The reader's dilemma: so many books, so little time

The article about L. M. Montgomery's compulsion to read and write contains this quotation from one of her journals:

“I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.”

For an avid reader, a 'book drunkard' as  L. M. Montgomery called herself, the dilemma of there not being enough hours in the day to do all the reading they would like to is a very real and major one. 

The 'so many books, so little time' dilemma does indeed often involve making a decision to select a familiar old friend rather than a fresh new book to read or vice versa; in other words, all reading is at the expense of other reading. 

I commented on L. M. Montgomery's thoughts about reading and the feelings of nostalgia that old books can invoke at the time. I have since come across another quotation about the advantages of old over new books, and this has inspired a few more words on the subject.

Comfort food for the mind
Elizabeth Goudge states that our favourite books can provide great comfort when we are going through difficult times in our lives.

A few words about Frances Hodgson Burnett on her birthday

The writer Frances Hodgson Burnett was born on this day, November 24th, in 1849. 

She was briefly mentioned in the article that lists some more Sagittarian writers. I read her three most popular children's books when I was very young and quite liked The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, but I knew almost nothing about her. After learning that she was interested in metaphysical matters, I put an investigation of her life on my to-do list.

I have looked again at the children's books and trawled through some biographical material. I found a lot of fairly interesting information about Frances Hodgson Burnett's life, some of it unexpected and some of it depressing. 

Where this blog is concerned, the results of the investigation to date are rather disappointing. Unlike fellow Sagittarian L. M. Montgomery, whose books, journals and letters are packed with article-inspiring material, Frances Hodgson Burnett provides very little that resonates or that I want to quote and comment on.

There is nothing new about her being different from the people around her as a child or being an avid reader and an inventor of exciting adventure stories from an early age. She was not the only writer to find books and the products of her imagination better than real life either.

Wanting to have something to show for my efforts, I selected enough material for a short article. It consists mainly of some elements that Frances Hodgson Burnett had in common with L. M. Montgomery.

Frances Hodgson Burnett and L. M. Montgomery

As might be expected, both Frances Hodgson Burnett and L. M. Montgomery were voracious and compulsive readers from an early age.

Frances Hodgson Burnett has been described as a writing machine; L. M. Montgomery felt compelled to write and was also very prolific. 

Both writers were profoundly influenced by works of the Brontës. There are some parallels to both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden for example.

Both writers had their first stories published when they were still teenagers.

Both writers became the main breadwinner in their families; in Frances Hodgson Burnett's case this started at the age of 18, when she began to make money from writing.

May Sinclair, Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery and the Brontës

After producing some articles about May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal, I decided to investigate her background in the hope of finding some more material of interest. 

I found some very familiar biographical elements and other connections when reading about her life. I mentioned a blueprint for writers in an article in the Context and the Total Picture series; if I created a template for writers of interest, May Sinclair would tick many of the boxes.

I have seen, for example, the Celtic Connection in the biographies of many novelists, so it was no surprise to learn that May Sinclair had an Irish mother and a Scottish father.

It also came as no surprise when I found that she had some other things in common with Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery. May Sinclair too was interested in and inspired by the Brontës, whose works she may have first encountered in her father's private library rather than the local public library.

May Sinclair and Jean Rhys
May Sinclair was a very different person from Jean Rhys, but they had a few things in common:

They both wrote under assumed names. 

Both novelists lived for a while in Devon.

They both read voraciously as girls, partly for escape, and both later wrote Brontë-inspired books. 

They both had unsympathetic mothers who tried to force them to conform to the norm. They had some things to say about their childhood experiences that sound uncannily similar. 

Just as Jean Rhys's work is mostly autobiographical, so are some of May Sinclair's novels, Mary Olivier in particular. Mary Olivier's mother wants her to behave like a 'normal' girl:

“...you should try and behave a little more like other people.”

"You were different," she said. "You weren’t like any of the others. I was afraid of you.”

More about Walter de la Mare's Return

The first article about Walter de la Mare's horror novel The Return ended at the point where Arthur Lawford, whose appearance has changed because he is possessed by the ghost of a dead Frenchman, has convinced both his wife Sheila and the vicar Mr Bethany that he is not an imposter.

They now have to decide how to deal with 'this awful business'.

They call in a doctor; he is not much use, which is not surprising as Lawford gives him only a modified version of what happened in the cemetery. 

They want to avoid comment or scandal so invent some cover stories for their friends and the servants: they tell people that Arthur Lawford is staying in his room and not seeing anyone because he is very tired and ill, and that the 'stranger' who has been seen in the house is a new doctor. 

From this point on, the story itself did not hold much of my attention. I couldn't find much to inspire commentary as I skimmed quickly through the details of the web of deception and Arthur Lawford's impersonation of the new doctor, the descriptions of Arthur's inner state, his disagreements with his wife and his excursions, not to mention the long philosophical discussions about life. I did however find a few more connections and a little incidental material of interest.

Another reminder of Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood 
Arthur Lawford makes a new friend, someone with the strange name of Herbert Herbert. This man believes Arthur's story about being possessed by the Frenchman when he fell asleep in the churchyard, and theorises that Nicholas Sabathier's restless ghost had been lingering on by his grave waiting for someone to ambush because he still has some living to do. 

Then, Herbert says, a godsend in the form of Arthur Lawford comes along. Arthur has been suffering from a dispiriting illness, he is half asleep, tired out and depressed; his weak inner state makes him a suitable vehicle for possession. This is spot on, and similar to what George Cubbins says to Lucy and Lockwood about ghosts homing in on vulnerable people in the previously mentioned article about Jonathan Stroud's Empty Grave.

Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery, Jane Eyre and public libraries

Terry Pratchett has said that he owes a great debt to the public libraries that he used as a boy.

Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery are two more novelists who were great readers and had access to a public library when young. As girls they read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which made a big impression on them and later influenced their writing.

Jean Rhys and the public library

As mentioned in the article about psychological black magic, Jean Rhys wrote a prequel to Jane Eyre: Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be her finest work. 

Carole Angier says in her biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that Jean Rhys was a member of the Hamilton Public Library in the British West Indies island of Dominica as a girl, and this was where she first encountered Jane Eyre. The course of her life might have been very different if she had not read this book at an impressionable age, and Wide Sargasso Sea might never have been written.

Jean Rhys had a lot of trouble with this book, which was probably started around 1945 but not published until 1966.

She said that she went to the local public library in Bude in Cornwall in 1957 to get a copy of Jane Eyre. She wanted to re-read it to refresh her memory of Mr Rochester's mad wife, whose story she was telling in Wide Sargasso Sea.

L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.

Money and envy in Stella Gibbons's My American

This article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s My American contains some minor material of particular interest.

The power of money
Stella Gibbons obviously knew the value of money. Some of her books describe the big difference that a small increase in someone's wages - or even a few extra coins - can make. 

She informs us that the Beeding children were rather afraid of their mother – until they became old enough to leave school and start earning some money for themselves:

“All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them...Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.”

There are some good points here. I know from experience that having an income of one's own – money that has been fairly earned from suitable work, reflects competence and is a by-product of self-improvement – does indeed increase morale and self-assurance. A certain amount of independence is no bad thing; people treat you better when they know that you have other options.

Stella Gibbons balances the positive effect that earning a wage has on the young Beedings with an account of Amy Lee's increasing unhappiness after she becomes very wealthy: 

“It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world.

Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.”

Context and the total picture: Part III

The previous article in the series describes how some people who for better or worse put painful personal experiences into the context of a few other, often well-known, people’s lives decide to leave it at that.  They go just as far as they want or are able to go.

Now it is time to say something about the next steps on the path to detecting and understanding the unseen influences that appear to be at work in certain people’s lives.

Up to this point, candidates for moving on may have come across some interesting information incidentally and in small amounts; now they change their approach and do some investigations - actively looking for writers with Celtic connections after coming across one or two with Scottish ancestry for example. This involves a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. 

This stage also involves putting aside the personal approach in favour of thinking objectively and analytically about various patterns and common elements in the lives of many people of interest. These may or may not be elements that the investigator shares with them. 

Investigators may then move on to a stage where they start to wonder what, if anything, might be behind the patterns they detect. They start to think about the What, the Who, the How and the Why.

For example, I have experienced some unexpected, unwelcome and unsettling encounters  with people from the past. Recently I discovered that this also happened to the novelist Antonia White.  These encounters are not just random painful personal experiences shared with one or two others: looked at objectively and summarised, they are typical of the unpleasant incidents that certain selected people endure when, for example, they are at a low ebb, have received a jarring shock or had an encounter with an energy vampire.

This leads to speculation about orchestration, distress signals, telepathy and people who are remotely controlled by puppet masters behind the scenes! What forces are in operation? How does it all work? Who or what is behind it?

Some writers with Celtic connections

The starting point for this article was a line in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Parasite, which has been the subject of many articles.

Austin Gilroy thinks that the witch Helen Penclosa got her hooks deep into him because of his Celtic origin and that his colleague Charles Sadler got off lightly because of his phlegmatic Saxon temperament.

This made me wonder if people of Celtic origin really are more open to unseen influences than those of other ancestries. I have Irish connections on one side and Scottish on the other, so this topic is of great interest to me.

I remembered that some of the writers featured or mentioned in this blog had Cornish, Irish, Scottish or Welsh connections; I decided to do a quick investigation and list any more people on here who are known or appear to be of Celtic descent on one or both sides.

People of interest with Celtic connections
Conan Doyle may have been born in Edinburgh, but he had Irish Catholic parents.

Joan Aiken’s Canadian-born mother was a MacDonald, which suggests Scottish ancestors.

J. M. Barrie was a Scotsman.

Enid Blyton had an Irish grandmother on her father’s side.

Angela Brazil had a Scottish grandfather on her mother’s side.

The Brontës had an Irish father and a Cornish mother.

John Buchan was a Scotsman.

Taylor Caldwell was of Scottish origin on both sides. She was descended from the MacGregor clan on her mother’s side.

James Cameron has remote Scottish connections.

Andrew Carnegie, whose public libraries have inspired many writers, was a Scotsman.

The family of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) had some Irish connections.

Eoin Colfer is Irish.

Marie Corelli’s real father was almost certainly the Scottish poet Charles Mackay.

Artemis Fowl and the demon cult leader: Part I

I read the first three of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl fantasy novels when they were first published. I remembered them recently when compiling a list of light and amusing reading that would help to counteract the effects of negative and disturbing material.

I needed a break from reading about the writer Jean Rhys, which is even more depressing than reading about Stella Benson and Antonia White! I decided to renew my acquaintance with Artemis the young Irish prodigy and his fairy friends.

I found that there are now eight Artemis Fowl books. I am reading my way through them all. I didn’t expect to find anything that would inspire any articles, and I was right - until I reached Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony (2006), the fifth book in the series.

The Lost Colony contains some material that immediately reminded me of what I have read and written about cult leaders and people who feel different on the inside from everyone around them.

The Artemis Fowl books contain many supernatural entities, including elves, dwarves, trolls and goblins; The Lost Colony features demons.  One of them reminds me of certain writers who felt different right from the start and went on to develop a special gift, and another one behaves exactly like a cult leader. 

Something about Eoin Colfer’s demons
Eoin Colfer’s demons begin life as imps. They go through a process called ‘warping’, which turns them into demons. It sounds similar to the way in which a caterpillar builds a cocoon then emerges as a butterfly.

A very few imps never warp into maturity. While ordinary full-grown demons have no magic of their own, these special imps become warlocks who can perform magic.

Most of the demons are collective-minded, bloodthirsty and aggressive with few redeeming characteristics, but there is one exception.

This special, different demon is called Number One.

John Buchan, L. M. Montgomery and some snakes

I neither love and revere snakes nor hate and fear them. I once horrified a friend by trying to stroke a big snake in a small zoo. I couldn’t understand why she reacted the way she did! 

Snakes certainly bring out strong emotions in people, and in fiction they represent evil more often than good.

The discovery that both Stella Benson and Antonia White were lovers of snakes made me wonder whether any more writers of interest shared their views. Did anyone other than Stella Benson believe that they had the soul of a snake?

I looked for obvious personal opinions as opposed to standard Biblical references where they are classic symbols of evil.

I couldn’t find any more positive references to snakes by the people featured on here apart from Gerald Durrell, who doesn’t really count because he was a conservationist and zookeeper who loved all wildlife.

I found that neither John Buchan nor L. M. Montgomery had a good word to say about snakes. Buchan used them to describe some of his villains and L. M. Montgomery obviously loathed and feared them.

A few snake references from John Buchan
This is from The Thirty-Nine Steps:

“...the real boss... with an eye like a rattlesnake.”

“Then he looked steadily at me, and that was the hardest ordeal of all. There was something weird and devilish in those eyes, cold, malignant, unearthly, and most hellishly clever. They fascinated me like the bright eyes of a snake. “

This is from The Power House:

“It was with profound relief that I found myself in Piccadilly in the wholesome company of my kind. I had carried myself boldly enough in the last hour, but I would not have gone through it again for a king's ransom. Do you know what it is to deal with a pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.”

This is from Mr Standfast:

“Blenkiron got out of his chair and stood above me. 'I tell you, Dick, that man makes my spine cold. He hasn’t a drop of good red blood in him. The dirtiest apache is a Christian gentleman compared to Moxon Ivery. He’s as cruel as a snake and as deep as hell.'”

Context and the total picture: Part II

Part I introduces the idea that putting painful experiences into the context of the lives of well-known people can have both positive and negative effects. 

Some people are the worse for learning that they are not alone, some take comfort in the idea and try to make the best of things and a few of them take another big step forward: they start noticing patterns, joining dots and making connections. 

It seems strange to me that some of the writers featured on here appear never to have reached even the first stage. Their writings are full of insights about themselves and their lives but they looked at it all in isolation. 

No context for their lives
I first mentioned this important point in an article about the poet Kathleen Raine: I said that while she made a good, honest evaluation of herself and her life, she did not compare it with the personalities and lives of other creative writers. She actually had many ideas, insights, feelings and experiences in common with some of them, but she never, at least publicly, did much to put her life into the context of the lives of other, similar, people. 

For example, she admitted that her thoughts about and feelings for Gavin Maxwell placed a heavy and intrusive psychic burden on him and that he eventually turned against her because of this. He may not have been the only person she had a bad effect on: he called her a destroyer.

Would it have made things better or worse if she had known about the terrible effect that J. M. Barrie had on the Llewelyn Davies boys and their parents or Benjamin Disraeli had on various people?

What do Alan Garner and L. M. Montgomery have in common?

A previous article describes how neither Noel Streatfeild nor Isaac Asimov ever forgot being refused some information that they had eagerly asked for. They never forgave their teachers for impatiently brushing them off either.

I have since read about two more very different writers who also experienced painful incidents that they never forgot: as children they were unjustly and cruelly punished for speaking in ways that their teachers disapproved of. 

The first incident was mentioned by L. M. Montgomery in a letter she wrote in 1907 about some discoveries she made while reading the Bible:

“When I was a child a school teacher gave me a whipping because I used the expression "by the skin of my teeth." He said it was slang. If I had but known then what I know now!!! It is in Job—those very words.”

From The Green Gables Letters from L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber 1905-1909

What’s wrong with a gentle reminder of the importance of speaking good English? That teacher should have known his Bible too.

I wonder if that teacher ever learned about the literary achievements of his former pupil.

The second incident involves Alan Garner.

L. M. Montgomery and Rudyard Kipling’s Cat

The Cat That Walked by Himself is one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s children’s classic Just So Stories (1902). 

This book contains tales about various wild animals:

“...the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”

The Cat walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

L. M. Montgomery knew this story, and it meant a lot to her. Her heroine Emily Starr mentions it after her friend Dean warns her about the pressure to conform at school:

“"...Don't let them make anything of you but yourself, that's all. I don't think they will.’

"No, they won't," said Emily decidedly. "I'm like Kipling's cat--I walk by my wild lone and wave my wild tail where so it pleases me. That's why the Murrays look askance at me. They think I should only run with the pack."”
From Emily Climbs (1925)

Later in the book, Emily gets the chance to go to live in New York. She is very torn, thinking about what she might gain and what she might lose:

“Would the Wind Woman come to her in the crowded city streets? Could she be like Kipling's cat there?”

She decides to remain with her people and the old farm on her beloved Prince Edward Island, even though it means missing many opportunities to broaden her horizons and have a career. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery made some very different decisions, and she came to regret them as terrible mistakes.

L. M. Montgomery on Rudyard Kipling and writing to order

It came as no great surprise to learn recently that L. M. Montgomery was familiar with the works of Rudyard Kipling: as mentioned in previous articles, she was a great reader. 

What was unexpected was that she singled out Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads for special praise - perhaps this was because she was given the poems as a Christmas present. 

Her actual words about the poems surprised me too:

“They are capital — full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world and gain a much clearer realization of all the myriad forms of life that are beating around your own little one. And this is good for a person even if one does slip back afterwards into the narrow bounds of one’s own life. We can never be quite so narrow again.”

From The Complete Journals of L. M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1900-1911

I certainly know what it is like to be thrilled and taken out of myself and swept into another, wider, world by certain poems, Rudyard Kipling’s in particular, but the Barrack Room Ballads are not among them. They have on the whole a negative effect.

This enthusiasm was so surprising that I went to Project Gutenberg to refresh my memory of the Ballads in the hope of understanding why L. M. Montgomery felt this way about them.

Writers: three views from L. M. Montgomery

Previous articles have covered some of L.M. Montgomery’s thoughts about reading and writing.

Her short story The Waking of Helen (1901) is a depressing account of a doomed girl. It is of interest because it contains a good summary of three possible ways of looking at well-known writers.

We can view them as elite, fortunate and noble people who are far above the masses; we can respect, admire, even worship them for their achievements and envy them for their position, popularity and immortal names.

We can view them with disappointment, disillusionment, disapproval and disgust when we become aware of their real characters and read about some of the appalling things that they believed, said and did.

We can feel sadness and pity for their unhappy lives when we learn what they had to endure and realise that for them, fame and fortune were no compensation for what they lost or never had.

These ways of looking at writers are not mutually exclusive.

Here are some relevant extracts from the story:

Terry Pratchett, L. M Montgomery and Fairyland

Terry Pratchett’s description of Fairyland in The Wee Free Men has reminded me of a passage I came across recently in one of L. M. Montgomery’s books. She too has something to say about the place.

Their views and descriptions are very different. Terry Pratchett is all negative while L. M. Montgomery is all positive.

Terry Pratchett describes a kind of hell universe that people are relieved to escape from while L. M. Montgomery describes a heavenly paradise that produces an unbearable sense of loss in people who have been banished from it forever.

Terry Pratchett’s Fairyland is an actual world than can be visited by a few select people while L. M. Montgomery’s, although not open to most people, is an inner world.

Terry Pratchett’s Fairyland drains real worlds and has nothing to give while L. M. Montgomery’s world is a wellspring of wonders that can be brought out into our world and shared.

L. M. Montgomery’s description of Fairyland leaves out something important that Terry Pratchett highlights.

Stella Benson and L. M. Montgomery

This article summarises a few common elements in the lives of novelists Lucy Maud Montgomery and Stella Benson.

They both had something to say about the feeling of being innately different from the people around them and the horrors of having to live an ordinary life. They both came to realise that their marriage was a terrible mistake.

Shared feelings of being different
Feeling fundamentally different is so common in creative people as to be almost a cliché. I have quoted Kathleen Raine on the subject. 

This feeling usually goes with the territory, although they don’t all go as far as Stella Benson did and believe that they have the souls of snakes!

As previously mentioned, Stella Benson felt different in kind from the throng of ‘real girls’ who surrounded her. Sometimes she felt superior to them. She wrote, “I know I have something infinitely more important which these giggling girls have not.“

L. M. Montgomery too felt this way. I mentioned in a previous article that, like many others of her kind, she felt that she did not fully belong in this world. She seems ambivalent about this:

“It was really dreadful to be so different from other people…and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed from another star.” 

From Anne of Windy Poplars

Stella Benson's diaries

I came across this quotation from L. M. Montgomery recently:

“Only lonely people keep diaries.”

She kept a diary from the age of nine, and this is where she wrote the above words. I think that they are probably true in some cases but definitely not in all.

Sometimes diaries are kept primarily for record keeping purposes, to be used for reference in the future if necessary. Isaac Asimov for example kept detailed but mainly factual diaries for much of his life.

Journalling is a possible outlet for creative people who must write. It provides a way of exercising writing skills and keeping them honed; it keeps the channel of inspiration open.

The quotation made me think of Stella Benson, who kept a diary from the age of ten until shortly before she died. It is certainly applicable to her. In Stella’s own words:

“To set down a record of my contact with people...is most necessary to me. Because my most continuous sensation is a feeling of terrifying slipping-away from people - a most devastating loneliness - I have to place on record the fact that I was human and that even I had my human adventures.”

Two more writers who were discouraged from reading

This article was inspired by a quotation in the previous one, which is about L. M. Montgomery and writing:

“Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”

-From Anne of Green Gables

Marilla’s words to Anne may well have come from someone L. M. Montgomery knew in real life, a grandparent perhaps.

Marilla is not alone in her views; her words have reminded me of two other writers who in childhood encountered people with this dismissive attitude and met with disapproval or worse just because they loved to read.

John Masefield, whose children’s books have been featured on here, had a horrible domineering aunt who disapproved of his love of reading and thought that it was a disgusting habit that should be broken. When he was 13, in an attempt to cure his addiction she sent him away to train for a life at sea.