My review of The Left Bank, and Other Stories by Jean Rhys

The Left Bank, and Other Stories

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

A must for all Jean Rhys aficionados. This was her first ever published writing, which came about by chance and desperation. Those who read her posthumously published unfinished autobiography Smile Please will know that the story behind these Left Bank stories is a great one:

In 1924 Ella Lenglet nee Williams (later Jean Rhys) was alone, destitute and starving in a rundown Paris hotel room. Her husband of five years, French-Dutch journalist and songwriter (and spy) Jean Lenglet, was in a French jail for what she described as 'currency irregularities'.

After visiting him one day, she took articles he had written to a newspaper contact to try and sell, so she could eat. The newspaper contact sent her on to someone else who asked her to go away and translate them, which, being multilingual, she successfully did. That contact finally declined her husband's translated articles but liked her translation style and so, as a final thought, asked her whether she, Ella, had ever penned anything herself.

Perplexed but desperate, she showed the person some samples of her diary, which included a few rough sketches of life in the Paris she inhabited.

So impressive were these that the rapidly thinning Ella was sent on to another contact, eventually coming face to face with English writer and publisher Ford Maddox Ford.

He was instantly impressed and took her under his wing, mentoring her and inviting her to move in with him and his common-law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen. Under Ford's tutelage her stories were developed into The Left Bank, and Other Stories and published in his Transatlantic Review.

It was with this release of her first published fiction that Ford persuaded her to use nom de plume Jean Rhys.

Ford published a generous introductory foreword, praising her 'singular instinct for form', for which she became so loved by her readers many decades on. 'Coming from the West Indies,' Ford explained here, 'with a terrifying insight and ... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World.'

Such was the advent of Jean Rhys' unlikely writing career.

It was also during this period, while living with Ford & Stella, that Jean's turbulent affair with Ford took place under Stella's nose, resulting in the breakup of Jean's marriage to her jailed husband - all to be later fictionalised into what would become the first Jean Rhys novel, Quartet (1928). But that cathartic act of vengeance is another story.

So, these Left Bank and Other Stories have quite a tale of their own.

These preliminary short stories that made young Ella Williams history and launched newly invented Jean Rhys are filled with her personal hallmarks: her vivid characterisations, her evocative, filmic scenes, her succinct, incisive take on life through the eyes of the downtrodden, of the outsider looking in.

Breathtaking. Not to be passed over by any of her readers.

(NB A selection of these are also included in Jean's Tigers Are Better Looking anthology).

My review of Arbella, England's Lost Queen, by Sarah Gristwood

Arbella, England's Lost Queen

by Sarah Gristwood 

My rating: 4 out of 5 star

Arbella is an excellent reading adjunct to mainstream Tudor-Stuart characters, especially after exhausting other material and craving more of the genre.

For anyone fascinated by such royal genealogies, Arbella's lineage is a feast to behold: great-great granddaughter of Henry VII and first cousin of James VI & I, she was descended from both of Henry VIII's sisters, Margaret and Mary. Her claim to the throne was therefore doubly, triply threatening to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, her first cousin twice removed.

Her formidable maternal grandmother, Bess of Hardwick, another of my favourites, became Arbella's ward when she was orphaned at 7. Arbella spent her childhood cloistered away in Bess's various gilded cages, receiving private tuition considered fit for her rank (archived dispatch documents have triggered speculation that poet Christopher Marlowe was one tutor).

Bess, a well practised keeper for years entrusted with jailing Mary of Scots, now had Arbella's safeguard in mind. Tight house security to prevent kidnappings, agenda-driven friendships and romances left the girl isolated, lonesome but deeply conscious of her royal lineage. Periodically invited to Elizabeth's court for royal scrutiny, she proved not so socially adept, a tad precious and disinclined to kowtow, so was not embraced by the vain queen.

Repeatedly sent away again, she always resumed her stately seclusion, the powers that be wanting her watched in this age of plots to dethrone and assassinate Elizabeth. Continuing home education into her twenties, Arbella acquired several languages and mastered the lute, viol and virginals. She was a restless soul, suspected by some of carrying her great grandmother Margaret Tudor's porphyria, famously passed down to cause the madness of King George III.

Her ambitious marriage suitors included the Pope's brother, the Duke of Parma's son and ... William Seymour Lord Beauchamp and later 2nd Duke of Somerset (whose grandfather Edward 1st Earl of Hertford had incurred Elizabeth's wrath for secretly marrying Lady Catherine Grey, sister of 'nine days queen' Jane, without royal permission). Later ones included Ludovic Stuart, 2nd Duke of Lennox, then even the King of Poland! With Arbella's marriage requiring royal approval, none of these suspicious sounding matches materialised - such men were believed acquisitive of her claim to the throne.

Weary and frustrated, Arbella eventually settled on William Seymour who, as grandson of Lady Catherine Grey, was sixth-in-line to the throne himself, intensifying Arabella's threat to the crown. With history appearing to repeat itself and royal permission denied they married secretly in 1610. The result was their separate house arrests under King James, in various stately homes.

After feigned illness and transfers, Arbella escaped dressed as a man (Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroine of Cymbeline has been read as a reference to Arbella) to meet her husband and flee to France. With her husband not making it to port on time she sailed alone, only to be captured at sea by King James' men, and henceforth imprisoned in the Tower of London. She never again saw her husband who, after arriving at port late and missing her, reached safety abroad at Ostend.

Arbella was made the focus of the 1603 Spanish Government funded 'Main Plot', involving Sir Walter Raleigh, to oust King James, replacing him with Arbella. However, seeing parallels between this and the Lady Jane Grey plot that saw her ancestor beheaded, cautious Arbella, already up to her neck in strife, immediately reported the plot when asked to agree in writing to Philip of Spain. This, however, only saved her neck from the block.

Arbella remained in the Tower until her death in 1615, which she helped along by starving herself.

Another tragic Tudor-Stuart descendent well worth the drama. Sarah Gristwood's fine craftsmanship equals that of her contemporaries.

My review of The Young Elizabeth: The First Twenty-Five Years of Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden

The Young Elizabeth: The First Twenty-Five Years of Elizabeth I

by Alison Plowden

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

So many greats have come along since the emergence of Alison Plowden, who hardly pioneered but was undoubtedly among the key players instrumental in reshaping this genre into its popular modern form.

This first in what became collectively known as Plowden's 'Elizabethan Quartet' was my starting point, many moons ago, when it seemed that the only established alternatives were the plainest of textbooks, the thickest of dusty tomes or the most absurdly romanticised of fictional accounts.

In my first year at secondary school, I was so bored by so much ... except Elizabeth I, who intrigued me so much I talked my father into driving me around England to the many historic buildings she had lived in or famously graced with her regal presence. To stand beneath those same trees on those very grounds, touch those brick walls, tread on those same floors, gaze from windows Elizabeth had gazed from had me riveted to a subject I've never since left alone. Coming away from such sites left me with indelible memories which only reading Alison Plowden reinforced and kept alive in my restless, easily distracted but hungry young mind, which stubbornly never settled for just any old thing.

This first book also complimented and reinforced my then still fresh viewing of Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R TV series, itself not recordable before the advent of video.

With much to thank this author for, after a lifetime of special reading she introduced me to, I occasionally revisit her pages which lull me into a haze of other, more personal, nostalgia while reminding me what a fine biographer she was.

For those just beginning the Elizabethan trip, or aficionados extending their coverage, this now comparatively basic piece, in what has evolved into a seemingly infinite genre, will, in my humble opinion, always make for sound, essential reading.

My review of Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen, by Joanna Denny

Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen

by Joanna Denny

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I was drawn to this by the rumble of differing user reviews it generated. I was intrigued as to what had elicited such a polarised response. What I found was a well written, if sympathetically biased, take on this infamous consort.

Few would read only one biography of such a queen and consider it gospel. History was so changed over this one marriage that readers must strike their own balance of knowledge, expect to encounter differing biographical positions and respect the entire consensus spectrum. We must then make up our own minds given all the available facts.

I concur that Katherine of Aragon is done an injustice and that the author sounds anti-Catholic in certain passages. That is her prerogative. This is not journalism, which demands greater impartiality. All history is recounted with some subjectivity. Consider the vehement anti-Anne Boleyn bias that dominated such material for centuries with her apologists out on the fringes. It is no crime for contemporaries to seek rebalance to such entrenched propaganda. 

I allowed that it may not be so much Denny's pro-Protestant stance per se that is so glaring, but the sensitivity of her pro-Catholic detractors in their reviews? With neither Catholic nor Protestant leanings, I remained fairly indifferent to all this, an observer rather than a participant in the debacle, as I read Denny's fine work. 

It is well documented that, despite her partly self-serving zeal for religious reform, Boleyn died as devout as Henry did in their old, if preliminarily Anglicanised, faith. Henry balked at taking the Reformation all the way, leaving his son to oversee this. Even Henry and Anne's daughter, Elizabeth I, who so famously saw in the first shining light of the new faith in her Golden Age, took a more compromising, halfway position on Church of England ways than future monarchs would. So much so that the notoriously indecisive Gloriana was criticised for being neither one thing nor another. Neither Anne Boleyn nor Henry VIII called themselves 'Protestant' in their lifetimes.

I've perhaps elaborated disproportionately here on that debate, but that was the catalyst for my reading of this book which, religiosity and pro versus anti Katherine of Aragon aside, I found highly readable.

I would not rate this in the same important reference category as, say Eric Ives, whose masterpiece on Anne suffers such bookish dryness, despite its academic brilliance, that it perhaps falls outside the parameters of leisure study. I maybe even prefer Antonia Fraser's or Alison Weir's sumptuous stylistics (the latter published specifically on this queen, while both wrote books on Henry's six wives). I do feel, nonetheless, that Denny has earned her place with this book, in this seemingly infinite reading line. I have read far worse Anne Boleyn coverage than this. The quality is indisputably high.

For those seeking diversity of views on a contentious historical figure, I consider this to be as important and valid a take as any other quality biography. Every angle is worth exploring and this one, in my opinion, is expressed stylishly and eruditely.

I enjoyed this passionate, courageously one-sided account of a woman we'll possibly never know certain vital adjudicating factors on. There were many fine Anne Boleyn biographies before this and will be others to follow, some not so good. This one definitely belongs on my 'good' shelf.

My review of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, by Alison Weir

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

by Alison Weir

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Some biographers are blessed with a voice that resonates, and Weir is an original of her kind.

This book I got around to after reading numerous other, individual, biographies on each wife. I had, therefore, turned to this after seemingly 'running out' of good material on this special genre (like withdrawal from an addiction, forever seeking to recapture that elusive initial elation).

Considering this was not new ground for me and had, since its 1991 publication, been vastly elaborated on by others I'd read, it did not disappoint. 

Proportionate to their lengthy marriage is the quantity allocated to Katherine of Aragon, Henry's most majestic and widely revered consort. If not for her childbearing misfortune the English-speaking world would perhaps have become vastly different to that of today.

Anne Boleyn is, as we'd expect, at times petulant, even spiteful, yet we rightly also pity her despite those famous shortcomings.

Plain Jane Seymour is less rounded here than I'd found her elsewhere, though she is typically the least dynamically portrayed of Henry's wives and had only a short time as consort.

Anne of Cleves is, as always, so very likeable, winning our respect with her combined humility and common sense.

Wild Katherine Howard I like more every time I read about her.

Erudite and sagacious, Katherine Parr is just as gracious, kindly and devoted as she should be and a little bit more.

It would be difficult to tire of this author. By her use of background and settings, décor and costume, foibles and mannerisms, she successfully makes a done-to-death topic seemingly fresh and inexhaustible.

This sumptuous 20+ year-old work has a stylistic and conceptual longevity. Avoiding the academic dryness of some and the gushing romanticisation of others, it has earned and maintained its place among the popular classics of its genre

My review of Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey

Elizabeth and Essex

by Lytton Strachey

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Though not everyone's favourite book of this period, this retains its genre's benchmark status. 

Once considered the definitive piece after its 1928 release, it has in more recent times been superseded by works of academics and aficionados with the advantage of modern research methodologies. 

Yet this vital contribution by a master wordsmith in a class of his own cannot be overlooked by today's Elizabethan history buffs.

Perhaps Lytton Strachey never intended Elizabeth and Essex as primarily a detailed documentation of this turbulent royal liaison. He was, first and foremost, a supreme storyteller.

A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and founding member of the influential Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, Strachey notably established a new form of biography that saw empathy and personal insight meet wit and irreverence. 

He was influenced by Dostoyevsky, whose novels Strachey read and reviewed. Similarly, Sigmund Freud's influence over Strachey's work, particularly in Elizabeth and Essex, has been commonly noted. 

Whilst not to everyone's stylistic taste and lacking the 'popular' appeal of more recent Tudor histories, this retains an important place in its genre. I suspected my Elizabethan history reading incomplete before consuming this and on finishing it saw why.

Though I might never have been bought this thoughtful gift from someone dear, I was, and it undoubtedly broadened my literary scope. Having since read dozens of fine historical biographies, I still honour this with pride of place on my shelf.

My review of Catherine of Aragon, by Garrett Mattingly

Catherine of Aragon

by Garrett Mattingly

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

A great biography of a great royal consort, England's beloved Queen Cate.

This daughter of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon was three when betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the English throne. They were then married by proxy in 1499, corresponding in Latin until Arthur was fifteen, when their parents agreed they were old enough to actually marry.

Henry VII sailed Catherine to England for the marriage. As Prince and Princess of Wales the couple resided on the Welsh borders. Several months later both became ill, possibly with the sweating sickness which swept the area. Arthur died aged fifteen in 1502, leaving Catherine alone in a foreign country, impoverished without a settled dowry. 

Henry VII tried avoiding his obligation to return Catherine's dowry, half of which he had not yet received, to her father. To settle matters, it was agreed that Catherine could marry Henry VII's second son, Henry Duke of York, five years her junior.

In 1509, seven years after Arthur's death, Henry became King Henry VIII with Catherine at his side from the outset. She was twenty-three, Henry a few days shy of eighteen.

Catherine's tenure as England's Queen Consort lasted almost twenty-four years. Such was her immense popularity that even her foe, Thomas Cromwell, said of her 'If not for her sex she could have defied all the heroes of history.'

A patroness of Renaissance humanism, Catherine befriended great scholars Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More. She commissioned Juan Luis Vives' book The Education of Christian Women, which claimed women had rights to educations, and was dedicated to her. She also won widespread admiration by founding an extensive programme for the relief of the poor. 

In 1513 she became England's regent for six months while Henry VIII was in France. During that time, she played an important part in the England's win of the Battle of Flodden. 

After Catherine's many unsuccessful births and only a daughter (Mary) Henry set his eye on Catherine's Lady in Waiting Anne Boleyn, with ideas for a male heir.

Seeking to have his marriage annulled, Henry initiated England's schism with the Catholic Church. When the pope refused the annulment, Henry defied him, assuming personal supremacy over England's church. In 1533 Catherine's marriage was declared invalid and Henry married Anne.

Catherine always considered herself Henry's rightful wife and queen, never accepting him as the Church of England's Supreme Head. Her stance attracted popular sympathy, with the English holding her in such high esteem. Regardless, Henry would only henceforth acknowledge her as Dowager Princess of Wales.

After all those years of struggle to remain Henry's consort, poor Catherine was finally packed off to the country, where she lived out her days at Kimbolton Castle. She was denied contact with even her daughter Princess Mary who, at Anne Boleyn's insistence, was declared illegitimate and removed from the succession in favour if Anne's daughter, Elizabeth.

Sad and alone, Catherine dyed in 1536 aged fifty. The English people hated her usurper and mourned deeply for Catherine.

Heartbreaking material at times, about a widely adored woman of immeasurable human decency and royal dignity, this makes for essential reading for those interested in this period.

Catherine's embittered daughter becomes the infamous Bloody Mary, who we know will take out her troubles on all and sundry - especially Anne Boleyn's daughter, Elizabeth - when Mary wins the crown.

Garrett Mattingly's biography cannot fail to satisfy.

My review of The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, by Alison Weir

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn

by Alison Weir

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Alison Weir is a supreme historian and writer on the royalty and courtiers of this era. I always lose myself for weeks in her books.

This one gives us a closer look at Anne Boleyn's plight, with a peep through the bars of her Tower of London cell as she awaits her famous execution.

This character has polarised historians. Many have focused on her cunning, plotting side. Others have argued her innocence, making her a political victim. This split in opinion has seen Anne's personality written up as the schemer and the lamb to the slaughter. Perhaps there was a little of both in this nevertheless remarkable figure.

She was certainly used by her ambitious parents for dynastic and political elevation. She had her heart broken when prohibited the matrimonial love match of her choice. She was adored, while tolerating much, from the tyrannical yet romantic King Henry, but endurance was a two-way street in their marriage. She undoubtedly treated Queen Catherine and Princess (later Queen) Mary appallingly.

She could surely not have been guilty of every absurd charge pressed against her, leading to her death sentence. She may or may not have been a little unfaithful to her husband King Henry VIII. She may have been a mere flirt, or she may have been thoroughly set up by her detractors. 

In fiction no villainess is without her redeeming qualities and no heroine flawless. In non-fiction we hope to see these dimensional layers examined at length. Alison Weir delivers accordingly in this fine work.

My review of Jane Seymour: Henry VIII's True Love, by Elizabeth Norton

Jane Seymour: Henry VIII's True Love

by Elizabeth Norton

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed this take on Henry VIII's male-heir-bearing wife. Since 'Plain Jane' Seymour has been traditionally passed down to us as a bland, pious, selfless creature devoted to wifely obedience, this book makes for interesting reading considering that, like Henry's other wives, Jane was not so cut and dried as once thought. There are several sides to every historical monarch and consort.

While Jane was indeed pious and obedient, she could not only also mistily seduce but had a mind not heretofore sufficiently credited. She could perhaps be as shrewd as any aspiring queen consort, in her demurest of ways: as they say, 'it's always the quiet ones you have to watch ...'

Jane knew how to work the system minus the shrewish histrionics or diplomatic clumsiness of her bewitchingly beauteous but hard-faced predecessor, Anne Boleyn. Perhaps she had learnt close-up, on the job, from Anne's mistakes, being her silent but observant Mistress of the Bedchamber.   

What I particularly like about Elizabeth Norton's telling is the woman's eye view of her which, as I've argued a lot, gets us much closer inside the psyche of the subject than plain dry academia. Whilst much of this 'Jane must have thought/felt ...' material supplied here is, arguably, speculative, it is rationally reasoned and well sourced.

I was fascinated, left feeling more knowledgeable, with a more three-dimensional picture of the woman, and entertained while not to the point of feeling as if I'd sat through a melodrama. Thankfully this does not extend to sensationalism. It sticks within the boundaries of credible theory supported by hard enough data.

If Jane was as calculating as some now opine, then she clearly needed to be in a court where heads could literally roll at the drop of a hat. Whatever the truth about her she maintained dignity, composure and humility, the eternal mark of a smart and classy woman who commands our respect from the grave, from where she remains forever this legendary king's sweetheart and heroine in his glorious historic chapter.

My review of Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII's Discarded Bride, by Elizabeth Norton

Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII's Discarded Bride 

by Elizabeth Norton

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The style of this follows a pattern across all Elizabeth Norton biographies I've read: skillfully researched, not too drily academic, and effectively enough written that we feel present in certain episodes.

This never-crowned queen consort, whose marriage was famously annulled, was passed down to us in a assortment of unkind and unjust ways, usually as an uneducated frump, the 'Flanders mare' whose looks and personal odours repulsed Henry VIII so much that he felt unable to consummate their marriage, paying her off with a wealth of palaces and income.

While this royal couple's chemistry was, evidently, all wrong, Anne was actually attractive and intelligent. Attractive enough to have had her admirers' remarks well documented and intelligent enough to negotiate probably the best deal of all Henry's wives, becoming an honorary royal 'sister' who remained in high favour and enjoyed her independence.

Neither formally well-educated nor culturally sophisticated, Anne was skilled in needlework, loved card games and considered 'gentle, virtuous, and docile'. Thought solemn by English standards, she perhaps appeared older than her years, but her paintings had undergone Holbein's 'treatments' to suit her much older king (these likenesses were famously accused of inaccuracies, blamed for overly flattering her to win Henry's approval).

The French ambassador described her as tall and slim, 'of middling beauty and of very assured and resolute countenance'. She was fair haired and was said by chronicler Edward Hall to have had a lovely face.

A sister of Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, Anne was a Roman Catholic who converted to Anglicanism to suit Henry but later reverted to suit his Catholic daughter Queen Mary I. A popular figure with the public and Tudor royal family alike, Anne had a great life and was universally liked and respected. The last of Henry's wives to die, she is the only one buried in Westminster Abbey.

Following the current trend of biographical amendments to Anne's reputation - from spurned, ugly foreign hausfrau to wily, highly esteemed great dame - Elizabeth Norton's contribution may offer no groundbreaking revelations, but her style is among the most accessible. 

Without lowering standards to the emotively driven novel-style of some, Norton strikes a fine balance granting us authentic entry into her subject's personal world without losing that all important scholarly perspective. Here she once more shows herself to be an erudite historian blessed with literary talent and a popular voice.

My review of Katherine Howard: A Tudor Conspiracy, by Joanna Denny

Katherine Howard: A Tudor Conspiracy 

by Joanna Denny

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Joanna Denny has brought dynamism to this erstwhile two dimensionally portrayed girl, who earlier biographers (with no more cited evidence than Denny uses here) wrote off as a juvenile delinquent, a whore, etc. Denny offers a more balanced, wider range of possibilities around Katherine's level of guilt or innocence than earlier writers took the trouble to flesh out.

I contest arguments that this book is best suited for beginners to the period. Beginners do not turn to detailed accounts of this fleeting young queen. They aim to see the outline of Henry's reign, the shape of his dynasty's epoch - in which, contextually, Katherine Howard (sometimes spelt Catherine) was barely relevant. We can only speculate on whether much would have unfolded differently had she survived the axe.

This is a book for those with the Tudors generally mastered but seeking deeper explanations lacking in the works of antiquated savants who grew academically lazy after enjoying higher acclaim from their fraternity than Denny so far has. She has dared offer diversion from the stiff consensus and been castigated accordingly for it. Denny has been made an easy whipping post for the unsubstantiated latter day academic snobbery of a handful of textbook greenhorns.

Those detractors, as they gain the wisdom of a mature readership rather than cramming in memorised indexes of names and dates, will see that all of history is drawn using some subjectivity, some opinion and some primary data. Much of it is dry, boring propaganda. Some of the most highly praised has been proven inaccurate with the passage of time, the opening of blinkered minds and the unearthing of new evidence.

I finished the this greatly entertaining work feeling I'd come to better know and understand this likeable girl, who has been so denigrated over the centuries.

Effective historical biography is a genre of its own, quite separate from plain academia, it strikes a fine balance between hard data and mere entertainment (if you want just data visit the archives or reference library, if you want only entertainment watch The Tudors). I found that special balance here.

Thank you, Joanna Denny.

My review of Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, by Linda Porter

Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr 

by Linda Porter

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Firebrand (2023) movie’s media criticism of historical inaccuracies, anachronisms and ‘wild conjecture’ prompted me to revisit this book. Cited examples include Katherine (sometimes spelt Catherine) enduring a pregnancy and miscarriage to Henry VIII, which never happened or history would have recorded it, as with Henry’s many stillborn and miscarried heirs. 

I reread reliable sources as a form of revision and confirming doubt around misleading screenplays that leave unwitting viewers assuming to have learnt something and maybe spreading such bunkum via dinner party chat, online comments, etc. 

Other such screen examples include Mary Queen of Scots (2018) depicting ‘that’ meeting between Elizabeth I (Margo Robbie) and Mary (Saoirse Ronan) which famously never happened. And which saw formidable old Bess of Hardwick, one of England’s wealthiest and most powerful landowners, transfigured into a beautiful young Chinese counterpart (Gemma Chan). Or The Tudors TV series, with Henry VIII’s Tudor sisters Margaret, Queen of Scotland and Mary, Queen of France, amalgamated into one composite character (played by Gabrielle Anwar) and corpulent, decrepit Henry VIII portrayed by svelte young heartthrob Jonathan Rhys Myers.

I enjoyed rereading about Queen Katherine Parr who, like Henry VIII's other five wives, became somewhat misrepresented over subsequent centuries.

While Katherine has come down to us as Henry's 'mature' last queen, this fact has been overemphasised (possibly in gauging her against her teenaged predecessor, Katherine Howard). Young enough for Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to be her godmother, this last one was only 32 when she married him and dead at 36. 

Linda Porter dispels various myths, including that of Katherine having always been an ambitious schemer who as a child declared to her mother: 'My hands are ordained to touch crowns and sceptres, not spindles and needles.'

Katherine was certainly clever and on occasion resorted to subtle survival tactics that evaded Henry's previous queens (indeed she was the one who famously 'survived', outliving him while still married to him - Anne of Cleves also survived him but he annulled their marriage). Katherine was neither ruthlessly ambitious nor gratuitously underhanded and is rightly shown here to be of outstanding integrity and loyalty to Henry despite her discrete passion for further religious reform than he favoured.

Already widowed twice she was set to marry Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry's second wife Jane, uncle of the future King Edward VI. When the lonesome and ageing Henry proposed to Katherine Parr, a year or so after his fifth wife Katherine Howard's execution, she shelved Seymour to become queen then married him anyway after Henry's death.

She was considered brave for marrying Henry, who had notoriously disposed of four of his five previous wives by axe or annulment. Widowed again after Henry, pregnant Dowager Queen Katherine sent away her ward, the future Elizabeth I, from her Chelsea house after finding husband Thomas in a compromising position with her stepdaughter. She then died after having Thomas's baby.

It is in part thanks to Katherine that we have the Elizabethan era handed down to us as was, as she had helped restore Elizabeth to the succession and involved herself in the princess's famous education. Of course, few suspected Elizabeth's brother would die, so it seemed unlikely either of Henry's daughters would rule. This being so, they could have been swept under the carpet and married off abroad.  Henry might have been so inclined if not for Katherine's notable loyalty to her stepdaughters.

She also helped reconcile Elizabeth's half-sister Mary to Henry, restoring Mary also to the official succession ahead of Elizabeth. Had that not occurred Mary, too, might never have reigned and her infamous burnings of Protestant heretics might never have been a reality. 

Renowned for her erudition, diplomacy and dignity, Katherine was made Regent in Henry's absence as he led military campaigns. She was meant to rule as Regent after Henry's death, during young King Edward VI's minority, but new Edwardian court politics saw this plan instantly dissolved before Henry's body was cold.

The later Victorian myth of Katherine Parr having been a sort of surrogate nursemaid to the sickly older Henry has long been dispelled by leading historians, with whom Porter concurs. Henry had no shortage of such intimate carers that he needed his queen to become one.

Linda Porter's biographies are among the more recent ones published and have a freshness that does not sacrifice academic quality. I certainly enjoyed this one, a fine complimentary addition to other such works by Porter's great contemporaries.

My review of 18 Months of One Night Stands, by Dolores Dunbar

18 Months 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 the '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.