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She is also to be congratulated for the excellence of her research and the quality of her language. Thank you!
Jeannette was hired for her culinary skill. It was hoped she could tempt his appetite with her cooking. Jeannette was of French nobility. But with the ongoing war in France, only she survived of her family. Now she had a new name, a new country, and hopefully, a new chance at life. Jeannette had always been good at cooking and she was grateful to find a position which would let her earn her living doing what she so enjoyed. However, Lord Endicott's appetite was diminished for many reasons. Going through all she had, Jeannette had a better understanding than anyone else on how to help the Lord. Things were made harder by the arrival of the Lord's sister. His sister was determined to have Jeannette fired.
***This is the best I have read of E. Fairchild's stories. I aim to keep this one always! Real history, real problems, real solutions. I loved it!***
The book is a celebration of differences, and teaches children the very important lesson that we are who we are, and nothing can change that, nor should we try. This reaches all levels - differences in attitude to the obvious difference in skin color.
"Spotty" reaches so much farther than any of the Rey's "Curious George" works, and I highly recommend it for every parent.
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I was very impressed by the author's tale, and the way she was able to weave in stories told to her by her father.
This is a great book -- one that I would share with others to better appreciate our connections in life with those we love.
A satisfying and enjoyable memoir.
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I have shared this book with several people, one of whom is a used book dealer who is planning to help her customers find the right book for their 'personal preference' using Ms. Ellington's book. She finds that many customers are unfamiliar with current authors and she felt this book would be useful to both her customers and to her in stocking her store.
I have given it to my daughter who is an avid Classical book reader. Her first love is the literature of the 19th century. She reads with a critical mind even when reading for pleasure. She has also expressed great interest in expanding her reading realm.
This book is all about reading to suit your personal preference and I highly recommend it for the insight it will provide its readers.
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In attempts to pin down Pym's special quality as a novelist, she has been compared to, and with, a quite disparate list of writers, from Jane Austen to Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth von Arnim, E. M. Delafield and a whole host of other names, many listed by Lenckos in her introduction. Kaufman compares the rivalry of Belinda and Agatha in Some Tame Gazelle to the humour of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia, and Everett commends Pym's 'high originality' which sets her fiction 'far above the intransigently reactionary ... Angela Thirkell'. Dunlap, tracing the influence on Pym of Charlotte M. Yonge, asserts that 'Pym's fiction is steeped in the work of Yonge' (even the unusual name of the heroine of A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet, is borrowed from a very different heroine of Yonge's).
To what extent are Pym's novels autobiographical, and her well-read heroines reflections of herself? Orphia Jane Allen, writing on 'Reading Pym Autobiographically', comments that 'Pym was aware that she could permit herself to become like Leonora' (in The Sweet Dove Died), but Leonora represents only 'one of the directions an aging, unmarried woman's life could take'. The most obvious incarnation of Pym's own personality is Belinda in Some Tame Gazelle, with her near-obsessive love of literary quotation. Pilgrim notes that, while Archdeacon Hoccleve and Bishop Grote quote aloud, sometimes not very felicitously, and Harriet 'tends to be oblivious to literary references', Belinda 'hardly ever quotes aloud, but silently recollects and meditates upon scores of passages, many of them quite obscure', and Nardin also finds significance in the fact that Belinda keeps her literary references to herself, 'restrained by a sense of personal modesty and strict propriety at once pathological and deeply lovable'. In being made privy to Belinda's interior monologue, the reader is at the same time granted access to the author's own stream of consciousness.
As Ackley points out, Pym 'often blurs the distinction between literature and life', suggesting in various ways that some of her characters have lives outside her fictional world. Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love, who cannot resist prying into people's lives, finds it 'so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of others'. Pym's characters, says Ackley, 'view the world as if they, too, were writers', and Nardin writes that 'in Pym's novels, there is a tension between the impulse to read and the impulse to contextualize or interpret'.
The inner monologues of Pym's heroines reveal her own uncertainties and need for reassurance. Pilgrim comments on Belinda's habitual alternation between self-doubt, 'expressed in her diffidence, timidity and constant anxiety', and self-confidence. Everett remarks on the unpretentiousness of Pym's early novels, and adds that the modesty of her approach 'possibly worked to Pym's disadvantage during the period when her manuscripts were being rejected' and 'makes her too easy to dismiss now'. Surveying the six earlier novels, she considers these thoroughly enjoyable but 'probably minor art', while Quartet in Autumn is to her mind a major work. She finds Excellent Women the 'most accomplished,... the most admirably competent', and has a kind word for An Unsuitable Attachment - it 'has a first-rate cat and a wholly believable public library'.
These are only some examples of the many rich insights provided by All This Reading. Further pleasures are provided in the second part of the volume, such as the reproduction in the essay by Paul De Angelis of Pym's letters to him of 1978-9, almost up to the time of her death in January 1980, and of A Year in West Oxfordshire, Pym's contribution to Ronald Blythe's anthology Places of 1981.
Janice Rossen's essay, 'Philip Larkin: Barbara Pym's Ideal Reader', discusses the crucial role played by 'virtually the only fellow writer with whom she discussed her work in progress'. Larkin's influence and advice were clearly of great importance to her: not only was he able to give her very specific and practical advice, but he was a writer of established reputation who treated her as an equal and gave her 'constant reassurances that her work was of extraordinary value'.
And not least, there is an account of thirty years of friendship and collaboration by Hazel Holt, Pym's literary executor, who tells us that she no longer reads Barbara Pym. 'I don't need to. ...once you've read the novels, she is with you forever.'
In Katherine Ackley's essay, she suggests Pym's characters are devoted to literature. They recite passages from an Austen novel or a Donne poem. Literature is a source of comfort to them. In John Bayley's essay, he further seees Pym as a comforter. He expands upon Matthew Arnold's theme that great art calms and comforts us, and he cites Pym as such a writer. Bayley notes that Pym's confidence about the sexes comes "from her sense of the arbitrary, almost ruthless, way they join up."
In "A Life Ruined by Literature", Elisabeth Lenckos argues that reading is a central theme in Pym's novels. The related topics of reading, romance and redemption are central in her novels. In A Few Green Leaves, the heroine Emma Howick recalls Austen's Emma. She stars in her own drama of misplaced affection, rejection and humiliation before leaving romantic fantasy behind. Lenckos suggests that Pym's world is like Austen's where the gentlewomen of reduced circumstances in post-war England have moved from manor houses to village cottages, and work part time in gentile jobs as librarians, clerks and social helpers.. "Like Austen's heroines their desire is to find a loving partner with whom to share life...." Those who love literature will find the nineteen essays in All this Reading satisfy every taste in a fine collection.
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