(I was disgusted by the ad-ridden appearance of my blog, and defeated by the task of culling my media library, so I’ve upgraded to a paid plan for a trial year. I had until now vowed not to spend any money on the site since I don’t make any money from it, but WordPress hooked me in with a 30% off deal, and I’ll appreciate the no ads and extra storage space. I hope it looks better now!)
A year club hosted by Karen and Simon is always a great excuse to read more classics. One of these was a winner, if peculiar; the other was so-so, but helped clarify for me what a particular literary prize is looking for.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
I was surprised to find that this was my seventh book by Cather, so I’ve actually read over half of her novels now. I think all her other works I know were set on the prairies of the Midwest (or in Santa Fe in the case of Death Comes for the Archbishop), so Sapphira and the Slave Girl feels like an odd one out not just for its antebellum historical subject matter but also for its setting in Cather’s hometown of Winchester, Virginia.
In 1856, the Colberts’ is a house divided: Henry, a miller from Quaker stock, disapproves of slavery; his wife, Sapphira, grew up with slaves and treats them severely. While the other Colbert brothers’ meddling with Black women is an open secret – one of them is assumed to have fathered Henry and Sapphira’s mixed-race teenage slave, Nancy – Henry looks fondly on Nancy and thinks of her almost like a second daughter. Sapphira resents that attention. When her Colbert nephew, Martin, a known cad, comes to visit, she arranges, or at least allows, convenient opportunities for Martin to be alone with Nancy.
Nancy appeals to the Colberts’ adult daughter, Rachel Blake, to accompany her on her walks so that Martin will not “overtake” her in the woods. Although none of the white characters take the repeated threat of attempted rape seriously enough, Henry and Rachel do eventually help Nancy escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. When Sapphira realizes her ‘property’ has been taken from her, she informs Rachel she is now persona non grata, but changes her mind when illness brings tragedy into Rachel’s household.
Had this been written 40–80 years later, it would have been completely different: first of all, I would expect it to much more graphically recount Black suffering, rather than depicting generally happy “darkies” with folksy accents and quirky character traits; secondly, there would be either a redemptive or a punitive plot arc for Sapphira. Instead, Cather paints her as a flawed human being who accepts the status quo but is also graceful in disability (she has dropsy and is in a wheelchair) and accepting of the approach of death.
I wish I remembered from the Hermione Lee biography more about the immediate inspiration for this novel, and its reception. Simply taking an interest in Black characters must have set it apart. For instance, there is a whole chapter on Nancy’s grandmother, Aunt Jezebel, the first generation kidnapped from Africa; and the final section has Nancy, now a sophisticated Montreal housekeeper dressed in silk and fur, visiting her mother 20 years after the Civil War. That Cather’s characterization otherwise doesn’t rise above cheerful mammy stereotypes can hardly be counted against her given the time period, right? It was good to experience a lesser-known American classic that I can imagine appealing to fans of Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton as well. (From a Little Free Library in Queen Camel, Somerset; April 2021)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas
Published when Thomas was in his mid-twenties, this is a series of 10 sketches, some of which are more explicitly autobiographical (as in first person, with a narrator named Dylan Thomas) than others. There is a rough chronological trajectory to the stories, with the main character a mischievous boy, then a grandstanding teenager, then a young journalist in his first job. The countryside and seaside towns of South Wales recur as settings, and – as will be no surprise to readers of Under Milk Wood – banter-filled dialogue is the priority. I most enjoyed the childhood japes in the first two pieces, “The Peaches” and “A Visit to Grandpa’s.” The rest failed to hold my attention, but I marked out two long passages that to me represent the voice and scene-setting that the Dylan Thomas Prize is looking for. The latter is the ending of the book and reminds me of the close of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (University library)
I was a lonely night-walker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on… [etc.]
For a long time he waited on the stairs, though there was no love now to wait for and no bed but his own too many miles away to lie in, and only the approaching day to remember his discovery. All around him the disturbed inhabitants of the house were falling back into sleep. Then he walked out of the house on to the waste space and under the leaning cranes and ladders. The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brick-heaps and the broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.
(I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club and 1929 Club.)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
I’ve just finished My Ántonia, my first by Cather; Sapphira sounds very different. The attitude to European immigrants in MA is generally tolerant and sympathetic, but there are flashes of stereotyping and patronising. I like the sound of the Thomas – and the Joycean melancholy
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I think My Antonia was also my first Cather, about 25 years ago. It seem it’s impossible to escape the stereotyping views of that time.
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I meant to include this Cather, as I love her, but it does sound very different from the ones I’ve loved so far. Thanks for adding the two books to the club!
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Thanks for hosting! I see we had one other review of the Cather but none of the Thomas (too bad, as other readers probably would have enjoyed it more).
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I really do want to read Sapphira and the Slave Girl—I had no idea that it was set in Virginia!
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In fact, I just saw a news story yesterday that her birthplace in Gore, VA is going up for sale and the Willa Cather Foundation is hoping to raise funds to preserve it. (The house looks like a derelict at the moment.) I hadn’t realized this year is her sesquicentennial.
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I do hope they manage to. It would be lovely to have a memorial or museum to her on the East Coast.
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There’s a couple of crowdfunding projects going on for it now. I plan to donate. https://www.willacather.org/birthplace?ut
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I HAVE DONE THE SAME re ads. I hated them so much! Sure it was exactly what WP wanted us to do…
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Well played to WordPress, then: making the ads just annoying enough to lure in those of us who had resisted paid plans! It’s a shame that the most useful plug-ins are only available at the business rate, though.
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Having lived in Wales for the last twenty years I regret to confess I’ve still to read any Thomas all the way through despite loving the language of the extracts I’ve read; I really should have picked this up for my Club read. Cather I’ve of course seen lauded on many recent blog posts so I’m sure I’ll get to her someday — maybe not this one though!
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The only Thomas I’ve unreservedly loved was A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a perfect little story.
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I could have chosen either of these for this week, but didn’t, so I’m glad you did, particularly the Thomas. I may have read it decades but can’t remember a thing – love his writing though.
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Thanks for hosting! There are always so many good options.
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I hear you about the ads. I just started seeing them, and they take up most of the page! Maybe I’ll look into the cost of an upgrade, too.
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It cost me the equivalent of $50 for one year. I’ll look into some monetization options to try to make some of that back.
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I think I’m going to sign up. They put so many ads on the page of my blog that you can barely see the content.
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The ads were beginning to drive me mad! So thank you for making it a nice experience to read your blog again without them. Once they started inserting them every other paragraph, instead of just at the end, it was really distracting.
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Yes, it looked just awful; I almost felt embarrassed sending a link through to an author whose book I reviewed, knowing she’d see so many ads. I’d resisted paying for blog hosting for over 8 years now. I think you said it’s worth it to include affiliate links? I’ve also been offered the chance to buy a domain. Is that something I should consider? I don’t enjoy working with all this back-end stuff but I’ll try to adjust.
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I’ve had my own domain (and for Shiny) for years now. It does give you complete freedom using WP.org rather than WP.com, but isn’t cheap for a single site – I have both sites on a single web-hosting contract but it costs me over £250 pa with the various extras needed (I pay for SSL certificate and back-up utility, plus I bought themes. Luckily I get about two thirds or more of that back on affiliate sales. A WP.com domain would be considerably cheaper. You can have affiliate links on WP.com – very easy to do once signed up with your one of choice. (I do so much better on Blackwell’s than I ever did on Amazon links – and Blackwell’s are good on prices too, often being the same as Amazon with free UK P&P (but their delivery is slower).
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I got the message “A free domain was included in the purchase of your WordPress.com bundle.” TBH, I don’t know what that means or if it’s worth doing. Does it just mean that “wordpress” is no longer in the web address of my blog?
I’ll look into adding affiliate links, maybe via Bookshop.
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I paid up last year and winced at the price of renewal then realised I pay more for coffees in the year. I ran out of image space although I’d always paid for no-ads. I was considering affiliate links but more likely to have a link to my local bookshop’s bookshop.org page. I justify it by my lack of expensive hobbies and the fact I probably get that much worth of free books a year that I would eventually buy …
The free domain name does lose the WordPress but I don’t know if all the internal and external links still work and also I never mind seeing wordpress in your address so bet other people don’t. I didn’t bother to remove mine.
I read Sapphira a decade ago and had some slightly confused reactions to it, https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/book-reviews-50/ I think you’re very right that it would be a different book written a few decades later.
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I went ahead and added the free domain name for the trial year but have been reassured that if I don’t renew thereafter it will simply revert to dot wordpress dot com. I didn’t realize about the links; I’ll have to keep a careful eye out for that. I’ve signed up as a Bookshop affiliate but I think it happens to be the U.S. branch of their site (I’d have to do both separately and can’t remember my password for the UK account … I’ll sort it eventually!). I also added a donate function on my Contact page, so I’ll see if any minute revenue comes in that way. I really don’t like working on any of this back-end stuff, but I’ll try to do my due diligence.
It certainly was an unusual choice of subject matter for Cather. Perhaps she felt, late in her career, that she had nothing to lose. I wonder if, for the time, it was considered ground-breaking, or if the nostalgia for the Confederacy made it just about acceptable to readers who wouldn’t have chosen to pick up a book about Black characters.
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