Reading Roundup.. as One Thing Leads to Another

                                

As always, my reading is all over the place because one thing leads to another. I talked about Unearthing The Secret Garden a while back; that led me to reread Little Lord Fauntleroy.This novel was wildly successful in its day but I remember being put off from the beginning--first by the frontispiece (below) and LLF's golden curls and over-the-top attire. Things didn't improve on the first page where it was revealed that Cedric (LLF) always called his (beautiful) widowed mother 'Dearest.'But I persevered. Cedric is described as the perfect child--enough to make one (this one) fling the book away, but after reading Unearthing the Secret Garden, now I know that this book was written after the author's loss of a beloved son and, in some sense, it was a kind of a memorial. The plot hits on a lot of tropes as Cedric finds his way into the heart of the gruff old grandfather who refuses to see Dearest. It's not a book I'd recommend to a modern day child, but I found myself enjoying it as the period piece it is.

I'm still plodding through volume 3 of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples and when I reached the reign of George III, I remembered my copy of Maryanne by Daphne Du Maurier. Maryanne Clark was a high-class, high-living courtesan who became mistress to the Duke of York. She was also Du Maurier's great grandmother. It's a good story, perhaps a bit bogged down in political detail (a very corrupt government in which appointments were bought and sold, not unlike recent history.) I tended to skim through the welter of names to stay with Maryanne. Enjoyable but no Rebecca. Still, it brought to life the period I was reading in Churchill's History.

It's been about sixty years since I read Jane Eyre, but I remember the story. I didn't remember how like a soap opera it is and how the characters do go on. Perhaps it's because I'm listening to it in pre-sleep chunks--15 minutes here, 3o there. But I like Jane, despite her irrational passion for the grim Mr. Rochester. And now I need to seek out and re-read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a modern novel all about the first Mrs. Rochester, aka the madwoman in the attic.It's never-ending.