Books of the Week

Today's recommendations are linked to this week's celebration of LGBT+ History.  

A Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr
Recommended by Mr Harris

I don’t read much non-fiction (life is too short), and I confess to not having read all of this, but that which I have read is excellent. An enthralling, if not punishingly lengthy, biography of the great Tennessee Williams. I’d recommend downloading this as an ebook; the hard copy has caused irredeemable damage to my spine having been lugged around in my backpack. 

There’s so much more to Williams than just his sexuality, but, as the title suggests, his hedonistic pursuits were a major part of his life, though the book has plenty other insights. Read it in chunks, or in one go, but definitely give it a try (especially if you study, or wish to study, English at A Level).

Amateur by Thomas Page McBee
Recommended by Mr Kugananthan

In Amateur, Thomas Page McBee, the first transgender man to fight at Madison Square Garden, traces his journey through the world of boxing, exploring the complex relationship between stereotypical masculinity and violence, and between living, fighting and healing, with great compassion and insight. This is a fascinating and deeply moving read.  Mr Dormandy also recommended Amateur in one of our previous posts: you can find out what he thought about it here.  

Maurice by E M Forster
Recommended by Miss Warner

E M Forster's wonderful early 20th century Edwardian novel, Maurice, is, fundamentally, a book about love. It is a book that reiterates Forster's rallying cry to his readers in Howards End (1910) to 'always connect!'

Dedicated to a much longed for 'Better Time', Forster understood that his powerful and romantic paean to homosexual love, if published when first composed in 1913-14, would sadly lead to the end of his illustrious career as a writer. It was for this reason that he asked that it remain unpublished for over fifty years 'until my death or England's' (along with his stories of homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come). 

Philip Furbank, Forster's biographer, observes that when composing this important work of literature, Forster felt that 'the time had come for him to commit himself, in imagination if it could not be in life, to the belief that homosexual love was good. He needed to affirm, without possibility of retreat, that love of this kind could be an ennobling thing'. And so Forster set about writing this moving romance within 'the ever and ever that fiction allows'.

One privilege of fiction then, is that it allows one to engage imaginatively with an alternative world; to entertain a different future where one might discover hope not yet found in day to day existence. E.M Forster achieves this in Maurice with his moving, urgent and rallying tribute to love in all its rich variety.

Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
Recommended by Miss McLaren

Set in the early 1800s, Learned by Heart is based on the true story of Eliza Raine, a young girl of dual heritage, sent to boarding school in York by her father (a doctor in the East India Company) when her Indian mother dies. There, she meets Anne Lister, another girl whose life and character challenge the conventions attached to femininity at the time: their friendship and eventual love is the heart of the novel. 

Donoghue brilliantly evokes the constraints of Regency life and the unthinking assumptions that govern English attitudes to race, gender and sexuality. The novel is set in the past, but the manners and customs it evokes feel in many ways fresh and modern. Seen through the girls’ lively, curious and fascinated eyes, the England of the 1800s is filled with wonder, novelty and ever expanding horizons, as well as quirks and eccentricities. Yet it is a world in which neither Raine nor Lister will ever comfortably fit. The different ways in which each of them adjusts to the intense passion of first love, with its liberating but also destructive power, shape the climax of the story. 

Suranne Jones as Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack

They don’t both die in the end: the reader is probably aware that Lister, recently the subject of Sally Wainwright’s excellent drama series Gentleman Jack, will continue to defy convention and build her life according to her own values and her own rules. But Raine’s destiny, in nods to both Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, is bleaker.  Donoghue follows Austen in her sharp appraisal of the Regency marriage market, for which - as heiress to her father's fortune - Raine is both perfectly equipped and - as inheritor of her mother’s colour - utterly disabled. 

And following Jean Rhys, whose Wide Sargasso Sea re-imagined the story of Charlotte Bronte's first Mrs Rochester, Donoghue uses Raine's story to make us re-think the perspective of ‘the madwoman in the attic’, and all that archetype reveals about conformity and difference in nineteenth century England. Like Donoghue’s best known novel, Room, which focussed on the perspective of a young boy confined to the tiny room in which his mother’s kidnapper and abuser has imprisoned them both, Learned by Heart is a book about worlds within walls, and the power love has both to build them and break them down. Highly recommended.  

Finally, Theo Frankel introduces a talk he will be giving later this week:

As part of this week’s LGBT+ history week events, I am giving a presentation tomorrow (Wednesday) on a history of trans literature. While it would be easy enough to just give a talk providing a list of queer authors, I was particularly interested in trans literature as I believe it is often neglected, and yet when I began to research it I found that it was one of the oldest narrative structures. My talk is going to range from the 8th century BCE to 2023, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, as I discuss how trans joy, suffering and love has been represented across the years and what bearing it has had on literature as a whole. Anyone interested in either the history of literature or LGBT+ rights should definitely come along (E1, 12.40), and I hope to see a lot of people there!

Additionally, our next book for Eighth Form Book club that I mentioned in the last book blog is going to be A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood which is another book with prominent queer themes (and you can read Mr Gardner's review of it here). George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his boyfriend — remaining determined to persist in the routines of his daily life. The course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day, covering George’s hopes, fears and profound loss. If this interests you, join our google classroom with code hky2yak, and share your opinions on February 6th from 16:30-17:30 in room E2.

Many thanks to all of today's contributors - if you'd like to read our LGBT+ posts from previous years, you can find them here and here. From our 2017 celebration of Reading Queer, you can find Mr Kemp on Alison Bechdel, Miss McLaren on Sarah Waters, former Head of English John Venning on E M Forster, Dr Hudson, sadly no longer with us, on Terence Rattigan,  and former A Level English students on Christopher Marlowe, plus poetry from Mr Anthony and his introduction to the devised drama Talking Queer, together with some of the highlights of the Kayton (then Walker) Library's exhibition.  And there are more suggestions for reading on our booklist here.  If you'd like to find out more about other events celebrating LGBT+ history this week, you can find a link to the poster here.