Miranda SeymourBesprekingen

For years, I kept hearing about this Jean Rhys and this novel Wide Sargasso Sea. I found a copy of the novel and finally read it, riveted. I loved her reimagining of the ‘mad wife’ in Jane Eyre, Bronte’s story turned into a social commentary about colonialism and the rejection of female sexuality.

That was twenty years or so ago. I knew nothing more about Rhys when I picked up this new biography, I Used To Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour. Her portrait of Rhys is unforgettable and complex, the story of a woman born too soon, who lived passionately and in seclusion, married unwisely for love, plummeted from wealth to poverty, and rose to fame to forgotten to lionized.

Seymour writes that “Rhys often said that she wrote about herself because that was all she knew,” and throughout the biography she demonstrates how Rhys’ characters were born of her experience, but also that they are born of Rhys’ imagination, and are not autobiographical clones. Rhys took what she knew, her Dominican childhood, her young adulthood as a chorus girl on tour, her bohemian life in Paris, her love affairs and marriages, and turned it into dark stories that publishers found too raw, unfit for a woman writer’s pen.

We met a woman who is damaged but determined, who bends to her weaknesses and shows incredible strength. Her beauty and charm lured men to want to possess her, then her violent temper dealt out blows. She walked away from an education to pursue the stage and yet wrote what the BBC identified as one of the ‘top 100 most influential novels.’

Her life was almost incomprehensibly complicated! If anyone truly lived, it was Rhys. Over her long life she went mad and discarded friends and men, hobnobbed with so many important people! Like so many Lost Generation writers she struggled with alcoholism, drug dependency and depression. She suffered accidents, underwent abortions, and was hospitalized for mental breakdown. No wonder she created unforgettable characters, women who contended with so much.

She was seventy-five years old when she published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Rhys was ‘rediscovered’ by a new generation, finally found financial security, and unwelcomed fame. To the end of her life, she took care of her appearance, this petit blue-eyed, once blond-haired octogenarian, with her pink and white wigs and fashionable colorful clothes.

You won’t always like Jean Rhys. But you will be impressed by her resilience and determination.

Now, to read the rest of her work…

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Biography

This is a dual biography of Annabella Milbanke and her daughter Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace is famous, and is the reason I wanted to read this book. Biographies of Ada don't talk much about her mother, other than to mention that she was married to Lord Byron, the marriage ended badly, and Annabella wanted to make sure that Ada didn't inherit her father's terrible qualities and therefore made sure she had good math tutors to keep her busy.

I'm sure that, like me, most readers who pick up this book will do so because they are interested in Ada. The author, however, is far more interested in Annabella. This can be a bit frustrating if you want to read about Ada, but lots of books have been written about Ada, and Annabella is actually a very interesting woman in her own right. Annabella very competently stood up for herself when it became clear that her marriage was a mistake and her husband was a madman. She consulted with lawyers to get out of the marriage, made sure she had clear legal grounds for doing so, and did everything in her power to secure the future of her daughter. She went on to become an education reformer, using her fortune to fund schools for poor children - she was decades ahead of her time in her ideas about education. She did encourage Ada to learn math, but also encouraged her to write poetry: she wanted to discourage any tendencies to madness or mercurialism that Ada might have inherited from her father, but she also encouraged Byron's good qualities in his daughter, including the incredible sense of imagination that made Ada into such a visionary.

The book tends to skim over Ada's relationship with Babbage, and assumes that the reader is more or less aware of Ada's contribution to the world of technology. Instead, it focuses on Ada's poor health, her relationships with friends and family, and her mercurial personality. If you're looking for analysis of why Ada is important, you will not find it in this book.

Ultimately, what Seymour strives to do in this book is to rescue Annabella's reputation: after her death, the world was still in love with Byron and Annabella had a reputation for being a horrible woman who couldn't appreciate what a wonderful man he was and who accused him of some unthinkable things. Seymour demonstrates convincingly that although Annabella could be stubborn and unforgiving, she was also generous, very intelligent, and wholly justified in leaving Byron (the relationship with Byron, full of incest, bouts of insanity, rape, and manipulation puts a lot of Gothic novels to shame).

The book tends to get bogged down in details... whole chapters are devoted to the development of friendships and business deals, and the events of those chapters are rarely placed in any context, so the reader is left to do their own analysis of why a particular friendship was worth including in such detail. This can make it tedious at times.

All in all, I'm glad I read this because it gives me a better understanding of who Ada was, and now I am aware of what a fascinating person Annabella was and how Ada would not have been so accomplished without her mother's encouragement. I do wish the book had been shorter and included more analysis instead of detailed chronologies of events.½

History of Anglo-German relations, told through the stories of individual families

Finally a definitive, accurate biography of a grand dame. Name almost any writer, poet, artist, politician, Bloomsberry, aristocrat from `1905-1938 and you will find a connection to Ottoline. Her portrait was painted by more artists, she was caricatured and pilloried in more novels by now famous writers in books that went on to become classics, her name appears in more biographies and her biography is filled with the names of people she helped before they became famous. She was one of a kind. This particular biography was made possible by the availability of the 2500 letters to her from Bertrand Russell, and all her personal papers including the letters exchanged with Lytton Strachey. The truth set against the scurrilous attacks on her by the Bloomsberries in their correspondence that was used in previous accounts of her life as fact. She deserves her place in history. Tilda Swinton played her in the 1993 movie Wittgenstein as flamboyant and colourful.

I'm fascinated by Byron, his wife, and daughter, but I couldn't get into this book. I found the author's writing style to be confusing.

Sympathetic but reasonable portrait of a woman whose only claims to fame are marrying ill-advisedly and giving birth to "Lord Byron's daughter, his rare, extraordinary child," featured in the second half of the book, the brilliant, eccentric, quicksilver Ada. It's interesting, though, that the most compelling figure here remains Byron, present even when absent from the text. His shadow down the centuries is long.

Interesting perspective on Augusta, addressing questions that always seem to want answering. Also interesting on the posthumous trashing of Lady B's reputation following the calamitous publication of Stowe's gossipy Vindicated.

Not much new here, but engagingly recounted.½

England and Germany have been both close allies and bitter enemies over the past two hundred years. In this book Seymour looks at the parallel histories of two great nations through the lives of a series of interesting and sometimes outrageous characters whose stories encompass this relationship.



I thoroughly enjoyed this book because although the history was known, the experiences made it seem so much more grounded in reality. In particular the sufferings of the German nationals during the Second World War and the antics of the naive youth of the 1930s who visited Germany and became entranced by Hitler.

Little vignettes of extraordinary lives bring history alive!

"The life of two countries (England and Germany) in many stories" is an apt sub-title for this book by Miranda Seymour which is rich in anecdotes.

In talking about the relationship between England and Germany, the author set out originally to write about the years between the two world wars, but found herself drawn to a much earlier history with an extraordinary cast of characters from both countries, including Prince Pueckler-Muskau and Lucie, Theodor Fontane, Sir Edward Goschen, Prince Lichnowsky, Margot Asquith, Daisy Pless and Hansel, Tisa Schulenburg, Hubert Herkomer and James Boswell.

We, the readers, are treated to anecdotes about all of these and many other people who influenced and were affected by the relationship between the two countries.

Miranda Seymour's book contains new material and surprises on nearly every page. I enjoyed it, and I'm sure that anyone else who is interested in the English view of Germany and the German view of England would come away with a wealth of new knowledge from reading it.

A lot of history, a lot of interesting people.

The about this book is that I liked some of the chapters and some not so much. The problem I had with some chapters is that the writing style was too much at once. It seemed like the author wanted to put in a lot of information and by doing that she jumped from one interesting person to another one and to another one and to another one, and then back to the first one.

So with those chapters I would have wanted less and more. Less people, and more information about the people in the book. I am like that, I always want more and here there were not enough.

Ok to the chapters I liked then, they were more fleshed out but I would have wanted even more. As I said there are A LOT of people mentioned in this book and some interesting ones were about Queen Victoria and her children. And the Winter Queen.

For the historical non-fiction lover this is a true treasure. 300 years of history between Germany and England. A lot of people that were new to me, some I did not know a lot about and all the rest. And they sure wanted to better the relationship between the countries.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a passionately political woman; her essays [b:A Vindication of the Rights of Man|224388|A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men|Mary Wollstonecraft|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172856084s/224388.jpg|217315] and its follow up, [b:A Vindication of the Rights of Woman|224387|A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin Classics)|Mary Wollstonecraft|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172856084s/224387.jpg|1938850], made her justly famous, particularly in intellectual circles. After a disastrous love affair (from which issued [b:A Short Residence in Sweden Norway and Denmark|1965539|Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark|Mary Wollstonecraft|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1190991747s/1965539.jpg|2479348] and her natural daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft fell in love with William Godwin. Godwin was well known himself, particularly for [b:Enquiry concerning Political Justice|1227184|Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness|William Godwin|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg|2785985]. Although neither believed in marriage, when Wollstonecraft found herself pregnant they decided to marry to make their child's life easier. And thus, a few months after her parents' marriage, Mary Godwin was born. Wollstonecraft died a few agonized days later, probably of peurperal fever.

Four years later, Godwin married Mary Jane Devereux/Vial/Clairmont (she went by a number of different names; she was actually an unwed mother masquerading as a widow), who had children of her own. And thus does Jane Clairmont, later called Claire Clairmont, enter the story. All the little girls and boys grew up in a household full of books and very short on money.

One day, the handsome Percy Shelley entered their lives. 20, a poet, given to extravagant exaggerations about his own actions and the persecution he suffered, Shelley seemed like a savior to Godwin (who expected to get a great deal of money from his aristocratic patron) and Godwin's daughters (who viewed their new friend rather more romantically). Shortly thereafter, Shelley fell in love with 16 year old Mary Godwin (many say for her parentage as well as for her beauty and wit) and, with Jane/Claire Clairmont's help, the girls ran off with him. Of course, Shelley was married at the time, to another teenage girl, and she was pregnant with his second child. But no matter!

Shelley, Mary and Jane/Claire swept across Europe, constantly impoverished but flush with excitement and the romance of it all. A tense triangle sprang up amongst them--Mary and Shelley were in love, but Jane/Claire felt left out, and Shelley liked that she was so sensitive and easily persuaded. Eventually, they ran out of money and returned to England, where they found themselves utterly ostracized. Not even Mary's family would see her, despite their own pasts. Mary's first child was born and died, shortly followed by the birth of another child. She, Shelley and Claire retreated from London for their health, and fell in for a short time with the notorious Lord Byron. Claire had a brief, lopsided affair with him that left her pregnant and Byron annoyed. Meanwhile, Mary had begun to write her greatest work, [b:Frankenstein|18490|Frankenstein|Mary Shelley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255576965s/18490.jpg|4836639]. This was also a period of tragedy: no sooner had they returned to England than Mary's half-sister Fanny committed suicide in a little anonymous room, and shortly thereafter Shelley's wife Harriet drowned herself. Less than two weeks later, Mary and Shelley were married.

They continued to live much as they had, although Mary's social ostracization was somewhat lessened. Mary bore two more children in short succession, and then lost her son William and daughter Clara while in Italy. She continued writing, studying, translating while simultaneously leading a vivacious social life and producing good copies of her friends' writing. Shelley became distracted by another woman (the duplicitous Jane Williams, oh how I hate her)

And then tragedy struck. Shelley and his friend were drowned at sea, leaving Mary a widow with an infant son and no money, in a foreign land. She returned to England, fought to get a small allowance from her father-in-law, and spent the rest of her life writing articles and books to supplement her income. Her remaining son, Percy, grew up to be a good-natured man with no poetry and little intellect. Mary died of a brain tumor at 53, having spent her life devoted to Shelley and then, to Shelley's legacy.

All of these tempestuous romances, tragic deaths, domestic quarrelings, petty gossiping, and timeless literature went on in a period of incredible tension and upheaval. Revolution after revolution swept Europe. England was a land of strict censorship laws, incredible disparities between rich and poor, strict codes of conduct--and amidst all this, Mary Shelley is just a smart, depressed woman with few allies, trying to live her life. She was intimidatingly well-read, and set herself to a rigorous education of languages and history. Like her mother, she suffered from bouts of depression; and like her mother, she devoted a great deal of time to uplifting women (but in specific cases, not as a general group). She spent her last days campaigning to get a widowed friend of hers a small allowance to live on.

Seymour does an incredible job of creating a seamless biography out of the countless letters, diaries, articles, and books written by and about her subjects. I never felt overwhelmed, although this book is stuffed full of names, quotes, historical contexts, literary criticism...For anyone interested in the Romantics, the history of early nineteenth century, the evolution of political thought, or Mary Shelley herself, I highly recommend this book.

Five stars may seem excessive for what is certainly a minor work. But there are many different scales for measuring merit and I have ranked 'Elegy for an Obsessive Love' at five stars because It is compelling, illuminating and utterly individual in its delineation of the Seymour family.

Victoria’s offspring, in peace and war

The Pity of War: England and Germany, Bitter Friends, Beloved Foes by Miranda Seymour (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, $32).

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that most of the heads of state during World War I—which began a mere century ago—were related. Queen Victoria, only recently passed, was called “the grandmother of Europe,” but her funeral in 1901 brought together powers—including her son, Britain’s Edward VIII, and her eldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II—who would soon be at each other’s throats.

But Miranda Seymour’s examination of the relationship between Britain and Germany, The Pity of War: England and Germany, Bitter Friends, Beloved Foes, goes further, detailing just how complex and long the tugs of war and love have been between the two states. Seymour uses narratives of individual lives, both royal and common, to show how closely tied the two nations are; the term “Anglo-Saxon” goes back to the fifth century, when the first merging of the peoples occurred.

The bottom line is that all people are related to each other, though nationalism and tribalism often prevent us from seeing that. Seymour’s work makes clear that the differences between the English and the Germans are superficial and recent; perhaps recognizing our relationships can help us avoid more internecine war.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com

Miranda Seymour's wonderful account of Henry James and his literary circle over the last twenty years of his life is graceful, affectionate and penetrating. One does have to begin, of course, with an appreciation of the pleasures and stimulations of reading Henry James and, in particular, the later novels. I suspect that some of the lower star ratings for 'Henry James and his Literary Circle' were conferred by readers who simply don't enjoy Henry James. He was the centre of what Seymour calls, in her sub-title, a 'ring of conspirators'. Over the period 1895-1915 James resided at Lamb House in Rye, on the South-East corner of England, in easy social proximity to a diversely talented group of novelists: Stephen Crane, HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Edith Wharton. Of these only HG Wells, commercially the most successful, was comfortably English. Crane, Conrad, Wharton and James were émigrés and Ford, whose father was German, incompletely assimilated. It was Wells who introduced the notion of a literary conspiracy among them that transformed the English novel. (To be continued)

Here is history of a love affair between Germany and Britain that became a troubled marriage after many centuries with all the passion, anger, tragedy and humour of star-crossed lovers just aching to be reunited. It begins with the marriage of Elizabeth Stuart (the Winter Queen or Queen of Hearts) to the Elector Palatine in February 1613. This union between the Thames and Rhine was celebrated by her father James VI and I with court performances of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Thereafter the histories of the two countries were constantly woven together with Hanoverian monarchs inheriting the British throne and artists, musicians, writers, bankers, industrialists and ordinary people following their example of merging two countries and cultures. George Eliot and G.H. Lewes eloped together and spent their unofficial honeymoon in Weimar – she spoke execrable German but wrote it perfectly. The stories told here are stained with the terror and cruelties of war. Families were pulled apart with the Great War and divided loyalties one member declaring: 'I feel as if my mother and father have quarrelled.' For Nazi POWs in Scotland, one man worked hard ensure that they took 'part in the reconciliation of all people and the maintenance of peace.' The Jewish interpreter, who had fought for Britain, Herbert Sulzbach, as Miranda Syemour writes 'never stopped working for reconciliation between England and Germany, the two countries he loved.'

Despite the agony and heartbreak of the Second World War, the stories of compassion, forgiveness and love are what remain with this reader and that this is a union, albeit rather worn and grumpy, should continue and be as happy, and hopefully far more successful, as that as the love-match between Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia.

I read this after reading some fairly negative reviews, so I was pleased to enjoy it. Seymour's memoir stresses the "father" of her subtitle more than the "house," though the house plays a great role in both their lives. While there are some passages evoking the house directly through Seymour's eyes, her perceptions, as well as the reader's, are heavily filtered through her father's. Some reviewers have summed the book up as, essentially, "Boo hoo, I'm rich but I hate my father!" This is an extremely superficial reading of a much more complex narrative. Seymour uses Catullus's pithy "I love and I hate" (odi et amo) throughout to structure her account of many facets of her relationship with her father: Both extremes of her sentiment toward him, the poles of her certainty and doubt, her own negative self-regard, and other intertwined aspects of this relationship. Seymour's mother functions as a corrective narrator (though one presumes not always an accurate one), consistently serving up the refrain that Seymour is misunderstanding, or nursing old grievances, or airing the dirty linens. This device works well to allow Seymour to demonstrate how she questions her own interpretations and struggles to understand the intersecting and diverging truths of her own and her mother's experiences of their family history. This includes their reluctance to speak about whether her father had affairs with young men.

As to her father himself, I do wonder whether he had a temporal lobe disorder (which might account for his pedantry, his social difficulties, his often humorless and emotionally wounded interactions, the heightened importance and meaning with which he imbues some aspects of the world, and his obsessiveness). Seymour does not describe her father throwing tantrums as a child, but does highlight his irritability and great lability and anger as an adult; this description makes me wonder whether the concussion he suffered during his military service caused a closed-head brain injury that exacerbated his earlier difficulties. Just a speculation based on Seymour's descriptions.

For two additional accounts by children of parents passionately emotionally invested in an old house (as well as the financial and legal tangles of ownership and inheritance) intertwined with narratives about homosexuality and family secrets, read Nigel Nicholson's [book: Portrait of a Marriage] on his parents, Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, and Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, [book: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic].

An excellent biography of actress Virginia Cherrill who is best known for her first film as the blind flower girl in Chaplin’s City Lights. While she was in other films, none were as successful and she was not aggressive in following a film career. Her second husband was Cary Grant. Much of the narrative of the book was taken from tape recordings Cherrill made with her caregiver and you felt like Cherrill was telling her own story directly to you. The author also interviewed many who knew or worked with Cherrill. After her divorce from Cary Grant, Cherrill went to England and the book gave you an idea of what life was like for the gentry as Cherrill married the Earl of Jersey. However, with their open marriage you also got the impression that Cherrill had numerous affairs or at least close relationships. During WWII, she met a Polish flier and gave up everything and was married to him for 48 years. Cherrill is discreet in her talks but you still read wonderful stories of Gable and Lombard, John Wayne, David Niven, and so many others. The book was easy to read and provided a good look at Cherrill’s life and what things were like in Hollywood in the early 1930’s and England before and during the war. It would have been nice to have a summary at the end of all the characters in Cherrill’s life and what happened to them.

Wow. That’s all I can say. I finished this novel about two weeks ago and it’s taken this long for me to put my words on the page. This novel is fantastic in the way that only good literature can be; it’s dark, depressing, exquisitely written and filled with compelling characters. My only disappointment is that it took me this long to read it!

Nancy is part of an old Boston Brahman family where she has been ignored and abused by her family. When her brother dies during WWI, Nancy’s life becomes exponentially worse. Her only solace comes when she visits her aunt and uncle in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Sadly, when these visits end, Nancy’s mother sends her to NYC. Once there, she meets Chance. Chance is the epitome of bohemian Greenwich Village (he runs his own publishing company from the printing press in his apartment). But when the couple becomes entranced by philosophical poet Isabel March, there are violent and destructive repercussions for the whole family.

I have to say that when I finished the novel I was even more depressed than at the conclusion of “The Bell Jar”. I had so many complex feelings that it has taken me two weeks to sort through them. While I found the story to be incredibly disturbing, it truly is great literature. The writing is just about flawless, the characters are deep, and the language is beautiful. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book! But if you’re depressed by the end...don’t say I didn’t warn you.

www.iamliteraryaddicted.blogspot.com

Be careful what you wish for . . .

Satan sends a devil called Clegg down to earth with instructions to cause trouble in a particular London street. In the guise of a Frenchman named Raphael Sartis, he decides to sow discord by granting the residents' dearest wishes. This is Clegg's final chance to show Satan that his compassion won’t get in the ways of carrying out orders, but will he go through with wrecking the lives of his new neighbours?½

Interesting but unfortunately biased account of her childhood and fault-finding father.

This is a light, pleasant read about what happens when one of the devil's helper's, who is charged with causing grief to the inhabitants of a neighbourhoods street in England, and decides to do this by granting the individual street dwellers their deepest wish. Well written in parts, bit patchy in others, one for the holidays.½

Helene Delangle is one of those characters that seem too over the top to be real; a successful dancer, a daring race car driver, the proverbial self-made woman, and without an independent fortune to back up her hell-for-leather lifestyle. It appears that her great mistake was to forget that friends come and go but enemies accumulate, so that when the noted French driver Louis Chiron tried to label her as being a collaborationist, damn few spoke up for her, even if the slander appears to be mostly a product of spite. While I might have preferred that this book was structured more as a conventional history, there is no doubt that it would make a good movie!½

Poor little rich girl with eccentric English family. Comes from English aristocracy on both sides, daddy has a huge manor home, decides he likes younger boys later in life.

Miranda Seymour writes a Biography of Hellé-Nice (Mariette Hélène Delangle), a french race driver of the thirties. Frequent starter with a Bugatti or a Alfa Monza

Sometimes the author writes a novel, and fills the holes with "creative reconstruction" Another technique Ms Seymour uses is the speculative deconstruction of photographs. No doubt these reconstructions and deconstructions make for interesting reading. There will be occasions when they may indeed illuminate a subject, while at other times they will perhaps mislead. The problem is how can we tell when a speculation hits the target or when it sails wide?

Perhaps the book should contain a table of actual races, real facts that could be traced with information outside the obscured life of Ms Delangle.

In general the book makes a good story.

A brilliantly told memoir of Miranda Seymour's always eccentric and often cruel father who loved his beautiful Jabobean home more than his wife or family. It is a very sad yet funny portrait of a very snobbish, selfish man.