Lemon: Kwon Yeo-sun

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Sadly and ironically, the patriarchy conspired to eject Etta Lemon from both her position and the annals of the RSPB until Tessa Boase revealed her full story here. We even discover many other women’s views about ‘Murderous Millinery’ and the Suffrage movement. For instance, Virginia Woolfe both RSPB supporter and Suffragist, refused to wear feathers but baulked at blaming women for the fashion trend when she vehemently exclaimed: ‘the birds are killed by men, starved by men, and tortured by men - not vicariously, but with their own hands.’ Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather was a wonderful book for me to read combining two topics which have played a significant role in my life - women’s history, particularly their efforts to gain direct representation in parliament both through the vote and through women candidates (I have a PhD in the area) and bird conservation (besides reading birding is my other main interest). The life is full of misery, as the lyrics say. Then I start wondering if this miserable life has any meaning.

For me, one of the most interesting bits was about Ada Nield, a Crewe factory girl who took on the battle for better working conditions and wrote to the local paper in support of rights for female workers. Ada Nield is a kind-of local celebrity where I live and I'm working on a campaign to commemorate her in statue form, so this bit felt very relevant to me. Lies, truth, assumptions, fear, grief, revenge, resentment, trauma, depression, humiliation, and the mysterious injustice are mussed—muddled-and messy. The prose is intentionally disarrayed and incongruous…. The book is actually only half about Etta Lemon, a woman who felt passionately that feathers/whole birds shouldn't be used to decorate hats and who was central to the founding of the RSPB. She took on the trend for 'murderous millinery' and made it her life's work - and good on her!A high School Beauty, Kim Hae, is found dead….sitting in a passenger seat of Shin Jeongjun’s car….. I wish this had lived up to its absolutely gorgeous cover, but it didn't quite. The focus is the women-founded Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for the purpose of ending the brutal plumage trade (the main reason I was interested in it), and the tensions between the Society and the contemporary suffragist movement. The Society is represented by Etta Lemon, the suffragist movement by Emmeline Pankhurst. I appreciated how Boase set up these two women and brought out their similarities in the midst of their glaring differences: Lemon, a strong-willed and outspoken woman, opposed extending the vote to women. I also appreciated how Boase made an effort to understand both sides, although I don't think she spent as much time exploring the reasons why some women opposed the suffragist movement as she should have: she ultimately concluded (as far as I could tell) that these women had just internalized misogyny and couldn't get beyond seeing themselves as standing in the shadow of the men. In the end it felt like Boase was still struggling to wrap her mind around the concept of women opposing women's suffrage...and not quite succeeding. [She also kept mentioning and describing the moustaches on the guys, and I got the feeling she was treating it as a sign of the patriarchy or something and it was just weird.]

Hace tiempo que no ME COMÍA un libro. Lo empecé en un finde relajado y de repente... se acabó el finde. Es una gozada de principio a fin, exceptuando quizá las partes donde se faenan a los animales, aunque al menos están en el campo y literalmente se los comen y viven de ello.

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But I was pleasantly surprised by the book; indeed, by the end I was thoroughly charmed. Stewart does not idealize the inhabitants Andalucia; for him, they are individuals, not bearers of ancient tradition. He enjoys farming and herding, but he knows it can be rough, tedious, and thankless work. Certainly he plays the role of the inept foreigner—this is inevitable if you’re moving someplace new—but he does not dwell on this overmuch. For somebody who began writing fairly late in life, he is a tasteful and skillful author. He is capable of rich prose, he has a good ear for dialogue, and best of all he does not stretch any subject beyond interest. Maybe I should have known. After all, the title says "an optimist in Andalucia." That optimism definitely permeated the book. The problem was it wasn't just over Stewart. You could feel it over every moment and every character. It watered it down and even though he was writing about an area of the world near and dear to my heart, I found myself just not caring.

Es la historia real de un inglés, que se va con su señora a vivir a una casucha inhóspita en medio de la nada, o bueno, en medio de una zona muy fértil y bonita en Andalucía. Pero el lugar hasta donde llegan se está literalmente cayendo a pedazos, al menos al principio. Luego van armando de a poquito sus cosas. The other half of the story follows the suffrage movement, especially Mrs Pankhurst's militant suffragettes who used fashion to further their cause - whether through their symbolic colour code, their expensive dresses used to denote respectability, or their penchant for a nice feathered hat... Tension galore in this Korean-set crime drama... Award-winning author Kwon Yeo-Sun's first English-language novel, this is exactly the sort of wintry noir to curl up by the fire with as the nights start drawing in. Just the thing for the true-crime lover in your life' Stylist.

Kwon Yeo-sun was born in Andong, North Gyeongsang Province of South Korea in 1965. Kwon enjoyed a brilliant literary debut in 1996 when her novel Niche of Green was awarded the Sangsang Literary Award. At the time, novels that reflected on the period of the democratization movement in South Korea, were prevalent. Chilling, suspenseful and disconcerting... I couldn't put it down and read deep into the night until I finished it, with my heart hammering' Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face I love these types of novels, so I am not put off but desire to see how he changes things. I remember reading books like it: God and Mr. Gomez, A Place Called Sweetapple, Under the Tuscan Sun, and The Caliph’s’ House, to mention a few. Well, wasn’t Stones for Ibarra one also? Whether or not, this kind of book is always charming to me since my husband and I liked fixing up houses, and my friend Julie did as well, and I got to see the results of those labors. This was a well-written and excellently researched (even Alice Battershall’s life is well traced) book which proved to be an engrossing read for the most part. I enjoyed following the journey of the two campaigns—their successes and failures, the ways in which they intertwined, and the stories of the two formidable ladies—Etta Lemon and Emmeline Pankhust—who played crucial roles in each (there were many others too, like Winifred Duchess of Portland in the bird campaign; Millicent Fawcett leader of the suffragists; and even Mrs Humphry Ward, prominent among the Anti-suffragists, among many more whose contributions we learn about as well).

A headscratcher, ideal for those who like to emerge from a book full of doubts as to what just happened The novel(la) is told in chapters sets over the years from 2002 to the present day (2019) and the narration switches between three narrators, Da-on, and two of the sister's schoolmates, Taerim (태림), a rival for Jeong-jun's affections, and who was with Han Manu on the day, and Sanghui (상희), who was in a literary club with Da-on, and whose poem, inspired by Joyce's Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man (and the line: The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt) gives the novel it's title: Ha-on's mother also has an troubling reaction. She had originally intended to name her first child Hye-eun (혜은), but her husband's regional accent mangled the name to Ha-on. After her death she attempts to retrospectively change the name, and then Da-on comes up with a disturbing solution of her own:

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Shifting between the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on's classmates, Lemon ostensibly takes the shape of a crime novel. But identifying the perpetrator is not the main objective here: Kwon Yeo-sun uses this well-worn form to craft a searing, timely exploration of privilege, jealousy, trauma, and how we live with the wrongs we have endured and inflicted in turn. Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those who knew and loved Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she's lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened. Lemon” [a Korean translated psychological literary crime thriller] is the strangest-odd-intriguing….slowly affecting book … The dialogue in the first chapter, “Shorts”, is continuously twisted. Kwon Yeo-sun brilliantly knows how to spin-a-yard. At the heart of the story are two adversaries, arraigned principally not against each other, but for the causes they champion: Etta Lemon for the preservation of birds, murdered by the million to keep every society hat feathered to its fullest glory; and Emmeline Pankhurst, feisty wearer of the hats Lemon abhorred, and suffrage champion who, along with so many others, tore up the rulebook and went to prison in the fight for women’s votes.