I definitely have iPod brain and I'm not ashamed of it. In fact, I recently bought a sort of iPod-dupe mp3 player and am having a lovely time listening to music I like again, rather than music Spotify randomly serves me. (I might write about this process of Spotify-uncoupling at some point if people are interested.)
I was lucky to work with some magnificent writers when I was on staff at the New Statesman. Behold, music critic Kate Mossman's devastating summation of Harry Styles in a single sentence: "Harry Styles is the only young male rockstar working in the UK, if we think of a rockstar as someone mysterious and charismatic who can usher in a whole new style of trousers."
Related, definitely. A data-driven look at "whither the male pop superstar". Surprise, surprise: "Gender parity might just be making us think that there are no men in the pop world anymore."
February is the cruelest month, I've decided. It's too short, the weather is foul, and this time around, it brought me some additional health challenges that interfered with day-to-day existence. With everything else taking me a bit longer than usual, it was my time for reading that suffered. So, only five books this month, without much variety.
Heyer's Waterloo novel, famously so accurate that they used it at Sandhurst to teach military trainees about battles. Also so accurate that for me, someone who isn't that interest in the minute uniform differences between different regiments, the long military descriptions dragged quite a bit. However, I did love the glimpses we get of society life on the fringes of Wellington's campaign, and I liked Audley and Barbara as a couple. I was also full of admiration for the feat of historical fiction Heyer had pulled off in writing this book.
The Late Mrs. Willoughby and The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh by Claudia Gray
I consumed both of these gentle Austen-inspired mysteries as audiobooks — a lovely recommendation from my Shedunnit colleague Leandra Griffith after I asked her for options that might suit my diminished powers of concentration. Each book has its own case, which is complemented by the longer character arc of the two "detectives", Mr Jonathan Darcy and Miss Juliet Tilney, both children of original Austen characters. I enjoyed Lady Catherine slightly more, just because it's always interesting to see how sleuths handle investigating attempted murder, rather than the death itself, but both were good.
After completing the Alastair-Audley tetralogy, I jumped back to this Heyer from 1923. It's a Georgian makeover montage, with the main character — a country bumpkin named Philip Jettan — executing a full transformation into a society exquisite by the end of the book. I loved this story! It's not emotional complicated or especially deep, which suited me.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
This is the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen book for March, our first ever "Sherlock Holmes" month. Although I spend a huge amount of my time thinking and writing about crime fiction inspired by Conan Doyle, it's been several years since I actually read his work. And I was reminded all over again that there's a reason why his stories are adapted and reworked continually. They're really good. Revolutionary, I know. This collection has some of the all-time greats in it, like "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Red-Headed League", and some absolutely beautiful writing. Take this passage, for example, which is Holmes talking to Watson:
"If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."
So often when I revisit a "classic", I find myself disappointed. Not so here!
That was my reading for February: five books, which wasn't bad considering how foggy I was. Here's to a better month in March.
I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I'd tell you why I do this and what it looks like.
I've been an RSS-first reader since I was a student in the mid-2000s. Back then, publications made it an attractive prospect. Many had bespoke feeds based on specific subjects or writers that you could follow. Before social media became the dominant way to keep up with your preferred media and personalities, you could use these feeds to curate your own little magazine in your feed reader of choice, made up just of the stuff you found most interesting. It was excellent.
Many years later, I started working for The Browser, a newsletter that curates a daily selection of the best articles, videos and podcasts available on the web. From my predecessor, I inherited a bundle of over a thousand RSS feeds that he used to put each edition together. It contained feeds for every major English-language media outlet, plus hundreds of niche publications and personal blogs. It had been collected over many years, assembled with taste and shrewdness. By this time, we were well into the era of declining online advertising revenues, rising paywalls and link rot. Taking custody of this RSS collection felt momentous, even a bit counter-cultural. In the 2020s, this isn't how you are supposed to read on the internet.
I've been using the feeds daily ever since. I've added to the collection: I'm now getting close to 2,000 publications. A lot of the growth has been driven by the atomisation of media. When an outlet shuts down, I do my best to find and follow the new destinations of its best writers. I use Feedly as my reader nowadays and all I have to do to follow a Substack is paste its url into the "follow source" field. Even if they don't advertise the fact anymore, most outlets do still have at least a "whole site" feed; for those that don't, my reader can usually pull something out of the website's architecture.
To put together each edition of The Browser, I (or my co-editor, we job share) scan through all of the new articles published since I last checked the feeds. There are often several thousand. I don't read everything in full, of course. I've become very good over the years at allowing my eye to slide over everything, stopping when I see a headline or phrase that looks promising. I keep a running list of likely candidates and then appraise them properly once I've finished the scroll.
The final selection goes out in the newsletter to our paid subscribers. I feel confident that it lives up to our "writing of lasting value" tagline, because I have glanced through, and in a lot of cases read, a vast amount of what was published that day. Along the way, I pick up a lot of other material that I find personally interesting or amusing but that doesn't fit The Browser's rubric. That's what you see on Thursdays, if you look at my "Thursday Thirteen" link roundups.
So what does the online world look from the vantage point of an RSS fanatic? Mostly, quite spare and minimalist. Not all feeds bring images through with the text, and a lot of embeds don't work either. If these seem important, I click through to see the original, but that doesn't happen very often. My reader just sorts all entries chronologically, so I see a random jumble of everything as I scroll backwards. To give you an idea of what a mixture it is, here are the subjects of the five articles at the top of my feeds right now: shark hunting in India, praise kink, 1970s architecture, AI's influence on filmmaking, and the growth of the anti-system voter in the US. I suppose I could sort the feeds into subject matter folders, but I find the constant variety makes all the information easier to parse. I think it helps me do a better job of sifting out the good stuff, too.
A homepage is a curated display of the articles that its editor wants to present to visitors. An RSS feed includes everything that is published. I find it interesting sometimes to compare what comes through to me on the feeds vs what is given promotion and prominence. When you read via RSS, you see all of the SEO articles that the casual web reader never sees but which drive search traffic towards the site. These are things like videogame cheats, Wordle hints, explanations of movie post-credit scenes, information on how to watch sports matches. Lists with titles like "What's good to watch on Netflix this month" or explainers on how to unsubscribe from streaming services are common too. Betting odds — "what are the odds on the Logan Paul-Anthony Joshua fight" — come up a lot. Instructions on how to circumvent paywalls or get around age verification requirements are becoming more common.
There's now an ever-increasing amount of explainer content that looks to me like it's tailored towards search engines' AI summary tools, too. Pieces about whether a certain app or service is down or advice on how to unblock sites that are banned in various territories fall into this category. The same goes for long summaries of books or films, many of which themselves look like they have been written by AI. The machine feeds the machine.
I also see a lot of what I think of affiliate bait product reviews — a "review" that sets out a problem and then makes extravagant promises about the problem solving brilliance of of a particular device or piece of software. This will invariable turn out to be something that the publication earns money for promoting. Re-packaged playlists are also common. An outlet will write up the "songs of the summer", which is actually just a list of tracks lifted from an existing playlist on Spotify or Apple Music, rather than original editorial. These will never appear anywhere prominent on a site's landing pages. They're just there to capture search clicks or referrals.
My favourite thing to see on the feeds, though, is the evidence that there are humans still out there generating content. Sometimes an article will have a temporary headline with "TKTKTK" in it, which was captured by the aggregator before it was updated to its final version. The multiple outcome pieces especially make me chuckle: I, too, have been a web editor under pressure to get an article out the second the polls close or a casting is announced, making multiple versions on the sly in the CMS and then only promoting the one that turned out to be correct to the homepage.
When people go live on Substack or other platforms, the videos get added to their feeds with auto-generated thumbnails. I'll be scrolling and sometimes the blurry resting face of a journalist I used to work with will suddenly pop up. I always enjoy that. There's a culture on Substack, too, of creating "hidden open threads" for only those who know how to find them to add comments. I see all of those, just by being an RSS reader.
My favourite thing of all, though, is when people have fun with the differing perspective that RSS gives you on the web. Dave Rupert runs an "RSS Club", where members pledge to publish stuff to their feeds that never appears anywhere else — a secret, just for those in the know. Many use it for more personal writing, or works in progress, or art that they don't want to expose to the whole internet yet. Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers. When I've spent hours scrolling through my never-ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something that was written just for me.
One of the best things I've read about AI in a long while: A.I. Isn't People. Related: a while ago a frustrated friend venting to me about bad AI usage in her workplace said the phrase "it's not even actual AI, it's just Numberwang", and now I think about this all the time.
Fantasy Herd — like fantasy football, but with dairy cows.
On Heated Rivalry as anti-dystopia art. I find this a persuasive argument: media that doesn't look like science fiction nonetheless imagines a parallel world in which awful things are not happening all the time. Of course we like it.
I watched a lot of Winter Olympics. This is an interesting look at what over-investing in narratives does to performance — c.f. Ilya Malinin and Alyssa Liu. (I have such strong opinions on which sports are good and which aren't. All the ones where people on skis spin about in the air and get marked on a complicated scale can go, in my opinion, in favour of more actual first-across-the-finish-line races of various kinds.)
I'm always wanting to read more about Lauren Groff's insane writing process. She does longhand drafts, then locks them away and starts again based only on her memories of what she's written!
This is the 1959 Pan paperback edition of Powder and Patch. The novel was originally published by Mills & Boon in 1923 and then re-released by Heinemann in 1930.
I've gone back in time: both fictionally, because this novel is once more set during the reign of George II in the 1750s, and biographically, because this was only the third book that Georgette Heyer ever published. After following the Alastair-Audley tetralogy through to its conclusion, I'm now going to return to some of the titles from the 1920s and early 1930s that I skipped while in the grip of my passion for all things Devil/Satanas and their descendants.
Powder and Patch is an anomaly in Heyer's bibliography. It was her only novel ever to be published pseudonymously and also her only one to be put out by Mills & Boon (which at the time was a general interest publisher, its concentration on romances only beginning in the 1930s). Unusually, this novel differs a fair bit between its two major editions. In 1923, it appeared as The Transformation of Philip Jettan by Stella Martin. Then it was reissued in 1930 by Heinemann as Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer, minus its original final chapter. It's also very short: my Pan paperback edition is only 159 pages. According to Jennifer Kloester, Heyer wrote it in just three weeks. Compare this to last week's Napoleonic behemoth: my copy of An Infamous Army is 412 pages.
Powder and Patch is a delicious morsel. It centres on Philip Jettan, as the original title would suggest, a young man from a wealthy gentry family. Philip's father, Sir Maurice, was a great one for fine clothes, high society and extravagant travel in his youth. He had hopes, we are told, that his son would follow in his footsteps, but disappointingly Philip prefers the English countryside and dressing more for comfort than style. Philip is also passionately in love with the daughter of Sir Maurice's neighbour. Her name, if you'll believe it, is Cleone.
The status quo is shattered by the arrival in the neighbourhood of a rival for Cleone's hand. Mr Bancroft marches down the village street in a suit of pale apricot and high, red-heeled shoes. The residents gawp at him and immediately dub him an "Apparition". Cleone — herself considered a "Vision" — is flattered by his courtly manners and perpetual compliments. Straightforward, unrefined Philip seems very boring by comparison. When he asks her to marry him, she refuses him on the grounds that he has no polish or refinement. And so, of course, he vows to show her by going away and becoming the most refined gentleman who has ever minced into a ballroom. His pride is further injured when he loses dismally in a fencing match with Bancroft. Better swordsmanship is also to be part of his transformation.
Much of this book is taken up with the details of Philip's evolution into a figure of fashion. I've learned that Heyer is fond of using a physical transformation as part of a character's development. In These Old Shades we get Léonie's shift from boy to girl and her opinions about having to wear skirts instead of breeches as a way of indicating her fiery and unconventional character. This book expands on that: Powder and Patch is one long Georgian makeover montage, if you will, as Philip Jettan is transformed from diffident country bumpkin into society exquisite and le dernier cri of fashion. In both instances, an older character acts as their fairy godmother or guide through the process — for Léonie, it's her future sister-in-law Fanny, and for Philip it's his uncle Tom, a rackety younger son with good taste in cravats. They head to Paris, which is to be the testing-ground for Philip's new persona.
Philip takes Parisian society by storm with his magnificent outfits, excessive languor and witty repartee. He soon has a circle of admiring friends and more invitations than he can handle. Heyer is careful not to make him too much of a paragon or a fashion plate, though, which would make him boring in a different way. No amount of beautifully fitted coats can change his essential nature. He is still fundamentally decent and competent, for all that he postures as an unreliable poet. His verses are laughably bad, though. Despite the new plumage, he's still at heart a country squire, not a creative genius. Some things can't be changed by the haresfoot or the skill of a brilliant tailor.
He returns to London, where Cleone is having a rather successful season of her own. Of course a comedy of errors ensues, with both parties pretending they aren't still attached and flirting vindictively with other people. In this section, we get to meet Cleone's aunt, Lady Malmerstoke, who espouses an interesting if rather essentialist philosophy of love. She warns Cleone against flirting too much with other men to enrage Philip, because "men with chins like his are not safe", which is a great phrase. Later, Lady Malmerstoke tries to explain to Philip why Cleone is doing the opposite of going after what she wants — that is, flirting with others rather than showing her partiality for Philip. "Women don't reason," she says, which is all very Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
Then later still, she tells Philip that he must be "brutal" to Cleone, and "master" her, and kiss away her objections. Up to this point, he's been too polite and respectful to win her. I think there is an interesting point buried in here — Cleone wants Philip to be interesting and exciting, rather than staid and boring — but words like "brutal" and "master" come a little close to suggesting he should override her objections or force her into doing things she doesn't want to do. Which isn't at all indicated with these characters, but the hint is there that a less courteous suitor might take it too far. Which is, after all, an accurate representation of how some men behaved, and behave, towards women. This is the closest thing I've yet seen in Heyer to the stereotypical "strong man and swooning woman" of pure romance fiction, and a far cry from her subtler take on such a relationship, like that of Dominic and Mary in Devil's Cub. Mary has much greater agency and autonomy than Cleone does. Maybe that's the difference between the 1750s and the 1780s.
Another interesting element, as a modern reader, is Lady Malmerstoke's "little black page", Sambo. His dialogue and action are limited only to announcing guests with a slight indication of his accent — he pronounces "Sir" as "Sah", for instance. We learn nothing more about him, other than that his mistress is polite to him and he does his job well. We don't know where he came from or how old he is, although the epithet "little" suggests he's younger than the typical eighteenth century servant, so likely quite a young child. His presence in the novel hints at the darkness that underpins all of this froth and fun, recalling the truth of how some of these fortunes are maintained and that in this era, some kinds of human beings were kept like pets for display. I don't think that Heyer includes him for this reason — she's not writing a novel about imperialism or the slave trade — but rather because it's historically accurate that a woman of this class and at this time might have such an attendant. It was fashionable, and the characters of Powder and Patch are, above all things, fashionable.
This story concludes, of course, with Philip being masterful and resolving all of Cleone's romantic difficulties — she has accidentally betrothed herself to two men she doesn't like in the same night. In the original version, there is then a final chapter with Philip, Cleone and Sir Maurice in Paris, all being highly exquisite and admired together. It's a resolution of a sort, with Philip's father finally proud of his son and the young lovers safely married. When the book was republished by Heinemann, though, Heyer chose to omit this conclusion and end with Philip and Cleone in London, betrothed and happy. The implication of this ending is that Philip has learned not to be diffident and boring, but isn't going to devote his life to the pursuit of the perfect waistcoat. He's got his girl and they are going to make a life together. It's a more mature and interesting way to bring the novel to a close, showing how much Heyer had developed her craft in the seven years between the two editions.
As the shortness of this book indicates, there isn't great depth to be found in Powder and Patch. It is, however, excellent fun — full of period details about mid eighteenth century fashion and society. I would absolutely read this book again if I felt in need of cheering up.
My Favourite Phrases
Philip's father, Sir Maurice, describes his son near the start of the book as "a raw clodhopper".
Philip calls Bancroft, an early rival for Cleone's hand, a "pranked out mummer".
Once he has morphed into a man of fashion, Philip has a "middle aged exquisite" to tie his cravat.
Cleone's aunt, Sally Malmerstoke, calls Philip's father "a punctilious ramrod".
Thanks for reading. I'm making making way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all the entries so far here.
I'm always tripping over Austen fanfiction, no matter where I am online. Here's an obituary for Charlotte Lucas that imagines interesting futures for her, her family and her friends.
This is the 1961 Pan paperback edition of An Infamous Army. The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1937.
I've had a marvellous time over the past couple of months reading the Alastair-Audley tetralogy: These Old Shades, Devil's Cub, Regency Buck and now An Infamous Army. It's taken me from 1926, when Georgette Heyer was a just-married young author in her early twenties, to 1937, when she was a mother in her mid thirties who had published over a dozen novels. I've read about the 1750s, the 1780s and the 1810s. Wigs and patches have come and gone, although it continues to be a bad idea to wear puce.
I was aware of An Infamous Army by reputation long before I embarked on this project of reading all of Heyer's historical fiction. It's her Waterloo novel, famously providing such an accurate description of the battle that it was recommended to military trainees at Sandhurst. I had heard this factoid so often that I thought it might be a flattering myth, but Heyer biographer Jennifer Kloester was able to confirm the truth of it, learning from a former instructor that army personnel and military historians alike value it as a teaching aid. This would no doubt have delighted Heyer, who in order to write this novel spent many months reading sources, including all of the Duke of Wellington's correspondence, and filled her house with maps of the battlefield.
The book covers most of the "Hundred Days" that elapsed between Napoleon's escape from exile on Elba and his meeting with the Coalition force — Wellington's "infamous army" of the title — in what was then the Netherlands on Sunday 18th June 1815. Just over half of the novel is focused on the social scene in Brussels in the later winter and spring of 1815, as Wellington was assembling troops and commanders in the area. The rest is devoted to a detailed play-by-play of the battle itself, much of it focusing on the activities of Colonel Audley, an aide-de-camp to the Duke.
Audley was a minor character in Regency Buck, the younger brother of the Earl of Worth who marries his ward, Judith, at the end of that book. At the start of An Infamous Army, set three years later, the Worths are taking advantage of the freedom to travel again in Europe, after the Bourbon restoration of 1814. They — along with many other leading members of British society — are in Brussels, holding balls, going on picnics and attending military parades. Also engaged in these pursuits is Lady Barbara Childe, the red-headed granddaughter of Dominic and Mary from Devil's Cub, who are now the Duke and Duchess of Avon. The chronology absolutely doesn't work for them to have got married in the early 1780s and already have a fully-grown and once-widowed granddaughter in 1815, but I don't think Heyer cared about that and nor do I, really.
Audley and Bab, as she is known, are quickly embroiled in a love triangle with "Brussels' most notorious rake", the Comte de Lavisse. Bab has been carrying on with Lavisse for some months, as well as engaging in other scandalous behaviour such as going for morning rides by herself, taking laudanum drops and appearing at a ball with painted toenails. She's also blunt in her speech and uninterested in affecting maidenly virtues she doesn't possess — as a young widow, she has more license than the average debutante. She's probably the closest thing a woman can be to a rake in 1815, in the sense that she truly does not care what anyone else thinks of her social activities or romantic entanglements. She even describes herself this way during a marriage proposal.
Early on, she is introduced to Audley, who is handsome and good at riding and also noble and honourable and reliable enough to excel in an important job in the army. Something in her — probably the part that doesn't enjoy having to take laudanum to be able to sleep at night — realises that she could be truly happy with him. They quickly confess their love and become engaged, only for Bab to rebel against marital expectations while Audley is constantly sent away from Brussels on army business. Theirs is an on-and-off, fight-and-make-up kind of engagement that echoes the unsettled nature of life in the spring of 1815. Everybody knows that a confrontation with Napoleon is coming. Nobody knows exactly when or where it will be. The balls and parties continue, full of handsome young officers who won't live to see the summer. It's a brittle, troubled time.
Then comes the action of the battle, to which Heyer devotes ten whole chapters. Audley's role as aide-de-camp to Wellington allows the reader to see up close how the Duke directs the strategy. Audley also acts as one of Wellington's messengers, taking orders to other commanders in the field, so that we also get to hear different perspectives from across the battlefield. In a nice bit of plotting, when Audley is injured on such an errand, it is Bab's erstwhile lover Lavisse who helps him and completes his mission by delivering the message.
Meanwhile, Bab and Judith are back in Brussels, doing what they can for the columns of wounded men who are being ferried back to the city. I found this section incredibly moving, as Heyer describes the inadequate preparations for medical care (they're still erecting a field hospital in one of the parks 24 hours after the fighting has begun) and how the city's few doctors are overwhelmed by the number of patients. Bab acquits herself well, nursing dying men in the street for hours on end, and we (and Judith) get a glimpse of the decent person who has been hiding under flippancy and flirting all this time. At the conclusion, Bab's drama with Audley is resolved in a satisfactory way that feels true to both of their characters.
I greatly admired An Infamous Army. It's a truly impressive feat of research and description. Some of the sections that deal with the human cost of war, such as those about the plight of the wounded, are excellent. But I didn't enjoy reading it, for the most part. I have never been very interested in the kind of history that dwells in the details of who stood where on a battlefield, nor in the Napoleonic Wars. This book overflows with both of these things: many pages are given over to descriptions of where various regiments are and what all their different uniforms look like, and the jostling for power that is going on between the different powers allied against Napoleon.
I found the first half of the novel, pre-battle, rather slow, and then the battle section itself too stuffed with descriptions of artillery bombardments and troop manoeuvres. The level of precision and detail in the battle section that makes this book a great military teaching aid renders it slow going for a reader like me (that's why this post has taken me two weeks rather than my usual one!). In her author's note, Heyer pre-empts the comparison to Thackeray's Vanity Fair, acknowledging the debt and saying that she hadn't read that novel for years when she wrote An Infamous Army. I likewise haven't read that book in a long time, but from what I remember I think I would have preferred it if Heyer, too, had made Waterloo one episode in a longer, more character-focused, story.
That said, I did enjoy Bab and Audley's love story, although I wished that there was more of it. I also had very little interest in the romantic B-plot, a forbidden marriage between two minor characters. That was all dealt with so sparingly that it felt like Heyer couldn't summon much attention for it either. I liked the glimpses provided of real-life historical figures, such as Lady Caroline Lamb in her outrageously transparent gown and the Duchess of Richmond, who really did hold a grand ball on the eve of the battle. Heyer's deft way of including such characters was much improved from Regency Buck. The cameos at the end of An Infamous Army from the Duke and Duchess of Avon were delightful, given how much I enjoyed their characters in Devil's Cub. I also gained a much better understanding of the scope of Wellington's achievements as a general: he was a politician as much as a tactician and did a superb job of keeping all the European commanders pointing in the right direction instead of fighting over who was going to pay for what. Did I want to know so much about that, though? Not really. My note on one long section about British-Prussian military liaison techniques just reads: "I simply do not care."
To me, this book felt like more of a study aid than an entertaining novel. Well-written as it is, I wouldn't rank it among my favourite Heyers so far. And it will be a long time before I want to read anything else about the relative attractiveness of Hussar uniforms versus Guards uniforms.
Five Other Thoughts
Judith's focus in the early sections on finding a good husband for Miss Devenish felt rather like Emma Wodehouse's championing of Harriet Smith.
Puce-watch continues: at a ball a plain young woman in a gown of "particularly harsh puce" stands next to Miss Devenish and makes her look angelic in white by comparison.
One of my favourite descriptive passages was the one about Bab and Audley galloping down the Allée in Brussels in the early morning light. Beautiful writing.
We get a small dose of casual anti-semitism in the description of La Catalani, an opera singer Wellington hires as the entertainment for his ball. She is "sharp as a Jew" and haggles fiercely over her fee.
I did miss the versions of Judith and Peregrine from Regency Buck, who raced curricles and attended cock-fights. They were both rather staid and middle-aged in this book, even though it is set only three years later so they will both be in their twenties. The generational maths of this novel is all out of kilter.
My Favourite Phrases
A gossipy man settles down for "a comfortable prose" — ie, a chat? — with his hostess.
There is "nothing more effulgent than his hessians with their swinging tassels" — I suspect Heyer went diving into the thesaurus to find the right adjective for Audley's very shiny boots.
"Such a quiz of a hat!".
"Oh, toll-loll!" as a sceptical exclamation.
Napoleon is described as "a Corsican ogre".
Thanks for reading. I'm making making way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all the entries so far here.
After several months of good progress, I've experienced a bit of a health setback in the past couple of weeks and found it difficult to focus on physical books. (I've written a little more about my experiences of long-term illness here). I asked my podcast production assistant Leandra, who I know is an avid audiobook listener, if she could recommend me any cosy, easy-to-consume titles that would fit my general tastes. And, kind soul that she is, she immediately provided a dozen options that fall somewhere in the realm of historical/mystery/fantasy/science fiction. I got searching on my library apps and this, the second book in the Mr Darcy and Miss Tilney series, was the first one available.
I read the first book in this series — The Murder of Mr Wickham — as an ebook last year. I've read a lot of Austen follow-ons and fanfiction (it's a bit of a project of mine) and I enjoyed the way Claudia Gray blended together the timelines of the different Austen novels so that characters like Emma Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Eliot could interact in the same book. The addition of an original plot in the form of a well-paced mystery elevated this book above the others of this type that I've read; Gray took the story onwards into new territory, rather than rehashing events that Austen had already covered.
Where The Murder of Mr Wickham puts the details from Emma and Pride and Prejudice at the fore, The Late Mrs Willoughby takes us into the realm of Sense and Sensibility. Both of our sleuth characters from the first book — Jonathan Darcy, son of Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth, and Juliet Tilney, daughter of Catherine from Northanger Abbey) — find themselves in Barton, Devonshire, where Austen's novel is mostly set. Jonathan is there as a reluctant houseguest of his school bully, Mr Willoughby, who has recently married and inherited his rich aunt's estate. Juliet, meanwhile, is making an extended visit to Marianne Brandon (née Dashwood), after striking up a friendship in the previous book in this series.
At a neighbourhood party, Mrs Willoughby dies horribly after drinking port laced with arsenic. It's awfully convenient for her husband, who disliked her and married her for her money, and terribly sad for another of his guests, whom she had spurned in favour of Willoughby's proposal. Marianne is also suspected and rumours of poison as a "woman's weapon" make life very unpleasant for her. Mr Darcy and Miss Tilney step in once more to investigate, skirting the bounds of propriety to question servants, perform chemical analyses of the poison, and interrogate their hosts. I will admit that I correctly guessed the identity of the culprit about halfway through, but this didn't impair my enjoyment of the whole story.
As well as working the case, our two protagonists make some emotional breakthroughs in their friendship, which is handled in a believable and period-appropriate fashion. The careful portrayal of Jonathan Darcy as neurodivergent centuries before such a term existed is done well, too. I found him to be a better-realised character in this book, where he existed separately to his parents, who will always be harder for a modern author to write convincingly because they carry the baggage of their Austen versions and all of the adaptations thereof.
I found Billie Fulford-Brown's reading of the book very easy and pleasant to listen to (and as an erstwhile audio editor, I am a notoriously picky audiobook consumer). The pace and momentum she kept up had me listening in every available moment and very nicely distracted from my symptoms. I plan to continue the series in audio and am waiting impatiently to borrow the next book, The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
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The "looking back on myself in 2016" trend of recent weeks has convinced me that the confessional online personal essay is back (if it ever really went away). Here's a great example of the form.
Someone in the thick of the AI-obsessed tech sector writes: I miss thinking hard.
This site where you draw a little horse and watch it frolic along with other people's little horses is oddly mesmerising and enjoyable (via reader Robin).
Speaking of cinema: Mark Kermode's review of Melaniais a great piece of criticism. A sample phrase: "It's a heist movie about a crime family breaking into the seat of power and stealing the cutlery whilst destroying democracy."
I am a passionate fan of the Dutch track athlete Femke Bol. It's nice to know that Geoff Dyer is too. He explains what's so magnetic about her better than I could (via my husband Guy).
Miss where you used to live (in the UK)? This site lets you generate accurate-sounding rail announcements for specific routes and stations.
"Here’s the truth: you’re not stuck because you’ve lost your ambition; you’re stuck because the dilapidated model for ambition you’ve been working with since childhood is broken beyond repair. I’m sorry. I’m doubly sorry because my industry, book publishing, did a lot of work to foist this shoddy model onto you in the first place. For a long time, my colleagues in nonfiction and I elevated mastery as a moral good, rewarding the people who swore they could explain the whole world in a single argument. These people promised us optimised futures full of clarity and control, and we platformed that nonsense."
