Jane Robinson, Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education

This is as interesting and impressive a book as all the blurbs on the back cover make it out to be, and also slyly funny; but there’s a very strange thing here: Robinson, an intelligent woman, sets out her stall here as writing about “Britain’s women students” (per the cover), and then goes on to write about women’s access to education in English universities only.  There is one sentence in the whole book about women’s access to Scottish universities:

“(The Irish and Scottish universities all accepted women by 1892, incidentally…”), p56

and one other mention of Scotland on p92, when Robinson brings Mary Ann Baxter, founder of Dundee College in 1883, into the frame (hurray!)

We all know, of course, that for hundreds of years there were as many universities in Aberdeen alone, as in the whole of England, and Scotland’s educational pedigree has been first-class – and more numerous – for hundreds of years since the foundation of the Ancients.

(Side note: until the 19th century, there were two universities in England and five in Scotland (‘the Ancients’).  Foundation dates are as follows: Oxford, 1096. Cambridge, 1209, St Andrews, 1413. Glasgow, 1451.  Aberdeen King’s College, 1495. Edinburgh, 1582. Aberdeen Marischal College, 1593.  So it’s easy to see here how important Scotland has been to what we now know as university education.)

It’s even more ironic when we consider Robinson was born in Edinburgh!

That surprising development aside, I really enjoyed this narrative – it strove to paint a balanced picture.  It didn’t dwell on the economic or social pressures that barred most women from education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also didn’t insist on women’s progress as being some kind of smooth and natural development, providing the lucky few with halcyon days and a bright future.  Robinson opens up a view on the tumultuous and exciting times experienced by these women and gave me new respect for their strength of purpose and academic achievements in such strange new circumstances.

Penguin, 261pp.

Friday

It’s odd, isn’t it, that there’s no noun from ‘gentle’?  Or an adjective from ‘action’?

When I was little, I was really fond of the word ‘actionate’.  But I still haven’t worked out a viable alternative to ‘gentleness’.

Vita Sackville-West, No Signposts in the Sea

It’s a bit off-putting when you’re about to start a novel you know very little about, and upon flicking through the Introduction, you find Victoria Glendinning dismissing it as ‘not a great novel’, with one of the main characters ‘a stock figure’ – surely these are subjective assessments, and not a particularly helpful element in a preliminary text?  Perhaps they’d be more useful as narrative notes afterwards.  I’m glad I decided to leave it until after I’d read the story and had time to make my own mind up.

It’s a simple premise, and quietly done, and effective, and much more, I think, indicative of VSW’s ability than, say, Challenge, which I’m still struggling to get through.  No Signposts, along with All Passion Spent, shows that the theme of middle-aged and, separately, elderly people embracing passion in later life, and allowing themselves to open up to romance and new experiences, was a very fruitful area for VSW to explore.

Virago Modern Classics, 155pp.

The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry

This is the hardback – the paperback still isn’t out yet – but I got it for a tenner in a charity shop a few months ago.  Wow.  SJF really doesn’t like himself.  And yet, he kinda does.  He does hit on the central frustration I have with him, though, in this, the second volume of his autobiography; that he could do so much more with the abilities he has. Not more in terms of quantity – that would, I think, be impossible.  More in terms of focus, direction and quality.   Some of what he has done, in writing, TV, film, radio, is good.  Very good.  Some of it – lots of it – is pretty average.  Not much of it is really awful, but there’s a bit of that too.  The same goes for Hugh Laurie who, I’m delighted to note here, is still as much in the affections of SJF as any Stugh slasher could hope to be publicly acknowledged.  Anyway, the point is, if SJF had followed one particular discipline and actually wanted to work at it consistently, he would have made his name as something he could genuinely be proud of, rather than what he has now, which as he acknowledges himself, a jack-of-all-trades, master of none but pretty good as most and with lots and lots of money in the bank.  It’s fitting to have read this concurrently with Wind in the Willows, because he reminds me of Toad of Toad Hall so much – his ingenuity, his bold luck, his propensity for obsession, large houses, vintage cars and demonic self-destructive streak.

One lovely thing is his affirmation as bisexual.  He doesn’t claim the term, but he does clarify that he’s ‘about 90% gay’ and has had definite feelings for at least two or three women.

This volume spans his life from going to university up to his 30th birthday, shortly pre-coke habit, and his story is almost unbelievable in its endless opportunity, obscene earnings and relentless luck.  And I’m sure these 425 pages of self-hating suavity will have made him another big paycheque.

Penguin / Michael Joseph, 425pp.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

Whilst I’m catching up on the childhood books that everyone else had read so long ago, they can barely remember them, I thought I’d get WITW under my belt. This is a 1955 Special Club Edition for World Book Members Only with EH Shepard illustrations and a gorgeous mid-century yellow dust jacket.

Hardback, The Reprint Society, 320pp.

Wednesday

At 3.20am today I finished reading Harry Potter.  All 7 books.  An estimated 4,176 pages.  I started by accident on 19 March, when I picked up the first, and then the second books from a shelf in the hotel in which we were staying.  Much to my surprise and dismay, it took over my reading life, and thoughts of the story, of what it meant, what would happen next, distracted me at work, during meetings and when out with friends.  I felt that the characters were hanging in suspended animation, robes flapping, waiting for me to get back to them.  It was like an illness.  I’m so sad there are no more, but so glad to have finished the story.  Sometimes it was physically painful, how impossible everything seemed, how bleak and hopeless.  When I started the seventh book, things had already been really bad for Harry for a thousand or two pages, and so I looked at the last sentence.  Thus fortified, I turned back to the first page of the narrative and got on with it.

Now I can get back to the colour and variety of life, the other books on my list, films and socialising.  It’s like having had the Total Body Bind lifted!

Save Glasgow’s Otago Lane

Flyer initially said 7th March 2011 for the deadline, but it’s the 11th, i.e. this Friday.

Please email your objection to: planning.representations@drs.glasgow.gov.uk

Like, Ali Smith

Virago, 1998.  343pp.  Have read this several times.  Re-read today for a couple of reasons, and to my delight, yes, I still enjoy it as much as I ever did, but there are also a few references in there, embedded in the deceptively simple prose, that I didn’t notice before – I hadn’t then read the sources they’re from.  It’s made me even more convinced that her style is so clear and lucid and yet is based on wide and deep reading.

I have more questions this time; the trivial ones, the unanswerable ones about the characters: is the fire the reason Amy stopped reading?  Did Amy ever love Ash?  Why [in terms of the story] does Amy have a kid?  If the Amy narrative is later than the Ash one, as it seems to be, by the fact of Ash’s brothers sending Amy’s diaries to her mum’s house, why is it related first?  Where has Ash gone?  If she’s away to America for work, why don’t her brothers, or indeed anyone else, know?

There are certainties from the book, too, though; the things I relished about it in previous readings.  Evocation of time and place, both Cambridge (oddly never named directly, even though it’s clear that’s the setting, by use of ‘Oxford?  No, the other place’) and Inverness (made clear by the naming of surrounding locations) and the awkwardness of much of the individual experiences of the two main characters, as well as the unresolved issues of their time together.  In terms of their troubled narrative, it definitely feels like an unresolved situation, as if there may be more to come.  In that way, very like reality.

Diana Souhami, Wild Girls: The Love Life of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks

Lots of fun. Miserable Romaine, legendary Natalie and their circles of friends, lovers, exes and collaborators. Phoenix, 253pp.

This Small Cloud, Harry Daley

Fab and charming autobiography by an English out gay man, born in 1901. Harry was a London policeman from around 1925 to 1951, and his story is moving in its own right, as well as a useful reference for those interested in social or police history.