Novelists No One Reads Anymore

i read *Dawn In Lyonesse*. its short. you could read it in a day. i liked it a lot. she had a simple style.

the best book i've read in the last year was *A Country Doctor* by Sarah Orne Jewett. i loved it. it was like 1884 alice munro kinda. don't know how many people read her anymore! i'm sure *The Country of the Pointed Firs* is still in print but i'm guessing when its taught its taught in some kind of medicinal way. for historical importance. regional writing of the late 19th century in america. i could be wrong. she's so readable and entertaining to me.

The Country of the Pointed Firs remained very much a thing when I finished grad school in 2010.

i've just got done reading a memoir/polemic by the english novelist douglas goldring. also a poet, playwright, publisher, lit mag editor, travel writer, tourist guide & journalist, he seems to have known everyone in art and leftist circles during the twenties but the only reference to him i can remember ever seeing was as the publisher of an early story by wyndham lewis. have never come across one of his novels but now keeping an eye out.

are there richard aldington readers out there? another writer of that era whose novels i never see around.

once upon a time i kept meaning to read some. plus the themes were relevant to some stuff i was taking notes on and chewing over. i remember his cycle was being kept in print - yellow spined volumes iirc - but can’t remember who by. was he a bit fash?

wait, i’m getting him confused with… who am i getting him confused with?

henry williamson.

aldington i kept bumping when i used to be in the english language modernists etc, think if anything id have him as a v minor poet, didn’t realise he’d written any novels or if i did know i’ve forgotten.

Edward Dahlberg

No one except skot that is

Burgess picks the whole of Williamson's Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight in his 99 novels selection, while admitting "In the later volumes a pro-Fascist tone prevails, highly disturbing, and an almost manic bitterness which is far from acceptable"!

his son played on some gong related projects iirc

xpost: liked the dahlberg collection i read a few years back!

& xposts: yeah aldington mostly known for his imagist association and biographies of the two lawrences. death of a hero is the only one of his novels that got/gets any attention as far as i know. was even published as a penguin which is why i'm surprised i've never spotted it.

also reading an article about goldring's lit mag turns out it was where a bunch of what would later become lewis's the wild body was first published speaking of fash

The only Williamson I’m curious to read is his unused film treatment for tarka that was 400,000 words long & basically encompassed that whole 15-novel cycle, going through centuries of history of the region before the otter even appears; weirdly the producers ended up going in a different direction. His descendants seem to work extremely hard at whitewashing his more unsavoury traits but even the official website basically intimates it was the scribblings of a demented crackpot

I myself have been meaning to read Dahlberg for a long while/pvmic

Mayne Reid, who wrote 75 adventure novels of the American West in the mid-1800s, which were quite popular, especially with young readers, and translated into many languages. He was cited as an early influence by some better-remembered writers, such as Nabokov, Chekhov, Milosz, Conan Doyle.

I just ran across this 1897 article from The Yellow Book called "A Forgotten Novelist" about an 18th century writer named Robert Bage

https://archive.org/details/yellowjan189712uoft/page/n318/mode/1up

i keep my dahlberg books handy for comfort reading. he always brings a smile to my face.

Just came across a cheap ebook of mentioned upthread and championed by Conrad Knickerbocker author Charles Wright’s novels that looks intriguing

Reminds me I have a Wright threefer somewhere: The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About, with intro by Ishmael Reed. Gotta dig that one up and get started!

Marie Corelli

The popularity of Marie Corelli has never been understood in this office, ‘“The Review of Books and Art” has done its full duty in pointing out the errors of Marie’s literary ways. Readers who still linger over her pages must do so at their own risk. The editor can no longer feel that he is in any way responsible for them. Mr. Alden’s letter from London, printed last week, probably explains the recruiting ground whence Marie’s readers are mainly drawn. He said she is read “by people who are ‘so fond of reading,’” and that, when a new book of hers comes out, the chambermaid is sure to read it. Here are the sources for a very large following, and Marie Corelli unquestionably has one. She was virtually started on her successful career by an august personage— who to have been told better—the Queen herself. Since the Queen was known to read her works, thousands of other persons, beginning with chambermaids and rising in the social scale far too high, have been drawn into the miscellaneous following.

But this is no reason why “Harry ©.” should read Marie Corelli. The Queen may do so, but he should not. It will be neither wise nor profitable for him to waste his holiday hours in that vain pursuit. The editor is glad to know that he finds “The Sorrows of Satan” “rather ridiculous,” and sees in that fact sound literary judgment. Publishers’ counters are loaded with better fictions than hers. Here below is a list (which the editor has chosen somewhat at random from the much longer list printed in “The Review” on Dec, 11) to which “Harry C.”, and all his reading friends are earnestly urged to give their days and nights, rather than to the books of Marie

--New York Times Book Review, Jan. 8, 1898

“The Review of Books and Art” has done its full duty in pointing out the errors of Marie’s literary ways.

Amazing line

i want to see how many on the much longer list no one reads anymore

Ulysses references Corelli a few times i think, which may have extended her longevity and would imply that at least in Dublin in 1904 people were ignoring the New York Times Book Review

In 2007, the British film Angel, based on a book by Elizabeth Taylor, was released as a thinly-veiled biography of Corelli. The film starred Romola Garai in the Corelli role and also starred Sam Neill and Charlotte Rampling. It was directed by François Ozon, who stated, "The character of Angel was inspired by Marie Corelli, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria's favourite writer. Corelli was one of the first writers to become a star, writing bestsellers for an adoring public. Today she has been largely forgotten, even in England."

Horror critic R. S. Hadji placed The Sorrows of Satan at number one in his list of the worst horror novels ever written.[2]

Brian Stableford, discussing Corelli's "narcissistic" novels, described The Sorrows of Satan thus: "as delusions of grandeur and expressions of devout wish-fulfilment go, the fascination of the Devil was an unsurpassable masterstroke"

On Wormwood:

The Times described it as "a succession of tedious and exaggerated soliloquies, relieved by tolerably dramatic, but repulsive incidents", and criticized Corelli's writing as having a "feminine redundancy of adjectives".[2] The Standard described the book as "repulsive".

"Corelli’s heaving blend of overheated romance, vitalist metaphysics, and occultism, with plentiful hints of clairvoyance, reincarnation, mesmerism, Egyptian mysticism, and mysterious psychic powers and traditions, had secured her position as one of the most popular and successful authors of the Edwardian period, outselling writers like H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling."

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/radioactive-fictions/

sounds rad tbh

Margaret Mackie Morrison "achieved international acclaim in 1932 with the publication, under her pen name March Cost, of her first novel A Man Named Luke," says Wikipedia. Someone must have read her stuff.

Ulysses references Corelli a few times i think,

The Guardian Angel by Paul de Kock

Introduction

Those who have heard of Paul de Kock at all will have probably have come across the name in Ulysses; Molly Bloom asks her husband Leopold to get her one of his books, and there are several other references to him in various places in the novel. (Though Sweets of Sin, the book Bloom bought, is apparently not by him.) Even to Joyceans it may come as a surprise to realise that Paul de Kock really existed; at least one (amateur) Joyce fan assured me that he didn't. But he did; he was a well-known and popular French author of the first half of the nineteenth centry. His books were translated into several languages, and popular in Britain for many years. Collected editions in English translation were published in both England and the USA in 1902-1904.

Paul de Kock - a Brief Biography

(From the 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911])
KOCK, CHARLES PAUL DE (1793-1871), French novelist, was born at Passy on the 21st of May 1793. He was a posthumous child, his father, a banker of Dutch extraction, having been a victim of the Terror. Paul de Kock began life as a banker's clerk. For the most part he resided on the Boulevard St Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians.

Gonna try a drib of Drabble tonight

lol what does this mean: "was one of the most inveterate of Parisians"

i mean i realise it's just an arch joke really but what exactly are we meant to conclude abt m.de kock from it?

Maybe it refers to people who are about Paris the way some New Yorkers are about New York - it's the center of the universe and why would anyone ever leave for any reason?