Haven

"I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve"

-- Charles de Montesquieu

I love books and continue to prefer them over electronic devices even though they sometimes threaten to take over my house! In fact, my very first blog post four years ago was about the beauty of books. In my opinion, nothing makes a room warmer than a personal collection of books. I love how they bring color, pattern and texture to a room. And they tell us so much about the collector. Recently, after returning from a trip to England and new books arriving daily, I realized it was time to edit the books in my study to make room for the new ones. The goal was to be able to put my hand on whatever title I needed without too much trouble. My system of organization was pretty relaxed with the only rule being to group all books by the same author together. Other than that, I hoped to arrange them in an attractive way to highlight the beauty of the books. Since every book "counts" in this room (no forgettable books here), I should be able to find what I want easily. The topic of this collection would be favorite authors, as well as some new ones from the trip to England. This room would contain literary novels and biographies, mostly English, and very much my "old friends."

 Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury would be front and center. These are the diaries I found in London. I have been reading Virginia Woolf's books for many years and finding these beautiful editions of her diaries was a highlight of my trip. Seeing her lighthouse in St. Ives was also pretty special!

 Books on her as well as her circle of friends take up a few shelves

 I have been collecting books on the Bloomsbury Group for about 35 years now!

Next were some groupings of favorite authors. I loved getting the Nancy Mitfords and Katherine Mansfields together.

As well as books by E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Von Arnim, and E.M. Delafield. Though it seems that I have many editions of just one title by Delafield, The Diary of a Provincial Lady. This charming book about the life of an ordinary woman living in an English village during the 1930's is laugh-out-loud funny. Go here to read more. I discovered this gem a few years ago and apparently can't resist buying attractive editions.

My beloved Barbara Pym --  I think I've read every one of these

And some lovely Persephone editions -- oh, there's another "Diary of a Provincial Lady"!

Elizabeth Bowen is next to books on reading and writing. This accidental combination makes sense since Bowen's writing is some of the most beautiful and memorable writing you'll ever read. Go here to read more.

My Jane Austen books

Next were the books purchased in London, Cornwall, Devon and the Cotswolds. The goal was to keep all those together so I could have them at my fingertips to remind me of my trip. I have been slowly making my way through them.

So far I have read A Cornish Affair and Ross Poldark. They are both fun, escapist books and they took me back to Cornwall. Ross Poldark is an old-fashioned, swashbuckling tale that I loved and would put under the category of "guilty pleasure."

Some highlights --

This one came highly recommended by one of my readers and I can't wait to read it!

Summer in February is about an Edwardian artistic community set in Cornwall. I am reading this  now and enjoying it. It was made into a film starring Dan Stevens which I may now have to rent.

This one is about a young woman who flees her wedding and hides out in Cornwall doing research on a grand old home and garden. Naturally she is seduced by the beauty of the place as well as the scion of the family who owns the house. A good old-fashioned love story.

I learned about Cider With Rosie while in the Cotswolds. A best-selling (six million copies) nostalgic memoir of finding love during a summer in the Cotswolds, it was published 100 years ago.

Another laugh-out-loud classic of English comedy, also set in the Cotswolds

A collection of recipes from Cornwall and Devon that I found in a bookstore in St. Ives

The third installment of the Old Filth trilogy by Jane Gardam. Go here to read an excellent article about her in the New Yorker magazine.

I found three books by Angela Thirkell -- they are impossible to find here -- at a little book store in the Cotswolds village of Stow-on-the-Wold.

And this book on Beatrix Potter's gardening life, found at Kew Gardens bookstore, was hard to resist.

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A room filled with books is such an inviting sight. I am looking forward to spending some happy hours this winter in my study curled up with a favorite book and a cup of tea!

A Welcoming Kind of House

"Cecilia's and Emmeline's house was in Oudernarde Road, which runs quietly down into Abbey Road, funnel of traffic and buses. It had big windows, arched stairs and wrought-iron steps at the back leading down to a small garden. Cecilia, hesitant over the agent's order, looking about at the temptingly sunny spaces of floor, had remarked: 'It's a long way from everybody we know...' But Emmeline said: 'We never know whom we are going to meet.' From the first glance the house had smiled at them and was their own. So here they had settled." 

--  from "To The North" by Elizabeth Bowen

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I have always loved this quote from To the North by Elizabeth Bowen. It is a poignant book about two young women in their twenties living together in London and finding their place in the world. One is an orphan and the other is newly widowed. Finding the right house is of paramount importance to their sense of safety and stability. The idea that "the house had smiled at them and was their own" struck me as so true. It made think about the elements that go into making a house a welcoming kind of place, a house that smiles at us and shelters us from the storm. A house that we love and and want to make our own. Of course it is different for everyone, but here are some ingredients that I think make a house a haven.

A cheerful front door

A cozy sitting room 

A fireplace

Window panes to look through on a rainy day

A sunny kitchen

Blue and white crockery

 A room with a view

A snug bedroom

A touch of tartan

A smattering of red

A room to call our own

Books and flowers

 A writing desk

A reading nook

Candlelight

Outdoor seating

Climbing roses

And last but not least, there is a certain something, a quality that is hard to define. It could be the lighting at dusk, the patina of the bricks or the fragrance of the garden. We may sense past generations who have lived there and we feel a connection. The emotion is strong, even mysterious. We are at home.

Images via Pinterest

Last image from Howards End

To the North

After I finished the novel To the North by Elizabeth Bowen, I realized that one of the most poignant themes in literature is that of the orphan.  The Victorian novelists did it so well -- Charles Dickens in "David Copperfield"  and Charlotte Bronte in "Jane Eyre" are two of the most famous.  "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett and "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton are two other books dealing with this theme that come to mind.  More recently, the Harry Potter books revolved around a sympathetic orphan.  I remember reading "The House of Mirth" over the summer and pitying Lily Bart for her lack of family and support system.  The reader watches her make so many mistakes that lead to her downfall;  she would have benefited from a sister, mother or even best friend who could have advised and guided her.  All of these orphans had to rely on the sympathy of distant relations or friends to whom they were a burden.  They were operating in a vacuum with no role modes or instructive parent figures.

I have just discovered another author who deals with the theme of the orphan in a powerful and brilliant manner -- Elizabeth Bowen.  In her 1932 novel "To the North" she tells the story of two young women who are thrown together by tragedy.  Cecilia Summers is a young widow who has recently lost her husband Henry after just one year of marriage. Henry's sister Emmeline Summers (Henry and Emmeline are both orphans since childhood), who is now entirely without family, forms a bond with Cecilia after Henry's death.   The two young women decide to live together and move into a sweet little house with French windows and flower filled rooms in the St. John's Wood neighborhood of London. It is there that they lead their lives, independent but finding comfort in each other's company.  Their world is the other side of "Downton Abbey."  Young girls living independently in London in the 1920's, they belong more to the avant-garde world of Bloomsbury than Downton Abbey.  This world is vividly brought to life on the pages of this book by Bowen's exquisite prose. The girls are bright young things, attending sparkling parties, going away for country weekends, and having romances, but not quite on a firm footing with anything.  And certainly not anchored down by a family like the Crawleys (from "Downton Abbey").   Emmeline has a career about which she is passionate, but there is a vague, unknown quality to these girls and their world, and hence an ominous feeling pervades our perception of their future.

From the beginning we know that Cecilia does not have a "nice character." In the very first scene of the book she meets and befriends a man who seems slightly disreputable on the train from Milan to London.  She doesn't really care about this stranger at all, but she often makes decisions out of boredom and with little thought as to consequences. They exchange information and she worries that he may contact her in London.  And it turns out that this man, Markie Linkwater, will play a large part in the lives of these two women.  Emmeline will uncharacteristically fall head over heels in love with him.  And Cecilia is so wrapped up in her own life that she never notices.

And so from the beginning we wonder what kind of influence Cecilia can have over the younger and innocent Emmeline, whom she really should be watching over.  She is five years older than Emmeline and has been married; surely, we think, she can offer her some guidance and instruction about life.  Though she cares deeply for her sister-m-law,  Cecilia is not able to overcome her own selfishness and shallowness to be of any real help.  At first we are not particularly worried about Emmeline, who is truly the more admirable character of the two.  She is independent, happy, and runs a boutique travel agency with a friend in Bloomsbury.  Her self-reliance and sense of contentment cause the reader to fall into the same trap that Cecilia does, not worrying about Emmeline.  But Bowen's genius from the beginning of this book is to set up a foreboding of disaster that is present throughout.    

"To the North" is an amazing book.  It is short and powerful, and contains insights into human nature that are so true as to make us gasp with recognition.  One of the most outstanding features of this book is the writing.  Time and again I found passages of astounding beauty.  I frequently thought:  here is a great quote about love, friendship or loneliness, just to name a few of the topics Bowen writes about.

And there is wit as well.  Cecilia is hosting a luncheon party at her house when she receives a telephone call from Justin Towers, the many whom she may marry; she has a tense conversation with him.  She takes the call in another room and suddenly realizes she has left the door open.

"Cecilia's lunch party, having heard through the open door the first phase of the interlude, had exchanged less than a glance and, all raising their voices, maintained a strenuous conversation till she came back.  They were not English for nothing." 

"To the North" is a brilliant book about love and its destructive possibilities.  The ending will have you on the edge of your seat.  This book is a gem by the great writer Elizabeth Bowen and validates the notion of visiting books from the past by writers that are not widely read and not letting these books be forgotten.  The exciting thing is discovering how many treasures there are to be found.

Capturing Inner Beauty

 Elizabeth Bowen photographed by Cecil Beaton (1943) via here

The first season of the new Upstairs Downstairs on PBS takes place in 1936 with a new family moving into the house at 165 Eaton Place.  There was a touching episode recently which included a story line about the famous photographer Cecil Beaton coming to 165 Eaton Place to do some photography.  The cook wanders into the shoot accidentally before the family arrives and Cecil Beaton photographs her and captures her inner beauty.  She receives the photo in the mail and is thrilled with the results.  She has never looked more beautiful.  I thought about that episode when I spotted this beautiful photo of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen taken by Cecil Beaton.

There are writers that we carry around with us for some reason.  Maybe we read their books at an impressionable time in our lives, or maybe something about the way they lived their lives resonated with us.  Whatever it is, we find ourselves picking up biographies and memoirs about them as well as copies of their works.  Without realizing it, we have been collecting their entire body of work.  This is what has happened to me with Elizabeth Bowen.  When I saw this beautiful photo,  I realized that I have always been fond of her and actually have most of her books, even though I have only read a couple of  them and do not know very much about her life.  She was an elegant and intelligent woman who wrote many acclaimed novels and short stories.  She was born in 1899 and died in 1973.  She is the author of The Death of the Heart,  a book I read many years ago and admired for its subtlety, psychological insight, and story of a young girl searching for her place in the world.  Some of her other books are The Last September, The Heat of the Day, and The House in Paris.   She spent the last decade of her life teaching at several different American universities, including Bryn Mahr.  She was highly regarded as one of the best living writers at the time.  Can you imagine being one of her students?  I love this picture of her at Bryn Mahr.

Photo via here

Elizabeth Bowen is one of those writers who are not well known but have a loyal following.  Random House/Anchor books reissued all of her novels in paperback in 2002 and I bought as many as I could find.  Elizabeth Bowen, unlike writers such as Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield who were  literary superstars, was one of the quieter luminaries in the literary firmament, steadfastly writing her books and supporting her fellow writers.  I don't know much about her (I am now going to read her biography) but suspect she was a secure and confident woman who didn't need the limelight. Her condolence letter to Leonard Woolf after the death of Virginia Woolf is touching and generous.  She wrote:

"As far a I am concerned, a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world.  She illuminated everything, and one referred the most trivial things to her in one's thoughts.  To have been allowed to know her and love her is a great thing."

 Random House/Anchor Books edition of "The Death of the Heart" 

Cecil Beaton's photo of Elizabeth Bowen conveys her inner beauty and gives her a place in the sun.  Obviously her published writing has memorialized her talent, but how many of us knew about her beauty, the way it is captured in this photograph?

Here is the opening of "The Death of the Heart," a book many people consider her best:

"That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments.  These tapped together, or parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam.  The island stood in frozen woody brown dusk:  it was now between three and four in the afternoon.  A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun -- but the swans, the rims of the ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light.  There is something momentous about the height of winter.  Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks.  This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight."