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: The Convictions of John Delahunt: A Story of Murder, Andrew Hughes (2013)

In today’s post I’m considering whether Neo-Victorian writing is simply a sub-genre of historical fiction through blogging about Irish writer Andrew Hughes’s debut novel, published in 2013, The Convictions of John Delahunt: A Story of Murder.

The pure definition of ‘historical fiction’ is a novel, or other work, where ‘the plot takes place in a setting located in the past’. Reading this, the texts I’ve looked at previously as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series – Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night and John Harding’s Florence and Giles – and Hughes’s novel definitely all fall into this genre.

The Convictions of John Delahunt: A Story of Murder (2013)

However, it is very noticeable that, in the case of the Cox and Harding, other important elements, which we’ve come to expect from historical fiction (at all levels of quality), are missing. First, there is the inclusion (or here exclusion) of actual historical figures. A key tenant of historical writing has been to offer a new perspective on famous historical events, or to educate the reader about events and/or people whose stories have previously been ignored. While The Meaning of Night uses the conceit of a newly discovered manuscript (labelled ‘Fiction?’), none of its events or characters have basis in truth. The novel is an escapist fantasy, and it fits self-consciously into the traditions of Victorian literary sensationism. Florence and Giles is even more indebted to a literary (rather than an historical) inheritance, as it is a reworking of a Henry James plot. There are no ‘real’ characters here – only layer upon layer of fiction and artistic response.

Hughes’s project, however, is very different. John Delahunt was a real person, hanged for the murder of Thomas Maguire (a real child) in Dublin in 1841. Hughes’s project is far removed from Cox’s or Harding’s – it’s about composing a compelling narrative from the details we know of Delahunt’s life, combined with his own imaginative embellishments. What’s more, it is presumed (correctly!) that the reader’s first response on finishing the novel will be to want to learn more about the text’s veracity – an Afterward supplies the answers we may have wondered about throughout and also adds the information (for example about the execution) which Delahunt (the narrator) cannot, in some ways acting not as a note on the text, but as the novel’s final chapter.

Along with the insertion of real people, historical fiction is also often rich in detail about the times in which it is set. Of the three novels, again The Convictions fits into this mould most comfortably. Having worked as an archivist and previously published a book on nineteenth-century Dubliners (Lives Less Ordinary: Dulin’s Fitzwilliam Square, 1798-1922), Hughes has a lot of knowledge of the period to draw upon. He does this very skilfully, with a light touch, suggesting the political milieu of the time without turning what is a suspenseful crime novel into a political history, and weaving details of forgotten ways of living seamlessly into the plot. One of the most effective passages is the partial description of a backstreet abortion, yet Delahunt’s wife’s struggles with the termination and contraception don’t just add colour – they’re integral to the story.

Andrew Hughes (1979 - )

Some details were occasionally overwhelming (although they may well be welcome to readers with a better grasp than me of Dublin’s geography!) and the inclusion of other ‘real’ characters from the period (e.g. Professor Lloyd and Dr Moore), as outlined in the Afterward, seems more like an in-joke for the author than of substantive benefit to the text. But largely, Hughes does a wonderful job of propelling us into the city as it stood in the 1840s and informing us about its society, without ever coming off as didactic.

While Florence and Giles is almost totally free from this kind of factual peppering, the level of detail in The Meaning of Night was also extraordinary, but occasionally more gratuitous than it comes off in The Convictions. For me, the distinction comes from whether there is a need to introduce a detail. (Does it advance the plot? Does it explain a character’s motivation?). Without a reason behind each detail, it risks changing the tenure of the novel, making it into some sort of immersive time travel, rather than a narrative entertainment.

So where does this leave our categorisation and definition of Neo-Victorianism? Some of the concerns of the movement I’ve discussed in previous posts (e.g. the prioritisation of previously repressed voices and the self-aware revisitation of standard Victorian literary tropes from a modern perspective) suggest something more is going on here than a spate of historical novels set in the Victorian period. If we take Neo-Victorianism as combining nineteenth-century setting with twenty-first century sensibilities and preoccupations, there is very much a space for The Convictions in this category. Hughes’s first novel is ‘historical’, but, in its very modern interrogations of personhood, morality, sexual relationships, power, and corruption, it has a strong claim to ‘Neo-Victorianism’ too.

Which novel should the Secret Victorianist read next as part of her Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: In a Glass Darkly, Sheridan Le Fanu (1897)

This collection of short stories from Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu varies in length, narration and style. They deal with vampires in Styria, legal malpractice in London, a strange man stalking his victim through the streets of Dublin. What unites them all is play with the supernatural and uncanny. Initial scepticism and a trust in the ‘scientific’ is increasingly unsettled and undermined as Le Fanu leaves us with no clear answers. These are ‘ghost’ stories which linger both in their telling and in their effect. Don’t expect horror movie shocks and twists. But draw up to the fireside this December to be more disturbed than entertained.

Sheridan Le Fanu

For general readers: In a Glass Darkly is an uneven experience and its strange narrative structure, as a series of loosely connected stories collected by a shadowy doctor (Dr Hesselius), may be off-putting to readers used to more traditional Victorian novels, but there is much here to interest a non-academic audience. The scepticism about the supernatural which pervades the novel, almost in spite of its content, is readily recognisable to modern reader, while the connection between the conscience or subconscious and the onset of hallucination and mania which the stories often suggest is one which is easily recognisable, even if this means the stories lose something of their ground-breaking edge. ‘Carmilla’ will probably have the widest popular appeal, dealing as it does with a form of vampirism with overtly erotic lesbian overtones. It’s the kind of story which confounds common misconceptions about the ‘Victorian’. The other longer story, ‘The Room at the Dragon Volant’, has similar character interest, especially given its hero’s actions are far from morally uncomplicated.

For students: As well as being an interesting read, ‘Carmilla’ will also be of interest to students of the Gothic and Bram Stoker in particular, predating as it does Dracula (1897), for which it provided some inspiration. Those interested in the impact of Swedenborgism on literature should turn to ‘Green Tea’, the first story in the volume, where the apparition of a phantom monkey also suggests interesting Darwinian contexts. And comparison with Charles Dickens’s short stories could also work, both in terms of structure (see my earlier discussion of MrsLirriper) and in some cases content – the judgement undergone by Justice Harbottle here makes the ghostly apparition which appear to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol seem almost cuddly.

What should the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Theatre Review: An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen, Gate Theatre, Dublin

Henrik Ibsen is one of those writers you can cite when people don’t believe nineteenth-century literature is relevant to today. ‘Look!’ you can cry, ‘political commentary, analysis of gender constructs, even discussion of venereal disease!’ But the problem with director Wayne Jordan’s production of An Enemy of the People at the Gate Theatre in Dublin is that it hammers home this relevance at expense of all else. Further difficulty is caused by the fact that the text used is Arthur Miller’s translation from the 1950s (the period suggested by Paul O’Mahony’s set and Joan O’Clery’s costumes). What exactly is the analogy here? Between fin-de-siècle Norway and Miller’s America in the time of McCarthyism? Or the latter and modern Ireland in the wake of financial crisis, ‘an inconceivable time when the many must take the consequences for the risks taken by a few’, as the director notes?

The Secret Victorianist goes to An Enemy of the People

 An Enemy of the People (1882) is the story of a man, Dr Stockmann, who thinks there is a problem with the water supply to the town’s therapeutic baths. His brother, Peter, who is Mayor, is worried about the economic impact of such a theory becoming public knowledge and so sets out to silence him.

The decision to highlight the play’s Scandinavian setting despite the obvious Americanisation of Miller’s script – on a linguistic and ideological level – was always going to be problematic and the result was a curious blend of preachiness and overstatement, which I hadn’t found in reading Christopher Hampton’s wonderful translation, with confusion as to what the play was actually preaching. Denis Conway’s Peter Stockmann was very much the villain to Declan Conlon’s heroic Dr Stockmann in a move which robbed Ibsen’s play of much of its subtlety and moral subjectivity. The journalists Billing (Mark Huberman) and Hovstad (Ronan Leahy)’s sexual interest in the doctor’s daughter Petra (Jill Harding) was also made much more overt from the outset, making the later revelation of their ulterior motives much less shocking and decidedly predictable.

Declan Conlon and Denis Conway in An Enemy of the People

 Throughout there was a feeling of being spoken down to, in a way which had much less to do with the original play I think, than with staging and delivery. It wasn’t only during the climactic town meeting that the audience felt lectured, and here our alignment with the crowd, as the citizens moved amongst us, felt ill thought through as the paucity of actors made their attack on the doctor far from intimidating. The irritating scene changes, in which suited men and women moved furniture officiously while glaring out at us against the noise of static interference on a radio, also felt heavy-handed, as the clever device by which the set increasingly narrowed the stage space available would have been enough to indicate the family’s increasing entrapment.

With a strong cast (particularly Bosco Hogan as Morten Kiil and Barry McGovern as Aslaksen), the whole production felt a little like a missed opportunity and it was disappointing that the implications of certain directorial decisions seemed to have been ignored. The successful commentary on women’s exclusion from political questions which earlier scenes in the Stockmann household had raised for instance was undercut by having one of the vocal citizens at the meeting be a woman. And the potentially fascist direction in which the doctor’s belief in a superior elite took his speech felt hurried over and unexplored, as the production celebrated his revolutionary spirit entirely uncritically.

Sheridan Smith in Hedda Gabler

 After seeing two wonderful Ibsen productions in London in the last year – A Doll’s House at the Young Vic and Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic – I was a little disappointed. If you want the real deal, and to appreciate Ibsen’s unflinching moral complexity, this play is one to read, and probably not in Miller’s translation. 

Dominic Rowan and Hattie Morahan in The Doll's House

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