Queering Holmes

Anyway, I was dipping in again to the Violet Hunt Tales of the Uneasy and in 'The Operation' there is the backstory where a man's first wife -

had smoothed and made easy the path of divorce for the man she loved.... full of zeal to give him his freedom. It was hardly human, so the woman who had profited by her action thought, and certainly not very womanly. Florence could not imagine herself allowing a cold business-like lawyer to dictate her a letter bidding Joe come back to her herewith; a summons intended, of course, for ultimate publication. It disgusted Florence, this horrible business of sueing for restitution of conjugal rights!

This was the cleanest way a woman could get quit of a husband pre 1923 - he had of course to be adulterous (or appear to have been) and refusing to restitute conjugal rights counted as desertion.

Otherwise she had to prove cruelty (which could include knowing infection with a loathsome disease) or that he was guilty of a sexual crime (rape, sodomy, incest....).

But in a situation where the man had, presumably, already run off with Another Woman, having to go through that legal rigmarole of asking him to come back so that he could refuse and be legally deserting does strike one as a very chagrining procedure.

Or that's what it feels like, over the last just over a week.

There was going to the solicitors to sign our wills.

There was going over to coughingbear and hano's for a get-together (very nice to see people!)

There was deciding that maybe a knee support would be advantageous for the knee which has been being bit wonky of late so I ordered one Click and Collect from the local Argos. And it does seem to ameliorate the situation somewhat though I think I probably need to set about making a GP appointment about it, since it has not gone away in a few days as I hoped it would.

In other health matters have been being mildly hassled by my dental practice about booking a hygienist appointment, which, when I got round to, found they could not actually fit me in for for the next 4 weeks.

There was going to Book Launch for work by a long-term acquaintance in academic field, at rather elite venue in The City, a bit of a faff to get to, though part of that might have been getting off the bus at the wrong stop, though building works occluding street names did not help. Very few people I knew apart from Author, who was besieged by people wanting her to sign copies of The Book, but had nice chat with an editor who knew somewhat of My Earlier Work.

Yesterday I flopped at home apart from attending an online seminar (actually a substitution offered for the one I'd booked for last week which was cancelled, felt it would be civil to attend).

Today we boogeyed on down to the Register Office to Register Our Intention of Civil Partnership, at which they interrogate one not only about previous marriages etc but endeavour to ascertain whether one is Under Duress.

What I read

John D MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee, #4) (1964) - pour me out a shot of that cheap whisky.

Change of pace - this was more, this was actually I wanted to be reading something like this, but this wasn't quite hitting the spot, nevertheless I continued and finished: Gail Godwin, A Southern Family (1987), bits of which I remembered and bits of which I didn't.

Have just finished Alba de Céspedes, There's No Turning Back (1938) - for in-person reading group. Young modern women in Rome in the late 1930s - they are modern in that they have left home to study, but they are living in an institute run by nuns (and not all of them are actually studying). A more complex picture of the lives of Italian women in the Fascist era than one perhaps supposed (though the education mostly seems to be with a view to teaching ho hum) - politics is all rather on the margins, though one of the women is Spanish and the situation in Spain affects her.

The latest Literary Review

On the go

Persuasion, for the bluesky daily chapter read-through.

Up next

About to embark on Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage, #5) (1919) for online reading group.

And then, maybe, can get to Vonda McIntyre, The Curve of the World, just posthumously published by Aqueduct.

Queer Non-Monogamy in Edwardian London.

Author of article does point out that this is happening among people with huge amounts of privilege and possibilities of discretion:

[I]t is certainly easy to romanticise the traditions of lavender marriages and queer non-monogamy that were so prevalent in the London arts scene during the Belle Epoch. However, to over-simplify the past in this way would be to overlook the many tensions that existed between queer couples, as well as the growing interest in alternative relationship structures within heterosexual participants in this scene. Most importantly, however, it would be a failure not to take into consideration the considerable inequalities that allowed the rich and the powerful to live by a double-standard of sexual propriety. Provided they avoided relationships that troubled other structures like class and race, this group remained free from the expected social and legal repercussions of queer sex in the early twentieth century.

Does she not realise quite how much This Sort of Thing - negotiating the boundaries of marriages that were made for various reasons of status, money, and politics, to accommodate other relationships - had been going on For A Very Long Time, and has she not seen that movie about the Duchess of Devonshire in the late C18th? (Which included sapphic dalliance.)

Will concede (she concedes) that a) Lords Strachan and Warwick did not seem on-board with their Ladies' sapphic dalliance (see icon), though the issue there does seem to have been they had not been sufficiently Pas Devant the wrong kind of people who would gossip and go away to make satirical prints sold in Piccadilly and b) the whole thing probably got even more discreet in the Victorian era, though when one considers Edward the Caresser's set, did it do so by very much?

I once, in fact, I think, put forward an argument that Bertrand Russell, e.g., in his arguments for free love, was proposing to democratise a way of life his family had been practising for generations.

Take five books off your bookshelf: I took 5 fairly random books from the various piles around the room I am in.

First sentence from Book no 1: 'Two women had arranged to have tea together, in the flat of one of them which was in a rather distant and not so fashionable quarter of the Left Bank'.

Last sentence from page 50 of Book no 2 -- last sentence on page fifty: 'Eleanor wrote that their great difficulty would be in managing their first break with their friends'.

Second sentence on page 100 of Book no 3: 'Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it'.

Next to the last sentence on p 150 of book no 4: 'Because it's true, you know--he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court'.

Final sentence of book 5: 'We have many more evenings before us if we want them'.

Make these sentences into a paragraph:

Two women had arranged to have tea together, in the flat of one of them which was in a rather distant and not so fashionable quarter of the Left Bank. Eleanor wrote that their great difficulty would be in managing their first break with their friends. Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it. Because it's true, you know--he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court. We have many more evenings before us if we want them.

1: Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction of Naomi Mitchison (I skipped the editorial introduction.)
2. Mary Gordon, Chase of the Wild Goose (about the Ladies of Llangollen).
3. Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: an appetite for life
4. Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
4. Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence.

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Grocery delivery came early enough that I had time to get going dough + tomato topping for a sardegnera for Friday night supper, with Salame Milano added before baking.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, 4:1 white spelt/dark rye flour, dried blueberries.

As I was going to an afternoon gathering chez coughingbear and hano, and time did not permit of making foccaccia, I made cornbread (plain white flour + baking powder, half and half with mixture of fine/coarse cornmeal, since sourcing medium cornmeal remains impossible) to take instead.

Today's lunch: had seabass fillets, and for the wild variety, cooked them thus, which worked quite well, served with baby Jersey Royal potatoes roasted in goosefat and asparagus steamed and splashed with lime butter.

I was intrigued to see this report: London's Wellcome Collection returns 2,000 manuscripts to the Jain community given that that is a repository I know well although not a part of the collections with which I was particularly acquainted.

I was also a bit taken aback to see that there is a Centre of Jain Studies at the University of Birmingham, though on a spot of further looking around I find that there is also a Jain Ashram in Birmingham. (Not of as great antiquity as the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, f. 1889, and featuring in HG Wells' The War of the Worlds.)

It is a religious tradition particularly associated with non-violence.

While one might think that this collection of South Asian origin might return there: article points out that there are hardly any Jains left in Pakistan, where a significant tranche of the mss came from. I also wonder - it is not mentioned in the article - what is the position of Jainism at present in India. Some sources I have looked at suggest it is relatively assimilated to Hinduism? The article refers to them as a 'fragmented community'.

The Wikipedia article does suggest that they have a long tradition of being involved in commerce, banking and trade, and founding an array of philanthropic enterprises, including libraries....

What I read

Finished Platform Decay

Read Jonathan Coe, Bournville (2022), which was a Kobo deal, and I have been vaguely interested in reading something by him since coming across his really rather good intro to that archetypal Sad Girl Novel, Dusty Answer. However, was rather meh and tempted at points to give up on this family saga from VE Day to Covid told as vignettes at various Memorable Dates in History of C20th Britain.

There was a certain amount of picking things up and reading a bit and thinking, no, at least, not now, if ever.

Re-read Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward, #2) (2025), as there is another one forthcoming shortly.

Kobo deals turned up a new Simon R Green, For Better or Murder (Holy Terrors Mystery #4), alas, this was pretty much phoning it in.

Muriel Spark, The Hothouse by the East River (1973), which is a very very weird novella, absurdist, grotesque, is it about something that happened when they were working for Secret Organisation with German POWs in War and is that why the unheimlich frisson (turns out, no).

After that I just wanted the perhaps too simple and predictable pleasures of Robert B Parker, Silent Night (Spenser #41.5) (2013, unfinished at his death, completed by his agent Helen Brann).

On the go

Persuasion, which I began somewhat behindhand of the daily chapter group read on bluesky.

Up next

Well, there's that new Literary Review, but apart from that.

Am being irked by certain writers whose new ebooks are pretty 2x or more what they used to be. (I might have gone for this I suppose had I not been a bit underwhelmed by some recent offerings.)