Articles in “Reading”

And one of those things is this fact: once I became aware that there was such a genre as the vampire boarding-school story, I was going to read as many as I could get my hands on.

Surely there can be no surprise about this?

Oh, I know that there’s a certain segment of the world’s population who feels that reading anything that hasn’t been nominated for some sort of prize amounts to prostituting one’s literacy (and, yes, that is a line I stole from Sue Townsend)—and, apparently, they don’t count any of the numerous prizes awarded to children’s literature.

But I—as you know, from reading this blog—adore children’s fantasy and I always will.

Plus, a quick glance at Delicious Library 2 tells me that I own 150 girls’ school stories, and that’s not counting the eight or so that my mother has bought for me recently, which I haven’t yet added to the database.

And though I wrote a post, early in this blog’s life, about how I wasn’t entirely sure I was interested in vampires (a post to which I won’t link, because it was weak writing), that was, in point of fact, a lie.

So when I see a book called Vampire Academy, my heart sings a little, just a little atonal hum of pleasure.

When I see that the second volume is marketed with the tagline “When love and jealousy collide on the slopes, winter break turns deadly,” that little atonal hum swells into “Ode to Joy,” because this is basically Sweet Valley High.

Sweet Valley High with vampires.

How could I pass that up? And, yes, that was a rhetorical question.

So now I not only own the Vampire Academy series, I also bought the first five books in the House of Night series.

And the first two volumes of the Evernight series.

And I’ve just comes across the Blue Bloods series, which, of course, I’ll buy.

Not to mention The Immortals, which I’ve only just discovered today.

And, thanks to friends who are returning from the U.S. this weekend and are willingly acting as book/DVD mules for us, I’ll be able to read the Bard Academy series, in which students are taught by the ghosts of famous writers who died young. I mean, Wuthering High? The Scarlet Letterman? Moby Clique? There is no way on earth I would let those pass me by.

I’ve devoted thirteen years of my life—thus far—to studying and teaching English literature—some of the best and most beautiful literature ever written in English—in the academy.

I have no concerns whatsoever about the fact that for the past month, I’ve not read a single book that didn’t have a vampire in it.

For the forseeable future, it’s vampire boarding-school stories all the way.

(Part one of this series is here, part two is here, and part three is here.)

When we first meet Meg Murry, in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), she’s sporting an incipient black eye and a torn blouse, after attacking older boys who are taunting her younger brother.

So it’s hardly surprising that she’s in this list, is it?

A Wrinkle in Time is a book for which I have a perpetual soft spot, because, while I’m not convinced that it was the first science-fiction book I ever read, it’s certainly the first one I remember reading.

It’s also the first book in which I came across a woman with a Ph.D. Well, Dr Murry had two Ph.Ds, actually. And a Nobel Prize. She was was also staggeringly beautiful, but that was less compelling to me than the Ph.Ds. It seemed both more probable that I could manage a Ph.D. than that I could become staggeringly beautiful—and also that it would be more interesting. Perhaps I’ve been underachieving, and should have tried for both—and another Ph.D.

No: too tiring.

(Anyway, none of that is important right now, but then that is rather a pattern on this blog. And I did consider the feelings of my lovely readers when I decided not to blog the conversation I had with my best friend earlier today, in which we discussed whether fancying the protagonists of teen fiction is inappropriate if you only feel sixteen in your head, instead of old enough to be the character’s mother.)

To get back to my original point, though, Meg does become distinctly less interesting to me as the series progresses: by the time we get to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, she’s much blander and more domesticated than in the original book—and that’s fine, if Meg is seeking a comfortable domesticity. I like Meg enough that I want her to be happy outside the confines of the page.

But she doesn’t interest me as much.

I like Meg when she’s stroppy and intelligent in the first book.

I like Meg when she’s violent because she’s young and undiplomatic.

I like Meg when she’s uncertain about who and what she is—when she’s driven by the kind of incandescent fury at the unfairness and the brutality of life that she will shout defiance at the dictator who is over-powering even the most powerful people in her life.

And if all that leads her to a comfortable life with the lovely Calvin, then I’m happy for her.

But it’s still going to be A Wrinkle in Time that I come back to.

(Part one of this series is here and part two is here.)

For part three in this intermittent series, I’m looking at one of my favourite princesses: Princess Irene in George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872).

This is one that I read many, many years ago and keep coming back to—this and, to a much lesser extent, its sequel, The Princess and Curdie (1883). Like Lewis Carroll, Macdonald is one of my formative literary influences.

(On a slightly unrelated note, have I mentioned how much George Macdonald looks like Grigori Rasputin? Because it’s more than a little disturbing, that similarity. Every time I look at the page, I wonder whether someone’s uploaded a picture of Rasputin to Macdonald’s page for a laugh.)

None of that, of course, is relevant to a discussion of Princess Irene.

Part of what’s intriguing about Princess Irene is the fact that she’s the type of sheltered princess we so often deplore in fairy tales and mainstream fantasy: provided with all the good things in life, but locked in the castle away from the dangers of the world, under strict and severe supervision.

But she’s not simply locked away because she’s a princess. Her world actually is dangerous.

When the humans dispossess the goblins and drive the latter underground, we’re left with a world in a state of seething never-quite-actual civil war, and the princess—vulnerable in her age, in her gender, in her privileged position within her family—is the target of those tensions.

She’s at risk in three ways.

She’s at risk because she’s young, and therefore more vulnerable to attack than a grown woman would be—especially since the goblins are themselves of diminutive stature.

She’s at risk because she’s female: without the fact of her gender, the goblins would be unable to plot to marry her to their own prince (assuming that this fantasy kingdom doesn’t have unusually progressive marriage laws, which I think is a fair assumption, given the publication date).

And she’s at risk because she’s a princess: if she weren’t of the royal family, the goblins would have little if anything to gain from forcing her to marry their prince.

For these reasons, she is locked away—for her own safety. But her incarceration simply puts her at greater risk, because now she doesn’t know why the world is dangerous and she doesn’t know why she’s under threat.

So she wanders away at the first opportunity.

As any girl of spirit would do.

The reason Princess Irene is here—when she’s younger and certainly less bold than the other girls I have looked at, and the ones I will look at in future installments—is that she never uses her ignorance or her youth as an excuse for failure to act. (And she is both young and ignorant, neither of which she can help.) When she is in peril, she’s as brave (if less stroppy) than any of the other girls I admired as a girl reader.

Add that to Macdonald’s peculiar brand of whimsy, and I’ll always love this book more than At The Back of the North Wind (1871), no matter how sweet and lovable Diamond is.

First up, John Dickson Carr’s The Curse of the Bronze Lamp:

Hmm. Am I alone in thinking that this looks less like “John Dickson Carr writing as Carter Dickson” and more like “John Dickson Carr writing as Barbara Cartland”?

It’s not usually a sign that you’ve bought high-quality detective fiction when the heroine/victim (I haven’t read it yet, so she could be either, or both) is in soft focus on the front cover.

Also? That’s not a lamp. At least, I’m fairly sure that’s not a lamp—and I own a lamp shaped like a swan (as well as three-quarters of a lamp shaped like a panther). So I suppose it could be a TV lamp, like, say, some of these.

But the book was first published in 1945, which I believe is a decade or so before the big “TV lamp boom,” so I’m just going to go out on a limb and say, “That’s not a lamp. That’s a mask. You can tell the difference, because masks only light up under special circumstances. Like this. And I’m fairly sure that didn’t happen in 1945, either.”

Still, it’s one better than Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan: Keeper of the Keys:

My, but that’s an ugly cover!

What?

Oh, yes: it’s also bordering on the highly offensive. But, mostly, it’s just ugly.

Oh, and Earl Derr Biggers? If I have to go the trouble of looking you up on Wikipedia to make sure you’re just one man (and he is), then that suggests there’s something weird about how you’re formatting your name on the cover, here.

I’m also highly bewildered by the great detective’s speech patterns, as showcased in the blurb in the front of the book. (Nope, I haven’t read this one yet, either.)

For example:

Chan intercepted him and laid his hand on the host’s arm. Beyond Ward he saw frightened faces—Romano, Swan, Beaton, Dinsdale, Ireland, Cecile. “You are psychic, Mr. Ward,” Charlie said gravely. “Three days before the crime, you summon detective.”

Is it just me, or does this seem as though Charlie Chan, halfway through his speech, suddenly thought to himself, “Bugger, I forgot my ‘music-hall Oriental of the late nineteenth century’ patter. Best drop an article there, old chap”? Either that, or he’s comfortable with the definite article but has serious reservations about the indefinite article.

And, finally, the prize in my Lifeline Bookfest haul:

Enough said, really.

(And, yes: this is spoileriffic. But only in regards to the first twenty pages of the book. And that’s taking into account the fact that the narrative starts on page seven.)

1. Netherfield Park is on the market because the entire “household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead” (7).

2. Mr. Bingley “escaped London in a chaise and four just as the strange plague broke through the Manchester line” (7).

3. Mr. Bennet is reluctant to visit Mr Bingley because of the risk to the horses on the zombie-infested highways (8).

4. Mrs. Bennet’s “nerves” date back to “the first outbreak of the strange plague in her youth.” She’s not quite as silly as she seems; in the wake of the plague of the living dead, “she sought solace in the comfort of the traditions which now seemed mere trifles to others” (8).

5. In other words, “The business of Mr. Bennet’s life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennet’s was to get them married” (9).

6. Lydia, though the youngest Bennet sister, is “also the most proficient in the art of tempting the opposite sex” (10), which is blunt but accurate.

7. Mr. Darcy is quite the catch, not just because of his handsome face and handsome fortune, but also because “of his having slaughtered more than a thousand unmentionables since the fall of Cambridge” (12).

8. Mr. Darcy knows only one other woman, apart from Lizzy, “who wielded a dagger with such skill, such grace, and deadly accuracy” (14).

9. Sir William Lucas made his fortune crafting fine burial gowns, until the arrival of the strange plague of zombies: “Few thought it worth the expense to dress the dead in finery when they would only soil it upon crawling out of their graves” (18).

10. Lizzy admires her sister Mary’s skill in battle, but “she had always found her a trifle dull in relaxed company” (19).

Why aren’t you all reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?

(The first part in this series is here, along with my explanation for why the seemingly sexist title is not, in fact, sexist.)

In the first part, I looked at Laura Chant from The Changeover, but in this one, I want to look at Sophie Hatter, from Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle (1986).

Some disclaimer may be necessary here: I love Diana Wynne Jones. I’ve always loved Diana Wynne Jones. As far as I’m concerned, Diana Wynne Jones can do no wrong.

It’s also a great deal of fun to say “Diana Wynne Jones” over and over again.

And I love Howl’s Moving Castle: while I’ve never been disappointed by one of Diana Wynne Jones’s books—and I savour them, so I haven’t even read the two latest ones—this is one of my favourites.

But one thing that always strikes me about Sophie Hatter is how relatively damaged she is in the beginning of the book. “Damaged” is a word that has the ring of psychobabble about it, but I don’t think it’s too misplaced in a description of Sophie, who becomes paler and more tired across the opening chapters, until she’s even afraid of the crowds in the small market town in which she lives.

Sophie has a coherent worldview in which she is inevitably the least and last—at least, she thinks it’s coherent and plausible, and we are almost seduced into believing her, thanks to the tight third-person narration.

But Sophie’s is a worldview built on self-abnegation—almost martyrdom, though her marginalising of herself brings her no pleasures or benefits.

In the early pages of the novel, Sophie too readily takes on herself the thoughts and opinions of others: even when she trusts what she thinks are her own opinions, she’s drawing them from outside sources.

It’s also a world-view built on a narrow definition of genre. This is a magic kingdom, thinks Sophie, so the old, worn patterns of fairy stories and folk tales must come into play: how can I, as the eldest daughter of three, achieve anything noteworthy?

Sophie’s not the only one whose thinking is constrained by a certain narrow approach to genre—look how readily people believe in the wickedness of Wizard Howl.

But Sophie is the one who wears herself down by thinking in these patterns, and it takes a radical change in status and circumstance to break her of these patterns and show her where her strength lies—where her strength has always lain, though she didn’t know it herself and the first person to recognise it has no intention of sharing the information.

Well, it takes a radical change in status and circumstance—and the involvement of Wizard Howl.

I’ve never identified myself as a romantic (though I probably am) and I’m certainly not going to use this blog as a forum in which to argue that a woman can only really reach her full potential by standing behind and supporting a man.

But neither am I going to insist that all fictional women must stand alone and Sophie—the Sophie who break herself of the damaging patterns of thinking to which she holds in the beginning of the book—is never blind to Howl’s character.

Take this discussion she has with the hapless Abdullah in the sequel, Castle in the Air:

They were so high that the world below was out of sight. Abdullah had no trouble understanding Sophie’s terror. The carpet was sailing through dark emptiness, up and up, and Abdullah knew that if he had been alone he might have been screaming. “You talk, mighty mistress of magics,” he quavered. “Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours.”

Sophie’s teeth chattered, but she said proudly, “He’s the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he’d only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he’s sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly and you can’t pin him down to anything.”

“Indeed?” asked Abdullah. “Strange that you should speak so proudly of such a list of vices, most loving of ladies.”

“What do you mean—vices?” Sophie asked angrily. “I was just describing Howl.”

Castle in the Air. London: Methuen, 1990. 155-56.

That’s my girl, Sophie.

I was talking to a friend about this the other day, saying that it was one of the aspects of genre fiction that always appealed to me: that it is in children’s fantasy and science fiction (and by children, I mean what publishers call “young adults,” as well) that I found strong, independent girl protagonists.

And that’s essential for the development of a bookish girl, one who might be a feminist without really knowing at that stage what feminism entails.

Of course, the same is true for boys: if they’re fantasy readers, they need to see characters who aren’t just psychopaths with swords. And readers of both genders need to see strong characters of the opposite gender. So the point I’m trying to make here is not intended to be sexist or exclusive in any way.

But I’m more interested here in the girls of fantasy and science fiction, not least because of the point I’m about to make.

Successful film and television franchises tend to bring these books to new audiences. But when the books are filtered through other forms of media, characters who are or have been socially marginal often suffer. And it’s not just female characters, of course: think of the “whitening” of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

But the books are always there, no matter how manipulated, how poor, or how plain different the films might be.

So I’ve compiled a list, in nor particular order, of some of my favourite strong girls from children’s fantasy and science fiction—and I’ve left out Baum’s Dorothy (about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog) and Carroll’s Alice (about whom cleverer people than I have written).

It was going to be just a bullet-pointed list, but then I started writing more and more about the first girl on the list, and I thought, “Well, I haven’t bored people with a series in a while.”

So now it’s a series, the first part of which looks at Laura Chant, in New Zealand author Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover (1984).

This is the book that started the discussion I mentioned above: I’d never read it—though I have a feeling that I might have read other Mahy books, in my dim and distant childhood—while my friend said that it was for her, as a child, the first book that made her feel she too could be powerful and achieve great things.

All that is centred on Laura Chant.

Laura exists in a world of dangers, but the dangers aren’t all magical or supernatural. Laura moves through a relatively small, relatively new suburb, one that exists in an uneasy state that we are still seeing in newer suburbs: bored teenagers, trapped by their youth and the comparative distance of the city—it’s always so far away, when one has no transport. (Running through this book, for example, is the younger teenager’s admiration for those older students who have access to their parent’s cars. The fact that a boy might be worth going out with just because he has access to his mum’s car is a moment that so effectively captures the spatial limitations of the teenage years.)

So the teens and the young men who can’t find employment despite the city’s growth gather in gangs, which may not intend violence but nevertheless present an implicit threat to those weaker or more liminal than the gangs themselves—especially when the situation does, on occasion, spill over into actual violence.

In one scene early in the book, Laura, walking through the suburbs at night, remembers these acts of violence, and moves along the edges of shadows, anxious not to put herself in plain sight or to step fully into shadow where others may be hiding.

This liminality is echoed in her age: fourteen, and still, she says, unfamiliar with the new body that has recently replaced her childish form.

It’s echoed in her appearance: she’s distinct from her blonde mother and baby brother since her genes, like those of her absent father, are paying homage to a Polynesian ancestor among her great-grandfathers.

It’s echoed in her position between the supernatural and natural worlds: she’s sensitive, but it’s not a power over which she has any control, and its manifestations only makes her feel more separate from everyday life, especially since it’s not an experience she can ever explain to anyone. She tries—unlike so many young girls in fantasies set in the contemporary world, she talks about her abilities. And people listen. But they can’t understand.

When it becomes apparent that her sensitivity could lead to more active powers, the experience of unlocking these is also evoked in terms of liminality: walking through a shadow of the world, she sees brambles that are also herself, and books that are also trees—or are the trees also books?

But her liminality is not weakness: she does walk through the night and she does walk through dangers—and though she says she’s uncertain of her new body, she holds herself intact and she holds her own, whether encounters are implicitly or explicitly threatening.

When, by the end of the book, she grows into the face (and the self) that was promised to her in the beginning, we are none of us surprised.

Why, yes: I have spent the afternoon adding more books into Delicious Library. This time, I hit a patch of girls’ detective stories (my other guilty pleasure, along with girls’ school stories), and it occurred to me that more modern reprints of the old classics tend to lack most of the charm of the 1970s’ hardbacks.

It’s partly the format: I loved the hardbacks when I was a child, because they felt like real books to me.

But it’s partly the comparatively hideous cover illustrations (and I realise, as I say that, that the 1970s’ covers were hideous in their own way).

But take this 1974 edition of Nancy Drew’s The Moonstone Castle Mystery:

It’s true: Nancy does look disturbingly like Grease‘s Rizzo in a bad wig here. But other than that, the cover has everything you could ask for. Girl detective in a prominent position! Easily identifiable best friends (sporty brunette) George and (plump blonde) Bess! Person who is possibly Carson Drew in a suitably distant position! Looming castle! Man who may or may not actually be a statue! Whistler’s mother!

What more could you need?

Compare that to this 2000 edition of a brand new Nancy Drew adventure, The Mystery in Tornado Alley:

Hmm. I can’t even tell which one of these blonde girls is Nancy. I’ll assume it’s the one in the pink polo neck, but where’s my red-headed girl detective? And if that girl next to her is plump, boy-chasing Bess, I’m going to be more annoyed than I was by the fact that when they re-jigged the Hardy Boys mysteries, the first book showed them investigating the death of faithful long-time girlfriend Iola Martin in a car-bombing.

(For the record, I was quite annoyed about that.)

Actually, the more I look at this, the more questions come to mind:

• Why is Nancy wearing those hideous high-waisted shorts, at least five years after they were in fashion?
• Has she realised that if she’s that close to the tornado, she’s probably dead already (in a metaphorical “Achilleus at the end of The Iliad“ way, rather than actual zombie fashion, of course)?
• Why is she gasping in horror and staring off to her left when the tornado is actually behind her?
• Shouldn’t the tagline read “Nancy is swept into a tornado of danger”? Because, according to Wikipedia, a tornado is really a specific subset of the broader category that is whirlwind, so I suppose the pun works, but it just seems a little weak. Much like some whirlwinds.

And the publishing gap between reprints doesn’t always have to be broad for the covers to take a sharp dip in quality/amusement value. Take this 1975 edition of the Dana Girls’ Winking Ruby Mystery. (The Dana Girls were an attempt to cash in on the success of Nancy Drew: they were published under the same pseudonym as the Nancy Drew books—Carolyn Keene—and this was their twelfth adventure.)

Honestly? I love this cover, around which I constructed the following imaginary conversation:

LOUISE DANA: Heavens! The idol!
JEAN DANA: Louise, why am I holding this . . . well, I don’t know what kind of tool this is, actually.
LOUISE DANA: Its eye! It’s a ruby!
JEAN DANA: Couldn’t I at least have the shovel? At least I know what’s that’s called. Or is that a spade? Should I call that a spade?
LOUISE DANA: But one of the eyes is missing!
JEAN DANA: I mean, anyone can see by comparing my lustrous blonde locks to your pixie cut that I’m not the tomboy in this family.
LOUISE DANA: Someone has been here before us!
JEAN DANA: Fine. Don’t listen to me. I’m just going to stand here and practice my sultry face.

Compare that to this 1981 edition of Mystery of the Stone Tiger:

Well, Jean still looks intensely bored. But now Louise’s expression says nothing so much as, “What was that?! Did I just walk through a spider’s web? Is the spider on me? Get it off, get it off, get it off, get it off!”

The vampire in the background is fairly awesome, I suppose. But I remain unconvinced by that overgrown garden—give me the apparently post-apocalyptic setting of The Winking Ruby Mystery any day!

To celebrate not having any marking to do for the first time since week two, I decided to carry on adding books to my Delicious Library database.

I should, in retrospect, have settled for sleeping on the sofa while pretending to re-read an Agatha Christie novel that I’ve already read, since it took me six hours to catalogue two shelves’ worth of books.

But the upside is that it did remind me of some truly disturbing book covers lurking in there.

In the last post, the books themselves were cheesy. The semi-tragic aspect of these books is that they aren’t all cheesy, but their covers most definitely are.

And you don’t get much cheesier than 1970s’ science fiction:

And the terrifying thing I learnt when Googling this book is that this isn’t even the cheesiest cover available. I’m remarkably lucky, I feel, that I don’t have this cover instead:

Except—well, at least in the second one both protagonists are equally naked.

Then there’s one of my disturbingly large number of copies of Jane Austen’s Emma:

I did consider checking whether that bonnet is historically accurate or not, but I’m just not that dedicated. I will venture an entirely uneducated guess that the pink ruff she’s sporting was not a common item of clothing in the Regency period, though.

Still, Austen got off lightly compared to Sir Walter Scott:

I’ll be honest: this cover kills me. No one’s going to lost sight of these two on the battlefield! And while I can perhaps see—by squinting and exercising an over-active imagination—that the knight on the left has feathers on his helmet, no amount of squinting will perform the same service for the knight on the right. I’m forced to assume that he topped his helmet with an intricately folded crocheted scarf.

And science fiction isn’t the only genre that suffers from bad covers, of course:

I’m particularly enamoured of the gold text on that one, but let’s have a closer look at the protagonists, shall we?

They seem to be looking at each other longingly, but the more I look at the expression on his face and the position of his torso, the more convinced I become that she’s actually just dislocated his shoulder.

Well, some of the cheesiest books on my shelves, anyway. (This post brought to you in the wake of the cheesiest television event of the year, the Eurovision song contest.)

Some of the books are partly cheesy (the headscarf!):

And partly surreal—why is the most significant event in the narrative the moment when Robin checks her friend’s wristwatch by the light of her torch?

And is it just me, or does it look as though that cover’s missing a noun? I always want to ask, “The phantom what, Robin? The phantom what? If this were Nancy Drew, it would be a phantom stagecoach. Or maybe a phantom staircase. Or a clock. But just ‘a phantom’ seems like you’re not trying hard enough, Robin.”

(Imagine how awesome it would be if it were The Mystery of The Phantom: Robin Kane, Girl Detective, versus The Ghost Who Walks.)

They do get cheesier, though:

Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter, are you on some kind of harness? You seem to be leaning at an extraordinary angle there. Still, if you are on a harness and yet still calm enough to be casually chewing your sunglasses, I do have to admire your sang-froid.

Don’t look now, but I think you’re about to be shot in the back by a cowboy.

And sometimes they are both cheesy and impossible to interpret:

Kim Aldritch is, and I quote the back of the book here, a “smart, beautiful secretary for an international insurance firm . . . living for the day she can become a full-fledged investigator for the firm . . . action-loving, curious, and courageous.”

And, yes: those are their ellipses. They clearly don’t believe in moderation—or really know what purpose ellipses serve.

What I find intellectually intriguing about these books—this raft of books published right down into the 1970s (this one is from 1972) that deal with working women—is the way in which they construct ambition and professionalism.

What I find amusing about them is the dodgy cover art. Is Kim coming up out of the water there? There does seem to be a boat in the bottom right corner. But then what angle is she on? And how? Why isn’t her hair wet? And why on earth would she apply so much make-up before scuba diving? For that matter, is she scuba diving? She doesn’t have a tank or a snorkel.

So many questions—and only two hundred pages of plot, the first ten of which are taken up by a description of Kim’s trip to work, on the subway, with her father.

Sometimes the books are just out and out cheesy:

The Donna Parker books are, it seems, popular enough to warrant their own Wikipedia page. I didn’t know that when I bought them, of course. I just liked the picture boards and the strangely freakish faces. (Plus, I have a possibly unhealthy obsession with depictions of female adolescence and female professionalism in young-adult fiction of the early to mid twentieth century.)

And I love his optimism: “Donna, if I give you this twig I just found on the ground, will you be my girlfriend?”

And sometimes the books involve Annette Funicello tail-gating some guy in a convertible:

Enough said, really.

You know, this blog post almost certainly isn’t going to be as interesting as that title suggests. Especially since the man in question is dead.

But yesterday, as I was moving a fabulous but rather disturbing picture of Hansel (as in “Hansel and Gretel”) interrogating two suspected witches (bless you for making that exist, James Jean), I realised that it had been hiding a volume of Casanova’s memoirs (volume four of an 1894 unabridged reprint in six volumes) that I’d forgotten I owned.

[I do own another set of Casanova’s memoirs, from Johns Hopkins University Press (also incomplete: I have only three of the six volumes). I have no intention, however, of posting a picture of their cover. It’s beautiful cover art, but it’s beautiful cover art focusing intently on a naked figure, and this isn’t that kind of blog, despite what the odd Google search suggests.]

No, it’s the cover of this solitary volume that makes me suspect that Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, had he not inconveniently died in 1798, might be having stern words with his publicist once this arrived on his doorstep:

I’ve slightly distracted myself, now, by wondering just how Casanova might fit into modern society. (He would have a publicist, wouldn’t he? And would probably be just another person famous for nothing more than being wealthy and leisured.) But leaving that aside for the time being, do you think he’d be pleased with this cover?

He doesn’t really look like a man whom—assuming, for the purposes of the argument, that you eye men speculatively—you’d be likely to eye speculatively, does he?

I think it’s the hideously magnified eye.

Well, once we ignore the fact that he appears to be largely two-dimensional, and whatever it is that’s going on with his lips there, and the fact that his cheekbones and chin look like they could cause some serious damage to the bed linen if he rolls over in his sleep—once you move past those issues, I think it’s the hideously magnified eye that’s the most disturbing factor.

I understand that enormous eyes are part of the reason why baby animals are appealing—and I’ve heard the argument (somewhere, many moons ago) that the appealing, exaggerated facial features of young mammals are helpful in triggering the protective instincts of the adult of the species.

But surely that doesn’t apply to Casanova, does it?

Maybe that’s the true secret of his success: perhaps eighteenth-century women were irresistibly attracted to men who looked like bush babies?

It’s one of the great mysteries of my bookshelves.

Of course, I’ve done this before: no sooner had I started to read L. Frank Baum’s books again, then you were subjected to a series of posts on him and on John R. Neill’s illustrations to the later books. What can I say? This blog is a fickle creature.

But I was thinking at the end of the last post that I really do like the Dean illustrations to Enid Blyton’s Naughtiest Girl series. I have no idea who drew them: no illustrator is listed on either my 1980s’ or my 1990s’ Dean editions. But I do find them beautiful and I was wondering why.

I can’t say this is the only reason why I like them (apart from on aesthetic grounds), but I suspect the main reason is that they concisely capture the idea of Whyteleafe School as a child’s world, where adults are teachers but rarely authority figures—and, indeed, appear remarkably rarely as teachers, since the books concentrate more on the process of socialisation than that of education.

This idea of a child world isn’t unique to Blyton: it reminds me of both Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum, where in both cases the child enters a world in which everything—buildings, landscape, other people—is sized to them, so that they can move through it as freely as adults move through this one. (Though this is more true of the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where the Munchkins are child size, than it is of the film.) And it isn’t unique this these three works among Blyton’s prodigious output: much the same phenomenon is evident in the Faraway Tree books.

But it is unique in my experience among school stories, and these illustrations capture it in detail.

They show a world in which work is the province of children:

(Even the cows there seem to be on the small side! Jerseys rather than Friesians, perhaps?)

A world where children socialise with one another, independent of adult involvement (and, of course, the fact that this is Blyton’s sole co-educational boarding school helps with that association):

They show a world in which adults rarely appear, even as authority figures. Instead, the authority figures are slightly older children, such as Rita the head girl:

They show a world in which children are deemed competent to deal with disasters (though some children are more competent than others, or Elizabeth would never have lit this fire in John’s absence, and certainly not when the wind was likely to blow it over the woodshed. Perhaps she saw something nasty in there?):

And the idealised child world of these illustrations is more obvious when you compare them with the illustrations of an earlier edition. I have a 1952 Angus and Robertson edition of the final book, The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor. And the striking thing about this edition is that the children are presented as very much more adult.

This is the more striking in instances where the same scenario occurs across more than one book.

As in the case where Elizabeth shops for her ill-thought-out surprise birthday for Joan in The Naughtiest Girl At School:

Compared to the spoilt Arabella refusing to pool her money and buying expensive chocolates in The Naughtiest Girl Is A Monitor:

Or Elizabeth being greeted at the railway station by friends in The Naughtiest Girl Again (and, once again, note the absence of adults):

Versus the same scene at the beginning of The Naughtiest Girl Is A Monitor:

Call me old-fashioned, but I much prefer the child protagonists of the Dean illustrations to the oddly ageless ones that Angus and Robertson commissioned for the 1950s.

In the earlier post on ugly 1970s’ book covers for girls’ school stories, we got to talking about ugly 1980s’ and 1990s’ covers.

And I thought, “Wait, I have some of those!” And so here they are.

Actually, this one isn’t ugly, as such:

But can you imagine the teachers at Malory Towers putting up with such sloppiness? Particularly the hair: I remember distinctly that in this actual book, Gwendoline has her hair tied into pigtails by Matron because it ends up falling around her ears—much like the hair of that girl second from the right.

Plus, I really don’t see the point of updating the covers when the story inside is still so intensely 1940s.

But with this next one, the cover is very much of its time. The book was published in 1984:

And, wow, but that’s one 1980s’ cover. The sweatband! The random aeroplane (with speed lines)! The purple kneesocks! And what I love most about this is the fact that their hockey team is called the Trebizon Tramps. It may have been a simpler time, but that’s not actually that recent a slang term.

I have a later version of this book, too, from 1988:

I don’t know which is worse, but I do know there’s something seriously wrong with the thighs on that girl on the left. And I love the fact that the girls have all been rendered practically indistinguishable, despite the fact that they’re different nationalities.

ME: Honey, guess the nationality of these girls.
NICK: Eastern European.
ME: Really?
NICK: No. I can’t tell!
ME: The one on the right is Afro-Caribbean.
NICK: Wow.

That about sums it up.

But this one from 1995, is by far the ugliest of all:

I mean, that is just hideous, isn’t it? I see no redeeming characteristics at all—and I think that boy on the left has just had his neck snapped by the kid behind him. This is The Naughtiest Girl Again with vampires. (Yes, I associate neck-snapping exclusively with vampires. Blame Buffy.)

And it’s a shame, really, because it’s a Dean edition, and the Dean editions from the mid-1980s, when I first read them, were actually rather cute:

Plus, this terribly ugly one still has the original (Dean) illustrations, and I’ve always thought the line drawings for the Naughtiest Girl series were beautiful:

Certainly more beautiful than that revolting cover.

And still continuing Random Weirdness from Girls’ School Stories weekend on the Circulating Library.

(Don’t worry: I have no intention of running through all 132 books. Well, maybe. No, probably not.)

This frontispiece from Ierne (yes, Ierne) L. Plunket’s The Dare Club neatly encapsulates the difficulties of being a teenage girl struggling through adolescence in an all-female, highly regimented environment:

In other words, at any moment your peers might knock your hat off and attempt to suffocate you with a garishly patterned silk scarf. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

And, in fact, The Dare Club, as one of the weirdest books on my shelf, gets a second mention in this series. This illustration is from the cover:

I’m going to do the illustrator the favour of assuming that this is some sort of lottery, but it looks as though the girl’s going into a trance over that hat. Perhaps they misplaced the ouija board, and are practicing a rough-and-ready form of divination with Scrabble tiles?

I have no idea what’s happening on the cover of Mrs Noah here:

Given that a cursory glance at my shelves reveals an improbably high number of illustrations showing schoolgirls being tied up by their peers, I’m increasing glad that I wasn’t a boarder at my semi-boarding school.

This one’s the frontispiece from W. E. Eastways’s Christine of the Fourth:

The actual caption is “‘You think you have the right to run everyone’s lives,’ flashed Christine.” But given that Christine’s expression is one of mild bewilderment rather than anger, I suspect a better caption would be, “Um, madam? I think your wedding might be in the other hall.”

And this frontispiece from Marjorie Taylor’s The Highland School is even more bewildering:

The caption reads “‘Never mind about that just now. I want to talk to you two,’ said Janet curtly.”

But every time I look at it, I’m visited by the overwhelming impulse to shout, “No capes!”

Continuing the Random Weirdness from Girls’ School Stories weekend on the Circulating Library.

These ones aren’t even mildly suggestive, like the last set. They’re just out-and-out odd, which is, frankly, how I like my school stories.

This one’s from St Margaret’s Trials and Triumphs, the last in Helen S. Humphries’s mildly religious school series.

Well, I say “mildly religious,” but the first book, Margaret the Rebel, is advertised on the back of this one with the following blurb:

Margaret Vincent had been the spoiled darling of her widowed mother. Consequently, when her mother marries again Margaret is furious and hates everything connected with her stepfather. At school Margaret is against everyone, but, fortunately, she has an understanding headmistress and form-mistress, and through them she is led to the Savior.

So “mildly” might have been understating it. They’re less religious than the Glendorran series, though, in which Wendy copes with a school whose inhabitants are such heathens that they smoke out of the dormitory windows. And no, I’m not joking about that.

So, St Margaret’s Trials and Triumphs:

Doesn’t seem that weird, you say? What I love is that the girl didn’t bother to remove her blazer before she leapt into the pond. Sure, a small child’s life was in danger, but, honestly, where’s the pride in the uniform? When Elizabeth did the same thing in The Naughtiest Girl Is A Monitor, she took off her blazer and her shoes and stockings, which is how the child’s wealthy father didn’t know who the rescuer was.

And, yes, I can just recite plot points from Enid Blyton novels off the top of my head. It’s a gift.

Methinks the St Margaret’s girl here wants some school branding prominently visible in the inevitable newspaper photographs.

Of course, it’s less disturbing than this illustration from Susan Ann Rice’s Form 2A At Larkhill:

Yes, she has stitched her finger to whatever garment she’s making in Home Economics. And, yes, this is the frontispiece to the book—of all the available scenes, the editors thought this was the one that best illustrated the book.

I’m assuming it takes place in chapter three, “Excitement in the Needlework Room,” but it gives me a poor impression of Larkhill in general and its Home Economics teachers in particular.

Pamela Hinkson’s Patsey At School is a different case altogether:

This is a school story, it’s just a school story masquerading as an early Edwardian melodrama. This could be easily captioned “Dead, and never called me mother!” or “Freedom I can promise myself, for who can chain or imprison the soul?”

The fact that it’s actually captioned “It was awfully wicked of you to do it, of course” doesn’t really clear up the confusion.

And I have absolutely no idea what’s happening in the cover to Elizabeth Tarrant’s Crisis At Cardinal:

I presume the crisis is that the students are being menaced by grotesquely oversized jewelry that when you look at it closely appears to be looking back at you.

It doesn’t help that, while I think the girl is looking back at the trio of girls on the right-hand side of the cover, it looks as though she’s thinking, “Damn! Is that brooch still following me?”