A question for literary sleuths

Stella Gibbons : The Woods in Winter

This is the third book in my ‘women alone’ reading journey, but like most things, it did not turn out to be exactly as I expected.

Frauds/freuds 9: The Irish Professor

Nasty women through the ages

Not only are women frail and ill-suited to hardship, but when they slip the leash they become vicious, scheming and hungry for power.

Amanda Hampson : Sixty Summers

We came across Amanda Hampson among The Guardian’s Never Too Late articles. Here was a woman after our own hearts. She always wanted to be a writer, but life got in the way. In her late forties, she ‘ realised that writing a novel had become like Everest.’ She decided to get on and do it, and in another five years she had published her first book, The Olive Sisters. At the age of fifty she had this book accepted by Penguin. She is now sixty-six and has written two non-fiction books and five novels.

Bonnie Garmus: Lessons In Chemistry

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Sheila,” one of the women was saying, “but didn’t she say cast-iron requires zero-point-one-one calories of heat to raise the temperature of a single gram of atomic mass by one degree Celsius?”

“That’s right, Elaine,” the other said. “That’s why I’m buying a new skillet.”

Congratulations! Annie Erneaux

Congratulations to Annie Erneaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’

We repost below our review of her 2017 work The Years

Elizabeth Jenkins : Dr. Gully’s Story

Elizabeth Jenkins was probably best known for her 1958 biography of Elizabeth the First, Elizabeth the Great, in which the New York Times said she achieved ‘ a psychological dimension to her portrait that other historians had scanted,’ but I, like most of us, missed it. I only came upon Elizabeth Jenkins through a review of The Tortoise and the Hare on Jacqui’s blog. She gives high praise to this novel which she likens to a modern take on Jane Austen. But I would add, a Jane Austen  who does not shrink from intimate details of life and marriage and with a wonderful sensibility for the workings of deceit and manipulation.

Women Growing Old

April is my birthday month and as T. S Eliot says

April is the cruellest month,

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,

Mixing memory and desire….

I can’t add, as he does, ‘stirring dull roots with spring rain’, because April is autumn here and the leaves are falling, but whenever these anniversaries occur, I tend to reflect on my life. How many more birthdays will I see, how long will I remain strong and energetic? It is useful to think upon these matters, for, as Marcus Aurelius said, ‘We are all creatures of a day.’ It was for this reason I took on my self-appointed task for this month; reading inspiring books by or about old women. Could I learn something that would assist me to grow older with wisdom?

Alive, Alive, Oh!: And Other Things That Matter : Diana Athill

I am finding my project of reading books by or about very old women rather dispiriting. Why am I surprised that a major concern seems to be being put away in a nursing home by families who have had enough? I am able to assure you, though, this seems to happen after one reaches the ninety mark; able bodied women in the seventies and eighties seem to be able to be independent for the time being. But so far three of the books I have read have a common thread; the old female protagonist runs away from home in an attempt to remain free. Although this is usually doomed to failure due to their debility.