Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Part 2
Leaning into Autumn and going deeper within.
This week I’d actually planned to explore Edith Wharton’s literary classic Summer to mark the end of mine and anyone else’s that finds themselves in the Northern Hemisphere this month.
Whilst walking home from an evening out a couple of weeks ago, rather than the slow eddy of shorter days and cooler nights, gently easing us into the seasonal change, Autumn smacked me full in the face as if out of nowhere. Dark, windy, wet, slippery leaves under foot, the sharp smell of cold in the air. It was a little disconcerting not unlike Summer whose gorgeous bright yellow & pink cover (another recent Penguin Clothbound Classic acquisition — it also comes in yellow & blue) sold me a very different story to the one I would go on to experience.
In preparation for the post I made a mightily wrong assumption about the book’s contents and even looked up female artists of the time who painted idyllic beach landscapes near the area where I believed the book to be set that I thought might provide some beautiful artwork for the piece — I found an amazing artist I’d never heard of before, Louise Upton Brumback, so that’s something — but I was imagining long hazy Summer days filled with picnics, romantic gazes and sand muddling between toes. Instead, I read something masterful but that compressed my heart a little.
First published in 1917, it is a love story of a sort, igniting with a look between a reluctant librarian and a visiting architect in the tiny town of North Dormer in New England, which is really little more than a group of houses with a church at either end. I won’t get too lost in the narrative here, that would defeat the purpose of my choosing not to read from it but this is a complicated love story, heady with ominousness throughout, through the lens of stifling puritanical womanhood during a time of enraging patriarchy. It is outrageously feminist for its time, I can only imagine the worthy social disruption it caused on publication and in a very meta way, I can also imagine Edith Wharton not caring at all whilst simultaneously caring very deeply what people made of it all, much like her heroine Charity Royall. So too, the way it affectingly captures the maudlin quality of Autumn and its inevitable decay that you can sometimes feel with the loss of Summer, almost like the death of hope as its central metaphor for the loss of love and it is that precise tone that it didn’t feel right to put out into the community, to set as our own precedent through this seasonal transition, so I have decided to trust that and u-turn at the last second hence the later than usual publication of this post.
Much like Alice I couldn’t… or didn’t want to, find my way out of the rabbit hole just yet, either. Rather I want to observe the beauty of this oncoming season with the quiet reflectiveness that it can also offer us. Going further within to see what changes the Autumn shift may bring: within me, within you and on Substack too. And so we will be continuing on into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland heading deeper into that mysterious world of imagination and possibility with another impromptu series — with perfect kismet too? In Chapter Two Alice does at least (of a sort) end up at the seaside. This also happens to align perfectly with a new offering that I will be introducing in the coming weeks, inviting us all to connect with ourselves and our creative processes in deeper and more meaningful ways. But for now, come with me… there’s a tea party we’re horribly late for.