A.S. Byatt: The Children's Book

One Word Summary: Poor Tom
More Words: I didn't enjoy this book, although it has given me some ideas to chew on. Byatt could have written a brief-but-not-compelling-history-of-the-arts-and-crafts-movement-in-England-from-1895-to-1915. A huge problem, for a simple person like me, was the vast number of characters. Then Byatt killed off everyone that couldn't have a snappy happy ending. Thank goodness for WWI, right? I feel guilty for not being remotely interested in any of the women characters, because... well I am a woman. I'm still unsure about one idea. Byatt writes somewhere near the beginning that the children of arts and crafts generation experienced childhood differently from all other children past and present. How asinine, I thought, at first. Of course now I'm wondering if I missed the point. Maybe Byatt meant that the romanticized childhood was invented during this period-like Olive creating Todefright with Violet manage it smoothly. Whatever she meant, I still don't get it.

Knopf Books 2009

Quotes:

She was thinking much faster than usual, and reflected sardonically that
those hungry-minded women, those frustrated female thinkers, of whome Marian
Oakshott spoke, would always need her, Eslie, or someone like her , to carry
coals and chop meat and mend clothing and do laundry, or they wouldn't keep
alie. Someone in the scullery carrying out the ashes. And if one got out of the
scullery, like a disguised princess in a fairytale, there always hd to be
another, another scullery maid to take her place.

Nevertheless, she would like to get out.

{and that half speach by Saraphita after Benedict Fludd is dead}