Jane Austen in her 250th Year

Happy New Year's Day! I began the process of reviewing Jane Austen's novels a couple of years ago, and I'm now committing to completing them in this coming year, as 2025 will mark Jane's quarter-millenial birthday--250 years since the birth of one of the earliest, best-known female novelists! Jane's witty, incisive pen makes her good company, for all that she's... well, read the following blogs to find out what else I think of her (but keep in mind that I've saved my favorites for last):

*Sense and Sensibility (1811) *Mansfield Park (1814) *Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous) *Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)

Lloyd Alexander’s Farewell Novel, 'The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio'

At last I've completed my final unread book by my favorite author—Lloyd Alexander’s very last novel—on this, the year of his centennial birthday. I have now read all of his published books and novels, achieving my goal for this year, in his honor.  As an author myself, I’d once taken to calling him my ‘favorite childhood author’, but I can’t fathom ever calling any author aside from him ‘my favorite author’ without qualifying it.  I bought his last novel, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio (2007), long ago, and for some reason only read half of it at that time. This time, I read it aloud to my husband a chapter or two per night, enjoying it thoroughly.  We’ve been saying, “You’re a Chooch!” to one another, as Chuchio is called by many who know him, and it really does seem to be a light-hearted novel on its surface.

Author Sophia Alexander with her favorite
author's final novel

It’s not—at least not for me, not essentially. 

However, as I am not a truly objective party, it’s hard to know how much to recommend it to the unfamiliar reader. It’s fine as a novel in and of itself. Not one of his very best, but his writing craft is honed, and it certainly has his authentic voice and inspiration (unlike some of his early commission works). The novel meanders a bit, as others written in his last decade of life seem to do, but his trademark tongue-in-cheek (and sometimes slapstick) humor still makes us laugh.  So yes, go ahead and read it to your kids—or husband, as the case may be.

Lloyd Alexander dedicated this novel “for young dreamers, and old ones.” This feels personal, as at about age 12, when I was actually living in Pennsylvania (he was in Philadelphia, PA), I dreamt in a totally ordinary fashion that Lloyd Alexander was my father. In my dream, he walked into my room to wake me up, saying, “Good morning,” and peering out my little window as the sun shone in.  It was the simplest thing, absolutely normal, yet my heart was so glad.

I say now that he’s my ‘literary father’. His Chronicles of Prydain were my favorite series then (and certainly where to start if you appreciate YA or Middle-Grade Fantasy).  Since then, I have read everything of his that I could get my hands on. His were the first books that I ever requested a bookstore order for me.  Later, my husband and I hunted down his out-of-print novels online.  He even gave us one himself when we visited him on our first anniversary, about 13 years before his passing.

Some of his earlier, out-of-print works are memoirs, so precious to me. Janine Is French stands out above all for me, though I’ve come to realize that he spun this memoir about his wife rather artfully, making something lovely out of a difficult situation. I don’t love it less for that, though. I do read between the lines now, shaking my head. But it is beautifully done.

In Carlo Chuchio, young Kuchik asks, “Are you saying, Chooch Mirza, these [folktales] are lies?”

“Yes,” I said, “but some lies are better than others.”

He did love Janine, so much. She passed away at age 90, only two weeks before him (he was 83). He wrote this book somewhere near his passing, no doubt within that last year of their lives, as it was published by his estate after his death, and he did tend to publish almost annually. 

(Spoiler Alert.)

At the end of Carlo Chuchio, the love interest, Shira, has decided to journey onwards, about to cross a river that she’s dreamt of crossing.  She weaves a branch into a circlet, explaining that journeyers carry wreaths of willow to remember where they come from. I can’t help but think of the river Styx. (Lloyd Alexander read mythology insatiably as a boy.)  Chuchio tells her, “Weave a circlet for me. I’m going with you.”  And he did.  He truly did.

So, from my perspective, I see Carlo Chuchio not only as a farewell to readers for himself, but as a second, minor ode to Janine. I don’t think she’s in most of his books, actually—rarely the inspiration for a fictional character, at least not obviously. I think I do see her a bit in Mickle (from The Westmark Trilogy, his darkest YA fantasy series) and here, in the character of Shira.

Despite their hidden marital troubles, I’m convinced Lloyd Alexander was speaking of Janine when his character, Carlo, tells Shira’s little brother Kuchik simply, “I love your sister.”  This was the essence of his life, it seems, as she was getting ready for her journey—their journey—beyond the river Styx. He’d lived with her, mostly childless, for nearly 60 years.  And the charming ‘lies’ in Janine Is French perhaps gave his true heart away, after all.

I recently read an enlightening short story of his written in a peculiar, artsy, existential style when he was quite young (his earliest published work that I’ve seen) but jaded from the war, and he seems to have written it about Janine, saying (and I may be paraphrasing), “It’s you, it’s always you.”  I’m not sure that ever actually changed.

All that said, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio is more the story of Carlo than of Shira or even Carlo-and-Shira. It’s memoir-like at times, Carlo being Lloyd, of course. Uncle Everiste’s early frustrations with the hapless Chooch mirrors Lloyd’s father’s frustrations with him. Interestingly, though, Lloyd had ceased to travel by the time we even met him in 1994, saying that the last time he’d gone somewhere, many years before, that had been it, as the river had caught on fire! (I'd love to know the specifics on that, but I don't think I asked at the time.) So Carlo’s restless, ceaseless travels are perhaps more analogous to his writing career progress than to his physical journeys.  On the other hand, maybe not—he’d traveled much in his early years, and he’d been happy to settle down with Janine in Philly—much like Carlo was happy to settle with Shira at her homestead—but then when she had to move on, over the river, he chose to go with her.

In his old age, perhaps all those decades in Philly seemed like the blink of an eye. Shira’s home was where the treasure was (like his Newberry medals, books, etc., in Philly), but he was leaving it all to be with her. Perhaps this earthly realm even seemed more Shira’s domain (hence it being Shira’s family home instead of his) because of her grandchildren and such—she had deeper roots to keep her here, though he’d been happy to share her space. And wished to continue doing so.

I’m sure I’ll continue, as I’ve always done, to re-read and sometimes review Lloyd Alexander’s books, for all that this feels so final. And that’s the beauty of literature, isn’t it? That we can continue to read and even re-read the thoughts and imaginings and wisdom of brilliant people long since gone.

I’ve only just realized that I’m finishing his entire published works and am reviewing his final novel at the same age he was—exactly a half-century—when my life was just commencing. He began with memoirs and advanced to fantasy. I began reading his fantasy novels and have come to favor reading his memoirs. Ebb and flow, beginnings and endings… the written word is less bound by time than most. Yet Lloyd Alexander still said farewell, in a way, as Carlo Chuchio, once more recasting his life, this time as a hapless Chooch who ultimately does find his beloved—and his treasure, but it was always more about the journey, anyhow.

Redeeming the Witchy Greek Goddess that is ‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller

 

Author Sophia Alexander holding her copy of Circe by Madeline Miller

I had asked Odysseus: “What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?”

He’d smiled in the firelight. “That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”  

-p. 272, Circe

Circe, daughter of the Greek Titan Helios and granddaughter of the Titan Oceanus, is infamous for turning sailors into pigs when they land on her island. However, in this tale by incredible storyteller Madeline Miller, this much-maligned goddess’s situation is revisited so convincingly—from her perspective—that one wonders how her situation and actions were always so ill-depicted before. Miller has me convinced, as what else would be so likely to bring a nymph living alone on an island to do such a thing?

That said… even as Miller subtly points out the misogyny of extant myths by correcting them in Circe’s interests, I find her protagonist to be rather misogynistic in her own right, for all that I didn’t sense that Miller meant her to be. In Circe’s millenia or so of life, she never has a truly close female friend. During her exile on a deserted island, which lasts for centuries, she is finally sent other nymphs for attendants/company, but she never makes a single friend among them, nor does she seem to really try. The people who matter most to her are always male.

Circe even hates her mother, and her mother hates her.  Miller somewhat rectifies this offense to mothers later in the story, but even that is with regards to a mother’s relationship with her son, not a daughter.

Meanwhile, the story drips with lush, poetic descriptions and brings to life a number of the Greek gods and heroes in all their vanity and cruelty and beauty and self-interest. I was gripped by the tale from beginning to end and highly recommend it for its power and prose—and, of course, for its educational value in helping us to get a slightly better grip on those Greek myths. Madeline Miller holds a Master’s degree from Brown University in the Classics, and so within this novel we can absorb select drops of her coalesced Classical brilliance and understanding. All it takes is sacrificing just a few short, exquisite days of our mortal lives on this, Miller's altar to Circe. Totally worth it.

Founding Origin Story for Southerners Via Lost Colony Roots In 'The Only Land I Know' by Dial and Eliades

Author Sophia Alexander with the Lumbee heritage book, The Only Land I Know

The Only Land I Know (1996) by Adolph L. Dial and David K. Eliades* may unlock certain mysteries of our heritage and as such should hold widespread interest for a vast number of Southerners and American historians. The work is a rather brief and perhaps overlooked history of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina in which Dial and Eliades have almost convinced me of Lumbee descent from Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Lost Colony’, the first group of English colonizers to settle in North America. They’ve also stolen my thunder in postulating the resultant wide distribution of native Lumbee genes, a speculation which could hold significance for a large contingent of American Southerners.

I heard about the early English settlers’ mysterious disappearance during an anniversary trip to the Outer Banks when we visited Roanoke Island; while there, we saw the outdoor play The Lost Colony, featuring Eleanor Dare and the first-known English baby birthed on American soil, Virginia Dare. These 1587 travelers had been miserably low on supplies as soon as they landed in America, and so their leader was forced to turn around and head right back to England to fetch more supplies. Unfortunately, he ran into delays for three solid years (no thanks to that Spanish Armada!), and by the time he made it back, the ‘Lost Colony’ settlers had abandoned their original settlement on Roanoke Island.  Well, the Roanoke Island Park Visitors Center postulates different possibilities as to their fate, and various historians have assumed their demise, but Dial and Eliades tell of how they moved off with a few Hatteras (Croatoan) native families and eventually settled in a remote, swampy area of North Carolina in present-day Robeson County, mostly retaining their English heritage—so much so that when English settlers moved through the area over a century later, they came across English-speaking, gray-eyed, bearded ‘natives’ who lived in a mostly English fashion and were familiar with the ability to speak-through-books, something their grandparents had done. Not only that, but 41 of the original surnames found among the original 95 surnames of the Lost Colony settlers were still in use by this group of ‘natives’ when a study was conducted.

I ordered this book, actually, after discovering what seem to be Lumbee ancestors on both sides of my family, to my astonishment (no, not the same line!**). Most white Southern families hushed up any non-white descent—and granted, it sounds like some of my Lumbee ancestors may well have had gray eyes and beards—but before even receiving this Lumbee history book, I’d already gotten excited about a theory I had of why I had all these Lumbee ancestors. It’s very simple!  What killed most Native Americans?  The smallpox!  Well, if English people without smallpox mixed with natives over a century before their descendants’ exposure to the smallpox, then their European genes would have protected many of the mixed-race Lumbees (likely meshing Eastern Siouan and Cherokee blood-strains among others). The Lumbee are now deemed the largest contingent of Native Americans east of the Mississippi. Dial and Eliades point out this smallpox-immunity causality, too, thus stealing my thunder, as I’d treasured my idea as original!

That said, my own genealogical research goes further, my theory continuing on to suggest that Native American genes (particularly from the Lumbee) are more generally widespread among ‘white’ Southerners, specifically, than they are among other American white regional populations, thanks to both our Lost Colony ancestors’ smallpox immunity and their ‘English ways’; likewise, I’d postulate that the incidence of Native American genes decreases among whites, in general, the further from Robeson County, NC, that we go***.  The same may be true for black families, as well, of course.

Recall that these Lumbees were already rather close to the English in their lifestyles and complexions, so we can presume mixing would more readily occur, as these people would not seem so ‘different’ to the new white settlers, certainly not as ‘primitive’ as other tribal Indians.  This all works together to support a notion of wider-spread dissemination among Southerners of native Lumbee genes from the Robeson County, NC, area.

My own Lumbee ancestors were already residing in South Carolina in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Unfortunately, most common genetic testing currently omits large swathes of East Coast Native American genes, so it’s presently not a simple matter to check to see if you might have Lumbee genes, and you’re likely to be disappointed trying that route.  (I fortunately had my paternal grandfather tested ages ago by a now-defunct company that indicated on their limited panel that he had some Siouan heritage—and I fervently wish I had run a Native American panel on my other grandparents when I had the chance!)

One last optimistic point:  if my theory is true about widespread native Lumbee genes amongst us Southerners due to Lost Colony ancestry, this also means that a vast number of us Southerners are descended from the very first English settlers in America, preceding the Mayflower as well as Jamestown settlements!  Now, isn’t that somethin’ else?

Alternative theory:  [This is solely my own musing and is not inspired by this volume of Lumbee history, but it feels pertinent to include!:]  Pirates were rife along the NC coast, and many had covert settlements along the Outer Banks around the turn of the 18^th century.  Could it be that pirates settled in along with some lingering Native Americans there in Robeson County, adopting the popular ‘Lost Colony’ story to explain their English language, looks, and presence?  Perhaps they needn’t have been there so terribly long to be convincing before explorer John Lawson came through around that time!  One of the arguments for The Lost Colony ancestry for modern-day Lumbees is that they still use words common in 16^th-century English, or at least that was true in 1996. However, a similar phenomenon is also true on nearby Ocracoke Island (known to be settled by pirates) with the Ocracoke brogue having words from the 1600s; that brogue is dying out, but I did get to hear it from one older fellow in 2021!

All that said, I’d be surprised if pirates actually held the list of Lost Colony names to use as pseudonyms, and so I still veer towards the Lumbee being ‘authentic Lost Colony descendants’, but I felt the need to mention this piratey-alternative-possibility (which, again, I came up with myself).  After all, pirates could have paid someone to retrieve the list of Lost Colony settlers for them from England or elsewhere, as a good alibi might have been worth some coin to them.

Even if this were the true version of events, a few decades of pirate-native mixed bloodlines likewise would have protected their mixed-race descendants from smallpox, and instead of Lost Colony ancestry, it could be that us white Southerners have widespread pirate blood in us from the Lumbee!  Along with their Native American genes, of course…

*For the general public, I only recommend the beginning portion of this book, as it quickly devolves into the sad history of the Lumbee tribe’s more recent troubles, which holds far less personal interest for me, at least.

**Personal sidenote: My own family lines include Locklears (the most common Lumbee surname) on my mother’s side and Braveboy/Brayboys on my father’s side—honored for serving with the Swamp Fox in the Revolutionary War.  The ‘magical’ part of this research process was discovering yet a different ancestor from a line thought to have some native blood, whose given name, according to his daughter’s death certificate, was ‘Dare’!  I at first speculated that it might be a nickname, wondering what my great-great-great-great grandfather had done to merit it, but a day or two later I sat bolt-upright with the thought that it could be from the surname Dare!  Mind you, I may not be the direct descendant of Eleanor or Virginia Dare, as the ‘myth’ of the Lost Colony was handed down among the Lumbee, and it could simply have been a popular name among families already attached to the story of the Lost Colony (consider the number of George Washingtons there were, including George Washington Carver and some, named in that manner for GW, including in my husband’s own family). Anyhow, this supposed-ancestor Dare Hodge spurred me to seek out this book and this story, even though I have no real proof that he’s connected to the Lumbees himself at all.  I’m fairly certain the Locklears and Braveboys are Lumbee, however.

***Not to suggest that all white Southern families have Native American blood, of course.  In fact, I was dismayed some time back when I read historian Walter Edgars’ description of my ancestors’ area of South Carolina, in which I recall him as saying that they were uneducated, backwoods, and savage!  I can’t find the quote, so I’m paraphrasing, possibly taking imaginative liberties. Nonetheless, these people constituted large swathes of South Carolina, so I do think it’s widespread, anyhow, this Native American gene dissemination over centuries—be it via pirates or be it via The Lost Colony.  And my ancestors were in the thick of it, either way!

New Official Author Website!

I love this blogsite. You know I do!  And that's why it's taken me so long to get around to creating an official author website.  But it's finally out there, and I'm rather pleased with how it looks. It has nothing, really, that this blog didn't already have, except perhaps a more user-friendly aesthetic and a professional website address.  Check it out at sophiaalexander.net!

Jewish Kansan Adventure in 'August Bondi: Border Hawk' by Lloyd Alexander

I am slowly progressing on my journey to finish reading my last four unread books by my childhood favorite author, Lloyd Alexander, on the year of what would have been his centennial birthday.  August Bondi: Border Hawk is a cowboy-style story about a Jew from Vienna whose family immigrates to America, and he winds up fighting for Kansas to be a Free State (as opposed to a slave state).

I have to admit that August Bondi: Border Hawk is not recommended reading from my camp—not unless you have an abiding interest in the abolitionist revolutionary John Brown and/or have deep roots in Kansas and/or are a Lloyd Alexander devotee, no matter what. 

Sigh… Lloyd Alexander put out some literary treasures around this time, but he didn't put as much heart into writing commission work, apparently.  I suspect it’s commission work, anyhow.  It’s tolerably readable, but his wit and his heart are not much there.

The most amusing part of the whole book for me is when August Bondi has been swimming in the river and then pulls his ‘tunic’ back on. Perhaps the undershirts of Union Civil War soldiers were sometimes called tunics, but since Lloyd Alexander is famous almost exclusively for his YA fantasy novels, I felt suddenly transported into the wrong story--and would have liked to stay there.  

The second funniest thing in the whole book is that every time John Brown appears, almost to the end, he has ‘blazing eyes’. Eventually it started to make me laugh, even though the story was never meant to be funny.  I just plowed through the book, really, reading it aloud to my husband (who at once became a Lloyd Alexander fan upon meeting me). I suspect that Lloyd Alexander just plowed through writing it, too.

My favorite passage of all was when August Bondi is talking about how there are good men on both sides. He’s simply being open-minded, but my husband took issue with this passage—and it made me wonder whether or not that view was actually shared by August Bondi (Lloyd Alexander drew from his memoirs for writing the biographical novel). It seemed, however, to be Lloyd Alexander suddenly speaking for himself, at least for a moment. Unless I learn otherwise, I’ll assume this much-beloved author was attempting to inject some wisdom into a tale of adventure and strife, hoping it would stick and plant a seed of rationality.

(I'm publishing this blog on the birthday anniversary of Lloyd's wife Janine Denni Alexander. She's lovingly depicted in Janine Is French, just about my all-time favorite book—but not one of his famous ones. She was older than Lloyd, a war bride born 108 years ago today in France.)

Bill Bryson’s 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' Should Be Required Reading

Happy 20th publishing birthday to a science classic!  A classic I only got to just last year. I was blown away by Bryson’s summary of the history of science (up until 2003), including not just the major players (mostly scientists) and the gossip that interests us in them, but so many of the fundamental takeaways of their discoveries.  By relating the history of science to us in the order that he does, we gain a better appreciation of why these discoveries matter and how they changed science. These lead to improving our holistic understanding of the universe altogether.

    One of my biggest takeaways is how the dynamic crust of the earth and our volatile climate are the keys to life on our planet and probably any planet. So the same extreme climactic events that we dread are exactly how we got here in the first place!  On that note, we're in a comparatively balmy and peaceful lull at the moment, and while climate change is inevitable, pumping out greenhouse gases will only precipitate extreme weather, thus upsetting this delicate balance that we've lucked into for the last few thousand years. 

Author Sophia Alexander
with Bill Bryson's brilliant
A Short History of Nearly Everything

        My biggest critique so far is that the book's name doesn’t reflect its scientific focus. I don’t mind for myself, but seeing as how most of my current studies are in history, it’s brow-crinkling every time I recite it—and I certainly have been talking quite a lot about this book. He is continually putting information in perspective so that I can appreciate how amazing and fundamental it all is.

        I do question some of his ‘facts’—like his claim that we each have over a billion atoms that were once in Shakespeare himself.  Hmm. People in Australia do?  In Japan? In Madagascar? In Chile?  I blinked as my engineer son mused that he’d have to see what sort of dispersal rate they factored into their equations to see if there was any merit to that figure. Granted, we do shed cells continuously, but the body generally is interred after death, and it’s hard to imagine that many of those atoms finding their way to the nether regions of the earth (from where they began, that is).  Perhaps.  It certainly gave me something to consider!  In fact, I did have ancestors in London during Shakespeare’s time, so perhaps I should just own it:  I am Shakespeare, clearly, and so are you!

Oh, that’s just a fun little factoid, but he gives a ton of them, most of which I didn’t react to quite so unbelievingly. Truly, my favorite part of the book is really the first couple of chapters, in which he talks about the universe—so get a free sample download to your Kindle, or listen to the audiobook!   I was stunned at the sheer size of our solar system, beyond anything I had imagined. Pluto is basically a near neighbor to us at the center of the solar system. Conventional travel beyond our solar system seems sheer folly to anyone with common sense. Bryson has also, by the way, rather convinced me that Pluto is not technically a planet (heretical, I know, to most of us who grew up with Pluto being one).

2003 may seem out of date for a science book, but I’d argue that it isn't for this basic and holistic grasp of science. Most of the basics were down pat by then—but then again, I just saw a paperback 2016 edition online, so perhaps it's been revised. Regardless, much of his information seems solid to me (I do hold science degrees, which might make it a bit more digestable for me), and he received scientific honors as well as literary ones for this masterpiece.  If all advanced middle-school students had it for required reading, I suspect we’d have a lot more science majors out there today! 

For the last couple of pool seasons, this has been my poolside 'fun read', believe it or not, and that special combination of events--a perfect climate with an eye-opening book--have now established Bill Bryson as one of my favorite authors, just from this single great work. That said, I do intend to read more of his writing, for sure.