No comments about Queen Victoria - The Story of Her Life and Reign.

No comments about Catherine of Aragon and Her Friends.

No comments about Pickle the Spy - or, The Incognito of Prince Charles.

2 comments about Edward the Elder, 899 - 924.

1. King Edward the Elder (871-924) was the son and greatly overshadowed heir of Alfred the Great. This series of essays attempts to remedy the the absence of published research and prove that he "arguably did as much as any other individual to construct a singly, south-centered, Anglo-Saxon Kingdom." However, the amount of evidence from his reign is almost negligible in comparison to his famous father. And sadly, he is ignored by the Frankish chronicles (who wrote key sources on Alfred's reign) and many other non-English writers as well nor was he praised by his contemporaries.
   
   This essay set contains essays from very respectable historians on this period who explore Archaeological evidence, written sources, coinage, etc for Edward's reign. The essays are arranged in a chronological manner with strategically placed essays that deal with more broad overviews before delving deeper into the facets of his reign. For example the essay 'Edward, king of the Anglo-Saxons' is followed by 'The Coinage of Edward the Elder.' This also has frequent charts, pictures, maps, photographs, and lists that assist the reader and make the read much more interesting. One of the great benefits of having a collection of essays is the ease in ignoring some that deal with an element of history that you might not be interested in and simply move on. Likewise, some essays have extreme detail that may interest someone who actually wants to see how the historians conclusions have been reached. A must buy for anyone truly interested in Anglo-Saxon England. Another great asset are the topics that a single historian writing a book might ignore such as textiles, crafts, and coins. This is a much needed multi-disciplinary resource for a sadly maligned and neglected king who greatly extended the bounds of his empire.
   
   List of essays:
   Edward the Elder's Reputation: an introduction - Nick Higham
   What is not known about the reign of Eddward the Elder - James Campbell
   Edward as Aetheling - Barbara Yorke
   Edward, king of the Anglo-Saxons - Simon Keynes
   The Coinage of Edward the Elder - Stewart Lyon
   The West Saxon Tradition of dynastic marriage: with special reference to Edward the Elder - Sheila Sharp
   View from the West: an Irish Perspective on West Saxon dynastic practice
   Cloucester and the New Minister of St Oswald
   Aelfwynn, second lady of the Mercians - Maggie Bailey
   Edward the Elder's Danelaw - Lesley Abrams
   The Shiring of Mercia - again - David Hill
   Edward the Elder and the re-establishment of Chester - Simon Ward
   The Nort-West frontier - David Griffiths
   A kingdom too far: York in the early tenth century - Richard Hall
   The (non) submission of the northern kings in 920 - Michael R. Davidson
   The Northern Hoards: from Cuerdale to Bosall/Flaxton - James Graham-Campbell
   Edward the Elder and the churches of Winchester and Wessex - Alexander R. Rumble
   Dynastic monasteries and family cults: Edward the Elder's sainted kindred
   On pa waepnedhealf: kingship and royal property from Aethelwulf to Edward the Elder - Patrick Wormald
   The Junius Psalter gloss: tradition and innovation - Mechthild Gretsch
   The Embroideries from the tomb of St Cuthbert - Elizabeth Coatsworth
   Endpiece - Nick Higham



2. Edward the Elder is perhaps the most neglected of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Overshadowed by both his father Alfred and his successor Æthelstan, he did much on his own to expand the domination of Wessex across all of England.

   This book is a series of papers presented in 1999 at a conference on Edward the Elder held at the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. Twenty-two papers by some of the most noted experts in their fields explore the archaeology, charter evidence, textiles, dynastic marriages, coinage, foreign relations, scriptorium production, and more of Edward the Elder's reign.

   Of particular interest is the consideration of Edward's activities as king. Was he merely continuing his father Alfred the Great's program of recovering the Danelaw, fortifying the burhs, and incorporating Mercia into a comprehensive "Kingdom of the English"? Or did Edward follow his own policies in light of the opportunities he faced?

   An outstanding multi-disciplinary insight into this much overlooked Anglo-Saxon king's rule.

No comments about Byron's "Corbeau Blanc": The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne.

5 comments about Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf.

1. I almost threw this book away after reading the first few pages. Author Coates is completely off her rocker. She tries to argue that Leonard Woolf was responsible for his wife's supposed madness. Her argument falls apart in the first few pages when Coates notes that Virginia Woolf had two nervous breakdowns (with hallucinations) even before she met Leonard. But it's worth a look for those who have a shelf or two full of Virginia Woolf biographies, diaries, novels, and critical essays. But wow, what a nut (the author, that is).



2. At last a reputable competent biographer is going to address the life of Leonard Woolf. Glendinning's bios of Anthony Trollope and Vita Sackville-West are rational and well written and thoroughly researched.



3. Over the years, many readers have been cynical about the despair and rage expressed in Virginia Woolf's feminist works, such as "A Room of One's Own". After all, wasn't Virginia a wealthy upper middle-class woman who never worked a day in her life? Wasn't she petted and cared for by an adoring husband? Didn't she have a beautiful home (which is now a tourist spot?)and a circle of stimulating and enlightened intellectual friends? "What the heck did she have to complain about?", those overloaded with children and dreary jobs have often wondered bitterly.

   Well, according to Coates, the answer is - quite a bit. Coates gives us an entirely new view of Virginia's life and marriage, one which seems straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins or Sheridan LeFanu. Virginia is seen as the heroine entrapped by a cruel husband, who presents to the outside world the face of kindness and care, while viciously tyrannizing and silencing his wife, who can appeal for help only in carefully coded letters and diaries. Coates presents Virginia Stephens as an isolated and sheltered young girl, manipulated cleverly into marriage to an ambitious and greedy man. Leonard Woolf gained access to her social set as a college friend of her adored brother, who died young. Woolf is here portrayed as a man willing to stop at nothing to get ahead, a Jew who abandoned and rejected his own religion and family to strive for upward mobility in the English middle class. His marriage to Virginia was pushed by her sister Vanessa, who wanted her younger sibling off her hands, and by Leonard's friends, who wanted him to marry a rich wife as a way of remaining in England, rather than return to a civil service job in Ceylon. Virginia allowed her initial resistance to be worn down, with disastrous results - having married the rich Gentile wife he wanted, Leonard then despised and exploited her. (But he might not have been happy with any woman - most of his Cambridge friends were gay, and while Leonard considered himself heterosexual, he obviously shared many of their views on women - Coates quotes a letter to Lytton Strachey in which Woolf describes male sexuality as "noble" and female as "vile".) Their early married life was a disaster, and Coates goes so far as to suggest that Virginia's first suicide attempt was, in fact, attempted murder. Her husband insisted she see a doctor of his choosing, who told her that she was too disturbed to become a mother (Leonard detested children). He then left her distraught, with an open box of sleeping pills beside her, and gave himself the alibi of a visit to her sister Vanessa. As he had hoped, she took an overdose, and was saved only through the unexpected visit of a woman friend, who promptly summoned help from a medical student living in the building. The long-term result was the total destruction of Virginia's independent existence. Leonard refused to let her see her family physician (who considered her perfectly healthy and capable of motherhood) only allowing her to consult his tame specialists. To have had her certified as a lunatic would have deprived Leonard of money or of a divorce, so he chose to have her declared incompetent - giving him, as her guardian, total control of her money, and preventing her from applying for a divorce, while he could still divorce her. He now had what he wanted, total control, and any protests against her sexual and financial exploitation could be seen as the ravings of a madwoman. And sadly, there is no suggestion anywhere in the book that Virginia ever tried to seek outside legal, medical, or spiritual advice.

   Virginia's only escape came through writing, and through her one love affair, with Vita Sackville-West, a strong, independent woman. Vita balanced not only an "open" marriage, but a whirl of children, travel, gardens, and dogs. Through her relationship with Vita, Virginia realized bitterly how constricted her own life had become. Their homes had been bought with her money, but chosen and organized by Leonard - she hated their country house, which he had remodeled to his own taste, giving himself a huge studio, while she was relegated to a hut in the garden. Her money had paid for their business, the Hogarth Press, which gave Leonard editorial control of all her books, and for a car, which she wasn't allowed to drive. In the Woolf family, even the gardens and dogs belonged to Leonard - when Vita gave her a spaniel puppy, Leonard promptly annexed it as his own. It was this bitterness and rage that finally burned through in "A Room of One's Own", which was first given as a lecture, with Vita at her side.

   But the affair did not last - they remained friends, but Vita sought other lovers - and Virginia was once more trapped without support, and her husband's increasing hostility and disrespect. She was offered speaking engagements and American lecture tours, but Leonard insisted she turn them all down. He was furiously jealous of the increased sales of her work. As WWII began, daily life grew harder and harder - Leonard interfered with the servants, forcing Virginia to do the cooking and cleaning herself, and refusing to let her visit friends. Finally, in despair, she killed herself - or did she? Coates thinks that Leonard deliberately drove her to it - at the very least knowing that she was suicidal and not helping her - and at the worst, she hints that he may actually have killed her. If so, he got away with it, and his punishment was this - to always be known as "Virginia's husband".

   This is sure to be a controversial book. But is it accurate? This reviewer, who is not particularly expert on - or enthusiastic about - Bloomsbury, finds it to ring psychologically true. The ambitious poor man who marries a rich wife and then despises her is all too familiar. The legal position of both women and the mentally ill was such at the time that the trap set for Virginia was almost inescapable. And this account well explains the bitterness and despair in her works, in a way that pictures of her as a cosseted and loved wife fail to do.




4. I am a graduate student who has spent the last four months learning everything I can for a class project about Leonard -- which is QUITE A LOT. Two books in particular have fairly good, reasonably balanced accounts of Leonard Woolf: Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee and A Marriage of True Minds by George Spater and Ian Parsons. Please read those carefully researched, scholarly, interesting, and vivid books to find out more about both Virginia Woolf's illnesses and Leonard Woolf's responses/contributions/whatever to her health. The relationship between the two was complex and deserves to be written about intelligently and carefully.



5. As Irene Coats, the author of Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf, states, Quentin Bell's authorized biography of Virginia Woolf presents Leonard Woolf as Virginia's loving, attentive, self-sacrificing husband. However, even as I read and enjoyed Bell's book, I came away feeling that there was something sinister about Leonard, as if he had some hidden agenda. Therefore, when I came across Coats' book, I was extremely intrigued, but having read it I am instead extremely disappointed.

   Rather than presenting, or at least attempting to present, a balanced, lucid, objective case that Leonard was not the saint he appeared, her book is an unremitting demonizing of Leonard Woolf. Coats has presented the known events and existing letters by interpreting all as proof of Leonard's malicious intent and devious manipulation. I find this an extremist viewpoint that works against good biographical writing.

   In addition, the book comes with the most appalling index: a name index where each name is followed by lines and lines AND LINES of undifferentiated locators making it totally useless to the reader. This is definitely an example of no index being better than a bad one.

4 comments about The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls (P.S.).

1. I absorbed this read with great interest. The subject of slave-trading has been too painful for me to tackle it head-on but here I got into it because I am interested in Elizabethan personalities. The thing that shocks me in the book is how matter-of-fact the trading really was. This fact-based account puts the reader into the then-contemporary perspective of humans as just another commodity to be dealt for profit and a highly lucrative one at that. The rewards for successful trading were enough to turn the Queen, Elizabeth, into a profiteer. In fact, we see an Elizabeth in denial after she has waxed moral in her view of the abduction of Africans. She says they should be asked to volunteer. (Which is ridiculous on the face of it.) Of course, Hawkyns only saw the green light to GO. One cannot view Elizabeth in any ideal sense after this: there is no Gloriana or Astraea in this book. The business of the Queen is business; Queen and country are one.
   
   There isn't much of a biography of Hawkyns in the book. At least, insofar as a biography fleshes out the nuance of the character. What we get is a very competent individual who is able to make both military and financial decisions in quicktime. The depth of the book is focused on the ambivalence of Hawkyns in matters of religion. This is, in my opinion, is what places the story into it's deeper historical context. The English, as other Europeans, who were destined to fight bloody civil wars in the next century, were obsessed with the outer manifestations of Christianity (ritual, plastic images, etc. or not) and had lost any real sense of Christian teachings. In this book, we lose any ability to condemn Hawkyns as an individual; we are overwhelmed by the brutality of the times. I think the author, Nick Hazlewood has done quite a good job here.



2. Attempts to analyze the historical sociology of capitalism and slavery too often deal in abstractions. And the morality of power politics, and economic globalization, as with Marx, tends to be sublimated into the account by value-free laws of history, etc,... All well and good, but. This account of a one vignette of the early gestation of the Atlantic slave trade, in England, speaks more eloquently by its plain account of actual people, at the moment of the crystallization of a dreadful circumstance. Significant is the detail of Queen Elizabeth, quoted early on as denouncing the traffic in human beings, succumbing to royal patronage once the immense profits possible became clear. While one can practically hear the ghost of Marx snorting with contempt, the plain fact of the matter is that there is an ethical history possible, and there was nothing inevitable in the way slavery, almost extinct in Europe, made a comeback in the early modern period. It is not utopian, as this portrait makes clear, to consider that politicians, instead of being untrustworthyfrom the word go, might actually not succumb to terrible temptations and enter in league with poor devils like the Hawkins portrayed here, basically a capitalist thug, soon a courtier. The portrait of John Hawkins gives a fine-grain series of images of one of the great and classic failures of economic globalization, and the terrible legacy and bitterness that it led to.



3. Nick Hazlewood has written an engrossing book that gives us a rare and in-depth look into the opening salvos of the English slave trade through the voyages of Sir John Hawkyns (also spelled John Hawkins), the first English trader. Hazlewood supplies a brief biography of the Elizabethan mariner but focuses on Hawkyns' three major slave-trading voyages starting from 1562, from his departure from England to his actual acquisition of slaves in West Africa, through to his transactions in the New World and return to England.
   
   This book is a must-have for those interested in the early Age of Exploration and the nature of early trans-Atlantic commerce, but it is of far greater significance and value for a general audience since it provides a rare glimpse into the little-known details of the wretched commerce in human beings that took place as the Americas were being settled. Treatments of the African slave trade often leave a reader wondering about the mindset and nature of the participants who were profiting from it, and Hazlewood provides us with a "you are there" feeling. He has clearly done his homework here, consulting primary literature in both English and Spanish archives to reconstruct the means by which Hawkyns acquired his slaves in West Africa, the "currency" exchanges which took place to seal the deal, the wretched and horrendous conditions on the slaving ships, and the nature of Hawkyns' eventual transactions in the Caribbean and Spanish outposts in America. What emerges is that Hawkyns was a remarkably shrewd and ruthless businessman, able to secure such an extraordinary profit margin from his deals that even Queen Elizabeth I-- initially opposed to the human commerce-- became a crucial investor in Hawkyns' slave-trading schemes, providing ships and resources for raising his crews and launching further voyages.
   
   Hazlewood also casts Hawkyns' commerce within the broader context of 16th-century European seafaring, demonstrating how Hawkyns' actions-- viewed as smuggling by Spanish authorities-- in many ways constituted the root of the conflict that would flare between the Spaniards and English (leading to the Spanish Armada attack and a 16-year war between the two countries) later in the century. The reader is treated to an in-depth look at Hawkyns' fateful third voyage in 1567, in which his ships were attacked by a Spanish squadron off Veracruz. Hazlewood provides perhaps the best description in any recent book of the clash at Veracruz and its aftermath, both for Hawkins and his unfortunate crew members who were seized by the Spaniards. The book does drag somewhat in its later chapters but is not at all a chore to read, and Hazlewood's evocative style ensures that readers have a concrete tableau of the events that were transpiring, rather than merely an abstract depiction of them.
   
   For what would become the United States as well as for Britain, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was integral to their history. Indeed, Americans are well aware of the brutal consequences of slavery from the Civil War in the 1860s, yet are often much less aware of the background to that "curious institution." Hazlewood details these often obscure origins with both accuracy and a highly readable presentation. The reader emerges from the book with a sense of the Hobbesian mentality and conditions that dominated seafaring in the 1500s, and a better sense of the psychology that enabled so many to allow themselves to partake in the bloody business of human enslavement and trans-Atlantic trafficking. Hawkyns is shown in all his complexity as a ruthless merchant and as an inspiring leader of his crews, who braved on-ship conditions and hostile oceans that would make most of us cringe barely minutes away from the dock. Hazlewood's book is an excellent complement to Harry Kelsey's book on John Hawkins-- which covers similar territory-- and to Hugh Thomas's general history of the slave trade. It's a must-have for historians, for teachers and school libraries (at many levels), and for those who want to learn about the often-obscure history of slavery and of the fascinating details of 16th-century Atlantic exploration and maritime commerce.



4. First, the good: Nick Hazlewood gives us a thoroughly researched book about an interesting character from English history, the seafarer/pirate John Hawkyns. I was constantly amazed at the in-depth information that Hazlewood was able to provide, even going so far as to relate many of Queen Elizabeth's conversations with or about John Hawkyns to the reader. We also get the words of Philip II, the Spanish king, and his ambassadors in London. We even get the gist of John Hawkyns' conversations with all the dignitaries he dealt with in the new world as he sold his horrific cargo. All in all, we get a fairly complete picture of Hawkyns the brute, the opportunist, and Hawkyns the leader of men. It is an interesting portrait.
   
   And now the bad: John Hawkyn's adventures in New Guinea and the New World aren't really enough to fill a book from cover to cover with enough drama or information to keep the reader enthralled. Hawkyns makes three missions to the New World to sell slaves, and each time he visits the same places, and employs the same tactics. By the third trip, I was reading out of obligation rather than excitement. And of couse, the drama of his defense against the Spanish Armada falls outside the scope of this book, though there is an attempt to tie it to an earlier conflict that occurred at the end of Hawkyns' slaving career. What I missed most was a sense of history throughout the course of the book. Oftentimes events were merely relayed in sequential, if wonderfully thorough, order, but an analysis of these events place or influence on world history were saved for the final chapter of the book.
   
   All in all, an OK read if you enjoy Elizabethan or Age of Sail histories, but not enough to recommend it to the general readership.

No comments about Winston Churchill - Biography of a Nobel Statesmen.

1 comments about Charles Waterton.

1. Waterton was a traveller, writer, ornithologist, taxidermist, a lifelong student of natural history and an environmentalist. He was also prone to accidents and arguments. As a youth in Spain, he had a close call with death from the "black vomit." Later, on the Essequibo river in Guyana, he captured a cayman with a special baited hook, then rode it for forty yards on the bank, using its forelegs as a bridle. When he finally settled down in the 1820s, he converted his Yorkshire estate into a nature reserve long before National Parks were thought of. (The Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta was named in his honour.) He fought a legal battle with the owner of a neighbouring soap factory whose noxious gases and effluent were killing vegetation on his estate and poisoning a river.
   The author gives us a sense of Waterton's strong Catholic upbringing and background, his ascetic lifestyle, his love of wildlife and his charity towards human neighbours less fortunate than himself. He also provides cryptic, sometimes amusing, descriptions of Waterton's frank exchanges of opinion with "closet naturalists" and others who did not accept what were, to him, unassailable facts. Waterton was often right, sometimes he was wrong, but, right or wrong, he clung tenaciously to what he believed. He was intolerant of bigotry in others while not being entirely innocent himself.
   The section on curare is more accurate and comprehensive than those in other Waterton biographies. It also includes details of his animal experiments that do not appear in anaesthesia textbooks. Waterton set off on his first "wandering" into the interior of Guyana in 1812 to obtain curare from the Macusi Indians. His best known experiment was the one in England in 1814 in which a donkey was injected with curare, became paralysed and was kept alive by artificial respiration, using a pair of fire bellows through a tracheotomy, until the effect of the curare wore off. The author also includes verbatim quotations from Waterton's vivid and endearing accounts of his earlier experiments on birds and animals in Guyana, as well as Waterton's belief that curare could be an effective treatment against hydrophobia and tetanus.
   Such is the continuing fascination of Charles Waterton that this biography by Brian Edginton is the fourth to be published in the past fifty years. The author's refreshingly informal, sometimes unconventional, writing style is eminently suited to his subject. This is not to say that the book is casually written. It is extensively referenced from Waterton's own books, pamphlets and collections of his letters, from contemporary and modern newspaper and magazine articles on both sides of the Atlantic, and from many other miscellaneous sources. Those readers who would like to meet the @most incongruous mixture of bizarre eccentricity, credulity and unbelief, coupled with a brilliant originality of thought, in a somewhat rough setting of common sense" will enjoy this book.
   
   J. Roger Maltby MB FRCA FRCPC
   Calgary, Alberta

No comments about The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots 1542-1551.