Guilty pleasures

Limoges, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

We all have them, and I’d love to know what yours are – please leave a comment on my blog if you have something to confess in this department.

I’ve apparently launched a spring cleaning endeavour here at the home/home office. Part of it was necessitated by getting tax info together, a task that always takes three solid weeks of whining (sometimes more) and about three hours of actual work before I hand it off to my accountant. This year is the first time I’ve managed to get receipts for two years muddled up together, and the shame of this is what’s propelling the spring cleaning. No cupboard or drawer is safe.

Yesterday I found both the little notebook in which I list the books I’ve read and their authors, which hadn’t been updated since my move in November. As I began to add titles with the help of my library lists of books checked out (three more scraps of paper for the recycling bin, one tiny step for womankind and its sanity), I began to realize something: not only have I developed a fondness for historical fiction (that’s worthy of a post in and of itself), but I apparently have a bit of a fetish for what, in all honesty, can only be described as historical romance.

The evidence is overwhelming. The Friday before Christmas 2007, in anticipation of some serious and perhaps snowbound hibernation, I took 11 novels out from the New West library, and at least four of them were historical romances. I blame The Tudors for stirring up my love affair with all things Elizabethan. My heart starts to stir when I hear the theme music, my pulse quickens – I’m more excited than I was as a child waiting for the next installment of Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth R. (Another post there about my heroines – will all these posts ever get written?)

The web site, which I anxiously check every couple of weeks to see when Season 2 is going to air (and because I’m mesmerized by the pearls, the gold, the garments – they’re definitely garments, to call them clothing is like calling diamonds hard coal), is sponsored by The Other Boleyn Girl, the movie recently made from Phillipa Gregory’s novel. http://www.cbc.ca/tudors/ After seeing the trailer for it when I finally saw Atonement, I had to read it. It was one of those long but good novels, and it was actually quite wonderful to learn more of Mary Boleyn's life and to see a quiet, early version of an almost-Ghandi-like feminism. Mary's passive resistance to being used as her father's, uncle's and brother's pawn was ultimately successful - she was the only one of the Boleyn siblings of her generation not to be executed by Henry VIII. Did she really bear him two children? It's the first I've heard of it, but I suppose it's possible.

Apparently I also had to read her other novel, The Virgin’s Lover. I disliked it, I’m afraid – the portrait of Elizabeth she painted was indeed that of a weak and fearful woman, one who had neither the heart nor the stomach of a man, was mistrustful of other women and overly dependent on her male advisors. I also had to read Carolly Erickson’s The Last Wife of Henry VIII (good, but I’m far less invested emotionally in Catharine Parr than in Elizabeth herself or in her mother, Anne Boleyn), as well as Sara George’s Journal of Mrs. Pepys (which was great although not terribly memorable, it seems).

From the safe distance of four centuries or more it’s fascinating to see creative minds bring alternate versions of history to life. The rivalry between the Howards and the Seymours, its desperate intensity and long duration, had somehow escaped me when I first started consuming Tudor history in my childhood. Since this is really the only era of English history other than the Victorian that’s really fascinated me, perhaps I can be forgiven for not knowing for sure whether the Seymour/Howard feud was also part of the whole Lancaster/York thing. That, of course, was the great thing about Henry VII (I’m not so convinced the Star Chamber was such a good idea). He was the compromise candidate, and his ascension of the throne marked the end, once and for all, of the Wars of the Roses, leaving subsequent monarchs to tackle other pressing issues, such as the separation of Church and State, the need to plunder those pesky monasteries to keep the monarch in cloth of gold, and, of course, the necessity to put an end for once and for all to the territorial and economic ambitions of both France and Spain.

One of my oldest friends is a mediaeval historian who has always sneered at Antonia Fraser as a popularizer of history. I still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with that, and frankly the fact that she married Harold Pinter makes her interesting aside from anything else she’s done (oh to be a fly on the wall of that marriage). But now reading Antonia Fraser is also, it seems, a guilty pleasure, and after seeing the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette on American Thanksgiving (when my hostess asked me at least twice if we really had to watch the whole thing and I stubbornly insisted that yes, we did, although we did watch part of the middle section in fast forward), I had to read the Fraser book on which it was based, Marie Antoinette: The Journey. It confirmed what I suspected: the Coppola film version was a travesty and Marie Antoinette was renowned for her physical grace and her dancing. She did not, in fact, walk like a duck or talk like a Valley Girl. And she was not the originator of the phrase, ‘Let them eat cake.’ She probably never said, ‘Off with their heads!’ either. That may well have been the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Or the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

And why is it this is such a guilty pleasure? Well, you know, I'm not only an English major, I was a hyper-responsible English major. Eleven of the 15 courses for my degree were English courses, and with the exception of Old English, I took every course I would need to get into the strictest of Canadian graduate schools, even though I certainly didn't have to at the liberal arts college I attended and even though I never did end up doing an MA or wanting to, really. I took Chaucer of my own volition. I even made it through Restoration and 18th Century literature, although it almost killed me (if it hadn't been for the dramas I would never have survived Pamela. Or Clarissa. Or Tom Jones, to be brutally honest. And for some strange reason we never got as far chronologically as Jane Austen, and in retrospect I'd like to know why.)

So to read a book that fits in a rack is - well - the intellectual equivalent of junk food and something I used to reserve for times of sickness or utter exhaustion (one Anne Rice per cold and I am confident you will be able to read the entire oeuvre in your lifetime). Mea culpa.

Now make me feel a little less guilty by confessing some of your guilty pleasures. Keep it clean though folks. And the golf web site is thattaway. ----->