Revisiting old friends

Recently I was asked to write about three books or writers that I return to again and again. It was hard to choose just three, because I do a lot of rereading, particularly at times of great stress or illness. And my house move certainly counts as one of those times. Anyway, this is what I came up with.

One author I have returned to so often that my copies of her books are falling apart is Jane Austen. Her moral sense, her understanding of human nature, her wit, the elegance of her writing, in fact the sheer pleasure of reading her take me back to her again and again. If I had to choose just one novel, it would probably be Mansfield Park, not her most popular, I know, but for me, perhaps her richest in terms of theme and characterisation.

Sometimes I want to read something that lets me escape to a different time and place, and a writer who lets me do that is Joyce Dennys. She was an artist and writer, married to a GP, living in Buddleigh Salterton, and in her mid forties at the beginning of WWII. Henrietta’s War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942 and Henrietta Sees it Through: More News from the Home Front 1942-1945 are collections of the letters that she wrote and illustrated for Sketch magazine and which were republished in the 1980s. Although they are fiction, they are clearly based pretty closely on her own life. As well as being highly entertaining, they remind me of a time when people navigated dark days with humour and good will. My enjoyment is heightened by the familar location. My parents-in-law lived near Exeter and my late husband and I  used to have trips out to Buddleigh Salterton with our daughter. Precious memories.

Around this time last year, I found myself even more reliant than usual on the comfort of reading, and specifically rereading. I was admitted to hospital where I was diagnosed with food-poisoning and was put in isolation. I was as high as a kite on steroids, and couldn’t sleep even though I was exhausted. Fortunately I had taken my well-stocked Kindle with me, but still I yearned for some real books. After a few days, I was no longer considered infectious and was allowed out of my room to the common room where there was a TV and various books, mostly left behind by previous patients, I guess. There I found copies of A Murder is Announced and 4.50 from Paddington, both featuring Miss Marple. I fell on them, because when all else fails, when I am too exhausted or ill to read anything else, there is always Agatha Christie. There is a reason why she was so much read during the Blitz and why she continues to be a world-wide best seller: the perfectly dove-tailing plots, the satisfaction of moral order being restored, and the apparently straightforward writing which is yet both clever and amusing. I was on a panel at a crime fiction convention recently where a member of the audience asked which writer had inspired us to write. Agatha Christie was the consensus. Truly she is the crime-writer’s crime-writer.