E. M. Delafield: Zella Sees Herself

It was only last autumn, towards the end of my penultimate semester of university, that I suddenly realised that I could use the library's free inter-library loan to hunt down all of the E. M. Delafield novels that can't be found in my library system -- which is most of them, as despite a lovely regional network of libraries that stretches from Nevada to the depths of Southern California, we only have a very few titles which aren't modern reprints. Aside from her justly beloved Provincial Lady books, Delafield wrote 25 other novels, plus 3 volumes of short stories and at least one play. I have made it my quest to finish all of her out of print work before I lose library access (which fortunately doesn't happen until the end of August), and have been happily reading my way through the novels chronologically, skipping the ones which are in print or otherwise locally available with the intention of going back to them later, after my ILL access ends.

Most of Delafield's early novels are studies in egotism; she's fascinated with the generation of egotistical authority figures who came of age in the 1890s and raised the children who suffered during WWI. Her novels study both how such tyrannically selfish adults came to exist, and the ways in which their absolute confidence in their own (usually mistaken) judgement leads them to create traumatised children who often replicate the damage in their own post-war families. Because of this, I find a lot of her novels uncomfortable to read; I like neither being inside the head of an egotist as they destroy others, nor being inside the head of an indvidual whose sense of identity is being hammered at, and Delafield excels at doing both.

Her first novel, published in 1917, is Zella Sees Herself. Along with the egotism strands, it also touches on another of her themes; the way in which girls raised by late Victorian & Edwardian standards end up unable to find happiness as adults. Zella is in a particularly bad way; when her mother dies she finds herself pulled between her conventionally sentimental aunt, who insists that Zella must display an appropriate set of reactions, and her authentically emotional father who bursts into rage at any sign of insincerity. Zella, already dreamy and given to dramatising her experience rather than simply feeling it, ends up unable to tell the difference between her true emotions and the sentiments she's expected to perform due to her class and gender. She makes bad decision after bad decision, basing her choices on brief emotional surges which she takes for the reality of her heart, and only narrowly avoids a number of personal catastrophes. She's contrasted with a number of characters; her father's devoutly Catholic French relatives, students at a convent school, a painfully affected young Spiritualist, and most directly with her cousin Muriel (who has internalised the conventions of her sentimental mother to the point that she has no thoughts of her own), and her intellectually ruthless cousin James, the only person in her life willing to speak the truth. It's an engaging book, but a painful one, because Zella's struggles are simultaneously so heartbreaking and so infuriating; I wanted to shake her and console her in equal measure. The ending leaves quite a bit of room for hope, which made me grateful; I think the book would have been too unpleasant otherwise.

interwar novelists everywhere!

I have sorted out the theoretical framework of my paper as much as it's likely to ever be sorted out, and I've started my analysis of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, so now I really ought to go to bed. In spite of the tantalising world of book blogs I've been browsing through all afternoon, with their challenges and... well, mostly the challenges; I love making lists and I love making plans and I already have my own set of reading scheduled for this summer -- I'm going to do author studies of speculative fiction authors I used to be fond of & see how they hold up with my new critical appartuses (apparati?) and hopefully fall in love with the genre again. And I'm going to do some structured non-fiction reading about subjects that I'm interested, and I'm going to schedule both of these things so that during any two-week period I know what I'm reading, because otherwise I will be overwhelmed by all the possibilities and spend the summer unfocused and dismayed. So that is my plan, and I should probably avoid taking on any of the challenges I've come across and just enjoy the fact that there are other people out there in the world who, like me, feel the desire to structure & organise their reading, preferably as part of a community.

Also, I am excited to find that there are other human beings out there who overlap with my taste in books! I mean, I knew there had to be, or otherwise Virago & Persephone wouldn't exist, but it's still amazing to come across a post like this one by Danielle at A Work in Progress in which she lists not only one of my all-time favourite novels (The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, which I did my first reread of during my trip to London last autumn), but also some of the critical work I've spent the last few years obsessing over. And that obsession was to good result, as I managed my best paper for my Women in 20th Century Literature class last semester by drawing on Humble to analyse a particular scene in Orlando.

But I digress... which is the point, actually; I'm excited and enthused and wanting to write about my own reading, which is as it should be. I long to tell you, gentle reader, about my love for E. M. Delafield and Stella Gibbons, my enormous pile of unread Rosamund Lehmann, my problematic relationship to Noel Streatfeild, and my surprised adoration for Jane Duncan. Plus there is much to be said about the Victorians; I'm sure that once I'm done with this paper I'll start thinking nice things about Braddon again.

But now, to bed.

only one paper remains

A marvelous (as always) lunch today with Susan, in which we wandered aimlessly up & down Castro until I discovered that the restaurant which has been remodelling for a while is now open, and that my predictions were right -- dim sum! (I don't know how I could tell, but it just looked like a dim sum place from the outside while they were getting it in order.) So we had a very nice dim sum lunch, with mostly excellent food (the slippery noodles were a little bland, and the sticky rice ditto, but the taro balls and the shrimp dumplings were great, and they had mushrooms stuffed with shrimp in a black bean sauce that was phenomenal) and good conversation, and finished up afterwards at our usual coffee shop downtown. All of these places had air conditioning, which is a blessing, since it is once again Far Too Hot. I've retreated to the back room with the fan and the closed blinds and ice water, but since it didn't get cool enough during the night for my apartment to dump all of its excess heat, things are considerably worse than yesterday.

In spite of this, I've finished my Chinese history paper -- it's 2 pages too long, but I'm not going to spend the time editing it down, as it will certainly be sufficient in its current condition to get a good great. Now I must gather together all the books for my last paper and pile them up near my computer and start the terrifying process of doing my literary analysis and plugging it into the cultural-historical framework I constructed earlier in the month. And all while resisting the pile of Noel Streatfeild novels that inter-library loan has been acquiring for me...

too hot for cats

Today has been a day of record-breaking heat, which means that my apartment has been transformed into an oven. I've spent the day cocooned in the back bedroom, sitting in front of the computer with a fan (for me) and an ice pack (for the older of my two cats, who doesn't handle extreme heat well) trying to put an end to my history paper so that I can pour the rest of my free time into my study of sensation novels. For most of the day things went relatively well, but my apartment holds heat in irriating ways, so now that it's finally cooled off outside things inside have reached a peak of stuffy warm doom. I have fans blowing cool air in, but my body and brain are both complaining about how warm it is, which makes it hard to focus on the paper.

I did have lovely bacon & tomato sandwiches for dinner though, with gammon bacon, which my husband brought home because the butcher was so enthuasistic about it. It seems to be bacon made from leg instead of belly, and cured using more spices than typical American bacon, and is quite tasty on sandwiches, although I think regular slab bacon will still be my choice for wrapping around dates. Clearly I should do a test run of bacon-wrapped dates with all the different types of bacon I have access to? Yes, but later, when I have finished my papers and gotten through graduation and it is less hot.

Fortunately for my brain and my kitties, it's supposed to cool off marginally tomorrow. Every little bit helps.

my inclusive nature manifests itself

I have been browsing book blogs (while I should be writing my paper, yes, I know, but I can't write constantly or my brain turns into something rather gloopy) and thinking about what I'm going to do with this space starting right now because if I plan and then wait until I have free time I'm much less likely to get around to it.

I don't think it will ever suit to me to write the beautifully crafted sort of blog in which I carefully present certain aspects of my life and leave all the rest out. Not to say that I don't edit -- I do, of course -- and not to say that such blogs are problematic, because I think they're they gorgeous. But I don't tend to know what I want to do with a thing until I think out loud about it, and if I were going to make a life-as-art sort of blog I would need to decide how to do it in some other space -- hide the process away as it were -- and simply present the finished results here. And that's just... not me.

So this is the post in which I muse about how I am going to start using this space, and then (one hopes) the next post is the one in which I start using the space in that way. But the musing must happen first, and it must happen visibly or somehow I am not satisfied.

What, then, do I want to do? I seem to have two goals:
1. Post close to every day; probably 4 out of 7, since it's hard to write coherently on the weekends, and I usually need one day a week to precolate.

2. Write about what I've been doing as well as what I've been thinking; I lean towards the latter to an almost absurd extent. Thus, book reviews (probably not super-formal ones), reports on knitting, cooking, & baking (maybe with pictures), Shakespearean picnics, library trips, lunch with Susan and so forth.

Thus, this is not going to be an X blog (X being 'books' or 'knitting' or whatever). In a way I regret that decision; I really enjoy reading blogs that focus on a single interesting aspect of the world -- but again, it's just not my style. I am more of an inclusive person than an exclusive one, the sort of woman who will often order three beverages at a restaurant because I want to try everything that looks interesting. (Which reminds me of a very happy memory: on the morning of my wedding I said Very Seriously to the site coordinator, "Could I have water and coffee with cream and orange juice?" and he oh so kindly and smilingly said, "Yes, of course," and I was presented with all three, which seemed in the moment to be a sure sign that everything would be perfect. Which it was!). So while I admire the sort of blog which digs really deep into one topic -- and while I suspect that my blog might be more interesting to readers if it only looked at one or two things -- once again, it's just not who I am.

I seem to know myself better and better each year, after my first few decades of learned obliviousness. How strange and delightful, knowing who I am.

guess what time of the semester it is?

If, Gentle Reader, you have guessed that it is the time of the semester in which I frantically write papers, you are quite correct, and should treat yourself to a nice cup of tea as a reward.

This semester, however, is different from others, because:

a. I have only two papers to finish, as my biology class & my literature survey class got theirs out of the way early. (However, they have in-class finals, so I cannot simply forget about them as I am longing to do.)

b. Of my two papers, one is a history paper, which means a lot of research but little original thought, since I don't know how to do original historical thought, not being a history major. The other paper, however, is a frightening many-tentacled monster; a 15-pg in-depth analysis of the representation of patriarchy in a trio of sensation novels, backed up by quite a bit of research. I am simultaneously impressed by the work I've done so far and aware that I could do so much more and better work if only I was, say, writing a thesis instead of a final undergraduate paper. Which is a strange place to be, because I both want to be done done done with this semester, and am sad that I'm running out of time to make this piece of work as perfect as possible. To be honest, though, the need to be done is winning out handily.

This semester is also different because 'done' now has a different meaning; when I turn in my two papers and take my two final exams, I will be done with my undergraduate career, and will be the proud recipient of a BA in English Literature.

And then? Well, my parents are visiting for the graduation ceremony, and my in-laws also, and after they leave I have a fundraiser to work at, and then my dear friend Susan is throwing me a graduation party. But after all of that, time stretches out before me in which to develop home-making skills, volunteer at the local library, investigate graduate school options (an epic undertaking in itself) and do a lot of writing for my own pleasure rather than for grades. I am ready and eager to start reinventing my daily life all over again.

But first the papers -- and that is why I am really, truly ready to be done, hand-in-hand with a sort of wistful knowledge that, as always, my papers would be Even Better if I only had more time.