Bonjour!
Real random week of reading, and I didn’t really do a lot of it. What I did read was pretty enjoyable but I also don’t feel like I have any pressing thoughts on any of it. I guess I will find out when I start writing about it.
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
I finished the first book of Rosemary Sutcliff’s King Arthur trilogy (The Sword and the Circle) and immediately started reading the second book, The Light Beyond the Forest. Light is about the quest of the Holy Grail, and it kind of focuses on the newer generation of the Round Table (Percival and Galahad). Lancelot also features a lot, largely sad that he isn’t the best knight in the world anymore, Galahad is. Sutcliff has at least calmed down with saying that he is extremely ugly every third line, so there’s that.
I’m really enjoying it so far, but one thing I’ve noticed is how much the King Arthur stories just…don’t really have Arthur in them. I think T.H. White is one of the only instances I’ve read where he spends a lot of time presenting his childhood and inner life as an adult; in other versions, he’s just kind of around. Poor Arthur.
I put Light aside to read The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole (1857) for teaching, and found it to be a really interesting text. As you can imagine, it’s the autobiography of Mary Seacole, written when she was skint after the Crimean War ended. Seacole led a pretty bonkers life; born in Jamaica to a Creole mother and white, Scottish father, she married (and was widowed) young, learned medicine from her mother who ran a kind of boarding house, moved to Panama to be with her brother and open a dining room, travelled to London a couple of times and then pitched up near the battlefields at Crimea to open a hotel and administer medical help when needed. She was never formally trained but rather worked with the knowledge gained from her mother, and also practised different methods and medicines on a varying range of diseases and injuries until she found the most effective methods.
Her life is only half of what makes the book interesting. It’s also a really fascinating insight into race and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Seacole is, technically, a colonial subject as a native Jamaican, and yet she speaks of Britain as a stabilising force in the world, where its individual people, especially male soldiers, should be admired. It’s quite jarring to read from today’s perspective, but I think remembering that Seacole was writing this for a British audience when she really needed the money should be considered. She is also mixed race, and often talks of how she is much lighter skinned than other Black people she comes into contact with. Although she says early on that she is proud of her inherent relationship with African-Americans and other Black communities, she does often attempt to assimilate with the white people that she is surrounded by in different contexts. It’s interesting to read about colourism during a time when the Empire was still very much a factor, instead of a long-lasting legacy.
That was all my reading for the week really, as well as some background stuff on Seacole that helped to contextualise and focus my response to the text. See ya next week