Ha!

[eve_prime]

I just have to share the opening paragraph of Miss Mapp:

Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older. Her face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity; but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body, which fully accounted for the comparative adolescence with which she would have been credited anywhere except in the charming little town which she had inhabited so long. Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

Comments

[kaishin108]

ha hah!!

[eve_prime]

After reading the first book, about Lucia and Georgie, who are reasonably sympathetic although silly, I was feeling a bit reluctant to start reading about Mapp, who isn't sympathetic at all. And then I read the first paragraph and remembered, oh right, Mapp is SO much funnier!

In chapter 1, she spends time spying on her servants to make sure they're not doing wrong things, and in chapter 2, she wants to sabotage her friend's bridge party by showing up as a 9th person so that someone else can't play, but then when she gets there it turns out the friend's mother was away so instead she'd made the event work perfectly - so frustrating for her!

[kaishin108]

ha ha hah!

[eve_prime]

The idea of someone who's actively malicious but basically harmless is surprisingly amusing.

[kaishin108]

it is funny, and then it backfires on her, ha hah.

[eve_prime]

In chapters 3 and 4, she decides to say a mean thing to her friend and then also works hard to play a trick on her, but her friend manages to outwit her on the trick and more or less accidentally reverses the mean thing too. I am definitely having fun with this.

[kaishin108]

ha hah! it makes me think that her inner self, (or maybe a reflection of the author) is really quite a kind and compassionate person and it just doesn't work out to be mean, lol.

[eve_prime]

Ha! Well, I think the author was kind, but Miss Mapp... nope.