An ideal of cozy eccentricity?
Apr. 6th, 2009 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeAs I just noted on Facebook, I've been rereading old favorites as a way of passing the time while waiting to get healthier. First, I read The Moor, in which heroine detective Mary Russell and her famous husband solve a new crime involving Baskerville Hall. Then, yesterday and today I reread Wodehouse's Leave It to Psmith, a precursor of the Jeeves and Wooster novels and to my mind funnier, and now I've moved along to Cordelia Underwood, the first of the books about the Moosepath League.
It just struck me that these books have a common theme of great affection for eccentrics. In The Moor, we have the Rev. Baring-Gould and the rural folk of Dartmoor, and in the next, we have Psmith himself and the highly distracted horticultural earl. And the towns and backwoods of 1896 Maine were apparently chock full of remarkable characters, at least in Van Reid's rendition. I suppose this means my ideal form of indulgence is to distract myself with warm thoughts about the lives of flagrantly odd people situated in familiar-seeming places, about a hundred years ago.
It just struck me that these books have a common theme of great affection for eccentrics. In The Moor, we have the Rev. Baring-Gould and the rural folk of Dartmoor, and in the next, we have Psmith himself and the highly distracted horticultural earl. And the towns and backwoods of 1896 Maine were apparently chock full of remarkable characters, at least in Van Reid's rendition. I suppose this means my ideal form of indulgence is to distract myself with warm thoughts about the lives of flagrantly odd people situated in familiar-seeming places, about a hundred years ago.