January 5, 2026

What I Read on my Winter Vacation

Holiday break! This year I only read books by British lady writers whose pub dates span most of the 20th century. It was a pleasure!

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark: I’ve been reading a lot of Muriel Spark in the last while, and welcomed the opportunity to finally reread The Prime…, which I initially encountered in a first year university English class, and almost all of it went over my head. Muriel Spark’s work is strange, sly, and sneaky, and this slim volume is especially subtle. In all her work, there is also a religious element I don’t fully understand, so I’m always a bit unmoored when I’m reading her, but this time I was grateful to easily have a better understanding of the book. While it’s very much about girlhood, the novel’s scope is very broad and I think I personally had to be older to really understand it. It’s also funny, and brutally devastating in a vicious yet understated way that is easy to gloss over if one is not paying attention—I really wasn’t back then, or just didn’t have the right kind of antennae.

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald: I have a complicated relationship with P. Fitzgerald, whose novels were off-putting upon my first encounters, and in some ways they continue to be so—I don’t read her as easily as I do other English writers. Her perspectives and framings are always just a little “off” from what I’m expecting, and there is a strangeness too that’s a little akin to Spark. But so many people I admire love her AND her books are short enough that they’re easy to reconsider, and so I’ve done so, and read them all, connecting with her through this challenge. I also connected via her wonderful biography, by Hermione Lee, which I loved—her own story is fascinating. Anyway, in December I read the novel Fonseca, by Jessica Francis Kane, a fictional telling of an experience Fitzgerald had in Mexico in 1952, and while I liked it, but didn’t love it (it was strange and a bit obscure in the same way I find Fitzgerald’s work, probably deliberately so), it did put me in the mood to reread some of her work, so I picked Offshore, set in the 1960s, about a motley crew of variously desperate people living on London canal boats—something Fitzgerald knew about, as she’d spent time raising her own children on a canal boat during some of many lean years, a situation which finally ended when the boat sunk and landed at the bottom of the Thames.

The Rector’s Wife, by Joanna Trollope: It was at this point that the themes of my winter reading became clearer—I was going to be reading about rectors, vicars, and curates well into the new year (and Bishops too!). Even Offshore had an interfering Priest, although he didn’t have a lot of impact. Also Joanna Trollope had died earlier in December, and so it was time to finally read this novel which I stole from a rental cottage the summer before last, drawn by its Pym appeal. It was very fun and rich, the story of a middle-aged woman who has delayed her own chances and dreams in order to serve her husband’s interest as a rector in a rural English community. But when he fails to get the promotion he’d been hoping for, she finally takes matters into her own hands, getting a job stocking shelves in a grocery store in order to finance their troubled youngest child’s private schooling—although it’s also more than that, setting off a cascade of events that change everything.

A Game of Hide and Seek, by Elizabeth Taylor: I don’t really have a sense of Elizabeth Taylor (the other one, who did not have violet eyes), but every time I read her, I’m surprised by her talent, and glad that I did. This one is about Harriet, the unremarkable daughter of a suffragette whose quiet life is disturbed when she falls in love with Vesey, the nephew of her mother’s friend, the flame he lights in her heart enduring even after the two are parted (they were barely together) and she finds respectability in marriage to an older man. Which means that when Vesey reappears in her life decades later, she can’t help but act on her feelings and the attraction between them, even at the risk of upsetting everything in her careful life. There’s a lot of humour in this one too (the shop where Harriet works where wages are so low that the employees feel justified spending their workdays taking care of personal needs, like doing their ironing, or waxing their upper lips). Richly textured, and full of such understated feeling, I enjoyed this one a lot.

A Few Green Leaves, by Barbara Pym: The Barbara Pym read odyssey continues, and I loved this one, her final novel, released posthumously. Pym’s novels are either set in London, or in rural villages, this one being the latter, in which a 30-something anthropologist moves into a cottage and becomes swept up in community affairs, and possibly an attraction to the widowed rector who is much occupied by local history. It’s very much about the passage of time, and there are mentions of characters from Pym’s previous novels—the formidable Esther Clovis, in particular—having died. I think this would be a weird, albeit still enjoyable, novel to pick up and start reading out of the blue, but in the context of Pym’s oeuvre, it’s very poignant and lovely.

The Little Girls, by Elizabeth Bowen: Bowen is another writer I sometimes struggle with. I’ve really enjoyed some of her novels, but found others really hard-going, almost as though they were a deliberate running of circles around their points. This one was also a little bit hard to understand, and very odd—it was her second-last novel and perhaps not wholly representative of her body of work. It was fiercely funny in places—an eccentric widow places ads in all national newspapers in order to locate two old friends with whom she’d partaken in a pact during their school days just before WW1, but also there are parts where I’m still not sure what actually happened, the story so thoroughly obfuscated, a little too much going on. It was not my favourite

The Knox Brothers, by Penelope Fitzgerald: The one book in this stack that’s not a novel, but it’s by a novelist, so it counts? I happened upon this secondhand copy of Fitzgerald’s biography of her father and uncles, and wasn’t quite sure how much I’d be interested in these men’s stories, but it turned out to be A LOT. The Knox brothers were the sons of the Bishop of Manchester and the daughter of the Bishop of Lahore, four out of six children, and were remarkable every one. The one who grew to be Penelope Fitzgerald’s father became the editor of Punch Magazine, another was a famous cryptologist in both world wars, the other two both were priests, one of whom ended up converting to Catholicism (and FINALLY this book gave me the context for the Anglo-Catholic questions that come up again and again in Barbara Pym novels where priests are continually “going over to Rome” or being suspected as such). Even more remarkable than their accomplishments and eccentricities, Fitzgerald underlines how her father and his brothers were kind and loving men, feeling people in a time where men of their class were not commonly thought to have such emotional capacity. I loved this one.

Family and Friends, by Anita Brookner: And I loved this one too, though I was wary. Some of Brookner’s novels are incredible dense, opaque, and more cerebral than anything else, but this one (which followed her Booker-winning Hotel Du Lac in 1984) seems to be the exception to the rule. Not cerebral in the slightest, it begins with a family photograph and glosses across the surface of that family’s history across decades as things are ever-changing and nothing ever quite unfolding as expected. Fast, sweeping, and engaging, this turns into a remarkable portrait of seemingly ordinary people, highlighting the less flattering aspects of its characters. Playful and surprising, this one as a pleasure.

Whose Body, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I wasn’t planning on reading Sayers, except then I watched Wake Up, Dead Man, the new “Knives Out” movie, and this novel is referenced (and also Penelope Fitzgerald’s priest uncle Ronnie Knox was also a detective novelist and contemporary of Sayers—they were both members of The Detection Club, along with Agatha Christie, and others). I came to Sayers and Peter Wimsey via Harriet Vane, and was sort of uninterested in reading any of Sayers books in which Vane doesn’t feature (which was most of them) but getting to know Wimsey and his vulnerabilities (he’s suffering from shell shock in the early ’20s; his mother admits it might be too much to ask someone to get over a war in just a year or two) was fascinating. The mystery was satisfying and not too convoluted, although the antisemitism was unpalatable, though at least it was mostly displayed by the novels villains, but still.

The Life of Violet, by Virginia Woolf: This little book is a collection of three short stories written by Woolf when she was still Virginia Stephen, back in 1908. This work had previously been regarded as unimportant, but then a polished draft was discovered, resulting in this publication of these three fables inspired by the life of Woolf’s friend Violet Dickinson. Dreamy, funny, and whimsical, the stories are also remarkable for how they feature elements that would continue to preoccupy Woolf’s creative work—biography, rooms of one’s own, the lives of women—for the rest of her career.

An Unsuitable Attachment, by Barbara Pym: My Pym reread is nearly complete! This was an earlier Pym novel that remained unpublished until after her death, and lacks the (even unplumbed) depth of her later work, but is still very charming, and it was kind of amazing to read back into the past in order to see Esther Clovis resurrected!! This is one of Pym’s urban London parish books, complete with a sojourn to Rome. There is a librarian, a pampered cat, a lugubrious vicar’s wife, chicken in aspic, an anthropologist, and a bedraggled beatnik—what more could a reader want?

Pack of Cards, by Penelope Lively: And I am so THRILLED to be loving this book as much I am, because it’s a pretty big commitment—more than 30 stories by Penelope Lively published in one volume in North America after her Booker win for Moon Tiger in 1987. (It includes the contents of her first two story collections and nine new stories). Fortunately, the stories are wonderful, and I’m gobbling them up—I’m nearly two thirds through now. I don’t think I’ve ever read her short fiction before, but it’s just reminded of what a wonderful writer she is, and now I want to reread the huge stack of her novels that I own, most of which I’ve not read in years.