leads directly to another, and it was Cather's essay "A Chance Meeting" which led me, in some errant Amazon or Google search, to Rachel Cohen's utterly brilliant book, subtitled "Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967." It also gave Cohen her title, and she writes a bit about Cather here as well as many other delightfully random and often unexpected encounters, culled from casual mentions in biographies and given flesh by Cohen's diligent piecing together and savvy sensibility. We read about Henry James being taken as a child to be photographed by Matthew Brady, and Brady subsequently photographing Walt Whitman. We see W. E. B. DuBois going with mentor William James to visit Helen Keller, and Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin going out on the town. As the chapters ventured later in time, they became a bit less interesting for me, and most readers may find some chapters more intriguing than others, but overall this is one of the most unique and lovely books I've ever read. It has now been reprinted in the New York Review Books Classics series.

[I honestly can't remember if it was here or in Cather's longtime companion Edith Lewis's memoir Willa Cather Living, or perhaps both, but somewhere last year I came across and was much struck by Cather's chance meeting with Vaslav Nijinsky in Paris, during part of which time Nijinsky, who as we know suffered serious mental health issues, stood facing a corner, believing himself to be a horse.]

1) CLAIRE HARMAN, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (2023)

I've loved Katherine Mansfield for ages, but I have a slightly ambivalent relationship with biography (a genre that leads you to fall in love with someone only to watch them die), so Harman's somewhat experimental approach was perfect for me. Harman looks at Mansfield's life through examination of ten of her best stories, which provides a lovely sense of the author's joyous but at times agonizing life and creative process. A really beautiful book. Mansfield is on my list to re-read as soon as, but in the meantime I'm tempted to dive back into Harman's book. (She does present Mansfield's tragic and criminally premature death, of course, but somehow in a more episodic context it wasn't quite so devastating to read about.)

And that's that (at least for a few months before it's time for a 2025 Dozen)! What I have lacked in timeliness, I have made up for in wordiness, so I hope you enjoy some of these recommendations, and I hope you all had a great reading year in 2024 as well. Ah, it was a simpler time back then…

A genuine thank you, and the news!

I really can't thank you all enough for all the encouraging words and reassurance in your comments on my last post. It's pretty inspiring to be told, "Write about whatever you want and we'll enjoy it." It's unlikely that I'll take up trigonometry or the mechanics of nuclear fission as my next obsession, so you can feel reassured about that, but you've given me some ideas about directions I might take with the blog. I really appreciate your support.

On a brief reading note, I finished Eça de Quieroz' The Maias and really loved it. Part soap opera (with an incest theme no less!), part a mockery of Romanticism and noble feelings, it's entirely entertaining and has a perfect, melancholy but funny ending. Do have a look at it if you're at all into sprawling 19th-century dramas, and give Portugal's native son a bit more of the attention he deserves.

One other quick note before The News. Several people have asked me about my 2024 Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen, the dozen that wasn't (as it were). Actually, I confess that even in the midst of my dervish-like mental spinning around the holidays, I did manage to make some preliminary notes toward my Dozen, but then I got derailed and overwhelmed and it never went further. I'm going to go back to those notes and see what I can come up with. A 2024 highlights post may not be the most timely or relevant thing you'll read in July of 2025, but I enjoyed some wonderful books last year and should share them with you. Stay tuned for that (I'm not going to promise a definite timeline, as I know myself too well, but it will happen...).

Now, for news about new FM titles!

There's still a bit of time to prepare yourselves, as we're anticipating a late summer/early autumn 2026 rollout for the new books. But it will be worth the wait, as we'll have SIX new titles being released then, and they'll be from two "fan favorite" authors who are already members of the FM family.

I've long wanted to get back to DOROTHY LAMBERT after we published the wonderful Much Dithering back in 2020 (time doth flit!). She tends to be a wildly uneven author (and, unlike Mae West, when she's bad she's really NOT better), but there are some real gems among her ouevre, and we've selected four of them for release. You know that one of these has to be All I Desire (1936), which I raved about here, and which I might like even better than Dithering (!!). Also from 1936, we'll reprint the delightful Scotch Mist, reviewed here. From Lambert's World War II novels, which are, alas, quite variable in quality, we're plucking the treasure, Staying Put (1941), which, as I noted here, may not be her most polished novel but perhaps contains the single funniest scene she ever wrote, when the villagers engage in some spy-catching... And last but certainly not least, we'll also sample Lambert's post-war novels, with 1950's Harvest Home, which involves a set of eccentric Londoners being roped in to help with the harvest on a family farm.

And then, we're returning to one of our favorite FM authors for two more titles. I don't want to suggest that any kind of devious readerly conspiracy has been going on. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that several people emailed us about the same two books. (Really, I'm the first to understand that needs must when it comes to getting hold of the books one wants). At any rate, several years after Rupert and I announced, following the release of our last batch of D. E. STEVENSON titles, that we were finished with DES, some of you have sought to make it quite clear that DES is, in fact, not finished with us, so we are adding two more of her titles, Bel Lamington (1961) and its sequel Fletchers End (1962), to our paperback-only repertoire. As with several titles in our last big batch of DES, these two are already available in e-book from "another publisher," and so Dean Street Press will only be releasing a paperback version.

Some lovely person uploaded the original covers of these two novels to Amazon, and I couldn't resist swiping them and showing them to you here.

They're by illustrator deluxe John O'Hara Cosgrave, who did many of DES's covers, and they are delightful, but sadly they are still under copyright and not available for us to re-use. However, we have ideas of our own for the covers...

I hope you're as excited about these new titles as we are!

Thank you all again for your lovely comments last time. Do you know, it had completely slipped my mind that several of Elizabeth Cadell's novels are set in Portugal?! Are there other novels set here that I should know about or have my sluggish brain jogged to remember?

A particularly à propos review: ROSE MACAULAY, They Went to Portugal (1946)

I owe all of you lovely readers (if, indeed, there are any of you who haven't written me off forever by now) a sincere apology for vanishing for far longer than I had ever intended. I do apologize, and I feel terrible if any of you were fretting about us. It has been an extraordinarily eventful year—exciting and wonderful, but also logistically intense and requiring a fair amount of mental readjustment. No excuse for leaving friends hanging as I have done, but I can only say I have often been in a bit of a peculiar headspace and have had trouble focusing. Without dragging it out any further, then, the particularly à propos thing about reviewing Rose Macaulay's lovely book (I might get to actually talking about it somewhere in this post) is that, for those of you wondering, "What the heck has been happening to Scott and Andy?", dear Dame Rose's title succinctly answers the question!

Yes, though I'm finding it a bit hard to wrap my head around even as I'm typing this, Andy and I are now Lisboans (or Lisbians even?). We arrived in late April, just over two months ago now, having got rid of most of our worldly belongings (including books, I shudder to report, though fear not, I still have my complete FM collection of course), and have been loving (almost) every moment of getting settled in and exploring. To some extent the process of getting here was so long in the works and we were so ready to be here by the time we finally were, that the actual adjustment to living here has been small potatoes by comparison. We live in a wonderful quiet neighborhood outside of the tourist craziness (naturally we're not tourists ourselves…), and have both been more or less diligently studying Portuguese—Andy is far better at speaking than I am, having worked harder at it before we moved, while I may be a bit better at reading signs and other text, having studied French in the past. 

Why this dramatic and exciting upheaval, you might ask? I can say first off that it was already well in the planning stages by the time of the US election last year, so had nothing to do with that (though I can't say we're not relieved, reading the news from day to day, that we're not experiencing it first hand…). In fact, we had long harboured a hope of moving to Europe when we retired, and we fell in love with Portugal when we visited a couple of years ago. So when Andy's retirement date came around last June, we decided not to delay—life is short and we want to travel and enjoy life while we can!

So here we are, and things have settled enough and I have stabilized enough after all the adjustments that I've started feeling lonely without you lovely readers in my life. The prodigal blogger returns... But to be honest I'm still feeling just a bit blocked, writing-wise, and I'm not completely sure of the future of the blog—what I want it to be, what you would enjoy, etc. We've discussed ideas of doing a travel blog (or vlog?!), as a way of sharing our adventures, but neither of us is totally invested in the idea and it feels like a lot of work. Or perhaps this blog could just become a bit wider in scope to cover some travel adventures? 

As for reading, I have actually been doing loads of it, but the content has shifted. In anticipation of moving and since we've been here, I've been particularly focused on European history, biography, and European literary classics. I finally, just the other day, started reading The Maias (1888), the most famous novel by Portugal's most internationally acclaimed 19th century author, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz—try saying that several times quickly (though I am happy to say, offhand, that I do now more or less know how to pronounce it once, slowly)—and am loving it. If you're a fan of big 19th century novels and haven't discovered him yet, check it out. I'm still finding time for some middlebrow reading as well, of course—just before the move, I re-read Ngaio Marsh's Surfeit of Lampreys and Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworths to distract me from the anticipation, and just a day or two ago I finished a re-read of Elizabeth von Arnim's Enchanted April. I seem to have turned to my own Middlebrow Syllabus to keep myself grounded! But I haven't exactly been blazing a trail as far as the unearthing of fabulous unknown authors. Would you be interested in hearing a bit here and there about my reading, even if it's a bit more varied in content than my old, middlebrow-obsessed self?

Oh, and as for publishing… I promise I'll do another post soon with some exciting news along those lines—in fact a couple of pieces of exciting news, though one you may already know…

But now, I feel I should at least gesture toward reviewing the wonderful Rose Macaulay's book, since I've used it as a convenient means of telling my news.

They Went to Portugal (1946) is actually in print (golly!) from the wonderful Daunt Books in the UK, and it may have been Dame Rose's project for staying sane after being bombed out of her apartment (see her lovely story, "Miss Anstruther's Letters," from 1942 if you're not already familiar with it) during World War II. Portugal was neutral in the war (and though Macaulay doesn't discuss it, for obvious reasons, I will say that learning about Portugal during WWII, with Allies and Nazis and refugees and spies and actors and heaven knows who else all associating freely, is almost as fascinating as reading about the British home front). This allowed Macaulay to make research trips there for her rather unusual subject—the experiences of Brits both famous and infamous who spent time in Portugal over the course of several centuries. She was so enthusiastic about her research, in fact, that in addition to the 600+ pages of They Went, she had to edit out a great deal of other material, most of which (some 300 pages worth) was finally published by Carcanet Press in 1990 as They Went to Portugal Too (not in print now, but I've snagged a copy, so you might hear more about it some day).

The voyagers discussed are grouped thematically—royalty, writers, clergy, tourists, military men, etc.—and as might be expected most readers will find some chapters more interesting than others, though I found all, in Macaulay's charming style, highly readable. My favorite was her longish chapter on author, critic, and all-round eccentric character William Beckford, whose determination to be received in the British high society in Lisbon, and envoy Robert Walpole's determination that he should not be, reads quite like a novel itself. There's a chapter on Byron (I already know quite well that one can't spit in beautiful Sintra, on the coast not far from Lisbon, without hitting a place where Byron is alleged to have stayed, or at least a business taking advantage of his name), and a very short one on Henry Fielding, who came here for his health ... and promptly died. Perhaps the exact location of his grave wouldn't have been of primary concern to Fielding, but because he died just a few months before the massive earthquake of 1755, all that is known today is that he's buried somewhere in the British Cemetery here, but the tomb that honors him probably doesn't mark the correct spot.

Several short chapters in the book about visitors to Lisbon at the time of the earthquake are also of particular interest—though perhaps a bit harrowing for one who is now living where it all happened. But for about a quarter of a century of living in San Francisco, I wondered how I would react to "the big one," so I can just continue doing so here. I do hope that I would have a bit more chutzpah than King José I, king of Portugal in 1755, whom a tour guide here referred to as their "coward king," who, for the 20+ years remaining in his life after the quake refused to ever live indoors again, residing instead in a series of tents along with his court!

If you have an interest in Portugal, or in British travelers, do invest in a copy of Dame Rose's book. And now, after a year or so of radio silence, this long post is quite enough out of me for now!