A Country Tale

A Country Tale

Diane Stanley 1985

 The best part about this story of two best friends is the detailed illustrations of Victorian cats!  Cleo and Lucy are two country cats and the best of friends.  They live simply and enjoy climbing Butternut Hill together on fine evenings.  Things change when haughty Mrs. Snickers moves into the manor house nearby.  Cleo becomes enamored with her fancy way of life and quite literally loses herself trying to be a fine lady.  In the end she makes her way back to her faithful friend, Lucy, who helps her rediscover who she really is and the kind of friendship that really matters.  

If you like Barbara McClintock illustrations (Heartaches of a French Cat, The Fantastic Drawings of Danielle), you'll like these as well!

The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa

Sometimes books come to me in the most fortuitous ways.  Recently I was at an estate sale.  Unbeknownst to me, the sale had been going on all summer and I was only catching the last of it.  I was there to pick up a sofa but ended up digging through what was left in the boxes and bins.   Lots of fabric and vintage clothes and tablecloths from the 1940's.   I didn't have the time or energy to start unpacking and looking through all the boxes of books.  I picked up some 1930's magazines and this book that was lying right on top.  I didn't even really get a chance to look at it- all I saw was Victorian and insects!

When I got home and had a chance to sit down and properly read it I was thrilled!  It is the story and drawings of two Victorian sisters who are obsessed with entomology and drive their other sister and painting teacher crazy with their antics.  The watercolor pictures are quirky and beautiful and absolutely wonderful!  Of all the books I could have chanced upon at that sale, this one was surely right on top just for me!!

The Adventures of Madelene and Louisa

Louisa Pasley and Madalene Pasley 

1980

As a joke the sisters portrayed themselves as old spinsters.

They also drew themselves shrunk down to size or with giant insects.

This one has a look of Edward Lear to me!

Make Believe Summer

Make-Believe Summer: A Victorian Idyll

Fred Cody 1980

illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton

I think this book was such a clever idea- I wish I had thought to do something like this! Fred Cody takes the beautiful black and white illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836-1875) and crafts a story around them. These illustrations, quintessentially Victorian, show the life of children in the English countryside. Cody writes in the introduction:

The pictures are also notable for the way the artist has entered wholeheartedly into the world of childhood. The children are seen at play, but their activity is portrayed on their own terms; they are unselfconsciously absorbed in a realm apart. The pattern for such a separate state of childhood took form in the latter half of the nineteenth century, though only among families of means. It is the way, of course, that we are accustomed to seeing children in our own time.

The story Cody crafts is about a widowed young mother who returns with her three daughters to her family in England. Told through one daughter's eyes, the girls experience change and an unfamiliar life in a country house filled with boisterous cousins. They visit the seaside, explore the woods and make friends. Meanwhile their mother falls in love with an artist (the artist who has drawn these pictures, it is later explained) and the little family is set to embark on a new phase of their lives.

The book opens with this:

Often, now that I am older and have children of my own, I take up the pictures you will see here and talk of the story they tell. And always they carry me back to a long-ago summer, which my sister Beth and I came to call our make-believe summer. I suppose I think of it in that way because it was a time between the end of one chapter in our lives and the beginning of another. It was a summer so full of wonder, of fear and strangeness, that it seems to have been not quite real- a kind of dream of fantasy.

Cranford

Anyone who knows me knows I have a weakness for 19th century literature, especially the British novels by Dickens, Trollop, Collins, Bronte, Thackery, and Hardy (just to name a few!).  So of course I love the BBC adaptations and best of all I have a teenage daughter who loves to watch them with me (yay!).  Lately we've been watching "Cranford" based on the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.  It's simply wonderful, there's no other way to put it. 

Cranford

Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell

(our antique copy)

Madeleine tried the novel (twice) but it's slow and though she loves other classic literature, it's just not quite her speed.  I however, loved the book.  It's sweet and funny and sad, and just a lovely "escape" from the 21st century.  It's a series of stories that follow the inhabitants of a quaint little town called "Cranford".  Most of the main characters are older spinster ladies concerned with lace and bonnets, their pet dogs and all sorts of gossip.  I consider it good Victorian "fluff" reading.

I love the part where dear Miss Matty relates her fear of getting into bed at night:

She owned that, ever since she had been a girl, she had dreaded being caught by her last leg, just as she was getting into bed, by someone concealed under it.  She said, when she was younger and more active, she used to take a flying leap from a distance, and so bring both her legs up safely into bed at once; but that this had always annoyed Deborah, who piqued herself upon getting into bed gracefully, and she had given it up in consequence.  But now the old terror would often come over her, especially since Miss Pole's house had been attacked (we had got quite to believe in the fact of the attack having taken place), and yet it was very unpleasant to think of looking under a bed, and seeing a man concealed, with a great, fierce face staring out at you; so she had bethought herself of something- perhaps I had noticed that she had told Martha to buy her a penny ball, such a s children play with- and now she rolled this ball under the bed every night; if it came out on the other side, well and good; if not she always took care to have her hand on the bell-rope, and meant to call out John and Harry, just as if she expected men-servants to answer her ring.

A Child's Christmas Cookbook

 A Child's Christmas Cookbook

Betty Chancellor 1964

My friend Lauren gave me this wonderful book for Christmas a couple years ago.  It's filled with Victorian illustrations and all sorts of fun recipes and ideas.  The recipes are fairly easy- we've made cinnamon toast and the egg on bread.  I especially loved the pages about Afternoon Tea or the Party in the Playroom with Tin Soldier Tarts.  And my favorite- Breakfast for a Tired Mother.

The Fantastic Drawings of Danielle

The Fantastic Drawings of Danielle

Barbara McClintock 1996

Another gloriously illustrated book by Barbara McClintock.  This story is about a girl and her father who is a photographer.  He can't understand the fantastical drawings she makes.  But when he gets sick and she tries to help him she finds encouragement after meeting a woman artist.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

Margaux and I always seem to be inspiring each other to buy books (to both of our husbands’ chagrin). I sometimes wonder if it is an unspoken competition- I’ve seen her library and I can’t tell who’s winning but I did get a 10 year head start on the children‘s books.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (The Wolves Chronicles)

Joan Aiken 1962

It was dusk- winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.


Last month I spied in the front seat of Margaux’s car Black Hearts in Battersea which led me to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (The Wolves Chronicles) (which I happily found for a $1 the next day at the used bookstore). I started it on a Friday night and finished it Saturday while sitting outside on my patio with the wind gusting away at my clothesline and four black-caped 12 year old girls running through the yard re-enacting Harry Potter. So a story of Victorian children, wicked governesses and a grand estate with secret passageways seemed a good fit for the afternoon. Madeleine read it the next day and liked it too. I knew it would be her cup of tea.

He spoke with a pleasant country burr.  Sylvia, lying drowsy on her heap of leaves, thought that his voice had a comfortable, brown, furry sound to it.

But Bonnie, with choking utterance, demanded, "Why are you wearing my mother's dress?"