Song of Achilles wins 2012 Orange Prize for fiction

American author Madeline Miller has won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut novel The Song of Achilles. 

The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. The Orange Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman.

Franklin and Eleanor

Youtube is a great historical resource! I have been reading Hazel Rowley's Franklin and Eleanor: an extraordinary marriage (Melbourne University Press, 2011) and just idly flicked in a search to Youtube as one does. Yes, there is Eleanor at the Human Rights Declaration at United Nations and also masses of other stuff from the FDR collection including family movies as well as more notable speeches and occasions.


Eleanor was an amazing woman and I have read other stuff on her and seen at least one documentary. This book by Hazel Rowley is a really enjoyable read. It's well-researched and well-written and has some great photographs. As she focuses on the relationship between Eleanor and Franklin the part of Eleanor's life that is mainly featured is that between her marriage in 1905 and Franklin's death in 1945, though the context of before and after is well set. I got a bit confused with all the relatives in the beginning and think that perhaps a family tree would have made a good addition to the book! But that's a minor quibble!

Last gift of time: life beyond sixty

I first started reading Carolyn Heilbrun's writing decades ago under her pseudonym of Amanda Cross. Her crime novels about a feisty academic feminist, Kate Fansler, really stood out for me among other early feminist crime fiction which was very issues based and not necessarily good writing or attractive publishing. Cross' novels, on the other hand, were well-written reflective pieces with a good story line and, at that, usually a storyline set in academic circumstances which I understood.

In 1970 an investigative journalist discovered who was the real person behind Amanda Cross and I came to know the writing of Carolyn Heilbrun herself, such as the classic Writing a woman's life. Heilbrun, atheist, feminist and a woman with strong views, had decided that she did not want to live beyond the term of a natural life i.e. 70, the Biblical three score years and ten though as an atheist the Bible was not a construct that ruled her life. The Last gift of time: life beyond sixty was written when she was approaching 70 and looking back on the last ten years of her life. She decided then that the time was not right but when she was 77 ended her life at her own time and in her own place and space, in a room of her own indeed.

Recently author, Paddy Leigh Fermor, died at 96. He was still living part of the year in the Mani and part in England. He is reputed to have still been writing and revising. Carolyn Heilbrun decided at age 77 in full possession of her faculties to choose her own time of ending her life. My friend's father, John, who is 90 and has dementia was a member of the Euthanasia Society but now he is in a high care dementia ward and doesn't know what euthanasia means. There are many pathways. But I really recommend that people read Carolyn Heilbrun and savour her prose.

In tearing haste

When Patrick Leigh Fermor died recently, I went to the Boroondara library catalogue to hunt out my Fermor favourites. Much to my delight I discovered a book I didn't know. Edited by Charlotte Mosley, In tearing haste is a collection of letters between Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Devonshire. The correspondence which is two-sided (i.e. I mean there are letters from both of them) spans the period from 1954 to 2008. It is illustrated by a great series of photos of them and lots of other familiar bods and ends in a poignant one taken in 2008 at Edensor with both of them, backs to the camera, heading away from the viewer.

I have just been dipping into it since I brought it home but think it deserves a solid cover-to-cover read now!

Lord Peter : the end

Weeks ago when I was sick I started reading or rather re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers' crime fiction. I quickly romped through the books which are all held in Boroondara's collection and then with some misplaced reluctance turned to the Jill Paton Walsh novels about Lord Peter Wimsey.

Novels past, I was left only with short stories and today I finally finished the last volume of her short stories: Lord Peter: the complete Lord Peter Wimsey stories. I have really struggled to complete this volume as short stories are simply not my favourite type of writing. I know they can be beautiful gems of construction but I really prefer the development of plot and character to be found in a longer work.

This volume is a compendium of all DLS's Peter Wimsey stories and some of them I reread recently in other collections such as Striding folly and In the teeth of the evidence. Don't get me wrong, some of these stories are very clever pieces of detection and there are passages that I love. One such is the scene in "The learned adventure of the Dragon's Head" where nephew Lord St George is visiting and purchases a secondhand book that turns out to provide an interesting mystery. How about this for writing?

"Yes, Uncle Peter," said the viscount dutifully. He was extended on his stomach on the library hearthrug, laboriously picking his way through the more exciting-looking bits of the Cosmographia, with the aid of Messrs. Lewis and Short, whose monumental compilation he had hitherto looked upon as a barbarous invention for the annoyance of upper forms.

These short stories contain lots of little gems that are reminiscent of her full-blown novels. I am very glad I have read them again but so wish there were more novels. Short stories are not the same.

In the teeth of the evidence

The book, In the teeth of the evidence, is a 1939 compilation called In the teeth of the evidence after the first (and Wimsey) short story in the book. The book contains two Lord Peter stories (the above mentioned and "Absolutely elsewhere"), five stories with wine and spirits salesman Montague Egg as detective, and ten other stories of mystery and suspense with no detective.

I enjoyed them all as little jewels of cleverness and wonder as I frequently do how someone has the ingenuity to come up with plot after plot. However, on a whole short stories are not my preferred style of reading. I have one more collection of DLS's short stories and then I am back to a full-blown book where there is more plot and character development.

Striding Folly

Striding folly is a collection of three Dorothy L Sayers short stories featuring Peter Wimsey in his detective role. "Striding folly" and "The Haunted policeman" were originally published in 1939 and "Talboys" was written in 1942. All the stories date to a time after Peter and Harriet's marriage in Busman's Honeymoon. "The Haunted policeman" depicts him as a new father after the birth of Bredon whilst "Talboys" depicts him as the father of three boys and the mystery of the stolen peaches. Whilst they are all good stories and offer some insight into Lord Peter's later life, #shortstoriesarenotthesame :( The volume Striding folly also has an informative introductory essay by Janet Hitchman entitled "Lord Peter Wimsey and his creator" and that essay is well worth a read.

More Peter Wimsey

I got on a real roll reading Dorothy Sayers crime fiction and, of course, once I had finished all her novels I wanted to read more about Peter Wimsey. That left me with two options: to read the ones written by Jill Paton Walsh and to search out the various short stories written by Dorothy L Sayers about him. So I have been doing both.

Jill Paton Walsh in 1998 published a completed form of Dorothy Sayers last but unfinished Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations. After its success, she followed up with two other Wimsey titles A Presumption of Death in 2002 and The Attenbury Emeralds in 2010. Both of the latter titles were based on ideas or hints of cases from DLS who refers to the Attenbury Emeralds as Wimsey's first case after the war and who wrote a series of letters to and from various members of the Wimsey family on which A Presumption of Death is based. In fact A Presumption of Death is identified as co-authored by the two writers as is Thrones, Dominations.



I had read Thrones, Dominations previously and read it again at the end of my recent Sayers burst. Coming as it did at the end of weeks of reading DLS's prose and allusions I really didn't find it as good (though certainly not bad). I had decided I wasn't going to read Jill Paton Walsh's other Wimsey titles but they came up in conversation with some friends, one of whom said the next two were very good. So I did read them and I have enjoyed both of them particularly The Attenbury Emeralds. But, they just are not Sayers. One can read her books on so many levels and the prose is just filled with literary and other allusions including, I am sure, many I don't get. But if you like the Wimsey stories do read the Jill Paton Walsh ones bearing in mind that this is another writer who writes well but differently.

#blogjune Dorothy L. Sayers

During the last month or so I have had a very yucky run of being poorly. That was the down side but the up side of this was that I was only in the mood for very recreational reading. And well let's face it for me that really means crime fiction. But I didn't want some new titles. I needed some comfortable old rereads that would delight me by their prose and give me the thrill of the chase when sometimes I really knew the outcome.

So I decided to read a Dorothy L Sayers or two. In fact, it ended up being not stopping at two but encompassing her whole corpus of crime novels as well as the one she left partly written, Thrones, Dominations, which was completed by Jill Paton Walsh. I decided I wanted to read them in order so I searched out a chronology first off and found one here (along with a lot of other information). This was a list in internal chronology rather than by year of publication. Some of these I had reread on a number of occasions but there were others that I hadn't read for decades.



So in due course, I read: Whose body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Documents in the Case, The Nine Tailors, The Five Red Herrings, Have his Carcase, Murder must Advertise, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, and the afore-mentioned Thrones, Dominations. I was amused to see as I clocked these up on Goodreads which then broadcast my reading to Twitter and Facebook how I seemed to be starting a trend amongst my followers! I hope they had as much please as I did :)

What a pleasure were they all! I love her prose and her literary allusions and, of course, her plots. They are all really fabulous but Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night are still my definite favourites! Some things don't change in decades. I didn't really like Thrones, Dominations as much as the real DLS but I was encouraged last weekend to start reading the other couple of Wimsey books that Jill Paton Walsh wrote as the person recommending them said they were good. I am currently reading A Presumption of Death which is also based partly on some extant DLS stuff. So I will be reporting back further on these titles.

Tartan Noir