Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, Judith Flanders

George Elgar Hicks, "Companion to Manhood," from Woman's Mission

(June 30) I loved this because of the time-travel effect of learning how people actually coped from day to day without electricity, running water and sound medical knowledge, and Judith Flanders did an impressively massive research job.

She presents the meticulous portrait partly as a way of explaining some of the unfamiliar practices of Victorian novels, like call-paying and card-leaving, partly to expose how strangely the Victorians applied morality to everything, and partly to protest the institutions and beliefs that oppressed women.

But even without these more scholarly excuses for the research, the details of domestic life are absorbing. I was fascinated by how dirty life was living with coal (your hairbrush would be black every day, even though you wore a hat outdoors) -- and how clean the Victorians actually strove to be (laundry was boiled at least three times during an eight-stage process) -- and how long and drudging all this husbandry was with the tools they had.

On the other hand, I was surprised that the time-travel effect was ultimately delusional. Flanders, I think, wanted to stress how different the Victorians were from us, but, in the end, it's apparent the differences between us are infinitesimal. We still have bizarre notions about cleanliness, food and health; we still oppress women; we still think we're in charge of the world.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Britannia

(June 3) Andrea recommended this as a book she couldn't put down, but for the first third of it, and more, I thought I must have misunderstood her. The book was pleasant enough, but it was not "unputdownable" -- in fact, I thought it was a bit of an old chestnut -- one of those spirited romantic comedies about plucky post-war Brits who are all very well-bred and educated, even though they work for a newspaper or whatever, who have tasteful adventures righting wrongs and jolly-well throwing a teapot or two at a deserving target, and often citing lines from or telling anecdotes about Great Writers in a chummy, inner-circle-y way, all the time calling one another "darling."

There were a lot of old chestnuts in this bag, actually -- there's a lovely, gifted writer-heroine, a real Mary Sue, obviously about to fall for the wrong man when-the-man-she-should-marry-is-right-in-front-of-her, and there's her search for the topic of a new book (when of course, as always, the book you're reading is the book that was sought), and there's having the entire story told through letters (and a little bit of diary-writing, because there are things that have to be revealed that you're never going to find someone explaining to someone else in a letter) -- so, lots of irons in the fire, and overall kind of a lightweight read.

And then the heroine gets to Guernsey and many, many cool twists come into play -- all completely legitimate -- and the book does become unputdownable. It also becomes kind of completely harrowing, in terms of the whole strange concept of Guernsey having being occupied by Nazis as well as because of the individual stories of the losses, sufferings and heroics of Guernsey Islanders.

The fulsome acknowledgements the authors wrote for this smallish (260-page) book (which apparently took several decades and two people to write) suggest they were most proud of having brought to light some of the stories of the occupation of Guernsey... and perhaps they are to be congratulated for doing that... but I am baffled over why they'd decide to wrap such a story up in a light-hearted literary-snob epistolary romcom.

Did they feel they had to lighten up the occupation stories? Were there not enough Guernsey stories on their own to make a book? Or did it actually seem this was the best way to showcase an important but under-acknowledged historical event? It's like telling the story of the internment of Japanese North Americans through recipes or something.