My review of 18 Nights of One Night Stands, by Dorlores Dunbar

18 Nights of One Night Stands

by Dorlores Dunbar

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Long ago in Far North Queensland, a tiny exotic girl named Dolores twirled between tamarind trees and on tabletops. She sang as she skipped and whirled in the tropical sunshine, a vocal gift inherited from her opera mother Kay Zammit, a celebrated radio and Tivoli Circuit soprano.

Kay was the eldest of ten offspring of Maltese 'Sugar King' Paul Zammit and his wife Pauline, who had landed on these sunburnt shores with zilch and pioneered a cane sugar industry.

Their family had grown such that, for some of their scions' households, cash got tight. But they scraped by without much need of pounds, shillings and pence in this mid-century lucky country.

They were tough but rosy times. Cairns, now a major travel destination, was a sleepy hollow without so much as a tourist bureau.

Mum Kay had married war veteran Bill Ernst, father of the author Dolores Ernst, eldest of five, who grew up seeking not fame nor fortune and without delusion of grandeur. Just that yearning to stand on a stage and feel the joy of applause.

She loved climbing trees, picking avocados, romping in sand with cousins, searching for pearl shells, fishing, catching mud crabs in mangroves and listening to the Bakelite radio. But her passion from the get-go was ballet, from age four.

Any Australian showbusiness insider worth their salt knows of this stalwart. Her motto 'happy to be here, easy to work with' has ushered in countless foot lit journeys.

At an astonishing 'eighty years young', Dolores Dunbar invokes the might to proffer this charming tome. Penned without literary trickery, her candour and humility strike at the heart.

Her anecdotal tenderness cloaks a theatrical behemoth. We embrace her trusty voice with its sprinkle of wry musings.

Dolores. Here is her tale:

After a strict yet blissful Catholic girlhood, her grownup action kicks off at the dawn of '60s. Word is out that country music legend Slim Dusty needs a girl to sing and dance in his roadshow, doubling as a magician's 'boom ching girl' alongside a rope-spinning cowgirl and bikini-clad juggler.

Teenage Dolores is up for this, anything for a foot in the door to her dream. And bravo, she gets the gig. Hence the title '18 Months of One Night Stands'.

So ensues a muddy 18-month convoy. Through outback bush tracks, backwoods and boondocks beyond the proverbial black stump. Townships with no building in sight.

Their loyal audiences comprise cattlemen, miners, barefoot desert folk squatting on floors with suckling babies and nary a word of English. Parched of entertainment in dusty one-horse-towns without so much as a communal TV, mobs hear via bush telegraph and show up in droves, waving 20-pound notes at the window when booked out. Some even muck in.

Galvanised iron venues with bare earth floors. Stages strung from painter's planks across 44-gallon drums. 100-watt bulbs as overheads. Old halls. Amp leads crossing streets from ramshackle pubs. Torch-shining crowds. Spot the loo if you can.

Showbiz apprenticeship in all its stark glory.

We feel their enterprise, sweat and camaraderie. The remoteness of a wide brown land at the end of the earth, before mass global travel or imponderables like internet or smartphones.

This isolation simmers in Dunbar's subtext, aglow with nostalgia and no hint of grievance.

Post-tour and braving the city smoke, she does 'those' humdrum jobs in this quest for the footlights. 'Paying one's dues', biding her time, eyeing what chances arise.

In a doctor's office. The handkerchief section at McWhirters store in Brisbane. Sportswear at Bolands in Cairns. Does shows with Cairns Choral Society.

Tries varying posts, feeling misplaced here and there. But tenacity is paramount. It's the end goal that counts.

Ambitious if homesick, she settles on a commission desk placement in the hairdressing salon of Sydney's Farmers department store.

A kindly supervisor's social connections lead to formal singing lessons from famed contralto Evelyn Hall de Izal, which in turn lands an audition for fabled producers J.C. Williamson's, known as The Firm or J.C.W.

Her first musical is in the ensemble of Funny Girl at Sydney's ornate old Theatre Royal. She discovers the not so ornate cold, grubby dressing rooms and bathrooms of the era.

Dolores cuts her teeth and earns her stripes the way it was done then. Show boys drill her on greasepaint, eyelash glue and where to pin hairpieces. The hoofer sisterhood helps too.

Funny Girl runs forever, moving to Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

At Her Majesty's Melbourne, as their companies co-dine between shows, she meets fellow Queenslander Rod Dunbar from Oliver! across the road at the Comedy Theatre. All of pop and TV know this handsome ex rock singer, a onetime regular on Channel Seven’s Sing Sing Sing. Expanding into musical theatre, Rod is already in principal roles.

They marry and stay together for life, until Rod dies aged 77, meanwhile welcoming a beautiful son into the world.

Both manage solo careers some of the time.

Dolores appears sans hubby in My Fair Lady, Applause, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Les Miserables. In her widowed 70s, she joins a luminary line-up in musical comedy Half Time at Sydney's Hayes Theatre, alongside the venue's eponymous star Nancye Hayes herself.

She portrays everything from a Ziegfield Bride to a mouse. Crones, whores, Disney creatures, Litle Miss Sunshine, Wonder Woman, a Fairy Godmother. She choreographs shows and events, takes on Company Management posts, the lot.

But the duo also becomes known as a team early on, appearing in shows together. Even before marrying, they are in Fiddler on the Roof, Dolores as daughter Tzeitel and Rod as The Fiddler. 

They reunite in Godspell, with Rod as Jesus. In Chicago Rod is MC, Dolores merry murderess Mona (Lipshitz). They become Johnny O'Keefe's parents in a tour of Shout. In Bye Bye Birdie they team up as Mayor and Mayor's Wife.

This tradition helps them through a life few theatrical marriages survive. But true love is their bond. 

And just when you think this old hand may retire, she embarks on a quarter-century encore career teaching Dance and Musical Theatre at the McDonald College of Performing Arts, directing extravaganzas like Copacabana, Grease and Fame.

In this 'giving back' incarnation, her passion and energy drive future talents. She takes student groups to the USA to perform, join classes and see hit shows of Broadway, LA and Vegas – even to China! And not just once or twice. She pioneers this McDonald custom that lives on in her wake.

Then she gets to work on this book.

She outlines highpoints, hallowed theatres and sellouts. Marvels at the stars, directors, designers and choreographers she's known. And drolly dismisses the less-than-kind ones.

The torrent of names along this Australian journey is eye-popping. Greats like Jill Perryman, Gloria Dawn, Bobby Limb and Dawn Lake, Betty Pounder, Toni Lamond, Bruce Barry, June Bronhill, Hayes Gordon, even Hollywood favourite Eve Arden.

Others are Lorraine Bayly, Normie Rowe, Jeanne Little, Richard Wherrett, Judi Connelli, Roger Kirk, Colette Mann, John Waters, Donna Lee, Ross Coleman . . .

Well sure, headliners may put bums on seats, but there would be no show without the all-dependable, ever-reliable trouper.

Keeping things real, the author peeps into those lesser ventures vital to most thespians: cruise ships, cabaret hecklers, bawdy theatre restaurants. Wherever there's a buck to keep the wolves from the door. Graft that the theatregoing hoi polloi seldom hear of, and the soulless sniff at from their 9-5 abyss.

The madness, slog, frantic tours, fluffed lines, dodgy scenery, missed cues, last minute stand-ins, stages the size of stamps. Theatre digs, from the dubious to the idyllic.

Career hiccups, injuries, bomb scares, fires and flops. Some catastrophic, others plain farcical. All part of the merry-go-round. Guessing what zenith waits round the next corner.

History is marked by where she performs on events like the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Six-Day-War, and Australia's Whitlam Dismissal.

This astonishing soul then shares secrets and tips to aspirants and aficionados, those who crave the Razzle Dazzle, those seeking inspiration whatever their dream, and we who just love an enchanting memoir.

Here's the crucial yarn of one who never sought acclaim but was just there. A formidable legacy. Look at that cover, check the blazing smile. Showbiz personified.

A raconteuse extraordinaire. If only there were more Dolores Dunbars.

100% must read for all humans.

My review of The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford

The Pursuit of Love

by Nancy Mitford

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

For some years this modern classic was on my 'to read' list, while I was more interested to read about the author. Nancy Mitford, eldest of the famed Mitford sisters, debutante, socialite, committed Francophile and mistress of tease, had a sting in her tail, camouflaged by her droll funniness.

Many have theorised over this, her breakthrough novel of 1945, after her four previous novels had met with little or no critical acclaim. Mitford aficionados have long weighed up what Nancy said about this book's relationship to her infamous family, with what her sisters said and with what endless Mitford biographers have observed or opined.  

That some of the sisters insisted Nancy invented much of their family legend has become misreported over time: Nancy was writing fiction! 

Where this much documented accusation of 'Oh you've made it up, darling' gets distorted is in the sisters' later response to Jessica Mitford's memoir Hons and Rebels, which Nancy and others said 'borrowed' some of Nancy's fictional detail from The Pursuit of Love for the sake of spinning a good yarn.

So, Nancy firmly altered the real Mitford family structure in fictionalising her kin for this novel - presumably in part to avoid libel suites, such was the infamy already surrounding some of the real-life sisters: 

Three of these six sisters were so politically radicalised that one (Diana Mitford Mosley) spent the war years in prison after leaving first husband Bryan Guinness for British fascist movement leader Sir Oswald Mosley (himself in the habit of suing for defamation). 

Another sister (Jessica Mitford) eloped with the Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Communist nephew Esmond Romilly initially to fight with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, never returning to live in England. A third (Unity Mitford) shot herself in the head after ingratiating herself with Adolph Hitler in the prelude to WWII. 

Mainstream media, including national press and Pathé newsreel, had a field day with them.

By the time Nancy penned this fifth novel, these three sisters' notoriety was set in stone. It's fair to say she used that notoriety in proclaiming The Pursuit of Love as loosely based on her early family life - everyone wanted the juice on this bunch!

But much of the Mitford sisters' real-life controversy was omitted from this novel or juggled around, the resemblances everyone looked for mostly missing. 

Nancy includes fictional Radlett sister Linda leaving husband Tony and going to France with new Communist beau Christian (not a Prime Minister's nephew) to help refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (as did Nancy herself with husband Peter Rodd). 

She has fictional sister 'Jassy' forever stashing her pocket money in a 'Running Away Account' (true for real life sister Jessica Mitford, but this was about as close as it got to the much publicised real life family shenanigans).

So, the novel's similarities to Nancy's kin did not much concern her more infamous three sisters, who had brought the Mitfords into the public eye. What she drew from and elaborated on were things like her parents' eccentricities, quirky household pastimes, the trademark camp Mitfordian lingo, their bizarre pets, and the setting itself, fictionalised as 'Alconleigh' but based on real life Asthall Manor.

This she does deliciously, as agreed by just about everyone on the novel's release. We are there, in Alconliegh, immersed in the bustle of a large minor aristocratic family closely resembling the Mitfords, feeling their love and their growing pains. 

The two heroines, older than the other kids, are eager to escape into adulthood, which will only eventuate by marriage. Hence the title The Pursuit of Love, suggested by Nancy's lifelong friend, sparring partner and sometime literary mentor Evelyn Waugh.   

Once the informed reader accepts this fictionalisation of the Mitfords into the differently structured Radletts, desists digging for disguised public characters and scandals, we are left with the novel itself, as charming as consensus has always deemed. 

However, Nancy Mitford, ever hailed for her wit and humour, was the first to admit she was no serious literary force, at least at this point in her career, her craft developing substantially later. 

There was therefore some anticlimax as I turned the pages, caused by the hype and consequent expectation. Charming and comic as the novel is, it is surprisingly featherweight and not so well penned in patches. 

For example, as primarily autodidactic she had not learned to punctuate, Evelyn Waugh still telling her years later of a manuscript she ran by him: 'The punctuation is pitiable, but it never becomes unintelligible so I just shouldn't try. It is clearly not your subject' (quote from The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh). 

Despite such minor issues I intermittently howled laughing at her characters and dialogue, glowing fuzzily at her heartwarming descriptions of interwar genteel country life.

More recent biographers have said that this was her first 'happy' novel, as in not being meant as a stab at some of her more irritating relatives (definitely so in her preceding four novels). 

The explanation for this was that Nancy, for the first time in her life, was head over heels in love, with the man she would so remain all her life if somewhat unrequitedly, French politician Gaston Palewski. He appears as protagonist Linda's third love interest Fabrice de Sauveterre, a wealthy French duke. 

Nancy even dedicated the novel to Palewski, so much had he loved hearing the tales of her youth. His encouragement and her adoration of him were her incentive to write 'less bitterly'. 

It was with this emotional release, after previously enduring a difficult marriage and before that a fruitless engagement to a gay fiancé, that Nancy wrote minus the stifled anger of her previous works. 

Not quite all 'shrieks' and 'teases', the story does have tragic overtones, providing lightness and darkness, saving it from becoming another of her earlier barbed satirical farces.

Such was its success that Nancy wrote two sequels, Love in a Cold Climate (1949) and Don't Tell Alfred (1960). 

Like many such modern classics, The Pursuit of Love and its immediate sequel Love in a Cold Climate became highly popular screen adaptions, arguably more entertaining than the novels.

As I'll always be a Nancy Mitford fan it's irrelevant how consistently I liked or disliked this one defining piece. The bits I loved outweigh any minor disappointments and I will, without a doubt, read it again.

My review of Marlene Dietrich, by Maria Riva

Marlene Dietrich

by Maria Riva

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I had to read this account of the woman seen through her daughter's eyes. I knew this was no trashy Mommie Dearest act of vengeance, having pored over mainstream reviews. I found Maria Riva's efforts commendable. Marlene was something else, onscreen and off. Imagine a night on the tiles with her, Berlin, circa 1920-something.

Born in 1901 in Schöneberg, now a district of Berlin, Dietrich studied violin, becoming interested in theatre and poetry as a teenager. Her first job, in 1922, was playing violin in a pit orchestra accompanying silent films. She was fired after four weeks.

She instead became a chorus girl, touring with vaudeville-style revues. Also playing small roles in dramas, she initially attracted no special attention. Her film debut comprised a bit part in The Little Napoleon (1923). By the late 1920s, Dietrich was playing sizable screen roles.

In 1929 came her breakthrough role of cabaret singer Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (1930), which introduced her signature song 'Falling in Love Again'. A success, she moved to the U.S. for Paramount Pictures as a German answer to MGM's Swedish Greta Garbo. The rest, as they say, is legend.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of all time. Among my favourites of her films were Witness for the Prosecution and Stage Fright. Marlene's middle years were of great interest to this baby boomer:

Approached by the Nazis to return to Germany, she famously turned them down flat. Staunchly anti-Nazi, she became an American citizen in 1939. Dietrich became one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds. She toured the US for most of 1942 and 1943, reportedly selling more bonds than any other star.

During 1944 and 1945, she performed for Allied troops in Algeria, Italy, Britain and France, entering Germany with Generals Gavin and Patton. When asked why she did so despite the obvious dangers, she replied, 'aus Anstand' ('out of decency').

Awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 1945, she said this was her proudest accomplishment. She was also awarded the French government's Légion d'honneur for her wartime work.

Dietrich performed on Broadway twice in the late 1960s, winning a special Tony Award in 1968. In 1972 she received $250,000 to film I Wish You Love, a version of her Broadway show An Evening with Marlene Dietrich, in London. Unhappy with the result, she need not have been.

I have live recordings of her 1960s and 1970s concerts, and what a performer she was. She had no need to sing as such; she was simply a supreme artiste who held audiences around the planet mesmerised.

In her later years, Dietrich's health declined. She survived cervical cancer and suffered from poor leg circulation. A 1973 stage fall injured her left thigh, requiring skin grafts.

'Do you think this is glamorous?' she said in a 1973 interview. 'That it's a great life and that I do it for my health? Well, it isn't. Maybe once, but not now.'

After fracturing her right leg in 1974, her live performance career largely ended when the following year she again fell off stage, this time in Sydney, Australia, breaking her thigh.

Her last film appearance was a cameo role in Just a Gigolo (1979), starring David Bowie, in which she sang the title song. That same year her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben (Take Just My Life), was published.

Dependent on painkillers and alcohol, Dietrich withdrew to the seclusion of her Paris apartment to spend her dotage mostly bedridden. For more than a decade she became a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller, before dying aged 90 in 1992.

It is perhaps unnecessary to hear from Maria Riva about her mother's many affairs and sexual fetishes. Fortunately, this does not lower the book's tone, just pads it out needlessly. That is my only criticism.

A good, solid documentation of a screen legend's ways by her frank and not at all nasty daughter.

My review of Women I've Undressed: A Memoir, by Orry-Kelly

Women I've Undressed: A Memoir

by Orry-Kelly

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Orry-Kelly was synonymous, in old Hollywood, with Oscar winning costumes and career-long close working affiliations with icons like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner, Kay Francis, Dolores del Río, Ann Sheridan and Merle Oberon. 

A plucky gay kid from the New South Wales township of Kiama, he was born in 1897 and sent to Sydney at seventeen to study banking. Defying his parents' plan for a respectable career, he instead became a small-time stage actor. 

Using the great city Down Under as a springboard to the wider world, he landed in New York earning a crust however he could: painting scenery, wheeling and dealing, blocking handmade ties, getting nowhere on stage but sharing crumby rooms and friendships with other struggling performers, some to become legends, others fading into obscurity. 

Here he established friendships with upcoming or newly established Broadway headliners like Fanny Brice, George Burns and Mae West. He also took under his wing the nay too talented but fast-learning young Englishman Archie Leach, later carved into legend as heart throb Cary Grant. 

Having almost inadvertently landed on his feet as a costumier, with zero training or qualifications, he grabbed an offer in Hollywood in 1932 and stayed, we assume abandoning his own ambition of performing, knowing a good thing when he was onto it. 

He was Warner Bros' chief costume designer until 1944, later designing for Universal, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and MGM. He also spent a stint in the US Army Air Corps in WWII before being discharged with alcohol issues.

Kelly's stylistic instinct defied the lure of glitter and sequins we associate with Hollywood's golden age, instead going firmly with understated elegance, gaining him the unswerving loyalty of great leading ladies who knew a good thing when they wore it on screen. 

With "networking" a phrase long yet to be coined, Kelly's "who-you-know" personal survival technique resulted in close lifelong bonds with the likes of Ethel Barrymore and their ilk. We sense him sniffing out the influential and using a blend of sycophancy and crafty haggling to forge vital allegiances.

His movies included classics like 42nd Street, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Arsenic and Old Lace, Harvey, Oklahoma!, Auntie Mame, and Some Like It Hot. 

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, with several hundred movies under his belt, power dynamics had reversed, and he became an authority to be reckoned with, famously dressing down Marilyn Monroe after one of her on-set flare ups. 

A chronic alcoholic, he died of liver cancer in 1964, aged 65, and was interred in the Hollywood Hills. His pallbearers included Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, Billy Wilder and George Cukor and his eulogy was read by Jack L. Warner

His unpublished memoir was found by a relative, in a pillowslip, where it had stayed until half a century after his death, when Gillian Armstrong's TV documentary on him, Women He's Undressed, triggered its erstwhile unlikely unveiling. 

Some argue the piece had never been published because of his open sexuality being too taboo at the time of its penning, with others insisting his priceless anecdotes would have insulted too many esteemed Hollywood insiders. 

I sense that a more accurate explanation is its unfinished condition. Yes, he had reached the end of his tale in this raw draught he left us, but the work is far from crafted to the finished state such a perfectionist would have required. 

He indeed opens with a thinly veiled disclaimer along the lines of 'people say I talk in circles', admitting, towards the end, of also having hired a ghost writer to rework it, but having thrown away that product, which he believed entirely erased his personality.

Whatever the reason, I find it inconceivable he would have wanted this to be the draft we all read, hence it being hidden away for so long. A character as determined as he would have seen it published in his lifetime had he thought it ready for print. 

Whilst his flighty personality remains indelibly intact here, this glowing authenticity is the price of his narrative being, for the most part, an impenetrable and irritating rant, skipping back and forth like the proverbial twittering budgerigar. This tipsy dinner-party type rambling, with its apparent petty score-settling, I despaired of. 

Though it took every ounce of patience not to throw the hefty item across the room, I persevered, purely to devour each last golden anecdote. For although an award-winning designer does not a great writer make, here is a fidgety but irresistible raconteur whose priceless content far outweighs his tacky, exasperating style.

The superb photographic content is sadly misplaced, inset among a brash and flippant page design I despised, with its nauseatingly coloured chapter graphics quite at odds with the understated style of Kelly's famous costumes (though perfectly as one with his brassy, undisciplined dialogue). 

The cumbersome dimensions of the 432-page, 7.7 x 1.7 x 9.4-inch hardback is like trying to hold up an oversized stone house brick to the bedside lamp. I recommend the Kindle or audio editions for all but professional weightlifters. 

Not a person I could bear to sit long with, Kelly's stories nevertheless deserve such preservation, despite their raffish form. I only wish more editing had been utilised for such an important book, to neaten things up and inject readability; but then considering it was published in 2015, so many decades after the narrator's demise, one must appreciate the impossibility of consultation with him over such matters.

For Australians interested in their national history there are fascinating and extensive passages on early twentieth century Sydney, including the brothels and backstreets of Darlinghurst. 

Imperative reading for those drawn to behind-the-scenes Hollywood, here is a time capsule of inestimable value for any showbiz historian. Just conjure up every last ounce of patience for the precariously skittish and roundabout manner of storytelling.

Highly recommended if you live well with the longwinded chaos of the otherwise supremely talented.

My review of The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, by Lilian Pizzichini

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

by Lilian Pizzichini

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

A thoughtful friend overseas bought and posted this book to me, unaware of my having read it twice – once after buying it before giving it away, the second on loan from my library. Without hesitation on rereading the life of my favourite author, I became immersed a third time.

Lilian Pizzichini draws much from Carole Angier's Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1990), producing a more condensed product. Her other main primary source is Rhys' Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979).

This piece focuses on Jean the person, without the extensive theoretical commentary on her literary technique that so protracts Angier's earlier biography to its 792 printed pages. (The Blue Hour contains basic coverage of Rhys' writing but in a comparatively slender 336 printed pages.)

Indeed, Pizzichini's word economy and 'instinct for form' (among Rhys' own key trademarks) make this biography also a stylistic tribute to Rhys.

On all three readings I was struck by its leaning towards the commentariat's judgmental take on Rhys the dysfunctional woman. Though this seems inescapable, documenting such a broken character, Rhys' staunchest fans would applaud volubly if someone, someday, wrote more sympathetically, less condescendingly, showing a more strident alliance with this unique literary voice.

Admittedly, Pizzichini doesn't go as far in this respect as Carole Angier, who even concludes with a second-hand posthumous diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. She touches, like Angier, on Rhys' positive character traits, while gesturally rationalising Rhys' dysfunctional side.

Yet I found myself leaping to Rhys' defense at each derisive inference. If still here to comment for herself, Jean would almost certainly call all of her biographers 'smug', 'respectable' and 'sneerers'.

Despite those personal issues I remained hooked by this biography. Where it triumphs over Angier's is in its pace and concision - for those seeking a faster, shorter read, that is. It makes no pretense of supplanting Angier's more fleshed-out 1990 study, still the undisputed definitive model for Rhys aficionados.

Like Rhys' prose, The Blue Hour is captivating, poignant and in parts exhilarating. Though an often patchy echo of Rhys and Angier combined, Pizzichini's work is slickly executed, sticking to factual historic elements, avoiding dry academic commentary and styled in the tradition of its subject: Jean Rhys. Hence my four stars.

Overall, nothing could give me greater pleasure than reading about this extraordinary woman, of whose life and works I have read far less engaging accounts than this.

Absolutely worth a read by any Rhys fan.

My review of Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford, by Laura Thompson

Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford

by Laura Thompson

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I sought out this biography after reading Laura Thompson's Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. Thompson's work on the famous Mitfords is engaging, entertaining and informative.

Though Nancy was not initially the most famous Mitford (Unity, Diana Mitford Mosley and Jessica Mitford having already attained notoriety with their subversive political antics and men), it was she who later secured the Mitford family myth with her bestselling novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, both (very) loosely based on her family and each still global classics.

As the eldest child of 2nd Baron Redesdale (16 years older than youngest sister Deborah Mitford, she was a prominent socialite long before becoming a famous writer. 

Despite her aristocratic, if rather penniless, beginnings, Nancy was the only Mitford sister besides Jessica Mitford, to attain vocational financial independence, the other surviving sisters marrying lucratively regardless of their various individual talents.

Nancy's later books, after the more frivolous fiction that brought her fame, were historical biographies. These were penned during her Paris years - a staunch Francophile, she made that country her home, first in Paris and later in Versailles.

She was also a notorious tease, both to loved ones and the wider world, causing national furore with her tongue-in-cheek commentary on 'U and Non-U' phraseology in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, which claimed certain terminology defined a person's class. England missed the joke and bit the bait, but Nancy was above it, across the channel in her adopted homeland.

The most socialist of the sisters, the funniest and most stylish, Nancy had a well-documented sting in her tail and was perhaps secretly the saddest to reach old age (Unity, who died young, being the most straight forwardly tragic), never settling with a truly devoted husband or partner and long hurt by unrequited adoration for the love of her life, politician Gaston Palewski, the close associate of President Charles de Gaulle. 

She suffered a lonely painful death from cancer in 1973, just a year after the French government made her a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and the British government appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). 

Whilst much of Laura Thompson's material here is recycled from Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters and much of it generalised Nancy Mitford 'stock' fare from the wide canon of work on her, Thompson's clear fondness for her subject gives it tremendous readability.

I read this book in a just few nights and will no doubt reread it far into the future, Nancy Mitford being one of my all-time favourite personalities.

My review of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, by Jean Rhys

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

by Jean Rhys (Introduction by Diana Athill)

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title.

After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also feared that by reading this I may be disappointed discovering that her fiction was not, after all, dressed up (or down) fragments her own life.

Such was the dilemma underlying my prevarication in reading this, a slow self-torture not unlike Jean's own which I knew so intimately from her stories. When I mustered the courage to read this it was the milestone I hoped it would be.

Yes, Jean's fictional books were distinguishable here in her real life. But thankfully, as the saying goes, 'truth is always stranger than fiction'. So I was saved, my dilemma redundant.

I had a reticence that this felt intrusive, like rummaging through her drawers when she had gone. However, I consoled myself, she would not have disclosed here what she chose not to, nobody was forcing her to say anything. My mother once said, 'I taught you everything you know ... but not everything I know!' Here was my favourite writer inferring likewise with those deliciously pregnant narrative gaps.

As devotees and biographers have noted, Jean bared her soul in her writing but kept some to herself. I was relieved she did likewise here, retained some small, precious dignity after the literary world had bellowed at her, in her dotage, for forever baring her most intimate truths veiled in gossamer thin fiction.

Many have concurred it was not just what Jean wrote that was so brilliant: it was what she did not write, those gaps left for the reader's mind to fill. Indeed, one biographer who researched her old drafts revealed that Jean always underwent a severe, almost self-lacerating editing process, originally taught her by ex-lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford. Here she does it one final time as she grinningly waves us farewell, leaving us longing to know what else happened in between these episodes she so tantalisingly punctuates.

In this Jean includes her first poem, penned the first time her adolescent heart broke. It comprises three simple words written three consecutive times: 'I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.'

I will not desist revisiting her works whenever I get those Jean Rhys blues. That would be unthinkable. I need to know her words await me.

This, her last word, was not for this fan the end of Jean Rhys, not something that left me with any disloyal finality or closure on her. Rather, it confirmed that I should start over and read her books from scratch. Again. And again. And again.

My review of Theatre, by W. Somerset Maugham

Theatre

by W. Somerset Maugham

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

After relishing Of Human Bondage, penned 22 years before this and adapted into a career-defining Bette Davis movie, I was surprised on several levels by Theatre, whose 2004 screen adaption scored Annette Bening a Best Actress Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Being Julia.

Firstly, I was surprised by its great readability, of the kind that defies conventional analysis; that literary X-factor distinguishing great writers from good ones, their material striking an artful balance between adequacy and audacity. 

Secondly, I was surprised that Theatre's magic is not in its delivery, which is clunky for such a successful wordsmith (he had this published in 1937, forty years after his breakthrough novel, Liza of Lambeth). Nor is his command of vocabulary so apparent here, as was noted by contemporary critics, several of whom were unimpressed by this novel.

Thirdly, I was surprised to see that word economy was not one of Theatre's notable stylistic features. Maugham's evolved indifference to narrative refinement suggests publication teams had become shy of engaging with this giant. Nor is the style, conversely, so flamboyant. 

Perhaps he had simply come to hold less concern for form than his less prolific contemporaries, more confidence in the purity of his storytelling. This is strangely reassuring. 

Those first three questions collectively begged the fourth and ultimate one for me: how did he get away with being so blasé?

I believe the answer is that, like so many prolific masters of the era, Maugham had relaxed into his art sufficiently not to need to prove much anymore. This piece might never have kick started his career, decades before; his vast readership had simply, by 1937, developed a steady appetite for whatever he wrote.

The essence of this fiction lies in its bare substance, rather than its presentation. As such, Theatre defies the discerning reader's better judgement by refusing to be put down despite conspicuous imperfections. Its key strength lies in the authentic characterisation, most notably that of protagonist Julia Lambert. 

Perhaps a crucial ingredient is its triggering of the reader's speculation as to which of this novelist-playwright's countless actress friends Julia Lambert parodies – not that she is a mere parody; on the contrary, here is a finely nuanced and compellingly original heroine. Maugham was famously friends with the likes of Gladys Cooper and Ethel Barrymore, to name but a couple, which lures the inquisitive mind down intriguing paths.

I devoured this roughly crafted gem like a famished hyena and shan't hesitate to reread it down the track.

My review of Wait for Me! by Deborah Mitford

Wait for Me!

by Deborah Mitford

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

For Mitford sisters' fans, Deborah is essential reading. The youngest, she achieved the highest rank, as Duchess of Devonshire. She was too young to know the earlier Mitford households, Batsford House then Asthall Manor, which were mythologised as 'Alconleigh' by sister Nancy in the bestselling semi-autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love. 

Instead, Deborah grew up at Swinbrook, which their father built and the older Mitford girls despised due to its lack of historic charm or communal library (which had been most of their autodidactic bedrock).

In some ways therefore a standalone, Deborah lacked her siblings' unfulfilled yearnings for formal education, instead relishing her rural childhood and many animals. She loved horse riding and many of her father's country interests, which the others (except for 2nd eldest Pam) longed to escape.

Perhaps because of these adored formative years, she was arguably the most well-adjusted Mitford girl and was noted for always treating people of every social stratum equally.

When She married Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941, there was no thought of him inheriting the dukedom, the couple living in various bucolic settings on the fringes of her in-laws' estates. She otherwise went around England with her army husband, whose military pay was pretty ordinary.

Only when Andrew's older brother William, Marquess of Hartington, was killed in action in 1944 did he unexpectedly become heir. When Andrew became the 11th Duke of Devonshire on his father death in 1950, Deborah was a Duchess!

Post-war inheritance taxes of 80% approx. (a bill of £7 million or £220 million in 2016) meant selling off much of the vast Dukedom of Devonshire estate to pay for retaining the jewel in its crown, historic Chatsworth House.    

As the new Duchess, Deborah faced the mammoth task of restoring Chatsworth, for centuries the Cavendish family seat, which would open to the public to pay for its upkeep. From scratch she learned to restore and maintain one of Britain's foremost stately homes, becoming the face of Chatsworth for decades, at times manning Chatsworth's ticket office herself.

These projects later extended to other heritage listed sites in the estate. In those restorative arts, and in running a stately home, she became an expert, writing around a dozen books on Chatsworth itself, plus numerous works of personal memoir. In 1999, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) by Queen Elizabeth II, for her service to the Royal Collection Trust.

She became Dowager Duchess on her husband's death in 2004 and died herself in 2014 aged 94, the last surviving Mitford sister.

Her memoir Wait for me! takes its title from her being the youngest and therefore the last in early family outings and activities, always running behind trying to catch up on her tiny young legs. Her teasing eldest sister Nancy always said down to earth Deborah had retained the mental age of an eight- or nine-year-old, never acquiring the airs and graces expected of a grand duchess. Of course, this was Nancy's way with all.

Deborah (nicknamed 'Debo' from an early age) entertained and befriended everyone of world importance, from the Kennedys in the '50s and '60s to Prince Charles and Camilla in the new millennium, yet always had some small anecdote about even the humblest servant.

This striking humility, with her gratitude for the good fortune she enjoyed (and quiet stoicism over the losses of three of her seven babies), makes her writing immediate and engaging. Like most of her famous sisters, she had a natural talent for writing and storytelling and was a true eccentric, at strokes fascinating, moving and hilarious.

Not the fanciest Mitford sister, the wittiest or the archest, Debo is the most solid and grounded of those published. Her photographs from over the decades, from angelic infancy to tulle and diamante bedecked debutante, to hostess of twentieth century world leaders, are breathtaking.

Of all Debo's books, this one in particular is the icing on the cake for any Mitford canon devotee. She does not disappoint!

My review of Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, by Anne Glenconner

Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown

by Anne Glenconner

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Lady Glenconner's life could arguably not have failed to make unputdownable reading. One might think it impossible for any aristocratic wife of the owner of the island of Mustique, and royal Lady-in-Waiting, to get this wrong, considering readership thirst. Yet being a prominent peeress and socialite does not always a fine author make. Some other daughter of an earl may not have been blessed with this one's magnetic persona or storytelling prowess. Whilst she humbly acknowledges the publisher's support, this articulate and amusing woman is a born raconteuse.

Her words glow with the impish charm and wry wit reminiscent of the late great Nancy Mitford, another highborn Mistress of Anecdote whose work became an industry. Literary critic Raymond Mortimer wrote that Mitford's Madame de Pompadour "reads as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone." In Glenconner's Lady in Waiting we find a similar flair. As with Mitford's globally loved works, Lady Anne's narrative makes no stab at literary greatness, instead riding on candour and authenticity guaranteed to entertain.

Her breathtakingly privileged status never once becomes the storytelling liability it could have, in connecting with everyday people. Her frankness and humility win us onside, without an ounce of the pomposity that has been the undoing of some biographers of her rank.

That we can't help but empathise over some of the awfulness life has thrown at her, is testimony to the balance of this piece. Her starchy aristocratic father Thomas Coke, 5th Earl of Leicester, her impossible but fabulous husband Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glennconner, her adored yet tragic two sons the Hon. Henry and Charles Tennant, were never going to make Lady Anne's life a walk in the park. But fabulous times she has enjoyed, and she shares these generously with her readers, taking us on the ride of our lives.

Having anticipated this finely polished biography for a year, I drank it up in four nights and was saddened to close the last page.

A classy and delicious read. More please, Lady G.

My review of The Old Wives' Tale, by Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale

by Arnold Bennett

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

First published in 1908, this is considered one of Bennett's finest works. His breathtaking detail and description are something to behold.

The story begins around 1840 in the Staffordshire pottery town of Burslem, where young sisters Constance and Sophia Baines work in their parents' draper's shop. They are initially close but contrastingly different girls, Sophie the younger considered incorrigible by the more proper Constance. As they grow up, the sisters drift, mentally and geographically, apart. Later also set partly in Paris, the tale tracks each sister, separately, into the full bloom of adulthood, the prime of maturity and the frailty of their dotage. It concludes in 1905.

The book divides into four parts. The first, 'Mrs. Baines', introduces the two sisters and those around them, in their bedridden father's combined shop-cum-house overlooking the town square. With their father ill, the sisters' primary parent is their mother. By the end of this section, rebellious Sophia has eloped with a travelling salesman, while obedient Constance has married her parent's shop employee, Mr. Povey.

The second part, 'Constance', follows sensible Constance through to her grey-haired retirement, when she reunites with her long-lost runaway sister. Her unremarkable life is defined not by adventure or outstanding accomplishments, but by deeply personal events, such as her husband's death, her growing worries over her son's life decisions and social behaviour.

The third part, 'Sophia', follows passionate young Sophia after her elopement. Deserted in Paris by her husband, she survives the odds, becoming a successful pensione proprietor.

The fourth part, 'What Life Is', sees the two sisters reunite. Worldly old Sophia finally returns to her Burslem childhood home, which plain old Constance has never left.

It's mindboggling that one man could have created so much intricate detail in these wonderful Victorian characters. How on earth did he achieve this?

In his initial published introduction, Bennett mentioned his debt to Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie (that same introduction originally included a nod to W. K. [Lucy] Clifford's Aunt Anne, but her mention is intermittently omitted from various subsequent editions and is permanently absent by the 1983 edition). Bennett's inspiration for the actual story was triggered by a chance encounter in a Paris restaurant, as he recounts:

'...an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless.

I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she." Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque — far from it! — but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.'

Perfect in every way, I have never read anything in this category that surpasses this in literary quality or storytelling. Why this is not more famously celebrated I can't imagine. No major updated screen adaption has eventuated since the 1921 film The Old Wives' Tale starring Fay Compton, Florence Turner and Henry Victor, other than the 1988 BBC TV series Sophia and Constance starring Alfred Burke, Lynsey Beauchamp and Katy Behean.

I adore this oft overlooked great classic. Everyone should read it at least once in their life.

My review of The House of Mitford, by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness

The House of Mitford

by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

After this sitting considerably far down my Mitford history reading list, I was taken by its erudition. My expectations were cynical, knowing it was penned by family insiders: author Jonathon Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, is the eldest son of Diana Mosley (née Mitford) by her first husband Bryan Guinness; his co-author is his daughter the Hon. Catherine Guinness. My tainted expectations could not have been wider off the mark.

Not only is there a marked absence of family bias, but the wordsmithing outshines every Mitford biography I have read. He does his forebears proud, his craftsmanship a testament to this clever bloodline. His being schooled at Eton and Oxford, one might expect this standard, but others with similar academic foundations have produced less impressive works.

I did not find, as certain readers have implied, any pro-Conservative slant to the narrative (the author was a Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidate). Wary of rightwing undertones, I here found objectivity from start to finish. Graced with impartiality, the content may stop short of censuring history's political right, which is not tantamount to partisanship.

I did sense, in certain of Jonathon Guinness's references to his novelist aunt Nancy Mitford, subtle retributory tones on behalf of his mother Diana who spent most of WWII in prison partly thanks to Nancy. That history, well documented by all Mitford biographers, goes like this:

After leaving her first husband for British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, Diana spent time in Germany with Hitler and his inner-circle in the prelude to WWII, aiming for a Nazi-approved radio station for the BUF which never eventuated. When Mosely was imprisoned early in the war under 18B as a potentially dangerous person, Diana was initially left to do much of his bidding on the outside. Nancy was summoned by MI5 to comment on how 'dangerous' she thought her younger sister. Putting patriotic duty before blood, Nancy said she thought Diana 'highly dangerous', swaying the government's decision to lock up Diana too. Separated from her babies, Diana was accordingly detained without charge or trial for years, subject to the horrors of Holloway Jail. Diana never learned of this sisterly betrayal until late in life and Mosley never learned of it.

So, one could understand any tinge of injustice felt on his mother's behalf by this author, who as a youngster witnessed her long imprisonment. Yet this is barely evident, if only hinted at (how much of the text his co-author daughter Catherine contributed is unclear).

The telling of Mosley's career itself is presented minus the fascist-bashing righteousness of many, from a rational 'setting-the-record-straight' standpoint. That seems fair considering the author is Mosley's stepson. It carries no hint of the fascist apologist we might anticipate. 

(Prior to this book, after Mosley's death his birth son from his first marriage to Lady Cynthia Mosley, Nicholas Mosley, had written harsh volumes against his fascist father, for which Mosley's widow Diana never forgave her stepson.)

I confess to being least taken by the convoluted earlier histories and lineages of the Mitford sisters' two grandfathers, Algernon Freeman-Mitford ('Barty') and Thomas Gibson-Bowles. Even so these are more impeccably detailed than any other Mitford historian's efforts I've encountered.  

To call this author's archival prowess masterly is a gross understatement. This book, Mitford descendants can keep in stately libraries and others can consult through the mists of time. I wish I had read this particular Mitford history sooner as it surpasses all others. 

With Jonathon Guinness in his mid-nineties as I write this review of a book published forty years ago, there still feels to be some carryover from these remarkable sisters, all now long dead.    

A self-proclaimed Mitford aficionado, I now see this as the definitive biography of this canon.

My review of Honey Trap, by Anthony Summers and Steve Dorril

Honey Trap

by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Profumo affair – one of Cold War Britain’s most famous political scandals – is an indelible flash in my early childhood. Framed by so many vivid, epochal images of my formative years, this fiasco became a defining mark of my generation. For this reason, reading Honey Trap was an irresistible lure down memory lane. 

A neighbour passed on to me the browned and curling paperback, which he had scored for fifty cents in a leisurely browse through our local op shop. Two distinct passages of time come into play here: the twenty-five years approx. between the events the book covers and its publication, and the thirty years between its publication and my getting around to reading it. As if two lifetimes divide the present from the story of Honey Trap. 

This staggered chronological detachment sets an intriguing and reflective context from which to revisit the scandal, which saw Britain's War Minister John Profumo and Soviet Embassy naval attaché cum spy Yevgeny Ivanov sleeping with the same woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler. The affair's exposure and alleged resulting friendship between Profumo and Ivanov forced Profumo’s 1963 resignation from Government. 

As with other such investigative books, I saw the movie it inspired ('Scandal' 1989) long before reading this. Sir John Hurt stars as sleazy but lovable Establishment scapegoat, bon-vivant Dr Stephen Ward, who introduced the lethal Profumo affair trio and was later hounded to suicide. Sir Ian McKellen plays disgraced War Minister John Profumo. Joanne Whalley is showgirl-turned unwitting spy mistress Christine Keeler, with Bridget Fonda shining as Keeler's sharp cohort Mandy Rice-Davies. Authentic '60s & '70s glamour puss Britt Ekland is fellow seductress Mariella Novotny. Veteran screen legend Leslie Phillips graces the project as Conservative hack Lord Astor. Its haunting soundtrack includes the delectable Dusty Springfield/Pet Shop Boys hit 'Nothing Has Been Proved'. 

The movie's scenes, paired with the original media events they depicted, replayed through my visual memory as I turned each moldy page in wonderment, sneezing at the confetti of dust sprinkling my pillow yet compelled to pursue this nostalgic trip, kept awake into the small hours of three gruelling, impetuous nights.

As per its genre, Honey Trap is more a gripping factual account than a literary experience, so I had adjusted my expectations accordingly (these pieces I find intersect for comfort and convenience with heavier/fictional reads).   

While devouring it as I might a cold pizza on a Sunday morning, I could only ponder in astonishment at what a fuss was made of this tawdry diplomatic bedroom farce, while feeling so sad for Stephen Ward. Of course, certain classified intelligence files would now be accessible that had not yet become so when Honey Trap was penned, outdating various lingering question marks. Yet we hear very little in this wake, as if this book's authors had indeed concluded all there really was to conclude. In that sense, Honey Trap may never become truly outdated.*

Whilst I found Honey Trap's incessant meandering back through certain characters' darkened pasts irksome, along with the sheer volume of these incidental characters, this loss of momentum is often the price for the requisite thoroughness. Even so, the authors (or publishers, or both) seem set on burdening us with the bedroom quirks and petty agendas of a whole establishment rather than three of four main characters. This is my common issue across much reading, non-fiction and fiction alike. If more authors would just stay focused, instead of rambling off track with scarcely related trivia that consumed them in their quest for background padding! We, the reader, are unconcerned with such superfluity. We don't want to be led in pointless circles just to hear about some secondary character's spouse's sibling's boss's partner's irrelevant part-time sexual fetish, just for that extra shot of shock value. 

These gratuitous muckraking delays border on cheapening the effect of the mighty yarn that is Honey Trap. Such, however, is the gossipy nature of this beast. It's perhaps inevitable that the telling of a scandal will be over-embroidered with such, like an ornate cake with too much icing (is there such a thing, some might argue). There's an art to gauging enough titillation then stopping, before tabloid quality looms.

That said, anyone who remembers these times may well tut along with me at Honey Trap's vaguely tacky sentiment, while hypocritically slurping it up anyway. I plead guilty as charged. I'll read it again too.

An essential retrospective read for those who remember these events, a great modern history lesson to those who don't!

*A more recent publication, Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Cambridge historian Professor Jonathan Haslam published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, reveals how the Profumo affair was a higher threat to UK security than previously thought. It finds that the Russian, Ivanov, was able to photograph top secret documents left out by Profumo after being shown into Profumo’s study by his wife, actress Valerie Hobson. Those documents concerned US tactical nuclear weapons and vital allied contingency plans for the Cold War defence of Berlin. Yet little else has emerged, especially concerning the MI5 and MI6's possible roles in Stephen Ward's 'suicide'. Nor has it ever been clarified whether Ivanov aimed to use Keeler to entrap or obtain information from Profumo. Haslam's new research shows Ivanov did not need to use Keeler thus, ultimately being able to steal information directly from Profumo. This resulted from Profumo's lack of office organisation and security protocol. Profumo left top secret documents visible on or in his home desk while out of his study, failing to secure the room or instruct family members to guard against entry. Consequently, when Ivanov visited Profumo’s home socially, Mrs. Profumo invited him to wait alone in her husband’s study. Ivanov merely needed to pull out his spy camera and take snaps, including of highly classified specifications for the X-15, a top secret experimental high-altitude US spy plane. But that's another book, decidedly more academic and less concerned with the sordid lust triangle that Honey Trap focuses on.

My review of The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Leanda de Lisle undertook a bold and lofty endeavour penning this. She triumphs gloriously.

Most Tudor readers know about the usurping 'nine days queen' Lady Jane Grey who, after her fleeting, reluctant reign, was beheaded under the rightful Queen ['Bloody'] Mary I. Jane, languishing in the Tower of London, might have lived had the ageing Queen Mary's unsettled marriage negotiations with Philip of Spain not looked diplomatically grimmer the more lenient she was towards poor Jane.

Philip's Catholic envoys wanted Protestant Jane's head off, which left Queen Mary's hands tied. Young Jane has been depicted in varying lights by recent biographers less sympathetic than those before who had handed her down to history as an innocent victim of others' dynastic scheming (primarily, that of her parents). 

Many Tudor aficionados, however, until this book, knew only scant details of Jane's two sisters who suffered so appallingly under Mary I's successor, Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch and irrefutable villainess of this piece.

The childless 'Virgin Queen' Elizabeth's reign became fraught with nervous speculation on her successor. Enter the two 'other' Grey sisters Katherine and Mary, maternal granddaughters of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary, 'the French queen'. (The latter had, on her husband Louis XII of France's death, married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk and produced four children, one being Francis, mother of these three Grey sisters).

All three Grey sisters were treated abysmally because of their positioning in the meandering line of Tudor succession. They are masterfully drawn as distinctly individualised characters: Jane Grey - headstrong, intelligent, yet martyred - was driven by her faith and principles, while torn by her sense of duty. The beautiful, romantically impetuous Katherine Grey was ruled by her heart, not her head. The plainer, diminutive Mary Grey, the least educated or threatening, just kept her head down aiming only to survive her piteous ride. 

The reader is lulled into empathy. We are left deeply moved, immensely informed and ravenous for more of this superb writer's magic. 

Never wanting to put this book down, I was saddened to reach its last page. And that's what great writing is about. A splendid achievement by a formidable writer and historian.

My review of Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen, by Tracy Borman

Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen

by Tracy Borman

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Some armchair critics have overlooked the immense task Tracy Borman undertook and successfully completed in writing and getting this published. In a literary avalanche of popular Tudor history dominated by old masters and current favourites, this comparatively unknown writer braved something extraordinary.

Like others, I turned to this after exhausting dozens of biographies on the key Tudor players and their epoch. We must keep our expectations realistic - as with any such addictive material, there is only a finite euphoric altitude we can maintain before desensitisation to the fix itself sets in. No use hammering away wanting the earth to move page after page so far into any such study (we can perhaps reasonably assume that few absolute beginners would turn to this particular title for introductions to the reign). These things considered, it's also impossible not to draw comparisons.

With voices like Alison Weir (and Antonia Fraser, if not specifically on this subject, then characterising the genre itself) to compete with, one has to wonder how others conjure up the confidence to even begin. What makes popular historians popular is not just their detail and accuracy but their voices (some of the most meticulously researched, accurately presented history published is dry, soulless and unreadable).

Borman holds her own voice-wise, here. It may be interesting to compare her progress after twenty, thirty, forty years  (Fraser, for example, already had her distinctively sumptuous, compassionate style down pat by the time of her 1969 Mary, Queen of Scots and, while perhaps growing technically and conceptually since, has preserved what made her successful: it's not so much what she says but the way that she says it! 

Similarly, Alison Weir had her own defining style to begin with - with perhaps more emphasis on impressive citation and indexing that made her stand out from others.

There are countless others. Carolly Erickson, Alison Plowden, David Starkey, David Loades, Eric Ives, the list is as long as it is diverse, all riding high on stylistic hallmarking rather than just breaking even on factualist or conceptualist calibre alone. 

Tracy Borman is yet to demonstrate any such characteristic consistency across any substantial body of published work. She has made a commendable start though and this book deserves its rightful place on any good Elizabethan historian's shelf. 

Though each of Elizabeth's women discussed have been well covered before in greater detail, they are here effectively assembled in a unique and stimulating formation. Context is key, with each woman's positioning seemingly bearing particular relevance on the defining of Gloriana herself.

Great concept. Well written. Will definitely consider reading more of this author's fine work.

My review of The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory

The Other Boleyn Girl

by Philippa Gregory

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The 2008 movie, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, made this title familiar to many who would not otherwise have read the book. That mass publicity was a double-edged sword, with the movie receiving mixed reviews and criticism for historical inaccuracy. Indeed, the novel too suffered some disputed historical accuracy but has far greater subtlety and creative licence.

While Philippa Gregory's novel makes requisite use of fictional elements, the film took it to extremes, discrediting the book it promoted. Though Gregory need perhaps not concern herself now, with the global success of her subsequent novels, the debacle must then have been tough for this talented, hardworking author. Certain historical details of this tale are black and white, others grey: 

Earlier historians claimed Elizabeth I's maternal aunt, Mary Boleyn, was Queen Anne's younger sister, but her children believed she was the elder, as does a growing consensus of today's historians. Regardless, legend strongly suggests Mary was thought the more beautiful of the two Boleyn sisters, going by aesthetic ideals of the day. With no less scandalous a public record than her beheaded sister Anne, poor Mary has undoubtedly been as much a victim of malicious press as Anne has been a victim of political propaganda.

A rumoured mistress of King Francis I of France, some historians believe tales of Mary's promiscuity exaggerated, while others deem them plainly apocryphal. King Francis's harsh reference to her as 'The English Mare', 'my hackney' and 'una grandissima ribalda, infame sopra tutte' ('a great slag, infamous above all), may have been merely sour grapes after a more innocently romantic public liaison: she did, after all, leave Francis and his court, and his hearing of her subsequent high profile amours could have simply bruised his royal pride.

When Mary returned to England in 1519, she was appointed a maid-of-honour to Catherine of Aragon, queen consort of Henry VIII. She then became Henry VIII's mistress from around 1521 to 1526. After later marrying wealthy and influential courtier William Carey, she was left widowed then secretly remarried for love to William Stafford, a lowly soldier considered beneath her aristocratic rank. This latter choice resulted in her banishment from court, and she spent the rest of her life in obscurity, dying in her early forties in 1543, seven years after Anne Boleyn's execution.

Many preferred this earlier Philippa Gregory book over her later one, The White Queen. This subject certainly holds more popular appeal, but to me that does not equal a better book.

Gregory's greater challenge was surely always going to be The White Queen, as readers are less familiar with that (infinitely more complex) history than with this story and its principal characters. Therefore, Gregory's greater achievement of those two is, in my opinion, the one which presented the harder challenge, The White Queen.

I nonetheless equally liked this, which makes for the more gripping read, its character list tighter and more focused than The White Queen's convoluted ensemble (that, I believe, is why some rubbished the latter, because they found it harder to follow due to their own lack of knowledge).

The Other Boleyn Girl is a good read by a classy, accomplished writer. Its sequel novel, The Boleyn Inheritance, tells the story of Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Jane (Parker) Boleyn.

I like everything of Philippa Gregory's I have so far read.