I’ve been really remiss on blogging recently – due to too much travelling for work, busy weekends and doing things to the new house. I now need to get back in the saddle, but the good news is that I’ve been reading a lot that I haven’t been blogging about, so there’s lots to catch up on. I’m going to start with a quick look at two books that were on my wish list for a while having initially caught my eye in the Review section of The Guardian where they struck me as the kind of quick immersions in quirky bits of the past that I would enjoy. They are The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale.
The first particularly fascinated me as it’s the kind of thing I really wish would happen to me – whilst researching a sensible non-fiction book the author comes across a far more intriguing tale, which takes excellent skills and detective work to painstakingly uncover. It’s set in the first half of the twentieth century and is the story of the 9th Duke of Rutland and his attempt to re-write his own history. A hoarder of epic proportions he chooses to excise from the historical record a few key periods of his own past and dies in some discomfort in order to do so. The narrative pace of the book is gripping and momentum builds as the truth gets closer. I was left feeling slightly disappointed at the end not to have had something more dramatic uncovered, but it is nevertheless well worth the journey to get there.
The second one I liked the sound of given the subject matter of how women were treated in times gone by and because I had read Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher a few years ago and enjoyed it. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is set in the second half of the nineteenth century and is the extraordinary story of the inner life of a Victorian lady who chooses to capture her thoughts and feelings in a diary, which her frankly horrible husband then uses against her. Her unswerving (and perhaps misplaced) loyalty to the man she loves sees her dragged through the mud in a court of law, but what I enjoyed most were the descriptions of the places of respite for the wealthy of the era where new techniques were tried to help restore mental and physical health.
Both of these books are very enjoyable and well written nosy dives into the private lives of others that give you a fasconataing fly-on-the-wall view of the morals and behavious of the time. Well worth a read.
