Four Women Making Sense of the World: BookMarks Update #92, March, 2026

Friends: We spent March in London and Amsterdam, providing me with my annual opportunity to read deeply in British fiction, drama, and poetry. The change in setting was also a welcome respite from the daily drumbeat of disastrous news out of D.C. from the ill-advised and unconstitutional initiation of a war to the ongoing dysfunction of the government, from long TSA lines at airports to the refueling of inflation. Reading, once again provided a small island of sanity amidst the craziness.

This is what I read while abroad.

My reading in March was done between visits to some of the great museums of the world. While it was interesting to explore Rembrandt's house on a canal in Amsterdam and stand on London's Waterloo Bridge painted 100 years ago by JMW Turner, the highlights for me were three one-woman exhibitions by artists who have remained active, creative, and energetic in their portrayals of the world on paper and canvas into their 10th decade. Rose Wylie (age 92) at the Royal Academy (upper left), Bridget Riley (age 94) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK (upper right), and Lois Dodd (age 98) at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague (lower left), have radically different styles, but each of them brings a curiosity, engagement, and excitment to the transformation of the world into paint, the translation of the big questions in life onto a two-dimensional surface.

Why does one create art, if not to explore and try to understand one's place in the world. Poets write verse to express their emotions, thoughts, and ideas in concrete form on paper. Novelists create fictitious worlds in which their characters actions are informed by their view of the world and their role in it. And artists pick up chisel, brush, stylus, or pencil and express their wonderment, confusion, and conclusions on marble, canvas, copper plate, or paper. How wonderful that we still have Wylie, Riley, and Dodd to amaze us and provide the stimulus for our own explorations of these questions.

Another woman who wrestled with these questions was Virginia Woolf who sadly lived too short a life, dying by suicide in 1941 at 59. Having read both "To The Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway" several times, I had never quite managed to take on "The Waves", thought by many critics to be her greatest book. The month in England with its quiet mornings and evenings in a comfortable, well-lit flat provided that opportunity, and I read and wrestled with this masterpiece. Often tough sledding, this 200 page Modernist classic written in 1931 presents the subconscious thoughts of six friends from their childhood games through their old age. Each transition in these stages of their lives is highlighted by several italicized pages describing the sun, the waves, and the sky as a 24 hour period unfolds, providing a subtle contrast in time between a day and a lifetime. The inner thoughts of Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Rhoda, and Jinny allow the reader to see whole lives lived, both inner and external, as they unfold, each character struggling to find meaning and value in their world. The writing is often cryptic and complex, but Woolf's take on life clearly emerges in the final section, where 80 year old Bernard muses on the “incomprehensible nature of this our life....What I call ‘my life’ is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am”. This is not a beach read, but the effort to read it will be well rewarded.

Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" was a fitting accompaniment to Woolf's novel and to the works of the three nonagenarian artists. Similarly complex and layered, I found the spectacular performance we saw at the Old Vic challenging, though I had read the play twice before seeing it. What a fantastic experience it was, as Stoppard takes us on his usual time travel, giving us a single room in Sedley Place, an English country manor house occupied by two separate casts of characters, one living there in 1809 and one in 1980. (I love the anagram of those years!) Love, sex, time, memory, history, fact, fiction, mathematics, Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, free will, and determinism all swirl around in this heady brew of rapid fire dialogue, clever literary references, and thought-provoking action and commentary. Along with "Leopoldstadt" and "Indian Ink" this play confirms my impression that Stoppard is the greatest playwright of our times. Read it, but better yet, if this play is being performed within 100 miles of your home, see it by all means!

"The Rings of Saturn" by W. G. Sebald was another fitting accompaniment to the three artists, Woolf, and Stoppard as he uses his writing to sort out the same eternal questions, e.g. what the hell are we doing here anyway??? Sebald, along with Nabokov, Borges, and Roth, is on my list of great writers who should have been awarded the Nobel Prize, and I believe he would have recieved it had he not died at 57 in an automobile accident. I've read "Austerlitz", "The Emigrants", "Vertigo", and "The Rings of Saturn", and they comprise a brilliant body of work. On re-reading "The Rings of Saturn", I once again accompanied the narrator as he walked the coast of southeast England, contemplating the ruins of earlier grand homes, the relentless advance of the sea, and the tragically short lives and efforts of past writers and artists in the face of the eternal universe and infinite time. Sebald points out the ‘iniquity of oblivion” and ‘It takes just one awful second …and an entire epoch passes’ . For him, all of life is transitory, and we are all doomed to be forgotten. Not a cheery message, but brilliantly conveyed. Bottom line: I strongly urge you to read Sebald.

The poems of Edward Thomas and Simon Armitage in the former's "Selected Poems" and the latter's "Blossomise" were written a century apart. Armitage is the current Poet Laureate of Great Britain and the author of a previous delightful tale, "Walking Home: A Poet's Journey" in which he tells of how he walked the Pennine Trail in Yorkshire reading poems each night at an inn to pay for his trek. His "Blossomise" is an ode to the beauty and impermanance of spring's awakening each year. It's a charming little book with beautiful woodcut illustrations of birds, flowers, and trees. Thomas also was dedicated to portraying England's natural beauty often observed on his long, solitary hikes in the countryside. He would have remained largely unknown, killed in 1919 in France in the waning days of WWI, but for his friendship with Robert Frost who had moved his family to England in 1914. In London, Frost, a still unpublished poet and a failed New Hampshire farmer and teacher, connected wth T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Thomas. Eliot published Frost's first two books enabling him to return to America a successful writer while Pound provided financial support and encouragement. Frost in his turn, encouraged Thomas to move from prose to poetry. A good outcome for all. Like much of Frost's work, Thomas's poems evoke a natural world that has largely been lost among the 'getting and spending' of today's life.

One can't be in England and not read an Agatha Christie murder mystery. I chose the 1936 "The ABC Murders", primarily because it was on the shelf at our local branch of the London Library, and I had finally applied for and received my own London Library card! This Christie was a delicious romp across southern England as four individuals whose names began with A through D were found murdered in towns starting with the letters A, B, C, and D. Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings, though initially at sea about motive and method of the murderer, eventually catch the culprit before he/she could move on to Epstein in Exeter. Christie's 66 books are considered to be the most popular of all times having sold more than 300 million copies during her lifetime. Her play "The Mousetrap" continues its uninterrupted run in the same West End theater where we saw the play as students abroad in 1971. If the unimaginable has happened, and you haven't read one of her books or seen their cinematic adaptations, this book would be a fine one to begin your relationship with Dame Agatha.

My goal of reading British authors while in England was facilitated by a 2015 BBC post entitled "The 100 Greatest British Novels". The list was compiled by asking 82 book critics from Australia to Zimbabwe to submit a list of their 10 best, with their top choice receving 10 points. When the points were added up, the top ten were "Middlemarch", "To the Lighthouse", "Mrs. Dalloway", "Great Expectations", "Jane Eyre", "Bleak House", "Wuthering Heights", "David Copperfield", "Frankenstein", and "Vanity Fair". Since I had read all but the last one and was not up for tackling Thackeray and Becky Sharpe, I decided to read two others from the list as well as two that were written by listed authors after the list was compiled. (As an aside, Woolf's "The Waves" ranked #16.)

Graham Greene's 1951 "The End of the Affair" was listed at #31 on the BBC list. It tells the story of Maurice Bendrix, a modestly successful writer, who falls in love and has a torrid affair with his London neighbor, Sarah Miles during WWII. When their tryst is interrupted one night by a German bomb and Sarah finds an apparently dead Bendrix in the rubble, she promises God she will end the affair if He brings Bendrix back to life. When it turns out that Bendrix is alive and relatively unhurt, Sarah fulfills her promise to God and abruptly ends their relationship without offering an explanation. Complications involving Sarah's husband, a private investigator, an anti-religious zealot, and a Catholic priest keep this novel moving at a fast pace, but I found the premise to be a bit far-fetched. I much preferred another Greene novel, "The Heart of the Matter" written in 1948 and ranked #72 on the BBC list.

Sarah Winman's "A Year of Marvellous Ways" was written in 2015 six years before her novel "Still Life", a book I had loved. This one was not quite as good, though it did feature some wondeful characters like the eponymous Marvellous Ways, a 90 year old woman living alone in a gypsy caravan in Devon. Marvellous is thought to be a witch by the nearby villagers and does demonstrate some remarkable powers. She devotes those powers to saving Francis Drake, a 23 year old suffering from a major case of PTSD after fighting in WWII. When Drake literally washes up on the shore of Marvellous' island church, the story takes flight. It's entertaining and skillfully woven, but if you're to read just one Winman, I'd go with "Still Life".

Zadie Smith's 2000 debut novel "White Teeth" (#25 on the BBC list) had been on my radar for years, having enjoyed her essay collections but somehow missing out on her novels. What better place to read about the complex racial chemistry of London at the turn of the century than 35 Gloucester Walk in Kensington. I found the book quite Dickensian as Smith introduces bevies of interesting characters and keeps the complicated plot and multiple story lines moving along at a rapid pace. From the two WWII veteran friends, the Brit, Archie Jones and the Bengali, Samad Iqbal to their wives, children, and North London neighbors, the themes of colonization and immigration, assimilation and identity, and the challenge of belonging are brilliantly woven through the 400 pages of this often funny novel. I think Smith had some trouble wrapping it all up since the book ended too abruptly and unsatisfyingly. Almost as well known as the novel is James Wood's lenghty review of it in The New Republic in 2000. Both are well worth the time to read. I'm looking forward to reading Smith's "NW", #54 on the list.

Finally, Ian MacEwan's 2025 sci-fi book, "What We Can Know", his 17th novel, was a wonderfully conceived exploration of how our current disastrous politics and environmental despoliation might end up. Divided into two sections, the book, much like a Stoppard play, has two casts of characters occupying the same space separated by 100 years. In Part One, it's 2119, and we meet Tim and Rose, two academics trying to find the only copy of a poem written to Vivian Blundy by her husband in 2019. The search is complicated by the Derangement and the Inundation. The Derangement refers to the violent wars between major powers in the mid-2000's that ended with a nuclear bomb falling into the Atlantic, inundating most of the coasts in the world and killing millions. Part Two is a flashback to Vivian and her world of academe, gardening, love, marriage, and adultery in 2019. The BBC list placed McEwan's earlier book, "Atonement" at #15, and this book shows that he has not lost his touch. I loved the epigraph by the British biographer Richard Holmes that introduces the book in which he makes this observation about biography:“It concerns the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can make as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby make it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally, what we can love.” I liked "Atonement" better than "What We Can Know", but this is an entertaining and provocative read that's worth the time.

The Poetry on the Charles this month presents the work of two British poets whose poems span a century. Edward Thomas, while often grouped with the English WWI poets, was primarily a poet of the countryside whose work echoes many of the features of his friend Robert Frost. Simon Armitage, the current British Poet Laureate, also writes beautifully about nature observed in his walks in the English countryside. Here are two poems by each of them:

Continuing last month's theme of storytelling and living life forward but only understanding it backwards (with apologies to Kierkegaard), here are quotes from two of England's finest novelists, E.M. Forster (He had three books on the BBC list: "Howard's End #17,
"A Room with a View #32, and "A Passage to India" #50) writing in 1905 and Ali Smith (Her "There but for the" squeaked in at #99 on the BBC list) commenting 100 years later.

Forster wrote in "Where Angels Fear to Tread": "Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing---how am I to put it?---which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever."

Smith said during an interview with Desert Island Discs (If you don't know this wonderful BBC radio show, do look for it!), "“We think we live and we’re just living… actually we live by telling ourselves stories about the lives we are living”.

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