Medieval Bookworm

Zelda Sayre is a vivid eighteen-year-old from Montgomery, Alabama, always the life of the party, when she meets F. Scott Fitzgerald. The youngest in her family, Zelda loves being the center of attention, and Scott is happy to put her at the focal point of his universe – for a time. As an aspiring author, but simultaneously a man who enjoys having fun, Scott is torn between numerous passions in a way that isn’t clear to Zelda when they meet. When they marry, they’re both certain that their lives are going to be full of success and love, with no perception of just what might happen when two vivid personalities clash.

I knew very little about Zelda Fitzgerald before I started reading this book. I had heard before that she had held back Scott’s career and that she’d been in a mental institution; I’d also read somewhere that she and Scott loved each other despite the difficulties. This book gave me a lot of insight, I felt, into the kind of woman Zelda might have been, and went a long way towards explaining how two people can love each other an absurd amount and yet hate each other at the exact same time.

The novel starts with Zelda as a young, impressionable teenager who meets Scott and completely falls for him, a Northerner with ambitions completely different from any that the boys she knows have. They quickly marry and the book spans the rest of their lives up until Scott’s death, so we get an insight as to how Zelda may have felt about all of his achievements, including his lack of them at times.

What I also really appreciated was that the novel gets across how Zelda might have felt as the wife of a man who was famous. She suffers hugely from a lack of her own identity, which made perfect sense to me; how would an ambitious, talented girl feel when she’s constantly shuffled to the side? I can’t imagine now, for myself, living in a time where my only duty was to keep house for my husband, simply because I’m not the sort of person who would be happy pouring all of my effort into someone else’s life without any real recognition of my own. This is especially true for Zelda, who watches as her husband spends the hours he’s meant to be working with a bottle in his hand, and who feels that she’s lost her own identity to support his. Her struggles were so clearly understandable to me and I could feel their mutual frustration pouring out of the pages. What’s heartbreaking about this book is that it’s also obvious that they do love each other, but it’s a destructive kind of love that is powerful but takes something huge out of both of them.

I also hadn’t realized that Zelda was a creative force in her own right, painting, writing, and dancing in a way that might have brought her recognition on her own. Perhaps not if she’d never met Scott, but once she has a foothold in the creative world, she keeps on going. She had her own art exhibitions and she was invited to dance professionally; she even had her own published novel and short stories. I had never had any idea, and now I’m actually very curious to read the fictional accounts, on both sides, of their marriage.

A wonderful book that brought a historical figure to life for me, Z is a spellbinding read. Highly recommended.

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After less than a year of marriage, Anna’s rigid clerical husband decides that she isn’t a suitable wife for him, and has her committed to a mental institution. She’s perfectly sane, but that doesn’t matter to anyone – not to the fake doctors whose signatures let him commit her to the hospital, not to the employees, not to the real doctors in the hospital, and certainly not to her husband. Anna is determined to escape, but she has no idea how, until she meets Lucas St. Clair. St. Clair is a young doctor who is attempting to use photography to discern the true nature of patients’ souls. Will his pictures show Anna as the innocent she is or the madwoman everyone believes?

I have to start off this review by saying I didn’t really manage to connect with this book. There were plenty of interesting elements, but they never combined for me into something that I genuinely liked much. It sounds like such an interesting premise; although we know that pictures aren’t really the key to the soul, when photography was a new art, people weren’t really sure what its purpose was. The idea that a doctor would try and use it to diagnose mental patients sounded very interesting to me. Moreover, the idea of an innocent woman condemned to one of these mental hospitals held a certain amount of appeal, even though I already knew that Anna’s life was going to be terrible once she was committed.

The main problem, unfortunately, was that I didn’t really connect with Anna at all. The reason that she’s deemed unsuitable by her husband is because she went to the seaside on her own to try and give aid to some shipwrecked sailors. To be perfectly honest, this does seem like a strange thing for a young woman in Victorian England to do without telling her husband. She even sells some of his things to get money for the sailors and proceeds to stay in an inn on her own without any supervision. Her behavior by no means justified the punishment, but she seemed foolish and naive, which made it hard for me to like her. I often say that I don’t really need to like a character to enjoy a book, but a lot of this story hinges on feeling sympathy for Anna, and it’s not really a complex character study that might justify her strange behavior. There is a reason for it, but not until the end of the book, and not quite earth-shattering even then.

While I didn’t fall in love with it overall, there were certain elements that I did like. One was the different ways that the women were constrained – maybe not appropriate to say I liked it, but it showed the limitations of a woman’s role once a man was in control at the time. The asylum is run by a man with a wife and teenage daughter, and both the wife and daughter are constrained because of what the men in their lives do. The other “patients” are obviously prisoners and generally with little wrong with them. Even the female employees in the institution have no control over their lives, and the one who does seize control comes to an unfortunate end. Anna’s own imprisonment is just one way that a Victorian woman could be trapped by the men around her.

With some interesting ideas, The Painted Bridge could have been an excellent book. For a different reader, it could be an exceptional read. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for this one.

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Emma of Normandy never suspects that she’ll be married before her sister – or that she’ll be sent north to England to wed King Ethelred, an aging monarch who disdains her immediately on her arrival. Emma’s life on arrival in England is far from what she thinks a marriage should be like. Her husband doesn’t respect her and she misses her family and all that is familiar from home. Worse, her husband’s seven children stand between her offspring and the throne of England. But Emma soon realizes that the only power she or her children will ever have is that she can seize herself, and the sooner the better.

Queen Emma is a fascinating historical figure. I’ve spent a small amount of time studying her life, though not in any great detail, enough to know what generally happened to her. It wasn’t long before I realized that Shadow on the Crown was covering only a tiny fraction of her life, because it went into much greater detail and imagined things I’d never considered before about the start of her life. While this part is often skimmed over in favor of her later life, I was riveted by Bracewell’s narrative and re-imagining of Emma’s young married life. I want to emphasize that a lot of this is imagining, and Bracewell includes the very useful author’s note so we can see where she’s changed history to better suit her narrative.

As I would have imagined, really, life in a foreign land as depicted here isn’t easy, especially when Emma is descended from England’s enemies, the Vikings. The Vikings were a scourge on England’s coast throughout Ethelred’s reign, so it’s no surprise that her relations to them cause distrust and unhappiness – even more so when a young, foreign queen marries an older king and ruins the chances for English women. Not only that, but while she doesn’t expect her husband to like her, he doesn’t even respect her, and he mistreats her frequently. It was easy to get attached to and feel for Emma, and I liked how the author put little hints in regarding where the story was going to go in the future.

I also felt that the author gave readers a great sense of what life might be like under a Viking siege. At one point, the characters’ lives are at risk, with events taking a terrifying turn. It was easy to understand how terrified they were and why some of them took the actions they did. Bracewell doesn’t use this event just for the sake of gratuitous violence, but actually uses the events of the raid to further the plot along. Several characters experience key events that help us understand their characters better and which will make a lot of sense going down the line.

Though by no means an entirely positive tale of a young queen, Bracewell’s ideas shed a lot of light on how Emma became the women she was later on, and I’m greatly looking forward to finding out how she fleshes out Emma’s story and reveals the multiple facets of her life as we go along. Recommended!

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Anne Morrow is a shy college student when her father, the US Ambassador to Mexico, invites Charles Lindbergh, the world-famous aviator who has just completed the first solo flight from New York to Paris, to his family’s Christmas. Anne hardly knows what to say to Charles, and imagines that he’s fallen for her beautiful sister Elisabeth; but Charles surprises her, inviting her for a secret flight and eventually proposing marriage to her. Covering the whole of the Lindberghs’ marriage, The Aviator’s Wife is a striking portrayal of how Anne’s thinking developed, how she went from biddable, awe-struck wife to become her own person and chart her own course in life.

Having previously read and enjoyed one of Benjamin’s previous books, The Autobiography of Mrs Tom Thumb, I’ve been looking forward to reading The Aviator’s Wife. I don’t know much about the Lindberghs, but I had heard of Charles and his flight over the Atlantic in The Spirit of St. Louis, and so I was curious to read about his wife’s point of view. This is especially true once I’d learned that she was a pioneer in her own right, going alongside her husband to make records that no other woman had ever done. I’m all about historical women getting the recognition that they rightly deserve, and just because she was married to a more famous man doesn’t mean she should spend all of history in the shadows.

This was an insightful and thoughtful book; Benjamin has a way with words that makes you feel as though you’re inside her characters’ minds and living their experiences for yourself. I loved her depictions of Anne’s life particularly in the early years of her marriage to Charles, when she felt like everything and anything was possible, and I found her ways of describing how Anne behaved even when she disagreed with Charles to be realistic. Her research seemed thorough; as with all excellent historical fiction authors, she covers in the footnotes what was and wasn’t true, but throughout the whole book I did feel as though there was a ring of authenticity.

In particular, Anne struggles to find herself, especially after she’s had children and lived in the shadow of her husband for years. She isn’t sure what her own purpose is, and I think this will still ring true for many women who define themselves by the people around them rather than as themselves. It really brought her out as a realistic character for me, and the combination of historical fiction and women’s issues worked exceptionally well. Since I knew virtually nothing about these people’s lives, each detail was new to me, even the kidnapping, and so I was as desperate as the characters to find out what happened next and how their stories would progress.

I’d certainly recommend this book to others who enjoy historical or women’s fiction; I was captivated by it, and Anne’s story certainly deserves a second look. I’m now inspired to not only keep on reading Melanie Benjamin’s books, but to seek out a few of the many books that have been written by and about the Lindberghs to add some non-fiction to my newly acquired interest in them.

All external book links are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review.