mariness

The Heyer reread continues with a post about the wonderfully fluffy The Corinthian. (Try to ignore the cover image. Sourcebooks is attempting to save money by using what is more or less stock art, and usually it isn't too bad, although this is admittedly a miss.) Also over at Tor.com, Jo Walton has a fascinating post on the right age for reading books.

( Some musings on the question and a small rant about Jane Eyre. )

Ok, since LJ seems to be back, let's try to celebrate with a long post that's been waiting on my computer for a bit. Sure, I know that most of you would rather celebrate with chocolate and booze, but this is what I have.

EditOk, LJ is NOT back. Not only is this not crossposting but when I tried to manually post this in LJ I kept getting an internal service error. THUNK. THUNK. Damn you, DDOS attack, go away. What did I ever do to you???

Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

Art museums generally fascinate me. Not just the collection of beauty, but the why behind it, with the explicit attempts of some modern art museums to stretch the definition of what most of us would call art and many of us would call seriously ugly, to the less explicit political agendas behind many museums and displays.

This is particularly true at some of the world's great art museums, all of which were formed with the ostensible purpose of showcasing beauty and the development of art, but many of which also had the political purpose of showcasing just how great and wealthy the museum's host country was – the Lourve, in particular, had a theme for awhile that "all great art leads to France," (considerably softened these days), while the British Museum showcased, in the great phrase of someone else, "the spoils of empire," and the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased "the spoils of money."

( Cut for a lengthy discussion of the Getty Museum, classical art, Roman plunder, sexism and tax fraud. )

Jehanne Wake, Sisters of Fortune: America's Caton Sisters at Home and Abroad

Edited for clarification after some helpful hints from tcherynobyelo.

Apparently I can't resist big gossipy biographies about American aristocrats, either. But this one is not only big and gossipy, but also a solid, engrossing read, and one of the few biographies that I've read recently where I have almost no complaints.

The four Caton sisters – Marianne, Bess, Louisa and Emily – were the granddaughters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, known to you, if known at all, as the last signer of the Declaration of Independence to die. (He was not selected as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention for whatever reason, but his cousin Daniel Carroll, not of Carrollton, was an active member and one of the signers of the Constitution.) But beyond that, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (he always used this full name to prevent confusion with the many other Charles Carrolls not of Carrollton) was also one of the wealthiest men in the thirteen colonies, with extensive tobacco and other estates; served as Maryland's first senator (where he crossed paths and met with one of my ancestors, in one of those oooh! six degrees of separation thing, except considerably more degrees here); and, along with his cousin Daniel Carroll, may have helped inspire the "no establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment, since, as Catholics, Charles and Daniel Carrollton had not been allowed to serve in colonial governments. (I originally heard that on a school field trip, and Wikipedia confirms the legend, but since it's not mentioned in this considerably better researched and heavily footnoted book it may not be true.) When Charles Carroll of Carrollton died, the nation went into official mourning on the orders of President Andrew Jackson, and his body lay in state in Baltimore for some days.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that three – three! – of the Caton sisters married titled nobility of England, one (Marianne) first becoming the sister-in-law of Napoleon's sister-in-law and then becoming the sister-in-law of the Duke of Wellington – yes, that Duke of Wellington – and later Lady Wellesley, Marchioness; one (Louisa) first marrying a nice baronet and then marrying the man who became the Duke of Leeds, eventually becoming a nice Duchess; and the third (Bess) settling for – it does feel like settling, after this – a mere baron.

The fourth sister, Emily, made it all to way to Montreal, hated it, and returned firmly to Maryland, to live out her life there and exercise just a leetle bit of undue influence on her grandfather to suddenly and unexpectedly become his major heiress. Lawsuits ensued. That is all very interesting, as is her social life in Washington's capital, but it kinda pales next to the story of the three sisters in England not to mention all of their investments and speculation in the stock market.

So how did three American women, granddaughters of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, end up in the British nobility? (Other American women, of course, were to marry into the British nobility – quite frequently in the later 19th and 20th centuries – but they were not related, or as directly related, to American revolutionaries.) Two separate factors, it seems. One, the oldest sister, Marianne, happened to marry the brother of one of America's most notorious women (at the time): Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, also known as Betsy Bonaparte, who had married Jerome Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, in 1803 at the height of Napoleon's power -- not, it must be said, with the approval of Napoleon.

The young and scandalous Betsy – well known for her habit of walking around with what shocked or delighted observers of the time claimed was excessively inadequate clothing leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination – according to just one quote, "I ought rather say, of her no dress, for if the reports are not much exaggerated, she goes to public assemblies nearly naked." The reports were apparently not much exaggerated. But this was enough to delight Jerome Bonaparte, at least, if not Napoleon, who declared the marriage null and illegal. Betsy, presumably with slightly more clothing, attempted to go to Napoleon to plead her case directly – but was not allowed to step ashore. Jerome married someone else, and Betsy lived in scandal – but the story was enough to gain her some sympathetic British equally unfond of Napoleon friends. Marianne became her sister-in-law, and thus, the sister-in-law of the shamefully mistreated (depending upon who told the story) sister-in-law of Napoleon. It opened doors.

The other factor, of course, money.

Wake does not conceal the unpleasant source of this money: the Carrolls were slaveowners, and the Caton girls grew up on a plantation and estates that made their money, and their inheritances, from slavery. The Caton girls were even given personal slaves who were supposed to be playmates who would grow into personal maids who could be trusted friends since they had grown up together – except, of course, that the slave playmates could be and were severely whipped for even minor offenses. Wake does note and detail that although the sisters lived in a household that supposedly distinguished household slaves from field slaves, supposedly because, as Wake notes, they were still slaves, and even if their status meant that their families would not be separated and sold off, they could still be whipped, lived in considerably lesser quarters, and were tied to the plantation. In a revealing aside that Wake does not explore, one of the white plantation Carrolls complains that the slaves can't be trusted not to drop expensive glass; I can't help but think that some of this breakage was not all that accidental. And in another revealing aside, Wake, who poured through extensive plantation documents, letters and account books, could not find out what happened to those personal slaves. They may have been "just like family," but they did not merit a recording of their deaths.

After a visit home, Marianne took one of these household slaves, a personal servant named Henny, back with her to England. Henny was not one of the original child slaves, but apparently became a friend of sorts; it's not clear if she was freed in United States, but once she reached England, she was free, and Marianne, who brought her to England, knew this quite well.

And yet, as Wake notes, none of the sisters mentioned slavery in their letters at all, even as the Civil War raged on. Marianne died before the start of the Civil War, but the other three lived through it or at least saw its beginnings, and one of them, Emily, still owned slaves. Many of them. They knew, but they stayed silent. And I can't help but wonder if the three older sisters stayed in England precisely because they knew – and did not want to face the truth on a daily basis. I don't know.

Equally fascinating is all of the gossipy stuff when the three sisters reached London and started to mingle with the elite. Parts of this book read exactly, and I do mean exactly, like a Regency novel, complete with trips to Almack's! the vouchers! the Duke of Wellington! Prinny! I had to check and see if Georgette Heyer had written the book, especially after every single one of the grand Patronesses of Almack's were name dropped. (Except that Heyer never really mentions slaves or indeed black people, apart from a couple of random black page boys in early books who were dropped from later books. And she rarely mentions Americans, although with her devotion to the Duke of Wellington, she must have known Marianne's story, at least. I am getting off topic again.)

Marianne arrived in London a married woman, so her flirtations had to be, shall we say, discreet. Nonetheless, the Duke of Wellington fell head over heels in love with her, which opened doors. (And then, after the death of her first husband, she married his brother.) The other two had a bit more freedom to flirt, thus allowing Louisa to marry one of Wellington's staff, an ADC who had lost his arm while fighting under Wellington and afterwards was at Wellington's side at Waterloo. (You can almost hear Georgette Heyer telling this story in a nice crisp British accent.) Louisa's first marriage, with her sister's connections, allowed her to marry the heir of the Duke of Leeds after the death of her first husband, eventually becoming the Duchess of Leeds. Bess enjoyed her freedom and the flirtations, deciding not to marry Lord Coke (another historical personage showing up in Heyer novels) and above all, playing in the stock market. Eventually she married a baron.

Which is another strength of this book: Wake details how these women continued to manage their own financial affairs and fortunes, often successfully (if, in Emily's case, by, er, putting a little pressure on her dying wealthy grandfather—just like something out of Jane Austen! [who is quoted in the book]), despite the belief that women in the 19th century did no such thing. (Unless they were the Brontes.) The sisters kept informed, and made careful, prudent and occasionally risky investments – often under assumed names, or under the name of a sister or a friend since, of course, married women lacked certain rights with these things. But Wake does an excellent job of showing just how the four sisters retained their independence, and how many of them became the financial support of their husbands. Which ends up explaining some of their marriages quite well, indeed.

....wow, March has turned out considerably busier than I planned. How is it that I can go through January and February with nothing to do, and then have a March like this? But anyway.

1. General reminder: I will be meandering around MegaCon this afternoon only, since various people had to cancel for tomorrow. I should be easy to spot - the blonde on the red scooter. Say hi.

2. In much sadder news, the brilliant fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones has just died. She was the sort of writer who demanded rereads to allow you to pick up all of the sly bits of humor that she slid in here and there. My hands down favorites of her novels were The Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin, which skewered travel agencies, sword and fantasy epics, and universities, but others recommend her more independent works, especially Fire and Hemlock, or the Howl's Moving Castle series.

More blogging forthcoming when I have a moment.

So a couple of weeks ago I found myself in an email conversation about the Donner Party – I find myself in all kinds of conversations – and in the course of this, I realized that, outside of the cautionary tale told in some junior high class or other and ghost stories told at camp that claimed that if you spent the night in Donner Pass all of the ghosts of the cannibalized people would come out and EAT YOUR LIVER and your heart RIGHT THERE and then you'd be stuck in Donner Pass FOREVER until the next group of ignorant people came by to spend the night and you, or more specifically, your ghost, could eat them and yes YOU WOULD HAVE TO EAT HUMAN LIVERS DRIPPING WITH BLOOD. (Always shouted; thus my capital letters.) It was quite a story when combined with marshmallows.

(Writing it down now, as a writer of the occasional horror and ghost tale, I rather wonder why the story didn't go further –that the ghosts of the Donner Party were busy gobbling up the livers of wary travellers so that they could increase and increase their numbers until they had enough ghosts to sweep down from the California mountains and EAT US ALL. Actually, now that I've thought about it, let's add this to the ghost story.

I must also add that I have since then spoken to numerous people who have driven through Donner Pass and skied all over Lake Tahoe without seeing a single hint of a ghost, which is terribly disappointing.)

Ghost stories aside, however, my ignorance of the Donner Party was fairly profound, so I decided to change that and read through Ethan Rarick's Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, which may be the most gruesomely compelling book I have read in some time.

Rarick doesn't address the ghost stories at all, but draws on the various and sometimes conflicting records of the survivors and their rescuers, as well as the few letters written by those that did not survive, additional information about the Mexican War, previous reports of naval cannibalism, and meteorological and statistical and psychological studies (the last to help answer the question of why, in the Donner Party, the women tended to survive when the younger able bodied men tended not to, except for the injured Lewis Keseberg, the last to leave the camp, his reputation as a cannibal permanently cemented.

What makes this particularly compelling, I think, is that the book and the reader both know that the Donner Party is mostly doomed: the question is how it ended up in this state. As Rarick shows, it began with a series of comparatively minor disasters that led to delays, and more delays, and then more delays, and then tension and fear, which led to abysmal decision making, which led to misunderstanding of weather patterns, which then led to death and eating one another. It has that compelling train wreck quality to it – although that's a poor metaphor; none of this would have happened if the Donner Party had been able to take a train to California.

Instead, what they took were wagons, pulled by very slow walking oxen. Rarick discusses this eventually disastrous decision (although, to be fair, hundreds of others chose oxen that year and survived the trip, mostly by not getting delayed by other things and by following directions) by noting the differences between oxen and the faster if less profitable at the end of the trip mules. Not only were their oxen slow, but they started a little late – not much, just a little – and they didn't have a chance to rest up for a couple of weeks before the trip, as other groups did. They spent more time burying one of their members, dealing with floods and mosquitoes, abandoning a beloved pony on the side of the road.

By the time they reached a literal folk in the road, a chance to choose between two paths, they were already exhausted and worried about running late. And so, they listened to people with excellent financial reasons to lie, unaware of the deception. If they had not been tired, if they had not known how time they needed to make up, they might not have tried the trail that led to the Great Salt Lake desert.

Rarick argues, fairly conclusively, that this choice, more than the weather, was what doomed so many of the Donner Party. The desert is difficult to cross even with modern vehicles; in oxen drawn wagons it's agonizing. The emigrants lost many of their animals and their possessions, and had to waste valuable time heading back to pull things out of the desert – and still ended up abandoning food. And once across, they could not go back.

This led to the next bad decision, to try to press on to California instead of wintering in the valley of what is now Reno. It wasn't, they argued, that late in the year yet; they would have to slaughter all of their animals if they wintered in what is now Reno; they would be safer wintering in California. And so they pressed on, only to find the snow falling and falling.

Even then, as Rarick notes, had they turned back about 35 miles or so, back to now-Reno, they might well have wintered more or less comfortably. Instead, deciding that they could not turn back, and realizing that most of the group could not continue immediately, they built makeshift cabins in the falling snow. (The Donner families, lingering a few miles behind, barely even had the makeshift cabins.) The snow fell, and fell, covering their animals.

And things got worse.

I couldn't put the book down in the next chapters, as again and again various groups and individuals tried to break away to find help, food, rescue, as they tried to eat boiled ox skins and slowly turned to the horror of eating their dead companions, to the point of murdering two of them (the Native Americans) for that purpose. (This is particularly awful since the two Native Americans had actually arrived to help rescue the party, and although some Native Americans stole some of the Donner group's animals, other Native Americans helped feed and succor the group along the way and were instrumental in saving some of them. The relationships between whites and Native Americans, at least in this book, were not particularly cut and dried.)

Rarick also takes a moment to discuss how the Donner Party story has been told and retold, as a tale of inspiration and heroism, as a cautionary tale, as a tale of laziness and poor choices (this last often for financial reasons by people desperate to get people to head out to California and convince prospective emigrants that really, the trip wasn't that bad and no, most people heading to California did not end up getting eaten.)

But it's not in the end the cannibalism that leaves the greatest impression, but rather the other tragic details: the death of the boy who, offered food again, could not understand that a starving body must eat only limited amounts at first, and killed himself through overeating; the image of a woman who, probably disoriented from her ordeal and near starvation, sent her children off in the care of strangers while she returned to sit by her dying husband, a decision that cost her life, and more. It is grim, it is gripping, and I can't exactly recommend it to anyone, but if you are mesmerized by tales of utter disaster, this is absolutely the book for you.

So in the unquestionably awesome news of the week, Winter Garden finally, but finally, has a used bookstore: Here Be Dragons. It's not that the Orlando area doesn't have used bookstores - it does - but until now, they haven't been in easy reach. And this store is: within both trike and scooter distance, conveniently across the street from a non-profit coffee enterprise place and that French bakery I have dragged so many of you to and need to drag more of you to, because, let's face it: cookie addictions should be shared. As should eclair addictions and tart addictions and pie addictions and so on. Also, this is the proper sort of used bookstore, with nice heavy squishy chairs, extra space in the back, and, well, little dragons everywhere. (For those of you who remember the late and lamented Archives in Fort Lauderdale, it has a similar sort of feel, although with fewer weird antiques so far.) The owner and I spent some time chatting, and I sense more good books to come.

Just walking into a bookstore of any kind generally gives me a warm, cuddly feeling - after all, I'm surrounded by my comfort food: books. (Libraries can give me the same feeling, but alas our local library branch has turned more to computers and DVDs and CDs and computer and language classes and the occasional yoga class and such, which is all quite within its serve the public framework, but doesn't quite give me the same books, books, books feeling.) And used bookstores give me the chance to find something half forgotten, half lost, almost gone. I can get lost in them for hours. So, if I vanish from time to time...well, this might be one explanation.

I'm about to start my annual (at least) reread of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Now, I reread a lot – often to the point of memorization, to where my mind is just reviewing words I already know, taking comfort in their familiarity. Oddly enough, very few scenes in the Count of Monte Cristo have ever reached that memorization point (the scene where Abbe Faria reveals the truth to Edmond Dantes, the overly dramatic scene where Mercedes begs the count for her son's life, the astonishing scene where the Count has everyone over for dinner and a chat about a dead baby in a garden, the scene where Eugenie Danglars finally decides that she's absolutely had it with France and men, and possibly a few others) possibly because I've read a few different translations, so it's not precisely the same reading experience each time. Or possibly something else.

But anyway.

Why a book about some generally despicable social climbers in post Napoleonic France has this sort of fascination for me is perhaps a bit harder to explain. The Count of Monte Cristo is, of course, a kind of ultimate revenge fantasy: not only does Dantes become far, far wealthier and more successful than his rivals, but also he gets to watch them suffer – destroyed by their own hubris. It's the great satisfaction of watching people actually get the bad karma they've earned. And, once past the improbably staggering wealth and the equally improbable situation that nearly all of Dantes' enemies just happened to end up in prominent, shakily wealthy positions in Paris years later (this makes some sense with the ambitious Danglars and the well-connected Villefort, but I must admit that the rise of the fisherman Fernand Mondego to the nobility is a little….how shall I say this? Fishy?

(Er. Forgive me.)

Although at that, Mondego does serve to illustrate one point of the novel: this is a picture of a society under great tension and flux, with a desperate ancien regime still trying to restore and cling to its wealth and power against those that used the Revolution, Napoleon and the aftermath to flourish. It's an age still working with the newness of rapid communications – manipulating telegraph messages becomes a major plot point, and I sense that Dantes could have had a successful career today as a hedge fund manager. (Maybe we could hire him and sic him on Wall Street executives. Now THERE'S an important revenge. But I digress.) For a revenge book, the novel is remarkably filled with sharp observations and critiques of social situations.

But then again, this is the novel with everything: pirates, Mob guys, duels, lesbians, revenge, a few pairs of young lovers, courtroom dramas, infanticides, runaway horses, stock manipulations, murder, adultery, wildly improbable wealth and delightfully chilled eels. If for some reason, you haven't yet read it, you must, with the caveat that the full version does contain an odd and rather lengthy scene smack dab between the Chateau d'If bits and the Italian mob bits, but once the narrative joins the mob, it never lets go. I love this book.

Excuse me while I go get lost in it again.

I waited until after Flashforward the show was over before picking up the novel – I didn’t want to get spoiled for either the novel or the show. And then I waited a bit more, since apparently half of Orange County had the same idea, and getting a library copy into my little hands took a bit more time.

It will probably surprise no one to hear that the book is considerably better than the television show, and in retrospect, I should have just watched the first episode, and turned to the book.

( Mild spoilers for the book and television show. )

Mother who refused to return the Gossip Girl books back to the library suddenly does; library refuses to waive/forgive fines.

Supposedly, the mother's turnaround happened because she feels she did her part to focus attention on the Gossip Girl books (no mention if the author is cutting the woman a check) and not because she came to the belated realization that engaging in public theft from an underfunded library might just be a worse moral example to her kids than anything in a Gossip Girl book.

Helpfully label them as "mature content" and put them on a special shelf so that everyone knows exactly what they are.

Once again, I haven't read either of the two books objected to here (The Bermuda Triangle and one of the Gossip Girl books) although they both sound like exactly the sort of book that I would have been delighted to search for and check out and read at an inappropriate age if someone had been kind enough to point them out to me, as here.