Faithful Jenny Dove (and other books...)
Jan. 21st, 2025 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosanicusIt has been a While since I last made a reading post, so I will begin with a brief round-up of all the books I read over the Christmas break (spent luxuriously flopping on my parents' sofa for the most part, interrupted by a lovely day including meeting up with philomytha).
Primarily, I was reading Gimlet. Philomytha did a good round up post about the series recently, but I really did enjoy the process of reading them even when I was cringing my way through looking through my fingers at what was going on. My favourites of this batch (which began with Mops Up) were Mops Up, Gets the Answer, Lends a Hand and Bores In. I did unfortunately get invested in horrible one-sided (or is it) Cub/Gimlet and will be posting some words on that subject whenever Gimlet deigns to participate in the story.
I also read the new Taskmaster book 'Absolute Casserole', which was a fun read and involved the sort of statistics which I enjoy - low stakes but with a real passion behind it. I would recommend it to fans of the show, especially if you're curious about the original Edinburgh version. Incredibly, I discovered via this book that one of the parents at work was IN THE ORIGINAL LIVE SHOW. Madness.
Now onto the title of the post!!!regshoe made a list of Yuletide recs after Christmas which I perused with interest, and the story for '-- And a Perle in the Myddes' was intriguing enough that I bought a copy of an anthology containing it on eBay, and having now read the whole book I can conclusively say: WORTH IT.
The full title of the collection is 'Faithful Jenny Dove and other illusions' (by Eleanor Farjeon, who I had never read before and will now be searching out!) and finding out how that subtitle related to each story was a lovely puzzle in itself, even without the quality of the prose - dreamlike at turns and a little impenetrable in a way which rewards reflection. There are five stories in the book and each has a very different tone and approach to the theme, which I enjoyed, and engaged with history and memory in interesting ways. I will do my best not to spoil each story because (spoiler alert!) I really do recommend this one.
The titular story is the tale of a girl - Jenny Dove - who dies of love (her beloved is a poet, poetry is a huge theme in the book), and we follow her as she exists in ghosthood, a 'morning-ghost' in contrast to the unlucky evening-ghosts that frighten people through no fault of their own. The underlying worldbuilding of the community of ghosts in the village is wonderful and it's such a wistful, bittersweet story, I was genuinely a bit tearful over it by the end.
Next came The Lamb of Chinon, which I admit I didn't really "get" as it was quite late when I read it and my brain had ceased higher functions. It's a recounting of a meeting between an older woman and a young boy who tells her of the time Joan of Arc came to save his rabbit from dying, and the story plays with reality and dreams in a lovely way which - predictably - confused my pre-sleep self quite a bit. I love the different narrative voices in this collection and this is almost Jamesian in execution.
Third is 'Spooner', which I LOVED. It's about a woman who unexpectedly inherits a house, and along with her pet cat (the titular Spooner, named after a cricketer apparently) discovers that something is amiss in her childhood friend's home. It's a ghost story with a sweeter and more curious air than is traditional and I loved the point of view character, a woman in her 60s who simply wants to get on with her new housekeeper and stop her cat from jumping out of windows.
Fourth is what spurred me to buy the book - '-- And a Perle in the Myddes'. This is one of two stories which goes heavy on the Middle English and it was a little hard to parse at points, but not so much that it became a struggle rather than an enjoyable challenge. It's about a man named Thomas Thacker who has an odd seasonal malaise which afflicts him for the month surrounding Christmas every year, and this year he is forced to change trains at a new station and finds himself oddly drawn towards the town and the abbey which stands there. It's a beautiful and sad story about lost love from the distant past, injustice and how people live through it, and also - crucially - it's just gay enough that you do a double take every so often. LOVELY, well worth the price of admission (£1.20+p&p) by itself.
Last in the book is the longest story, and the most experimental in my opinion. Farjeon takes on the role of a biographer of an obscure poet from the 1500s - including a discussion of particular dates and how they might or might not align with other scholarly theory - and catalogues his life and development over his sadly truncated career. It's clear how much care and attention Farjeon took with the verse and song in this book, and even if she insists he wasn't a great poet the emotion behind each poem - which is explained in wry tones by the biography - is still clear. Farjeon seems to have been a modern polyglot with a great number of pursuits and accomplishments, so I look forward to finding out whether this interest in Middle and Early Modern English bears out in her other works.
Long story short: it's a very good book. Each story is very different, which doesn't always work for me in an anthology, but the unifying theme of illusion was strong enough to make each story make sense on its own and as part of an anthology.
philomytha).Primarily, I was reading Gimlet. Philomytha did a good round up post about the series recently, but I really did enjoy the process of reading them even when I was cringing my way through looking through my fingers at what was going on. My favourites of this batch (which began with Mops Up) were Mops Up, Gets the Answer, Lends a Hand and Bores In. I did unfortunately get invested in horrible one-sided (or is it) Cub/Gimlet and will be posting some words on that subject whenever Gimlet deigns to participate in the story.
I also read the new Taskmaster book 'Absolute Casserole', which was a fun read and involved the sort of statistics which I enjoy - low stakes but with a real passion behind it. I would recommend it to fans of the show, especially if you're curious about the original Edinburgh version. Incredibly, I discovered via this book that one of the parents at work was IN THE ORIGINAL LIVE SHOW. Madness.
Now onto the title of the post!!!
regshoe made a list of Yuletide recs after Christmas which I perused with interest, and the story for '-- And a Perle in the Myddes' was intriguing enough that I bought a copy of an anthology containing it on eBay, and having now read the whole book I can conclusively say: WORTH IT.The full title of the collection is 'Faithful Jenny Dove and other illusions' (by Eleanor Farjeon, who I had never read before and will now be searching out!) and finding out how that subtitle related to each story was a lovely puzzle in itself, even without the quality of the prose - dreamlike at turns and a little impenetrable in a way which rewards reflection. There are five stories in the book and each has a very different tone and approach to the theme, which I enjoyed, and engaged with history and memory in interesting ways. I will do my best not to spoil each story because (spoiler alert!) I really do recommend this one.
The titular story is the tale of a girl - Jenny Dove - who dies of love (her beloved is a poet, poetry is a huge theme in the book), and we follow her as she exists in ghosthood, a 'morning-ghost' in contrast to the unlucky evening-ghosts that frighten people through no fault of their own. The underlying worldbuilding of the community of ghosts in the village is wonderful and it's such a wistful, bittersweet story, I was genuinely a bit tearful over it by the end.
Next came The Lamb of Chinon, which I admit I didn't really "get" as it was quite late when I read it and my brain had ceased higher functions. It's a recounting of a meeting between an older woman and a young boy who tells her of the time Joan of Arc came to save his rabbit from dying, and the story plays with reality and dreams in a lovely way which - predictably - confused my pre-sleep self quite a bit. I love the different narrative voices in this collection and this is almost Jamesian in execution.
Third is 'Spooner', which I LOVED. It's about a woman who unexpectedly inherits a house, and along with her pet cat (the titular Spooner, named after a cricketer apparently) discovers that something is amiss in her childhood friend's home. It's a ghost story with a sweeter and more curious air than is traditional and I loved the point of view character, a woman in her 60s who simply wants to get on with her new housekeeper and stop her cat from jumping out of windows.
Fourth is what spurred me to buy the book - '-- And a Perle in the Myddes'. This is one of two stories which goes heavy on the Middle English and it was a little hard to parse at points, but not so much that it became a struggle rather than an enjoyable challenge. It's about a man named Thomas Thacker who has an odd seasonal malaise which afflicts him for the month surrounding Christmas every year, and this year he is forced to change trains at a new station and finds himself oddly drawn towards the town and the abbey which stands there. It's a beautiful and sad story about lost love from the distant past, injustice and how people live through it, and also - crucially - it's just gay enough that you do a double take every so often. LOVELY, well worth the price of admission (£1.20+p&p) by itself.
Last in the book is the longest story, and the most experimental in my opinion. Farjeon takes on the role of a biographer of an obscure poet from the 1500s - including a discussion of particular dates and how they might or might not align with other scholarly theory - and catalogues his life and development over his sadly truncated career. It's clear how much care and attention Farjeon took with the verse and song in this book, and even if she insists he wasn't a great poet the emotion behind each poem - which is explained in wry tones by the biography - is still clear. Farjeon seems to have been a modern polyglot with a great number of pursuits and accomplishments, so I look forward to finding out whether this interest in Middle and Early Modern English bears out in her other works.
Long story short: it's a very good book. Each story is very different, which doesn't always work for me in an anthology, but the unifying theme of illusion was strong enough to make each story make sense on its own and as part of an anthology.
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Date: 2025-01-21 08:41 pm (UTC)