reading right now: bagnold, davidson, sinclair

I am always reading four or five books at once, usually a mix of non-fiction that's going slowly and poetry or drama that's going really slowly, and fiction that's going quickly... although sometimes the fiction slows to a crawl and the non-fiction is brisk.

Right now the books are:

• Enid Bagnold: The Happy Foreigner, my own copy in its 1987 Virago Modern Classics edition. It can be hard to find Virago books in the US, so I was delighted to come across this at a used bookstore. It's about an English female driver for the French army right after WWI, based on Bagnold's own experiences, and is so far a mix of fascinating and frustrating; I love the content, but the style is often so vague that I feel like I'm not quite understanding the book. But I'm only about 1/3 through, so this may improve over time.
  
  
• James Davidson: Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, which E. loaned me at least a year or two ago but I'm only just getting around to. I'm only 10 pages in, but so far it's a fascinating look at the Athenian preoccupation with sensual pleasures. I tend to forget that the ancient Greeks were breathing people, not just Victorian images of white marble, but I think this book is going to go a long way towards correcting that.
  
  
• May Sinclair: Superseded. From 1906 and thus requested from the library, this is one of her earlier novels, about a minimally competent middle-aged teacher at a girl's school who is, as the titled indicates, superseded by the younger, smarter, more competent generation of women who have had better education and more encouragement to develop their intellects. I'm not sure I'm going to like this, but it's pretty short so I see no harm in finding out!
  

Both Sinclair and Bagnold are authors I learned about from some combination of Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession and Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, two books I have read over & over again for their insight into a sort of fiction I discovered by accident & now adore. But my stumbling across women's middlebrow fiction and/or interwar fiction is, I think, a tale for a later post.