Hosted, as always, by Rebecca of Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of each month. I’ve auto-scheduled this one as I’m currently off hiking Hadrian’s Wall!
READ
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (1861): My fifth American Classics Reading Project book, an extraordinary first-person account of courage and anger by a woman who escaped slavery in the South but found that the North had its own dangers. I wrote a lot more about it here.
The Premonitions Bureau, by Sam Knight (2022): A nonfiction exploration of the life’s work of John Barker, a psychiatrist whose belief in the reality of premonitions led to a collaboration with science journalist Peter Fairley that sought to harness the power of people with foresight to prevent catastrophes. The book grew out of a New Yorker article and, unfortunately, it seems to have been better at article length; not that the material isn’t fascinating, but Knight goes down many side roads and spends much time on topics other than the titular one. He writes well and is capable of engaging the reader’s interest on most of these (disquisitions on the crumbling of Britain’s state mental health provisions are particularly interesting in their own right), but it feels like a wasted opportunity to delve deeper into the nitty-gritty of how the Bureau actually functioned, to interview people (or the children of people) who worked there, and to examine the science and philosophy behind the idea of precognition.
The Parasites, by Daphne Du Maurier (1949): A curiously uncharacteristic novel from du Maurier if, like me, you’ve only read Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Frenchman’s Creek. Julie Myerson’s introduction compares it to Wuthering Heights in its focus on the quasi-incestuous relationship between not-quite-siblings, though, and in that sense the Gothic influence is certainly strong. It’s the story of Maria, Niall, and Celia, three children whose parents were famous performers and who grow up to be extraordinary studies in selfishness, passivity, and immaturity—even Celia, who seems at first glance to be the most selfless of them all, remaining with their father in perpetuity as nurse and caregiver. Maria and Niall are technically only step-siblings, making the intimacy of their relationship (which du Maurier hints has a sexual dimension, though she is never specific) both acceptable and disturbing. The accounts of theatrical life are marvelous, as is the dissection of the ways in which pretending to have emotions for a living can stunt you if you’re not careful. Very funny and odd.
TO BE READ
The New Life, by Tom Crewe (2023): Can’t wait for this, a story of queer Victorian love that’s partly based on the life and work of John Addington Symonds. Rebecca loved it, and I hope I will too!
What have you enjoyed from your library recently, and what’s up next for you?
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer (2014). First read: January 2015.~~caution: this review contains details of the plot~~
What I thought then: Although I didn’t review Annihilation on this blog when I first read it, I did write about it on Goodreads: “Absolute cracker of a book […] The long-drawn-out uncanniness of Area X; the way that all of the characters are women and all are characterized as human beings first and foremost, not as wives/mothers/appendages; the way that human relationships are present in the story but are nuanced and awkward and life-like; and above all, the few answers we manage to glimpse at the end… It’s very well done.”
What I thought this time: One of the great pleasures and purposes of rereading is the recovery of detail. My memories of Annihilation‘s plot were in the right shape and order, I remembered most of the truly salient scenes, but so much of the specificity had disappeared. I had forgotten, for example, that the Tower (tunnel) near the expedition’s base camp was not marked on their maps, and that this is the first hint of deception on the part of the agency who have financed and trained the expedition team. I had forgotten that the expedition leader, the psychologist, is authorised to use hypnotic suggestion on the other team members, and that she takes this power too far almost immediately. I had forgotten that the protagonist, known as the biologist, was married to a member of the previous expedition who came back changed, and that she joins this team in part to find out what happened to him.
The entirety of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy also existed in my memory as a kind of unsolved puzzle. I seemed to recall that we don’t really get any answers about what on earth (or, rather, not) is happening in Area X. Rereading Annihilation, I realised that we do. I could see the hints and clues much better the second time around: the unnerving gaze of a dolphin, the mysteriously human tissue contained in the creature known as the Crawler, the molted husk of dead skin that the biologist finds on a path. With the faintest of recollections from eight years ago, I was able to come up with a theory for Area X much earlier than during the first reading. I had forgotten, also, that the biologist has a theory which she actually articulates, late on in the novel, and with which mine largely matched up. It doesn’t explain the actual origin of the phenomenon occurring in the area, so perhaps that’s why I recalled the mystery as unresolved, but it does explain, to an extent, what the biologist has observed and what we’ve observed through her eyes. It satisfied me, this time.
As before, I was pleased by the fact that every character (except for one we only meet in flashbacks) is a woman. Other readers have been irritated by the lack of personal names, but for me it just reinforces that these women are their jobs, first, and their relationships to others (as mothers, wives, etc.) don’t define them. This extends to their characterisation, as well, or at least as much as it can do with a single point of view. The biologist thinks like a biologist. Area X’s weirdness throws her off a little, and she’s already emotionally vulnerable, so she’s inconsistent, but she takes samples of the organisms she comes across, analyses them, thinks in terms of ecosystems and niches and adaptability. The psychologist, although she makes mistakes in doing so, also thinks like a psychologist, in terms of control, manipulation, and reward. It’s still so unusual to read a book where women are allowed to relate to each other with distrust, dislike, even violence, not because they’re competing in some feminine arena of desirability, but because they’re human beings trying to survive in an inexplicable environment.
VanderMeer is known as an ecological activist, and the Southern Reach trilogy strikes me now as one of the first wave of what has become known as climate fiction, or eco-horror. (Not that concern with the environment and the horror potential of the natural world are new in literature; just that there’s a specifically 21st-century interest in these themes.) There’s also a cosmic, Lovecraftian aspect to the weirdness of Area X: full comprehension means madness, subsumption, even (dare I say it) annihilation. But the strange hopefulness of the ending lies in an understanding that, in Area X, the experience of death may simply be more obviously related to its tarot-card meaning: not a termination of anything, but a complete change, a transformation.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs (1861)
A quick housekeeping note: last week, at the end of a work trip to France, some orange juice spilled in my bag and went all over my laptop, which promptly died. It’s currently in the hands of specialists and my hope is that data recovery will be possible, if not full power restoration, but it’ll take some time. For now, I’m writing on my phone, so please excuse any infelicities of formatting–Jetpack, the new WordPress app, is a little glitchy on small screens.
Harriet Jacobs’s book was the first first-person account of slavery by a woman to be published in the United States. It was printed privately the year that the American Civil War began. Jacobs’s work was edited by Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist who had previously edited biographies of several men involved in aiding and protecting runaway slaves once they reached the North. The presence of an editorial hand always makes me a little nervous (and is in fact responsible for a large portion of the second chapter of my thesis)–how much input have they had? In this case, it appears, surprisingly little; Child may have tidied up some of Jacobs’s phrasing and advised on structure, but the book is Jacobs’s work.
And what a story. Born into slavery, but with a free grandmother, Jacobs always worked in a domestic capacity, not in the fields. As she reached adolescence, her owner, Dr. Flint, began to make aggressive sexual overtures to her. To avoid being forced into sex with him, she chose another white man with whom to enter a relationship, a Mr. Sands, by whom she had two children. She represents this as a pragmatic exercise: she and Sands do not appear to feel much love for each other, but he isn’t cruel and she calculates he is more likely to help her free her children. When she discusses this in retrospect, she clearly understands how vulnerable she is to charges of promiscuity, and she uses that vulnerability to her own advantage: Incidents is an unabashedly political book, a deeply polemical anti-slavery work, and she uses examples like this to underscore the devastating moral effects of the slave system. She is not ashamed of what she has been forced to do to survive, and several other anecdotes (like that of her friend Luke, whose brutal master eventually dies and from whose deathbed Luke manages to illicitly acquire money) are presented in similar terms.
In fact, the tropes and techniques of sentimental fiction are everywhere in Incidents (yet another way in which it has surprising resonance with my thesis). Slavery was often dealt with in 19th-century reform literature in the same way as prostitution was handled in the 18th century: as a system that operated through force and cruelty, that ripped families apart in the quest for profit, that was profoundly anti-Christian for that reason, and from which those unfortunates involved in it needed saving. Obviously, slavery and the sale of sex are not identical activities, and it behoves us in the 21st century to be very careful and precise about what exactly we mean when we talk about sex work and public policy. At the same time, the sexual coercion and violence visited upon enslaved people was central to the functioning of slavery and cannot be separated from it or ignored. Jacobs’s use of sentimental techniques like direct address to the reader and invocation of “natural feeling”, her reiteration of anecdotes that circled in abolitionist circles (and may therefore have had reference to no specific situation), and her account of Dr Flint’s predatory behaviour (which although in a wildly different context, will have a familiar shape to readers of Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela) all contribute to the resonance. Jacobs’s narrative makes it utterly clear that antebellum slavery relied on rape.
Probably the best-known thing about Jacobs is the fact that she spent seven years hiding in a crawl space under her grandmother’s roof, having fled Dr. Flint at last and making it appear as if she had gone north. Instead, she remained right under his nose, able (just) to see and hear her children every day, although they were not told the truth and believed she had gone north, too. The incredible audacity of such a proceeding gives you some idea of what Jacobs is like as a human being: fiercely protective of her children, extremely courageous, stubborn. After she and her children manage to leave the South, her beloved grandmother dies, sending a final letter to Jacobs in which she recommends passive acceptance of God’s will. It is not at all the kind of relationship Jacobs herself appears to have with God, although her long confinement with only a Bible to read gave her an extraordinarily deep knowledge of Christian scripture. Instead, she more often furiously questions God’s goodness and omnipotence, notes the hypocrisy of white Southern Christians, and laments the sufferings her family experiences. One of her most frequently alluded-to texts is the Book of Job.
The Fugitive Slave Law, which was passed in 1850, means that even the north isn’t safe for Jacobs: free states were required by law to help slaveholders from the south recapture runaways. Some states worked around this and some didn’t, but private bounty hunters and malicious informing was a constant threat. Her book has a happy ending: “not marriage,” she writes, self-aware about the genre tropes of sentimentality, “but freedom”. Her friends in the North purchase her from Dr. Flint and complete her manumission; at last, she is as free as her children. Even so, there is a note of frustration and melancholy: Jacobs wanted to purchase her own freedom. Her pride and tenacity are entirely sympathetic; for her, to be freed by others’ hands is the final indignity of slavery. It’s a lesson for our times, too: people dealing with systemic oppression don’t want saving, but empowering.
This is the fifth entry in my American Classics reading project, and my first by a Black woman.
Elle Thinks 
