Reading List, Yule 2023

 

Every year during the Yuletide season I find some thematic reading. I try to stay on the spooky side, although I do diverge into Christmas mysteries (thanks to the British Library Crime Classics) and even occasional non-fiction. Here's what I have on the list so far this year:

The Lure of the Unknown: Essays on the Strange, by Algernon Blackwood (Swan River Press). This is a new favorite press, billed as "Ireland’s only independent press dedicated exclusively to the literature of the fantastic." I ordered this earlier in the year, and when it arrived, I discovered essays like "Looking Back at Christmas" and "My Strangest Christmas," so I decided to save it.

The Shrieking Skull & Other Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, by James Skipp Borlase (Valancourt Books). Their five volumes of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories are all must-haves, and this year they've done something different, a single-author collection. I had never heard of this writer before, and that itself is the Valancourt way. Beautiful production, beautiful cover, and halfway through, I am loving all the stories so far!

The Uninhabited House, by Charlotte Riddell (Broadview Press). Another of my can't-miss publishers, this is often name-dropped as a classic haunted house tale. I have yet to discover if Christmas plays a part int he story or not, but it was originally published in a Christmas Annual (1875), and the appendixes include an essay by the author called "The Miseries of Christmas," which sounds absolutely delightful!

Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory, by Robert E. May (University of Virginia Press). Obviously a lot more serious than my other choices, this looks at the historical reality of the holidays, debunking a mythology of happy "slave Christmases." My friends at the Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses in New Orleans are hosting a webinar with the author on December 14, 2022, which is how I heard about the book, and I can't wait to sit on that! You can sign up here and join me for free.

Iola Leroy, by Frances E.W. Harper

 I've tried to read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but never got very far. I was happy to find in Iola Leroy (1892) what I wanted in a Civil War novel: the point of view of the slaves, written by a black author, who in this case was an ardent abolitionist, born to free black parents in Baltimore.

A kindly Southern plantation owner thinks the slave system is wrong, and will eventually just kind of dwindle away. In the meantime, though, he doesn't mind profiting from it, and wishes those Abolitionists would keep their mouths shut and their noses out of everyone's business. This cognitive dissonance is very 2020! He marries and frees a beautiful mixed-race slave, and continues to think the best of his relatives despite their continued prejudice, but the minute he dies, they swoop in, invalidate the marriage, and plot to sell the family into slavery. 

The couple's beautiful and refined daughter Iola, raised oblivious to her racial heritage, is at school up North, believing that slavery isn't all bad, just before she's tricked into returning home, where that very fate awaits her. Her story carries through the aftermath of the Civil War, showing a (historically accurate but little publicized) world of former slaves desperate to find their separated family members with the scantiest of information, and debates on how to best help them find a place in the new world. Plus romance!

There's a clear didactic intent to the novel, which is something talking about as if it's always bad, even though many things are didactic just in supporting a status quo, and that goes unnoticed. Harper wrote mainly for overtly Christian audiences, who wanted their moral lessons plainly expressed, so that's nothing to condemn her for.

Editor Koritha Mitchell (author of the amazing book From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture) provides an excellent introduction, and a wealth of historical documentation impressive even by Broadview Press standards, with seven appendixes! 

Harper, Frances E. W, and Koritha Mitchell. Iola Leroy, Or, Shadows Uplifted. Broadview Press, 2018.