Whispers

What I read

Finished Wide is the Gate, and while things are getting grimmer and grimmer as regards The World Situation, I am still very much there for Our Protag Lanny being a mild-mannered art dealer with a secret identity as anti-fascist activist, who gets on with everybody and is quite the antithesis of the Two-Fisted Hollywood Hero. (I was thinking who would I cast in the role and while there's a touch of the Jimmy Stewarts, the social aplomb and little moustache - William Powell?)

Lates Literary Review.

Mary Gordon, The Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known as the Ladies of Llangollen (1936), which is sort-of a classic version of their story recently republished. But o dear, it does one of my pet hates, which is blurring 'imaginative recreation' with 'biographical research' and skipping between the two modes, and then in the final chapter she encounters the ghosts of of the Ladies, I can't even, really. Plus, Gordon, who was b. 1861, obtained medical education, fought for suffrage, etc, nevertheless disses on Victorian women as 'various kinds of imbecile', unlike those robust and politically-engaged ladies of the Georgian era. WOT. TUT. Also honking class issues about how the Ladies were Ladies and always behaved accordingly.

Began Robert Rodi, What They Did to Princess Paragon (1994), which was just not doing it for me, I can be doing with viewpoint characters being Not Nice, but I was beginning to find both of them (the comic-book writer and the fanboy) tedious.

Also not doing it for me, Barbara Vine, The Child's Child (2012): sorry, the inset novel did not read to me like a real novel of the period at which it was supposed to have been writ as opposed to A Historical Novel of Those Oppressive Times of the early C20th. Also, in frame narrative, I know PhD student who is writing thesis on unwed mothers in literature is doing EngLit but I do think someone might have mentioned (given period at which she is supposed to be doing this) the historiography on The Foundling Hospital.

I then turned to Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which it is a very long time since I read.

Then I was reduced to Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), and Murder in the Mews (1937).

On the go

I happened to spot my copy of Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown (1944), which I know I was looking for a while ago, and am reading that though it looks as though I re-read it more recently than I thought.

Have also begun on Books For Review.

Up Next

Really dunno.

I cannot help myself feeling a certain gratification when a reviews editor calls the reviews I have just submitted 'beautifully written' and is eager to solicit further (though as I have several others in hand, may not take this up very urgently....) (Preen, preen.)

Have also been solicited quite out of the blue to take part in a podcast. WOT.

It is also very pleasing that the return of Lady Bexbury and her extensive circle is appreciated.

***

Not so very long ago I posted about this lady who worked for SOE way back when: and now Blaise Metreweli named as first woman to lead UK intelligence service MI6.

I thought The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies this was connected - it's actually 2022 but maybe being reposted for the new association. There are several paragraphs of aged former secret agent lady waxing snarky about the sexism aforetimes that precluded advancement up the ranks.

Beneath her tales of life in the service there is real anger about the way women were treated. Both she and her great friend, Daphne Park — a fellow senior SIS officer who died in 2010 at the age of 88 — led distinguished careers but failed to reach the highest ranks. This, they suspected, was due to their gender.
Ramsay speaks in a soft Scots burr which rises audibly when I ask about SIS’s record on female officers. She feels particularly aggrieved that Park, a life-long intelligence officer who held SIS postings in Moscow, Lusaka, Hanoi and Ulan Bator, did not progress to the most senior levels. (MI6 would neither confirm nor deny it had employed Park.) “There’s no doubt in my mind that Daphne should have been at least one rung up as the deputy chief position. I can say that without any equivocation,” Ramsay says, tapping a lacquered pink fingernail on the table. Park, described unkindly in one obituary as looking “more like Miss Marple than Mata Hari”, resigned early from the service in 1979, having told a friend that she would never be promoted to SIS chief because of her gender.
By the early 1990s, Ramsay was rumoured to be in the running for the post of C, although shortlists are never publicly acknowledged. Privately, she thought the promotion of a woman to that role would still be “quite impossible”.... She observes that while many talented women such as Noor Inayat Khan excelled in the Special Operations Executive, a wartime secret service and sabotage unit set up in 1940, there was a long period afterwards when women ceased to be employed as intelligence officers at all. Ramsay recounts an episode in the 1970s when she came across a woman she thought would make a “perfect” agent-runner. She telephoned the head of recruitment to discuss the prospect, who told her they weren’t looking for women. “He said, ‘It would take an extraordinary gel’ — and it was the ‘gel’ that got to me — ‘to be an intelligence officer’. And I said, ‘Well, it would take an extraordinary boy too, but it hasn’t stopped you recruiting males!’”