Good morning team,

I’m currently reading a book about shyness, and whilst it’s not by a woman it is superb and it features a lot of women, so I am taking shyness as my theme for today.

Tove Jansson has certainly featured in this newsletter before, but did you know that she lived on a variety of islands, every time pining for an island more distant than the one she was living on? This short article is about Tove and her partner building a house and a life on an island they bought. It sounds like a very happy sitch, particularly if you are an introvert:

“I suppose I have rarely been as happy as I was during those weeks when the timbers were being put up, we hammered as if our lives depended on it! We slept in the Bredskär cottage (I, discretely in the loft) and early each morning we went over to Haru […] it was a stormy autumn, a constant 6 [or] 7 on the Beaufort scale. Gradually snow began to arrive. I made food for us on Haru, under a tarpaulin, mostly fish.”

https://www.ica.art/bulletin/island-her-own-susanna-pettersson-tove-jansson

Another thing that delights me about this book is that it has introduced me to an author I’ve heard of before only very vaguely – Elizabeth Taylor. She sounds pretty great and I look forward to reading her books, but first, just drink in this quotation about the asocial horrors of her afternoon teas with Ivy Compton-Burnett:

Each luncheon was an awkward and wooden occasion, with Taylor fretting about the flaky pastry from her Banbury cake cascading on to her knees, the shakiness of her hand as she helped herself to raspberry fool or the superannuated cheese her host liked to serve, which made her guests fear that the flat’s dodgy drains had finally given up the ghost. At the end Compton-Burnett would whisper ‘Would you like to…?’, and Taylor would say ‘no’ before hurrying to the ladies at Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge.

This expresses perfectly how I feel when I read Ivy Compton-Burnett books. Perhaps the promise of a trip to a large department store at the end would make them slightly more bearable, but I’m not planning on testing the theory any time soon. As that’s a quotation from the book, there’s no link, but you can enjoy this Atlantic article about Elizabeth Taylor and her works:

the English novel was born and perfected as a means to explore women’s interiority and bourgeois domesticity, and these remain subjects at the heart of the modern experience, to which the novel as a form is ideally suited. Amis responded to a critic who submitted “importance” as a criterion of Taylor’s worth: “Importance isn’t important. Good writing is.” Her prose was at once effervescent and smooth, and its clarity and precision sprang from the astringency of her vision.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/09/the-other-elizabeth-taylor/306125/

Have a great weekend! May all your social encounters be entirely without awkwardness!

Alex.