Allison Thompson Writer

Writing on English folk dance, Elsie J. Oxenham, Jane Austen, May Day and maypole dancing, Elsie J. Oxenham and more!

  • Home
  • Jane Austen
  • Abbey Girls
  • Carolan
  • Mayday
  • Dance
  • Angela Thirkell
  • Fiction
  • Store
  • Blog
  • Contact

Angela Thirkell: August Folly, 1936

January 9, 2022 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

August Folly is a book that I enjoy when I read it, but I don’t read it as often as others as I dislike some of the characters or are embarrassed by them or for them. (Terrible way to begin an essay, I know!)  Even though it is still funny and light, in many ways I feel that this is Angela Thirkell’s cruelest book in part because of the stresses within the Tebben family, which might mirror stresses that Thirkell was feeling toward her two elder sons, who were growing increasingly estranged from her.

However, while this is not my favorite of Thirkell’s works, perhaps because I feel so sorry for Mrs. Tebben, it is one of the best-plotted ones.  We have the story of Richard Tebben’s poor degree at Oxford and his parents’ concern over what will become of him, Richard’s infatuation with the beautiful Mrs. Dean, the gentle Margaret Tebben’s hopeless future and her potential romance with Laurence Dean, the machinations of Mrs. Palmer and the play, Hippolytus, that she is putting on in the barn, and the crusty Oxford don Mr. Fanshawe’s growing interest in Helen Dean, who is a rather confused young woman who has an intense adoration of her brother Laurence and a consequent hatred of anyone who might come between the two of them. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Angela Thirkell Tagged With: August Folly, Barsetshire

Angela Thirkell: Wild Strawberries, 1934

January 2, 2022 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

Published in the same year as The Demon in the House, Wild Strawberries is a charming and extremely funny but rather conventional romance which, if it had been Angela Thirkell’s only novel, might (still undeservedly!) be called a “woman’s novel” of the type to be read while eating a box of chocolates, but it contains countless gems of pointed humor and the seeds of the social satire that is to come. Neither Thirkell nor her contemporary readers were aware that this was an early installment in what would become a saga—the county in which the action takes place is still not named. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how beautifully Thirkell works with her various threads: she will have no difficulty connecting Laura Morland from High Rising with the characters in this installment. Loosely speaking, Wild Strawberries is the story of twenty-three-year-old Mary Prescott, who spends the summer with her uncle’s wife’s family, the Leslies. She falls in love with David, the spoiled playboy youngest son, but ends up marrying John, the staid widower of seven years. Put like this, it sounds scarcely strong enough to hold up a short story, but it is more than enough!

When I think of this book I think of English country life with a golden haze over it—this is a romantic paean not to love itself but to the “lost” country house life of Angela’s youth. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Angela Thirkell Tagged With: Wild Strawberries

Angela Thirkell: The Demon in the House, 1934

December 20, 2021 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

Published in 1934, this book has little value as social history—except perhaps in documenting the curious desire of the gently-born English of the time to get rid of their children, especially their boys, for the greater part of the year—but it is delightful nonetheless.  The Demon is the irrepressible Tony Morland and the book chronicles his adventures during the Easter, Half-term, Summer, and Christmas holidays. Tony is an obnoxious, busy, grubby, boastful, voluble, exaggerating little boy based on Angela Thirkell’s youngest son, Lance Thirkell, who was born in 1921 making him, at the time of publication, about thirteen.

Tony is actually presented on paper as being thirteen (mid-way between the two youngest girls at the Rectory with whom he often plays (and spars):  Rose at fourteen-and-a-half who adores him and Dora at twelve-and-a-half who does not, and I think the purpose of this age was to give him long trousers and send him off to the Upper School at the conclusion of the installment. In fact his speech and actions are that of an eight- or nine-year old boy and the action—what there is of it—of the story takes place a year after that of High Rising as Adrian and Sybil Coates have just had a baby girl. So ignore the stated age—it’s just there so his mother can worry about whether his spirit will be crushed by the move to the Upper School. (Adrian Coates tells her his sympathies lie with the masters and the other boys.)

As will so often be the case as we read along with Angela, [Read more…]

Filed Under: Angela Thirkell Tagged With: Barsetshire, Laura Morland

London Lavender, Edward Verrall Lucas, and Cecil J. Sharp

November 22, 2021 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

Here in the autumn of 2021, we are having discussions about how we should address issues of inclusion and discrimination and, in particular, how we should present the image and heritage of Cecil J. Sharp. When I first heard of him, when at the age of twenty-one I attended the Berea College Christmas School run by May Gadd, Sharp’s disciple and Elsie J. Oxenham’s “Little Robin,” we were taught to revere Sharp: why, he single-handedly saved English folk song and dance! Since then more information about his collecting practices has come to light and the academy has   found him wanting in many regards: he was domineering, autocratic and inflexible; he was highly selective about his sources, in particular ignoring any Black singers in his collecting trips in Appalachia; he bowdlerized the words of songs, standardized their tunes to his taste; he was mistaken about many of his assertions as the origins and development of various dance forms and ignored those (like clog morris or step-dancing in general) that he felt were “degenerate” or “modern,” and so on. Yet he was amazingly hard-working and incredibly influential and successful in getting English folk song and dance into the school curriculum and therefore more generally into English and, to a lesser extent, American middle-class culture. It’s complicated!

It’s complicated and also I’m burying the lead. You might wonder why the image at the top of the page is not of Sharp or of Lucas but of Gustav Klimt’s famous painting The Kiss. It will all make sense—at least I hope it will!—by the time you reach the end of this essay. [Read more…]

Filed Under: English Folk Dance, Uncategorized Tagged With: A.E. Housman, Cecil Sharp, E.V. Lucas, Elsie J. Oxenham, English folk dance, Esperance Society, George Butterworth, Mary Neal, Morris Dance, Perceval Lucas, Ralph Vaughan Williams

Angela Thirkell: High Rising, 1933

September 4, 2021 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

High Rising appeared in 1933 and I consider it a tour de force, springing like Athena fully armed from the forehead of Zeus. While Angela Thirkell had written many articles, short stories, and one previous novel—all written because she needed the money as her principal character and avatar Laura Morland does—this is the first of what would be a long series of inter-connected works. The tone is assured and confident, witty and observant. She does not yet name her imaginary county or connect any characters to Trollope’s; it is just a slice of idealized, upper-middle class English life.

If this is your first Angela Thirkell novel and if you are not into romanticized English county life, you might be tempted to say OK, it’s funny, it’s “nice,” but what’s the big deal? If you are that kind of reader the big deal comes a few novels hence, when we move into the War years, with each novel being written in the time it is set in. Here’s where we get the splendid, page-long sentences, the social commentary, and the details of life in War and the more dreadful Peace. If you are not that kind of reader, and are enjoying High Rising for the comic-romance that it is, then you will enjoy the rest of the series. As one anonymous reviewer on Amazon commented, “if you like this kind of book, this is the kind of book you will like,” a pungent summation indeed! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Angela Thirkell, Uncategorized Tagged With: Angela Thirkell, Cecil Sharp, English folk dance, High Rising

Angela Thirkell and Welcome to Barsetshire!

August 22, 2021 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

Dear Reader:

“What ho, what ho!”

Oops—wrong author!

Welcome to Angela Thirkell’s fictional county of Barsetshire! I have had a lovely summer reading through her 28 books, wallowing in the dizzying details of the county and its inhabitants—so interesting and so confusing, just like real life.

As I wrote in a previous post, I approached this project with a little trepidation, fearing that her novels wouldn’t hold up as well as I remembered them, but I am happy to say that they do. (“Too, too gratifying!” as one of her characters would say.) They are richly observed, fascinating in their detail, with sympathetic characters—and sometimes not-so-sympathetic ones like the odious Geoffrey Harvey, whose equally odious sister Frances is in the Department of Efficiency and Purging charged with getting rid of Undesirables in the government. They are funny, often in a surprisingly savage way; sometimes sentimental; and while they are romantic, in a yearning for the Golden Past sort of way, they are not really, after the first one or two in the series, romances.

(Above:  This is actress Thelma Todd, but she looks as if she could be Glamora Tudor, doesn’t she?) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Angela Thirkell Tagged With: Anthony Trollope, Barsetshire, Thirkell

Elsie J. Oxenham and A38_Two Queens at the Abbey

July 11, 2021 By allisonmthompson 2 Comments

The Astute Reader will have no difficulty figuring out the major plot trajectory of Two Queens at the Abbey—the publisher’s choice of title, not EJO’s as it gives away too much. Published in 1959 and set in April and May of 1939, this is the official final book of the Abbey Girl series and clearly EJO had planned it for some time. At its conclusion all the Abbey Girls are accounted for and their story lines are finalized with marriage and babies or engagements.

Above:  Margaret and Elizabeth. Of course you know that the Queens wear white dresses with a hand-painted velvet train, not this RenFaire garb. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Abbey Girls Tagged With: Abbey Girls, Elsie J. Oxenham, English folk dance, May Queen

Where is this blog going?

July 4, 2021 By allisonmthompson 4 Comments

Gentle Readers, I apologize for the sound of crickets for the last couple of weeks—there are several reasons for my radio silence.

The first is, frankly, job stress—during the lockdown, my employer offered an early retirement plan that many people enthusiastically accepted and, of course, they did not rehire. Now that the job market is heating up, others are leaving in droves, and those of us left behind are struggling to fill the void. After working two people’s jobs all day, I am disinclined to move the couple of inches from my work computer on my dining room table to my home computer on my sofa and produce deathly deathless prose. But I guess I’m going to have to get over this, because the situation is only going to get worse, not better, and I don’t want to stop writing.

The second reason is that, as many of you aficionados know, there is only one more volume in the Abbey Girl series to go, and I have been dragging this out deliberately. I hate to leave the Abbey World! I have greatly enjoyed my Abbey Girls project, writing about each book in reading order and foWherecusing on the elements of the folk-dance world that Oxenham describes so well. I have been immersed in this world for a long time, first reading and puzzling over the books for many years and then drafting the essays for some time before I even started blogging. I liked the discipline of the sequenced reading and writing, and Oxenham’s world gave me great pleasure and comfort during a trying time.

Well, I don’t think I’ll ever be quite done with EJO—after all there are another fifty books in her oeuvre, some of which have loose connections to the Abbey World, and I haven’t read them all yet.  Many of these other books also have folk dancing references, which was the main thing that brought me to EJO in the first place, though I have stayed with her for additional reasons. So I’m sure I’ll have occasional EJO posts in the future.

I have several new projects in mind that some of you Gentle Readers may find interesting—and some will not, and will bid me farewell! Alas and adieu and thanks for your company.

The first project is that I have been translating back into English the first French translation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: Raison et Sensibilité; ou, les deux manières d’aimer (Reason and Feeling, or, the two ways of loving). Produced in 1815 by Swiss-French Isabelle de Montolieu (1751-1832) and without Austen’s knowledge, it is, as de Montolieu calls it, a “free” translation—meaning that she changed up quite a lot, especially the ending. She may thus have the honor of being the first person to write fan fiction! It is an important book not because it is a good translation—it’s not good and, in particular, it’s not funny—but it is still used today without attribution which explains why Austen has not been popular with Francophone readers.

There are 52 chapters in this book, which would theoretically, if both you and I have the stamina, take us through a year of weekly posts. I have to conquer some WordPress formatting issues before this project can begin, however. Also some fear. Zut! It is a big project.

Where I am likely to turn more immediately is another reading challenge that might appeal to EJO fans—the Barsetshire novels of  An almost exact contemporary of Oxenham, Thirkell (1890-1961) wrote romantic and satirical books about English country and county life in the fictional county of Barsetshire originally created by Anthony Trollope. She published 28 books in this series—slacker! only 28!—and her stories take her from pre-war England through the war to the challenges of post-war life. I came to these books when I was quite young—my mother collected them—and they formed my first source of information about life in England pre- and post-World War II. Thirkell is funny, clever—and a terrific snob. Further, unlike Oxenham, who rarely let the real world impinge on her characters, Thirkell expresses the confusion and sometimes despair of the upper class coming to terms with significant social change. She is quite the social historian, albeit from one point of view. It will be interesting to visit Barsetshire with her, although again I am a little anxious—will the novels hold up? It’s been about thirty years since I’ve read them. (Dear Reader, since I penned that last sentence, I have been galloping through the novels and I will say that they are just as enjoyable if not more snobbish than I thought. We’ll have some fun!)

There is nothing in these two projects for my folk dance-oriented readers, I’m afraid, though I have some projects in mind for you further down the road, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise. So if you don’t stay for this part of the journey, check back farther along the road!

Next week I promise to discuss the last book in the Abbey series, Two Queens at the Abbey. Soon thereafter, I’ll start with Angela Thirkell’s first Barsetshire novel, High Rising (1933). We’ll meet Mrs. Morland, Thirkell’s avatar, who, to support herself and her four sons, writes the successful mystery series about a fashionable dress designer, Madame Koska. We’ll also meet another character said to be modeled after the humorist and writer E.V. (Edward Verrall) Lucas, the brother of Perceval Lucas, who was one of the four young men on Cecil Sharp’s demonstration morris team who were killed in the First War.

So, like playing the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, it really all does come back to folk dancing!

Filed Under: Abbey Girls Blog Tagged With: Abbey Girls, Angela Thirkell, Cecil Sharp, Elsie J. Oxenham

Pas devant les domestiques!

June 13, 2021 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

This phrase, allegedly used in Victorian and Edwardian times to encourage over-loud sharers to switch languages to keep sensitive conversations from the ears of the ever-present servants, has no place in the Abbey world. Upon hearing this reminder, the speaker would then proceed to dish the dirt in French, rather than English, making acquisition of the latter language a desideratum for little pitchers. But not only do Abbey Girls refrain from innuendo and idle gossip so that there is no need to check their utterances, there are virtually no domestiques in Elsie’s oeuvres. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Abbey Girls Tagged With: Abbey Girls, Elsie J. Oxenham

What does the May Queen at Miss Macey’s School DO, exactly?

June 6, 2021 By allisonmthompson Leave a Comment

A question from a Reader prompted me to think about the role of the May Queen at Miss Macey’s School. What does she do, exactly?

I think that, generally speaking, within the power structure of the school she simultaneously does a lot and not much.

First, let us remind ourselves that this is an imaginary role at an imaginary school—while real schools had May Queens from time to time or even for a long time—see my book  for more on, for example, Whitelands College and its long-standing tradition of May Queens and now May Monarchs—I do not think that they had the role that Elsie J. Oxenham assigns to her May Queens of the Hamlet Club. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Abbey Girls, Uncategorized Tagged With: Abbey Girls, Elsie J. Oxenham, May Queen, Whitelands

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 7
  • Next Page »

Subscribe To Receive New Posts

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

Recent Posts

  • Angela Thirkell: August Folly, 1936
  • Angela Thirkell: Wild Strawberries, 1934
  • Angela Thirkell: The Demon in the House, 1934
  • London Lavender, Edward Verrall Lucas, and Cecil J. Sharp
  • Angela Thirkell: High Rising, 1933

Categories

  • Abbey Girls
  • Abbey Girls Blog
  • Angela Thirkell
  • Elsie J. Oxenham
  • English Folk Dance
  • May Day
  • Morris Dance
  • O'Carolan
  • Uncategorized

Archives

  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019

Copyright © 2023 | Allison Thompson Blog | All Rights Reserved

 

Loading Comments...