AN ANNOUNCEMENT: Eight more Furrowed Middlebrow/Dean Street Press titles, coming January 2020

It's that time again!

No theme this time around—just eight stellar new reprints, by three marvelous authors, due for release from Furrowed Middlebrow and Dean Street Press in January of 2020. This will bring us to 46 titles in all, enough to fill an entire shelf of my—er, I mean, your bookcase!

First up is an old favorite, by which I mean both an author that we've published before and an author who helped inspire my passion for British women writers in the first place. 

We've already published five of the very best titles from D. E. STEVENSON, and in January we'll add three more. Not exactly a trilogy, but featuring overlapping characters from the Dering family, Vittoria Cottage (1949), Music in the Halls (1950), and Winter and Rough Weather (1951) are fan favorites and wonderful tales of postwar life in England and Scotland. 

(NOTE: Winter and Rough Weather has previously been reprinted and released in e-book as Shoulder the Sky. Although there is some evidence that the latter was actually DES's preferred title, DES's granddaughter specifically requested that we use the former for our edition and we have honored her wishes.)

Next up, I'm really thrilled to add another much-beloved and widely-known author to our list. Many of you already know DORA SAINT (better known by her pseudonym, Miss Read) as the author of two bestselling series, the Thrush Green and Fairacre books. 

But last May I wrote about coming across a lesser-known Miss Read treasure (see here). Fresh from the Country (1960) was such a delight, I couldn't believe the rights wouldn't already have been snatched up by some savvy publisher. Happily for me, however, I get to be that savvy publisher!

And finally, you had to know it would be on my mind: Having used the "buried treasure" heading for only (if my count is correct) three reviews on this blog, and having already published the books reviewed in two of those posts, hmmmm, perhaps the third one will be coming around soon?

Yep, I'm over the moon that we'll be able to publish four absolutely brilliant novels by DORIS LANGLEY MOORE, who may be the most famous person ever to be a horribly neglected author. 

I reviewed the novels here and here, fell head over heels in love with them, and now A Game of Snakes and Ladders (1938, 1955), Not at Home (1948), All Done by Kindness (1951), and My Caravaggio Style (1959) all join the Furrowed Middlebrow "books in print". Smart, funny, gorgeously plotted, and delightfully unpredictable, they deserve to be classics but have been neglected for half a century. No more!

And that's that for January. Not too bad, eh? I should be able to share the new covers here before long, as well as information on intros. And work is already going on furiously behind the scenes (i.e. very often while sprawled on the sofa or lounging in bed) to start pulling together Batch 6…

Buried treasure: DORIS LANGLEY MOORE part 2

If you missed my first post about the marvelous Doris Langley Moore, you may want to go back to it, as in that post I gave a bit of background about her many other accomplishments aside from being the author of six novels (and aside from being my favorite new author in quite some time).

In that post, I wrote about Moore's final two novels, All Done by Kindness (1951) and My Caravaggio Style (1959). Those were the two of her books that were most readily available to me, so I started at the end of her career. Shortly after finishing those, I was finally able, thanks to Andy, to obtain a copy of her fourth novel, Not at Home (1948), all the way from the University of Alberta (apparently the only library in North America with a copy in circulation, and the same heroic library, if I recall correctly, that provided me with the only copy of E. Nesbit's The Lark then in circulation, so it might just be my favorite library!). Not long after that, a reasonably-priced copy of her third novel, A Game of Snakes and Ladders (1938, reprinted and revised 1955), came up on Abe Books and I grabbed it like a snakebite victim grabbing antivenom.

Every time I read another of Moore's novels, I seem to have found my favorite. That happened again with Not at Home, set immediately after World War II (August of 1945), which follows the swirling low-level dramas that result when Elinor MacFarren, a middle-aged spinster, respected writer about botanicals, and collector of botanical prints and other objets d'art, decides to rent part of her house to Antonia Bankes, an American recommended by her friend Harriet (who, unfortunately, knows Mrs Bankes only as a customer at her antique shop).

Miss MacFarren is accustomed to being alone ("I don't mind being alone at all. I was often here alone in the blitz, and I was so frightened of the bombs that I quite stopped being frightened of burglars."), but needs must and Mrs Bankes seems too good to be true. She avers a passionate admiration for Miss MacFarren's beautiful and fragile possessions ("Oh, but it's the prettiest room I've ever seen in my life!"), promises quiet and care ("'You'll find me madly careful."), and seems an ideal homemaker ("I like housework. I've got quite a 'thing' about it.").

But of course, when something seems too good to be true…  In fact, she turns out to be exasperating and helpless, skilled only in charm, manipulation, and blithely promising anything in order to get her way. That part is, of course, predictable enough—there would be no novel if she were the perfect tenant—but what is not predictable at all are all the intricate twists and turns of the plot as Miss MacFarren tries to cope, tries to cajole, and finally tries to rid herself of her meddlesome tenant, all with unpredictable and delightful results. And all while taking up drinking whiskey…

Also figuring in the plot are Mr Bankes, a war correspondent traveling with the Occupation Forces in Germany, who charms Miss MacFarren with his flattery and his knowledge of her books; Dr Wilmot, her arch-rival in collecting botanical prints; Mrs Manders, the daily help, who is charmed (at first) into unprecedented dedication to her job by Mrs Bankes; Miss MacFarren's nephew Mory, a rising film director entangled with a married woman; and Mory's friend Maxine Albert, a rising starlet whose down-to-earth, practical approach to life initially alienates Miss MacFarren and later becomes essential to her plans to defeat Mrs Bankes.

Doris Langley Moore

Not at Home is little less than a saga composed of the most trivial social interactions and conflicts, but it's absolutely riveting for all that. And who is to say that it's not these trivial conflicts that form the basis of the larger conflicts on the evening news? As in All Done by Kindness, Moore is meticulous in her plotting. The most minor actions lead to unforeseen complications, and attempts to resolve trivial problems result in webs of deceit and intrigue. It's such good fun I'd like to pick it up again now and start reading again.

But by the time I finished Not at Home, my lovely copy of A Game of Snakes and Ladders, complete with a delightful dustjacket, had arrived. This novel seems to have had a slightly odd history.

In 1938, Moore published They Knew Her When: A Game of Snakes and Ladders, the third of her six novels and possibly the first in what might be termed her "mature style" (her ODNB entry asserts that she "wrote six romantic novels between 1932 and 1959," but in fact the term "romantic" doesn't apply in any significant way to any of the four novels I've read so far). A search for "doris langley moore they knew her when" brings up this blog as its top result, which, though flattering, is not terribly helpful to me and suggests that not a lot of information about the original version of the novel is available.

With her non-fiction book The Vulgar Heart in 1945, Moore switched publishers, and her new publisher, Cassell, seems to have more actively promoted her fiction than previous publishers had. After Cassell had published Not at Home and All Done by Kindness, which presumably found some success, they published A Game of Snakes and Ladders in 1955, which seems to be a reprint of They Knew Her When. However, at least a few revisions must have been made in the new edition, as the opening paragraph makes reference to World War I and World War II, which could hardly have been the case in the 1938 edition. I'd love to have a look at the earlier book to see what other changes may have been made, but alas, copies of They Knew Her When have virtually ceased to exist. (If anyone has a copy, I'd love to compare notes between the two editions.)

Publishing history aside, the story begins with two young women, Lucy and Daisy, performing with a theatre company in Egypt shortly after the end of World War II. They are young and attractive; Lucy is sturdy and unflappable, Daisy is charming but primarily self-interested. They are friends, but of the most casual kind:

Daisy always found it easy to feel affectionate towards people who were being actively useful to her, and Lucy could not help liking one for whom she had done so much: and the fact of their having been chorus girls in London together was glorified in recollection until it assumed the importance of a bond.

Having fallen in love with a well-to-do businessman (or as close to love as such a practical, in-it-for-herself kind of girl can get), Daisy decides to stay on in Alexandria after the show closes. Lucy, on the other hand, is eager to return to England as soon as possible. But her plans are shot when, shortly before the end of the show's run, she suddenly falls seriously ill. Daisy shortsightedly has her placed in a private nursing home rather than a (free) public hospital, with the result that by the end of many weeks of care, Lucy is heavily in debt. Daisy's businessman pays her bills, and is generously prepared to write off the money, but Daisy, forever worried about her position with him, makes a muddle of things by assuring him Lucy will repay it, and promises that she'll stay in Egypt working for him until it's paid off. This plan is presented to Lucy as a fait accompli, so that despite her homesickness she is effectively trapped in Egypt.

And there, over the course of nearly 20 years, she and Daisy both remain, while Moore's intricate, lovely plot unfolds, building tension and frustration as frivolous Daisy, the cause of Lucy's problems, ascends the ladder of wealth first as her businessman's mistress and finally as his wife (though she has a more difficult time on the social ladder), while Lucy, depressed and downtrodden but diligent and philosophical about her fate, slaves and toils. Misunderstandings, deceptions, and self-deceptions abound. Lucy befriends a silly teenage girl whose father neglects her, and rescues her from her own naïvete in a fling with a young Italian, a course of action (like many in this novel) that will have repercussions in Lucy's future.

If this description sounds a bit like it could apply to Moll Flanders or Clarissa, this turns out not to be coincidental. On the front flap of the Cassell edition of the novel is a letter from Moore herself to the publisher, in which she explains the themes of the novel and sums up her inspiration:

Fanny Burney would not approve of some of my chapters, but it was my affection for the novels of her school, in which the heroine goes through all kinds of distresses but emerges in a sweeping triumph at the end, that made me long to try my hand at the same theme—treating it, however, in our down-to-earth twentieth-century way.

It's been a long time since I've read Evelina or indeed Moll Flanders, though I enjoyed both at the time (Clarissa I'm sorry to say intimidated me too much to even attempt), but as soon as I read this explanation I felt I better understand not only this novel, but Moore's later work. It helped to bring into focus something that I now see is a central focus of all of her fiction—the complications and vicissitudes inspired by social niceties, repressed impulses, the avoidance of unpleasantness, things that are simply "not done," and—by no means least of all—trivial events and decisions that lead to completely unexpected results.

Moore actually highlights her classic influences here and there throughout Snake. How often in fiction of this period do you find ominous foreshadowings like this one?:

The whole affair had occupied so short a time that one could not imagine anything serious had been happening. Nor would she have guessed, even if Daisy had confided in her, that the foolish little drama was destined to affect the lives of everyone involved in it, herself not less than the others.

And here's my favorite bit of philosophizing, pertaining to Daisy's attempts at social climbing, which might have been lifted right out of Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell:

If we compare the fashionable world to a skating rink where only advanced performers are encouraged to disport themselves, we may say that money will purchase a spectator's seat but will not give you the ability to skate. Supposing you have thoroughly mastered the accomplishment in some other arena, you are welcome to step out of your seat and take the floor, and the skaters already there will accept you as one of themselves and even clear a space for you to cut figures; but unless you are proficient—or can at any rate flounder very amusingly—you had better keep your place, or you will suffer peculiar humiliations. Mosenthal never tried to skate. He preferred to sit in a good ringside position making fun of the people on the ice. Daisy, on the other hand, was constantly impelled to try her skill, but she was so afraid of falling that she had a stilted, mincing style which soon gave her uncertainty away.

With all four of Moore's novels so far, I have started off not entirely certain, a little doubtful of whether the magic would happen this time. But I see this now as one of her great strengths. She seems never to have done the same thing twice, and when you start one of her books you can never imagine quite where she's going to take you.

But Lucy's "sweeping triumph" in A Game of Snakes and Ladders, and the ecstatic high I received from the novel's final 40 pages (not to mention the occasional maniacal laughter Andy heard from the next room), were absolutely on a par with anything I've encountered in the classics mentioned above. Fanny Burney might have been shocked, but she would surely also have been proud.

Happily, I've now managed to track down the two most obscure of Moore's novels, her first two, A Winter's Passion (1932) and The Unknown Eros (1935), though I haven't yet got round to reading them. Are they really only "romantic novels"? Or do they have that inimitable Doris Langley Moore touch? 

AND, having fallen so much in love with the later novels, I decided a slight splurge was in order (it's my birthday next week, after all), and I gave in to the temptation of an inscribed copy of Not at Home, complete with dustjacket. (It's not the most lovely of dustjacket images, I confess, though it is appropriate, as ceramic cats play a surprisingly large role in the novel.) The images of the front and back of the book that I shared above are thus from my very own copy of the book, and here's an image of the book's inscription.

The name Margaret Canning sounds tantalizingly familiar, but she's not one of my authors and Google is playing dumb about her as well. But I'm delighted to have Moore's signature and to have a physical copy of the book to go next to Snakes and Ladders on the very top shelf of my bookcase!

Buried treasure: DORIS LANGLEY MOORE part 1

Ah, I've been awaiting the opportunity to use that title again. If I remember correctly, I've only used the "buried treasure" title once before, when I first came across the wonderful Elizabeth Fair (now almost three years ago—yikes!), who I later had the delightful experience of publishing as a Furrowed Middlebrow title from Dean Street Press. Since then, I've come across some wonderful books and authors, but no author whose work was quite forgotten enough to be called "buried" and yet consistently excellent enough to be "treasure."

It's extraordinarily odd that Doris Langley Moore should fit both of those categories. She is certainly not forgotten in herself, and is in fact remembered for several impressive reasons, probably most notably as one of the first serious historians of fashion—see her books The Woman in Fashion (1949) and The Child in Fashion (1953), among others—and the person responsible for the establishment of the Fashion Museum located in the Assembly Rooms in Bath (we walked by it on our way to see the restored Assembly Rooms where Jane Austen once danced, and now I could kick myself for not having visited the museum itself). She also occasionally worked as a costume designer for film and theatre, including designing Katharine Hepburn's dresses for The African Queen (1951)—see here for Hepburn's praise of her work.

Doris Langley Moore

But that's only the beginning. Moore was an important Byron scholar, and was the first non-family member to work with a large collection of Byron-related papers owned by Byron's great-granddaughter. The first of her Byron-related books, The Late Lord Byron (1961), focuses unconventionally on the dramas and revelations of the years immediately following his death, and has recently been reprinted by Neversink Press. (It's also available in the U.S. as a free download from Hathi Trust.) Lord Byron, Accounts Rendered (1974) examined the revelations that could be gleaned about Byron's life by closely examining his finances. And Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1977) is a biography of Byron's daughter. As you'll see below, Moore also utilized her knowledge of Byron in her final novel, My Caravaggio Style (1959), which deals with a forgery of Byron's famously destroyed memoirs (and even, amusingly, features Moore herself as a character when a team of Byron experts gather late in the novel to confer on the memoirs).

Then there is the fact that Moore was the first biographer of E. Nesbit (1933, expanded edition 1966), and her book, containing many interviews with family members and other contemporaries, has been heavily relied on by subsequent scholars. There's another acclaimed bio, Marie & the Duke of H: The Daydream Love Affair of Marie Bashkirtseff (1966). And there's several witty self-help and other non-fiction books as well, including The Technique of the Love Affair (1928), The Pleasure of Your Company: A Text-book of Hospitality (1933, written with her sister June Langley Moore), Our Loving Duty, or, The Young Housewife's Compendium (1936, also with June), The Vulgar Heart: An Enquiry into the Sentimental Tendencies of Public Opinion (1945), and Pleasure: A Discursive Guide Book (1953)

Phew! It's exhausting just listing all of her achievements. But my favorite part: her ODNB entry quietly notes that "she had no formal education."

On top of that, however, she published six novels, four of which are now among my favorites of the year (for that matter, perhaps my favorites of several years).

When I first added Moore to my list of authors, I flagged her fifth novel, All Done by Kindness (1951), which was described by a bookseller as "a civilized novel about some fabulous art treasures from an old attic." I didn't know anything more about it than that, but when I started all my recent frenzy of interlibrary loan requests, I saw it staring up at me from my TBR list. And virtually as soon as I had it in my hot little hands, I knew, first, that I had to correct her entry on my list (I had her down as having written five novels instead of six, because her first, A Winter's Passion (1932), has virtually ceased to exist), and, second, that I'd found a new kindred spirit in the literary universe.

Set just after the end of World War II in the town of Charlton Wells, Kindness begins with Dr George Sandilands visiting his elderly patient Mrs Hovenden, quietly decaying in her venerable old house. Money is tight for this last of her line, and she has been attempting to sell various pieces of old-fashioned furnishings, artworks, and jewelry, none of them fashionable or valued by a postwar market obsessed by the new and clean and modern. She's finding it impossible to keep a housekeeper and has been left unattended again, barely managing to care for herself. Out of compassion and generosity (the kindness of the title), Dr Sandilands offers to provide her with funds which will allow her to find a live-in married couple to help her. She agrees, but only on condition that he must take something from her possessions in return. She mentions a few remaining trunks full of belongings handed down for generations:

"We had such large trousseaux in those days, more than we needed of everything. Then, there's all kinds of needlework and lace, and a few clothes it might be worth while to make over. The old materials were not like the rubbish you get today." She paused again and fished up, as it were, more of these long-submerged treasures. "There are one or two very pretty counterpanes, and my mother's best parasol with an ivory handle-a beauty. And you'll find some of my husband's things—though I don't suppose they'll be much use, the cassocks and surplices. The cloth is good, of course. And there are some embroidered waistcoats that must have belonged to his father. They are very old. A museum might be glad of them."

Dr Sandilands tries to beg off, imagining the useless piles of outdated clothing, and the horror of his stern housekeeping daughter Beatrix. Then:

"There are some pictures too," Mrs. Hovenden brought out with a fresh effort, "oil paintings that were in the rector's family."

And thus begins an elegant comedy of errors that will rock the art world. The story twists and turns like a middlebrow Da Vinci Code, but with far more subtlety, wit, and insight into characters both noble and corrupt, and far less violence (scheming and deceiving and maneuvering are so much more interesting than gunfire and explosions). It's a masterpiece of tight plotting and unexpected machinations.

We meet Dr Sandilands' daughters, the rather imperious Beatrix, who has no patience with old beat-up artworks, and young Linda, who works at the Public Library and is fully prepared to get swept up in the romance of a stash of old treasures. Then there's Stephanie du Plessis, Linda's superior at the Public Library, an amateur art connoisseur recently returned from living in Rhodesia, who develops a theory about the artworks and clings to it like a dog with a bone; Sir Harry Maximer, esteemed author of books on Italian art (though perhaps not quite the expert he is made out to be), who isn't above a bit of shady dealing to build his own jealously-guarded collection; Sir Harry's patient and competent secretary Mrs Rose, whose personal feelings about him complicate matters considerably; young Arnold Bayley, director of the small local Elderfield Art Gallery, who throws his hat into the ring by helping Mrs du Plessis; E. Quiller, a sleazy London junk shop dealer; and Morris, the owner of the local antique shop (or junk shop, depending on who you ask).

This is one of those wonderful books where you don't want to put it down for multiple reasons—first, because you can't begin to predict what will happen and can't wait to find out, and second, because the characters are either so likeable or so delectably unlikeable that you can't wait to see them get their just deserts. It was absolutely marvelous fun, and I knew I was hooked. I put in an interlibrary loan request for My Caravaggio Style (the only other easily obtainable Moore novel) before I was a quarter of the way through.

At the beginning of Caravaggio, Moore's sixth and final novel, a young bookseller and author, Quentin Williams, finds himself perversely trying to impress an American dealer interested in manuscripts, and ends by hinting that he just might have a copy of Lord Byron's long-destroyed memoirs. This is partly because the American is irritatingly smug (aren't we though?!), and perhaps also partly because Williams has just received the biannual royalties from the two biographies he's published, equalling a grand total of just over 4 pounds. He puts the American off temporarily by inventing an elaborate tale about the manuscript's location in a relative's attic in Wales, and then begins to formulate his plans.

Oh, yes, and his motives for this deception are also undoubtedly linked to his need to impress his girlfriend, a smart, beautiful model whose decision to pair up with Quentin is something neither the reader nor Quentin himself are able to quite comprehend. And her intelligence, as Quentin manages to accidentally pique her interest in Byron, becomes only one of Quentin's problems.

The title, by the way (a slightly confusing one for a book about Byron forgeries), comes from Byron's own description of the style of her later memoirs. Apparently, the earlier portions of his memoirs were rather tame, and shied away from the more scandalous elements of his life. But later on he returned to writing his memoirs and turned up the heat, and Quentin quite sensibly decides that his part of the lost memoirs will come from these later sections:

"My finest, ferocious Caravaggio style"—that was his own phrase for his later manner; and that was the style I was aiming at, an interplay of light and shadow that would rivet the attention and, ultimately, draw the eye to darkness.

Here, as in Kindness, the unforeseen complications and complexities form the main portion of the entertaining plot. One of the refreshing things about Moore's work is that, in those novels I've read so far at least, she rarely exerts much energy with humdrum love affairs or traditional plots ending in marriage. Her main characters are far more infatuated with paintings, porcelains, and manuscripts than they are with other humans. There are few enough authors who can make middlebrow pageturners out of highbrow passions, but Moore certainly does it.

That said, of these two novels, Kindness remains my favorite as it has the more complex and deeply satisfying plot. But if Caravaggio is the only Moore you can get your hands on, by all means do so.

Next time, working rather strangely backwards in Moore's ouevre, I'm planning to write about her fourth novel, Not at Home (1948), and her third, A Game of Snakes and Ladders (original published as They Knew Her When: A Game of Snakes and Ladders in 1938, slightly revised and retitled edition 1955). Neither were quite so easy to track down and therefore I didn't have them in hand until I'd finished the last two. (And her first two novels, A Winter's Passion and The Unknown Eros, have proven even more challenging.).