2021: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Around this time a year ago, I published a retrospect on my 2020 reading. Now I’m back, a year on, with a similar post, looking back on the 60 books (10 more than the year before!) I read in 2021. 

In 2021, I read 45 novels and 15 works of non-fiction. I favored books by women writers, reading 49 books penned by women, 10 by men, and one mixed anthology. Ten of the books I read were by writers of color. And, unsurprisingly for a writer of historical fiction, “hist fic” remained my favorite genre, making up nearly half (26 books) of what I read this year.

Favorites

Just like last year, I’m chickening out and not crowning a favorite read of the year, but in no particular (okay alphabetical) order, here are my top five fiction recommendations:

Milkman, Anna Burns (2018)

An original, lyrical, Booker Prize-winning novel set in Northern Ireland (where I grew up)? Of course, I was going to love this book! Be warned: Milkman isn’t an easy read, but it’s a rewarding one.

The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue (2020)

We’re living through one pandemic, so do we really want to read about another? The answer is yes, but only if that book is Emma Donoghue’s story of the Spanish Flu, set in Dublin in 1918. A gritty insight into a nurse battling on a maternity ward as Europe is ravaged by war and disease, coupled with a queer love story, this novel is a winner for historical fiction fans. 

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

I also read Ishiguro’s newest release, Klara and the Sun (2021), this year. I enjoyed it too, but his 2005 novel of an English boarding school that isn’t quite what it seems wins my vote.

Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell (2020)

Everyone was raving about this novel about Shakespeare’s wife in 2020. I didn’t get to it until 2021, but believe the hype—this is one beautiful book!

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (2009)

I love a Gothic ghost story with a stylish historical background and a great twist. Above all, Sarah Waters is a great storyteller—expect to fly through this one. 

Feeling Arty?

One theme I noticed in my reading in 2021, was that I was very drawn to books that deal with other art forms beyond the literary. Here are some recommendations if you’re into…

Visual Arts:

Novels—Leonora in the Morning Light, Michaela Carter (2021); What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt (2002); The Improbability of Love, Hannah Rothschild (2015)

Non-Fiction—Old Mistresses, Rozsika Parker & Griselda Pollock (1982)

Dance:

Novel—The True Memoirs of Little K, Adrienne Sharp (2010)

Non-Fiction—Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans (2010)

Music:

Novels— Simon the Fiddler, Paulette Jiles (2020) (review here); Along the Infinite Sea, Beatriz Williams (2015)

Memoir—Sounds Like Titanic, Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman (2020)

Or Want to Feel Scared?

Another theme was books that deal with the strange, the spooky, and the downright frightening. In addition to The Little Stranger, which I wrote about above, I also read Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Mimi Matthews's gender-swapped retelling of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with a vampiric twist, John Eyre (2021) (review here), and Ghostly Tales: Spine-Chilling Stories of the Victorian Age (2017), an anthology of nineteenth-century ghost stories. 

For a survey of the horror genre, also check out Stephen King’s non-fiction book, Danse Macabre (1981). As someone who loves both The Sound of Music and horror movies, I couldn’t get behind everything King writes here, but his overview is well worth reading.

Discover Fascinating Lives

Finally, the biographies I read in 2021 are reflective of my interest in lesser spoken about historical figures, who I think led lives worth remembering. 

Join me by taking an interest in…

Denis Diderot, French philosopher, art critic and writer (1713-1784): I read Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, Andrew S. Curran (2019).

Danish father of fairytales, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875): I read Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, Jackie Wullschlager (2001).

French poet Theophile Gautier (1811-1872): I read Joanna Richardson’s 1959 biography, Theophile Gautier—Hist Life and Times.

His daughter, Judith Gautier (1845-1917), a poet, writer, and lover of Chinese culture: I read Joanna Richardson’s 1987 biography, Judith Gautier.

I’ll be back at the end of this year or the start of next with a summary of what I read in 2022. In the meantime, let me know if you have any reading recommendations for me. I’d love to know what books are on your nightstand. If you’re looking for a book to read, check out my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress (2020). And, remember, you can always contact me, here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Happy reading! 

Neo-Victorian Voices: Things in Jars, Jess Kidd (2020)

The crowded, murky streets of Victorian London. A detective. And a missing child. Pretty standard fare, you might think, for a historical mystery set in the nineteenth century, but Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars (2020), the latest novel under review in my Neo-Victorian Voices series, is anything but expected.

Things in Jars, Jess Kidd (2020)

First there’s her detective, Bridie—fearless, flame haired and ugly bonneted. Then there are the protagonist’s sidekicks—a seven-foot maid, with a penchant for a woman snake charmer, and a tattooed boxer, who may be either a ghost or a drug-induced hallucination. Christabel, the child Bridie has been employed to find, isn’t ordinary either. She has teeth like a pike. Snails, newts and other nasties trail after her. It’s said she can drown enemies even on dry land.

Things in Jars isn’t for the weak-hearted or stomached. But that doesn’t mean the novel offers only darkness. There’s a humour to the story, which is a wonderful complement to its macabre subjects, and an empathy to the shifting point of view, which plunges us into many characters’ motivations, feelings and desires, even those of a raven wheeling high above the scene. Kidd’s use of language is also astonishing. Her vocabulary is vast but her words always well chosen. Her Irish characters’ voices are expertly rendered—believable and lyrical without relying on cliché or non-standard spelling to convey dialect.

The fantastical elements of the story stood out for me in particular. I’m not a huge reader of historical fantasy, though I have reviewed a few favourites for this blog in the past (e.g. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus). But Kidd’s creatures are unique and genuinely uncanny, as unnerving as any creation straight from the pages of a nineteenth-century Gothic.

Things in Jars is a wonderful book to read if you want to stray outside your normal genre choices. The novel takes a familiar historical setting and makes it alien, gives us a satisfying conclusion to its central mystery while leaving us with more, and gives readers a creature of the ocean depths that belongs in neither The Little Mermaid, nor The Shape of Water.

Which novel would you like to see me review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on novels written in the twenty first century, but set in the nineteenth? Let me know, here, on Facebook, on Instagram or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you want to read about my novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which was edited by the same editor as Things in Jars, click here and/or sign up for my monthly newsletter below.

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Victorian Literature for Kids

Have you always loved nineteenth-century novels and want the same for your children? Or did you learn to like literature later in life and want your kids to embrace classic literature earlier? In this post I’ll be giving you my top tips for getting children interested in Victorian writing and also suggesting a few things to avoid.

'A Life Well Spent', Charles West Cope (1862)

Foster a love of reading generally:

Presenting a seven year old, who isn’t in the habit of reading regularly, with a copy of Bleak House, is a bit like giving a six month old a steak. It’s not going to end well, however bright they are. So incorporate reading into children’s lives from early on. Make bedtime stories part of your night-time routine, give your kids books as gifts, and encourage them to read for fun and tell you what they enjoy about what they’re reading. At this stage, the amount kids read and how much they enjoy it is so much more important than being prescriptive about what they read.

Give them modern books which deal with Victorianism:

Nineteenth-century novels can be challenging because of the style in which they are written, more so than their content. Starting with contemporary novels and history books can introduce kids to some of the themes of Victorian writing and help them build up knowledge about the period, without dealing with difficult prose.

There are historical novels specifically written for children, like Jacqueline Wilson’s The Lottie Project (1997) and Hetty Feather (2010) and Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), and kids’ history books like Terry Deary’s Vile Victorians (1994) in the Horrible Histories series. Chat with them about differences they might have noticed between then and now. How was life different for boys and girls? What would life as a servant have been like? How did people travel and communicate with each other before cars and telephones? Appreciating lives very different from your own is a key reading skill and you’ll be encouraging critical engagement with texts as your children grow into more sophisticated readers.

'Teasing the Cat', William Henry Gore (c. 1900)

Read Victorian children’s literature:

Rather than diving straight in with Jane Eyre, when the time comes when you think your kids are ready to read nineteenth-century texts (or to have you read to them), turn to children’s literature. Books like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales (1835-1872), E. Nesbit’s The Treasure-Seekers (1899) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) have an enduring appeal for kids and, unlike many nineteenth-century texts, do not deal with themes (e.g. illegitimacy, murder, inheritance) which may be too adult for your children at this stage.

Nineteenth-century poetry written for kids, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), can also be a low commitment way to get your kids reading some older writing and increasing their familiarity with poetry.

Watch TV and film adaptations of famous novels:

There’s absolutely no rule that people should read famous texts before watching adaptations of them and, for kids, already having familiarity with a story can be invaluable when it comes to tackling harder texts. Watching together also gives you the opportunity to talk about what’s going on and pause whenever something isn’t clear. I recommend BBC mini-series, like North and South (2004), Pride and Prejudice (1994) and Bleak House (2005), for quality and digestibility.

'Storytime', Charles Haigh-Wood (1893)

And what not to do:

Don’t tell your kids there are books they ‘should’ read. Similarly, I’d avoid the term ‘classics’. Reading should be fun – not a chore – and pushing too hard can have the opposite effect. It’s already sadly very likely that kids will come to dislike set texts they’re made to study at school (see my post on secondary school English literature teaching here), so don’t let the same happen at home!

Don’t make a big deal about length and number of pages. Lots of Victorian novels are quite long and, for a while, the ability to boast about having read a 300-page book may be motivating. But it won’t last and focussing on length will make reading seem a drag.

I’d also avoid abridged versions of nineteenth-century novels which are often marketed for children. Truncated and butchered versions of great texts aren’t that great at all. If you don’t think your kids are ready for the full-length version, I’d simply read something else and come back to this one in a couple of years!

Are you a parent? Do you agree and do you have any other advice or book recommendations? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

The Secret Victorianist at Open House London

The Secret Victorianist at Leighton House

Last weekend, the Secret Victorianist enjoyed Open HouseLondon – two days when hundreds of London’s historic buildings are open to the public for free. The sheer number of properties to choose from is staggering, even when you limit yourself by period, but I avoided the chaos of the city centre and crowds and queues of Whitehall in favour of a civilised Saturday in Kensington. Here I looked around two nineteenth-century properties, important for their contents as well as their former occupants – 18 Stafford Terrace and the Leighton House Museum.

18 Stafford Terrace is a building stuck in time. The servants’ rooms are gone, but otherwise the house is much as it was when it was home to famous Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne and his wife Marion. The couple moved into the house in 1875 and lovingly furnished it with furniture and ornaments reflective of late nineteenth-century aestheticism. On Saturday a bustling costumed ‘housekeeper’ showed us round the property but unfortunately only two rooms were on display.

Stained glass panel, 18 Stafford Terrace

 Other treasures the house holds which weren’t on show on Open House weekend include Sambourne’s collections of photographs and photography equipment. Working to tight deadlines for his Punch cartoons, photographing people was Linley’s way of cataloguing potential subjects and he used the same technique to plan the sketches for his book illustrations - notably Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) and Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales (various). The Sambourne residence is beautiful, fascinating and familial – and well worth another visit on a quieter day.

Edward Linley Sambourne photograph for Little Mermaid illustration

The resulting illustration

 Leighton House on the other hand is grand and spacious –not kitted out like a home, like 18 Stafford Terrace. You enter an extravagant atrium – domed ceilings, Moroccan tiles, a water feature, a rich blue and turquoise colour scheme and even a stuffed peacock - and wander through rooms which are largely empty, except for the impressive collection of paintings – Frederic Leighton’s and some of his contemporaries’ – which lines the walls. A significant portion of the first floor is taken up by Lord Leighton’s incredible studio space – home to much of the art collection and large enough for working on the very biggest canvasses. In comparison to the grand entrance, massive studio and large garden, Leighton’s bedroom is small and plain, furnished much as it would have been at his death in 1896. The museum is a must-see for anyone interested in Victorian art.

Leighton House

 If you find yourself in London for Open House weekend in 2015, you should definitely check it out – the buildings featured range from historic to cutting edge, beautiful to functional, and are dotted throughout the city. And learning more about Edward Linley Sambourne or Frederic Leighton from visiting their houses would make a great day out throughout the year. 

Did you visit any London attractions on Open House weekend? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!