Historical Musings #38: Reading Edward Rutherfurd

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Welcome to my monthly post on all things historical fiction. For the last few months, I have been looking at the work of some of my favourite historical fiction authors; having previously featured Elizabeth Chadwick and Anya Seton, this month it’s the turn of a very different author: Edward Rutherfurd.

Edward Rutherfurd is the pseudonym of Francis Edward Wintle, born in Salisbury, England in 1948. His first novel, Sarum, was published in 1987, and since then he has written seven others, with a new one expected in 2019. Rutherfurd’s novels all follow a very similar format; they each tell the story of several families who live in one particular country, city or region over a period of many years. Sarum, for example, is set in and around the city of Salisbury; it begins in prehistoric times, then moves forward a few generations with each chapter, bringing us right up to the 1980s, and in this way, we watch the entire history of the city (and of England) unfold. His most recent book, Paris, is slightly different from the others as instead of moving forward chronologically in time, the narrative jumps backwards and forwards from one century to another, and although I didn’t find this as effective it did make a change!

As you can imagine, covering so much history means Rutherfurd’s novels are very long – most of them have around 1,000 pages, which I’m sure will put a lot of people off reading them. However, the way in which they are structured makes each novel feel almost like a collection of interrelated short stories, so once you start to read they are not quite as daunting as they seem! I have read all of his novels and own all of them apart from New York, which I borrowed from the library and didn’t like enough to want to buy my own copy.

Sarum (1987)
Russka (1991)
London (1997)
The Forest (2000)
Dublin: Foundation (2004)
Ireland: Awakening (2006)
New York (2009)
Paris (2013)

Of these, my favourites are Sarum, Russka and the two books set in Ireland. His new book, which I think should be coming next year, is apparently going to be about the history of China and I’m sure it will be another fascinating read.

You can find out more about Edward Rutherfurd and his work at his official website.

I will be looking at another historical fiction author in next month’s post, but for now:
Have you read any of Edward Rutherfurd’s novels? Which are your favourites?

My blog’s name in TBR books

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I’ve seen this meme appearing on a lot of other book blogs recently and I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist joining in with it myself! It originated at Fictionophile’s blog, who posted the following rules:

1. Spell out your blog’s name.

2. Find a book from your TBR that begins with each letter.

3. Have fun!

Luckily, my blog doesn’t have a very long name and as I use Goodreads to keep track of my TBR, I found it easy enough to choose a book for each letter.

Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
High Rising by Angela Thirkell
Elijah’s Mermaid by Essie Fox

Red Adam’s Lady by Grace Ingram
Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim
Angels and Insects by AS Byatt
Dark Angel by Sally Beauman
Saraband for Two Sisters by Philippa Carr

Next of Kin by John Boyne
Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Lady in Waiting by Rosemary Sutcliff
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

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Have you read any of these books?

The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today by Alison Weir

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This is one of several e-shorts – short stories published exclusively in ebook format – which form part of Alison Weir’s new series on the wives of Henry VIII, Six Tudor Queens. I hadn’t had much interest in reading them until I noticed that this one, The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today, was (and still is, at the moment) free to download from Amazon. It seemed a good opportunity to see what they were like.

Having read the first two full-length novels in the series (on Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn) and with the third one, Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen, on my NetGalley shelf ready to start soon, this was the perfect time to read The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today because, chronologically, it provides a sort of bridge between the Anne Boleyn book and the Jane Seymour book.

The story is set in the modern day and is written from the perspective of historian Jo Maddox, who is taking a group of tourists around the Tower of London. Jo has arranged for a special guide to lead part of the tour and provide some history on Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, who was of course imprisoned and beheaded at the Tower. When the guide arrives, Jo is impressed by her resemblance to Anne herself – right down to the authentic Tudor costume and French accent. But then another dark-haired young woman catches her eye and Jo begins to feel as though she is seeing Anne Boleyn everywhere she looks.

This really is a very short story! I had expected it to be longer as the book was seventy pages long, but most of those seventy pages are actually devoted to the opening chapters of the first three Six Tudor Queens novels. I didn’t need to read these as I’ve already read the first two and am about to start the third, so the story itself is disappointingly short and can literally be read in just a few minutes. Maybe the other e-shorts in the series have more substance, which could explain why this one is being offered for free.

Having said that, the story is quite entertaining, providing some information on the history of the Tower and separating the facts about Anne Boleyn from the myths. There’s even some humour:

‘Didn’t Thomas Cromwell play a large part in bringing down Anne Boleyn?’ a guest asked.

‘Cromwell!’ The guide’s eyes flashed. ‘Oh yes! He hated me, for he feared I would ruin him. So he pre-empted me. He was a man without scruples.’

‘Not if you read Hilary Mantel!’ muttered one of the group.

The other e-shorts in the series so far are Arthur: Prince of the Roses, The Blackened Heart, The Chateau of Briis, The Grandmother’s Tale and The Unhappiest Lady in Christendom, all of which fit before or after one of the three main novels. It seems that they are currently not available outside the UK, although according to Alison Weir’s website her US publisher is including some of the stories in the paperback editions of the novels. I think that’s a better idea anyway as if all of the stories are as short as this one I don’t think it’s really worth spending money on buying them all separately. I’m not planning to read any more of them, but I’m looking forward to starting Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen.

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

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I read this as part of my Walter Scott Prize Project (it was shortlisted in 2017) and yet again I am grateful to the Prize for pointing me in the direction of a book I would probably never have thought of picking up otherwise.

Mothering Sunday, in its original form, was a day when servants were given the day off work so that they could go home and visit their ‘mother church’ with their families. Jane Fairchild, the twenty-two-year-old heroine of Graham Swift’s novel, is an orphan, so when she is given a day’s holiday from her duties as a maid, she has no home to go to and no family to visit. Instead, she borrows a bicycle and rides across the English countryside to the big house nearby where her lover, Paul Sheringham, is waiting for her.

The book takes us through the course of that one single day in March 1924 – a day so warm and sunny it feels more like June, a day which begins with so much hope and happiness. But Jane shouldn’t really be here with Paul; he is engaged – to a much more ‘suitable’ girl than Jane – and the marriage is due to take place in just two weeks’ time. Their lovely, idyllic afternoon is cut short when Paul reluctantly gets dressed and goes to meet his future wife. Jane is left alone and what happens next is something that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

Mothering Sunday is a short novel, really more of a novella, but Graham Swift manages to pack a lot into those few pages. He has a lot to say – but always subtly and always ‘showing rather than telling’ – about relationships, about class differences and about a country still recovering from the effects of war. I particularly liked the way he handles the passing of time, describing the events of that March day in 1924 then moving smoothly and briefly forward to a later stage in Jane’s life to show how those events shape her future self.

My favourite aspect of the book, though, is Jane’s love of literature. Perhaps unusually for a servant in the 1920s, her reading has been encouraged by her employer, Mr Niven, who allows her to choose from his own shelves. The books she is most drawn to are the ones by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H Rider Haggard, and her newest discovery, Joseph Conrad.

And later, much later in her life, she would say in interviews, in answer to a perennial (and tedious) question, ‘Oh boys’ books, adventure books, they were the thing. Who would want to read sloppy girls’ stuff?’

Her eyes might glint, her wrinkled face purse up a bit more. But then she might say, if she wanted to be less skittish, that reading those books then — ‘the war, you understand, the first one that is, was barely over’ — was like reading across a divide. So close, yet a great divide. Pirates and knights-in-armour, buried treasure and sailing ships. But they were the books she had read.

Although, as I’ve said, this is a short book, by the end of it I felt that I knew Jane Fairchild well. The limited number of characters – Jane, Paul and Mr Niven are the only ones with significant roles – gives the book a feeling of intimacy and the sense that we are there with Jane on that long-ago Mothering Sunday.

Graham Swift is not an author I had ever considered reading or thought that I would like, but based on this book, I could be interested in reading some of his others. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Poisonwood Bible to Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

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Sorry for the unannounced absence over the last week – I’ve been to Malta on holiday and didn’t get round to scheduling any posts before I left. Anyway, I’m back now and it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

The first book this month is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I have never read this book, but it is described as “the story of an American missionary family in the Congo during a poignant chapter in African history”.

Thinking of other books about missionary families, I’m going to link to a novel I remember really enjoying a few years ago: In a Far Country by Linda Holeman. It is set in India in the 19th century and the heroine, Pree Fincastle, is the daughter of two British missionaries living on a Church of England medical mission in Punjab.

I’ve read most of Linda Holeman’s adult novels and enjoyed them all – the settings are always interesting and beautifully described. My favourite of her books is The Saffron Gate, which is set in Morocco in the 1930s. Morocco is not a country that has featured very often in my reading, but it does provide the setting for another book I loved: The Sultan’s Wife by Jane Johnson.

There are so many books around these days with the word “wife” in the title. Some that I have reviewed on my blog include The Aviator’s Wife, The Tea Planter’s Wife, The Tiger’s Wife and, most recently, The Pharmacist’s Wife. A much earlier example is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife, a Victorian novel from 1864 with a similar plot and themes to Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

The image on the front cover of the Oxford World’s Classics version of The Doctor’s Wife is apparently called Faraway Thoughts by an unknown artist. Coincidentally, the same image has been used on the cover of one of my current reads, Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer (although I am reading a different edition).

Friday’s Child, one of Heyer’s Regency romances, follows the early days of a marriage between two young people, Sherry and Hero. This brings to mind another funny and charming novel about a newly-married couple, Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada. I loved that book and really wish it was better known!

It’s unusual to find a book with a question mark in the title, but I can think of a few that I’ve read, including Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie. I really enjoyed that one – it’s a bit melodramatic and silly, but a lot of fun to read.

And that’s my chain for this month! Have you read any of these books?

Next month, the starting point will be The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a book I’ve never read and know nothing about!

My Commonplace Book: April 2018

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A selection of words and pictures to represent April’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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There are no friends at Whitehall. Only allies and enemies. Among the great, power ebbs and flows according to their conjuctions and oppositions. And the rest of us are tossed about in the current, helpless to direct our course, let alone navigate our way to safety.

The Fire Court by Andrew Taylor (2018)

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Alexander frowned. ‘I am sure you exist, John, for I can see you here praying to God. But say this: a man may wake up one day and feel happy, and wake up the next and feel as if he cannot go on, though his life remains exactly the same. Or, to take another example: two men may lose their sight. One man quickly adjusts to it and continues to lead a useful life, the other falls into despair. What does that tell us? That the mind is all! If we can control the mind, it does not matter the circumstance.’

The Pharmacist’s Wife by Vanessa Tait (2018)

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“Circe” from Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, 1474 edition

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)

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The universe about you is charged with opposing forces – angels and devils, good and evil, light and darkness – you can call them what you will, and as you think of things and people, you invite into them one or the other. Think evil things of a man, and you’ve done your poor best to make a devil of him.

Gentian Hill by Elizabeth Goudge (1949)

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I do believe I begin to grasp the nature of miracles! For would it be a miracle, if there was any reason for it? Miracles have nothing to do with reason. Miracles contradict reason, they strike clean across mere human deserts, and deliver and save where they will. If they made sense, they would not be miracles.

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (1977)

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If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W Tuchman (1978)

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London in the 16th Century

I usually like being by the river. I like the noise: the bellowing between ship and dock, the raucous squabbling of gulls, the shoving and shouting, the creak and groan of ropes and the slap of palms as bargains are struck. The quays reek of the scent of fish and salt air, and the refuse stranded on the beaches at low tide. Beggars pick over the debris in the mud, or snatch at scraps around the stalls. Tall ships and sturdy cogs jostle at the quays, sailed in from who knows where, destined for somewhere far from here. They set sail across the wide seas, the seas I have never seen, ploughing through the waves, bucking and rearing like horses in the wind…

The Cursed Wife by Pamela Hartshorne (2018)

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“Patience is the capacity to endure all that is necessary in attaining a desired end. The patient man is master of his fate. The submissive man has handed his fate over to somebody else. Patience implies liberty and superiority. Impatience nearly always involves a loss of liberty. It causes people to commit themselves, to burn their boats, to put it out of their power to alter or modify their course. Patience never forsakes the ultimate goal because the road is hard. There can be no patience without an object.”

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1950)

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There were men who would take the sword and with it conquer the world for their countrymen or themselves. Such men were a nuisance always, and in a world of high-explosive they were a calamity. But always History – a sentimental jade – would give them a little glory: that amid an ocean of tears and blood.

The Daffodil Affair by Michael Innes (1942)

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Flag of Grenada

As we drew closer to Grenada, her forest summits became more sharply defined and green patches began a glimmeration among the inky blues. The distant mountains of the interior were veiled in grey mist, whiles to the west – as the afternoon gathered in – the sun melted the sky into the sea, turning them both pale-pale lemon.

Sugar Money by Jane Harris (2017)

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Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym (1977)

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Favourite books read in April:

Circe and The Feast

Where did my reading take me in April?

England, Scotland, Wales, Ancient Greece, France, the Amazon, Grenada and Martinique

Authors read for the first time in April:

Vanessa Tait and Barbara W. Tuchman

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Have you read any of these books? What have you been reading in April?

Elizabeth Goudge giveaway winner

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Thanks to everyone who entered my Elizabeth Goudge giveaway earlier in the week. I have used RandomResult.com to select a winner at random – and the winner is…

Allison M

Congratulations Allison! You’ve won a copy of The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge.

I hope you enjoy the book. I haven’t read it myself yet but I’m sure it will be lovely. Thanks again to Hendrickson Publishers for making this giveaway possible.