Currently reading
A London Family, 1870-1900: A Trilogy
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
All the Names
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Down the Garden Path
Virtue Betray'd, Or, Anna Bullen
Year of Wonders
Swallows and Amazons
Illusion in java
Victorian fictionalized memoir of an Englishwoman married to a German she calls "the Man of Wrath." Transplanted to their German country house, she works with her gardeners to restore/build a garden as an escape from the constrained tedium of a woman of her time and station. I think I expected to like this more than I did. She is certainly witty and I can see why the book was such a success at the time. She has a lot of forward-thinking things to say about women and she says them in such a dry and funny way. I also enjoyed her love of her garden and the woods around their property. At the same time, I found her to be a snob and though her views or servants and children were in keeping with her era and social standing, I still found them tiresome. Her views on women may have been ahead of their time, but her modernism didn't apply to how she saw others in similarly powerless situations. I kept putting down the book in annoyance and and not finding good reason to pick it back up. The library due date forced me to finish. It was a nice enough book, but suffered in comparison to the many glowing reviews i read. Same author who wrote Enchanted April and Mr. Skeffington.