wowOwow - The Women on the Web

02/08/2010 5:00 am

Culture

Liz Smith: From France to Texas to … Ozzy Osbourne?

Our Gossip Girl shares the latest from her bedside table.

"WE ARE not asking for superiority, for we have always had that; all we ask is equality!"

So said the obstreperous Lady Nancy Astor in 1919 when she took her seat in the House of Commons as the first female Member of Parliament.


I read this in an excellent new book by Juliet Nicolson called The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War.

We have wars now where people are so shocked and horrified that they gasp, stutter and faint when 100 lives are lost. We are shattered that 4,000-plus Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror.



But World War I was a true bloodbath almost from the beginning, with the cream of British youth being lost in the very first days. Four years later, 8,556,315-odd military persons had died. (In its final year, the U.S. entered and lost 16,708 troops. The Germans, who ended up totally defeated, bided their time and eventually, via a little corporal named Adolf Hitler, they paid the world back!)

It was World War I that caused the theater’s Joan Littlewood to write a bitter Tony-winning musical titled "Oh, What a Lovely War" – where a machine onstage kept unceasingly racking up the casualties by number and in the end, only lonely women and little children are left onstage.

This book concentrates on the British, but it is quite a story and a worldwide lesson of horror.

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HERE’S a different piece of history. With New Orleans in the news as the city approached hysteria over the Miami SuperBowl, I was beguiled by a novel called Savage Lands. (The writer is already well known. She is Clare Clark who has written two big hits before this one – The Nature of Monsters and The Great Stink.)

Now Miss Clark goes back to the days of Louis XIV and the settlements the French made in what we now call Louisiana. By 1703, when her story begins, people had been trying to settle the region for only two decades. They sent a few shiploads of would-be brides there with promises of husbands and a heavenly way of life.

Savage Lands is the story of one of these French women at the mercy of demanding, tyrannizing conditions and how she survives in a brutal climate, among both friendly and treacherous native Americans and disgruntled French and Canadian mercenaries. I couldn’t put it down!



It has three leading characters you will never forget.

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AND NOW for the one that people are comparing with Gone With the Wind. People magazine has already given Roses by Leila Meacham its four-star People pick.

The author is right out of central casting, a true little Southern lady who taught school for many years. In a box in her attic, she kept a manuscript that she was no longer working on. Wed to an army man, she often moved around, but she always dragged the manuscript with her. After retiring, she decided what she’d do with the rest of her life. Take up the book again. This was after "a voice" told her to finish it, which she did at age 71.



Roses is the story of East Texas families in the kind of dynastic gymnastics we all know and love – the rich, the mighty and the defeated. This one already hit the Times bestseller list on January 24.