Now that the dark days have stalked and superseded the winter solstice, I turn all the lights on while I read on the comfy sofa.
I call this book-and-light therapy, and it goes well with a hot cup of tea or coffee. This weekend I have been perusing two comfort books under bright lights, The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor (1996), edited by Regina Barreca, and The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives & Spies in Fiction (1981) , by Patricia Craig and Mary Codogan.
First, let me say that The Lady Investigates is the better of the two books. In fact, it is an exceptionally smart literary history. Craig and Cadogan are a mother-daughter team who have written a fascinating study of Miss Marple and her predecessors and descendants.
The book begins in the nineteenth century with Mrs. Paschal in The Revelations of a Lady Detective ( anonymously published in 1861 and later attributed to W. S. Hayward). Then they move on to the brilliant Valeria Woodville in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875). I took notes as I read, because there are so many mysteries I’d never heard of. The history extends to the late 1970s, featuring Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books (1960s and ‘70s), Joyce Porter’s The Hon Con series (beginning in 1973), Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler series (also beginning in the 1970s), and P. D. James’s incomparable mysteries.
And then there’s The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, edited by Regina Barreca. I wanted to love it. I loved parts of it. There are passages from Cynthia Heimel’s humor columns, the playwright Jean Kerr’s domestic humor columns, Lynda Barry’s cartoons, and and Lisa Alther’s witty novel, Kinflicks. But Barreca also includes – hold your breath – scenes from the Brontes’ novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Villette, and Jane Eyre.
What was Penguin thinking? The Brontes are witty and not without humor, but that is not humor writing. I was equally astonished to find scenes from Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall and a weak story by Doris Lessing, “How I lost My Heart.” Do the poems by Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore fit with Irma Bombeck and Anita Loos? No. Gentle wit? Yes. Great literature? Yes. Humor writing? No.
Still, there are some gems. The columns from Cynthia Heimel’s If You Can’t Live without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? and Enough about You still make me laugh out loud. I am also a great fan of Roz Chast. I had forgotten about the brilliant, funny Mimi Pond. And I discovered some new-to-me humorists: Anne Beatts, Serena Gray, and Libby Reid.
There’s something for everybody here: comfort books for dark days.
1 I love D. E. Stevenson’s Bel Lamington, a light, charming novel I inhaled in an afternoon.
2 The Truth by Terry Pratchett is a witty satire of journalism, set in Pratchett’s fantastical city of Ankh-Pork, where William de Worde starts a newspaper after dwarves invent a printing press.
3 The Life in the Studio by Nancy Hale, a writer whose short stories were published in The New Yorker. She was the daughter of painters Lilian Westcott Hale and Philip L. Hale. She was inspired to write this memoir about her unconventional family by relics she found in her mother’s studio when she cleaned it out after Lilian’s death. A classic!
4 Carter Dickson’s And So to Murder, a fast, funny Golden Age Detective novel with no corpses! Set in a movie studio at the beginning of World War II, it focuses on the foibles of movie directors, writers, and actors as well as struggles to close blackout curtains and the fear of Nazi spies.
5. An Orderly Man by Dirk Bogarde. Tired of the hectic life of an actor, Bogarde buys a small run-down house in France. He hires an architect to renovate it. While he is away finishing a film, the contractors make a mess, and everything that can go wrong does. Any home-owner will appreciate these difficulties, even if his or her house is not 500 years old!
6 Emma Tennant’s Confessions of a Sugar Mummy. This delightful novel is for women of a certain age, or at least for women who know they may someday be that age. The witty Confessions are narrated by a sixtyish interior decorator who falls in love with a 40ish man. She tells us that Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, but failed to invent the Jocasta complex, “to look at the situation from the point of view of…his mother.” In her work as an interior decorator, she meets the gorgeous French tile maker, Alain. An enjoyable light novel!
7 William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Metropolitan Life. These delightful autobiographical novels about a physics-teacher-turned-civil-servant are the first two in a series of five. They were praised by Kingsley Amis and John Braine. Neglected classics!
8 In Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, moody flappers and free love abound. The narrator, a writer, relates the tragic story of Iris Storm, a languorous , beautiful woman of the 1920s who wears a green hat and drives “a long, low, yellow car which shone like a battle-chariot.”
9 Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver, a collection of charming columns she wrote in for the London Times, was published as a novel in 1939. Mrs. Miniver’s domestic life is happy, she loves her children, one of whom is at Eton, and she describes marriage as two crescents bound at the points, with a leaf-shaped space in the middle “for privacy or understanding.” In my favorite scene, she endearingly buys an expensive green lizard engagement diary instead of a hat.
10 Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost. Porter, an Indiana native and environmentalist, is best-known for her children’s books. (You can read