This month’s Across the Page features the highly anticipated new release by Malinda Lo, Ash (Little, Brown), a rerelease of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s historic lesbian novel, Summer Will Show (New York Review Books), and a new volume of Willa Cather’s short stories, The Bohemian Girl (Harper Perennial).
Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner (New York Review Books)
The New York Review Books’ recent release of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Summer Will Show, begins with an insightful introduction by Claire Harman that explains why this historic lesbian novel is so widely respected and admired.
Summer Will Show is the story of Sophia Willoughby, a young and fiercely intelligent Englishwoman, caring for her children at the estate she inherited from her parents. Fredrick, her husband, is off with his mistress, a Jewish woman named Minna, in Paris.
Though Sophia does not necessarily miss Fredrick, and in fact she treasures her independence, she does spend a good amount of time wondering about Minna. When Sophia’s two children die of the smallpox, she decides to track Fredrick down in Paris so that he can give her more children and to see who this person is that has captured her husband so completely.
However, when she arrives, at the beginning of the 1848 revolution, her immediate, intense and shared attraction to Minna renders Fredrick obsolete. Minna is a seductive, dynamic character and full of contradictions. She is a leader of the revolution and a Bohemian whose art and livelihood come from the dramatic tales she tells of her childhood in czarist Russia.
Soon Sophia is caught in the middle of the revolution. Fredrick has left and refuses to give her any of her own money. Sophia has never been happier in her life despite near starvation and destitution, but her relationship with Minna grows increasingly more vulnerable as the undisciplined revolutionaries lose control of the uprising.
Summer Will Show is a story about passion in many of its messiest forms: the love a mother has for her children versus and the love a grieving mother has for children she believes she did not protect; the lust between two people from completely different worlds versus the control one person can have over another in a marriage; and, lastly, the connection between the personal and the political.
Claire Harman is also the author of Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. In her essay, she makes several connections between the characters in the book and Warner’s relationship with the poet Valentine Ackland:
“The book is, after all, about two women falling in love, just as Warner and Ackland did in 1930. It is also about making common cause with the underdog during a period of violent political upheaval, just as Warner and Ackland did when they joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935 and went to Spain in support of the Spanish government during the civil war.”
In a blurb for the rerelease, Sarah Waters calls Warner one of the “great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century. This, my favorite of her novels, has a disaffected Victorian wife falling for her husband’s charismatic mistress, and discovering revolutionary politics along the way.”
Ash by Malinda Lo (Little, Brown)
Former AfterEllen.com Managing Editor Malinda Lo‘s debut novel, Ash, is an engaging and enchanting retelling of the classic fairytale Cinderella, with a decidedly queer twist.
The story opens with Aisling (Ash) as a young girl mourning the death of her mother. Shortly after Ash’s father remarries another woman, Lady Isobel, who has two daughters of her own, he dies and leaves the family with a significant amount of debt that Ash is expected to repay through domestic servitude.
Ash is forced to leave her quiet and happy life in a small country village by the Wood to live at her (evil) stepmother’s house closer to the kingdom. In order to survive her bleak new existence, she studies the magic that her mother had practiced, reads stories from a book of fairytales from her father, and while her stepfamily is away or asleep, she takes long walks in the woods.
It is in this state of loneliness that Ash meets the mysterious and magical Sidhean, one of the more interesting characters in the book and Lo’s unique version of a “Fairy Godmother.” Ash and Sidhean make an unlikely pair: He is at once dismissive and supportive, predator and protector, and she is both fearful and intrigued.
Ash believes that Sidhean holds the power to get her out of her current situation and in exchange she is willing to give up her humanity and to enter into the world of fairies. But things change when she meets Kaisa, the King’s Huntress, and begins to find happiness and love in the here and now.
While Lady Isobel takes her daughters to the city to find wealthy and eligible men to marry, Ash and Kaisa spend more time getting to know each other and hunting in the woods. The courtship is suspenseful and authentic and though this is a world void of homophobia, Lo makes interesting comparisons between Ash’s feelings for Kaisa as oppose to Sidhean.
It all comes together in the remarkably tense and magical scene of Ash attending the infamous ball. She is not interested in dancing with the prince and there is no pumpkin or glass slipper, but in order to attend without her stepfamily noticing, she is forced to make a precarious deal with Sidhean.
The deal threatens Ash’s ability to be with Kaisa until she comes to a new understanding about the profound and real power of love. It is, after all, a fairytale. Highly recommended (and I’m not just saying that!).
The Bohemian Girl by Willa Cather (Harper Perennial)
Lesbian writer Willa Cather, one of America’s most distinguished literary figures, is known mostly for her novels, such as O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, and for her ability to capture the last years of the American frontier.
Harper Perennial’s recently released collection of Cather’s shorter fiction, The Bohemian Girl, includes six brilliant stories: “The Bohemian Girl,” a story about the contradictions within a family, community and religion; “Eric Hermannson’s Soul”; “The Sculptor’s Funeral”; “A Wagnor Matinee”; “The Enchanted Bluff,” and “Paul’s Case,” the story of a young man who comes east with a stolen fortune and a desire to be seen as wealthy.
The volume also includes a short story by Lydia Peelle, “The Kidding Season,” from her noteworthy collection of stories Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.
