Six Degrees of Separation – from Wifedom to The Inn at Lake Devine

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place, add six books, and see where we end up. This month’s starting point is Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder, which sounds interesting and was just published in the US last week:

Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life.

First Degree

Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair died young during a hysterectomy and Blair/Orwell married Sonia Brownell four years later, shortly before he died. Brownell appears in Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner (2022), which is about several young women working in a London bookshop in 1950.

Second Degree

Due to We Danced in Bloomsbury Square by Jean Estoril/Mabel Esther Allan (1967), I was fascinated by Bloomsbury as a pre-teen and particularly loved reading about twins who earn scholarships to attend a ballet school in London and explore the city in their free time. Thank goodness I finally found a copy because it is now quite pricey.

Third Degree

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever (2006) explores how Concord, Massachusetts – home of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau and others – developed into the first American community devoted to literature and original ideas.

Fourth Degree

Louisa is or was the most famous resident of Concord.  As a girl, I owned most of her books, including Under the Lilacs (1878), in a nice hardcover edition that belonged to a great-aunt. It’s about two girls who rescue a boy who has run away from a circus with his dog.  It is not one of her most popular but I read them all.

Illustration from an 1888 edition

Fifth Degree

In The Mystery at the Lilac Inn by Carolyn Keene (1930), Nancy Drew helps her friend recover heirloom jewels that were stolen at the Inn.  I gave one of my nieces all my Nancy Drews which was inconvenient when I wrote a paper about her in graduate school right before the pandemic.

Sixth Degree

I bought The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman (1998) because of a review that described it as "a punchy little comedy of manners. . . . Think Jane Austen in the Catskills," and I became a big fan of her novels. My friend Eva’s dog ate my copy while we were in law school and I never had the heart to ask her if she managed to read it first (she was sick and had needed something fun to read). Lending books is dangerous! If you ever have the chance to attend one of Lipman’s book signings, she is very amusing and friendly.

So this month’s #6Degrees took me from 20th-century Bloomsbury to 19th-century Concord to 20th-century River Heights (a fictional town somewhere in the Midwest), then back to Massachusetts and the Catskills – not as far-reaching as usual. Have you read any of these?

Next month (October 7, 2023), Kate has chosen a classic that most of us have probably read – I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.