6Degrees – Page 16 – What Cathy Read Next…

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post. You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

This month’s starting book is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read – although I get the feeling everyone else in the book world has! Given it has a 17-year-old protagonist, Cassandra Mortmain, it would probably today be classed as a Young Adult novel but Dodie Smith is also famous for her children’s book, The Hundred and One Dalmations.

So my first link is to another author – Lynne Reid Banks – who wrote children’s books, notably The Indian in the Cupboard, but also adult novels, the most well-known probably being The L-Shaped Room. (I remember owning this paperback edition with its evocative cover.) Lynne Reid Banks also wrote a biography of the Brontës, Dark Quartet, the relevance of ‘quartet’ being that it includes Branwell Brontë, not just his more famous sisters.

Another author to have been fascinated by Branwell is Daphne du Maurier. Her book, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, charts how Branwell’s ‘precocious flame of genius flickered and burned low’ resulting in his early death from a combination of laudanum and alcohol.

However, Branwell is alive and well, at least in his sister Charlotte’s memories, in Bella Ellis’s historical fiction series which imagines the Brontë sisters as amateur lady detectives. The third and final book in the series is A Gift of Poison.

A Gift of Poison is set in 1847 at the point when Emily and Anne (but not Charlotte) have had their first books – Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey – accepted for publication. Anne’s second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is probably more well-known.

Anne died in May 1948, her dying words whispered to Charlotte, by now her only surviving sister, being “take courage”. Fittingly, Take Courage is the title of Samantha Ellis’s biography of Anne.

Anne Brontë is buried in Scarborough, a place she loved. The seaside town of Scarborough is also the location for crime novel, A Wake of Crows by Kate Evans. As it happens, Scarborough has a castle with which fact I hope I have captured your attention!

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

This month’s starting book is Wifedom by Anna Funder. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read – although I’d like to – but I have an excuse because it was only published in the UK on 11th August. Subtitled ‘Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’, according to the blurb, the author uses newly discovered letters from George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to her best friend to tell the story of the Orwells’ marriage. For my chain, I’ve taken the rather obvious route of novels that feature the wives (or mistresses) of famous men.

The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023, gives an insight into the marriage of renowned author Thomas Hardy and his wife, Emma. With literary ambitions of her own, Emma’s role as her husband’s assistant is gradually supplanted by a far younger woman, Florence Dugdale.

Wife to Mr Milton by Robert Graves tells the story of the tragic and eventful life of Marie Powell, who, at the age of sixteen, was pushed into marrying the man who was England’s greatest epic poet— and knew it —John Milton.

The Secret Life of Mrs London by Rebecca Rosenberg is the fascinating story of Charmian London (née Kittredge) the woman who became close to two famous men – Jack London and escape artist, Harry Houdini – but whose own literary talent was overshadowed by her more famous husband.

Outside the Magic Circle by Heera Datta tells the story of Catherine, wife of Charles Dickens and mother of his ten children whom Dickens abandoned after twenty-two years of marriage for a young actress.

Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood is a fictional account of Ernest Hemingway’s four marriages told from the perspective of each wife, obviously imagining they would never suffer the fate of the previous one. ‘But there could never be two people at the close of his marriage…it always had to end on a three-card winner.’

Ike and Kay by James MacManus is the fictional account of the real life relationship between General Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, a young woman assigned to be his driver during a visit to London in 1942.

The theme running through my chain is, perhaps, don’t marry a famous man.