I hadn't planned to read Villette for this round of Brooding about the Brontës but I ended up hearing so much about it as I went through the biographies and secondary material that my curiousity got the better of me. It is a surprising thing for a book so consistently lauded as Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece to be one of the poor relations within the Brontë canon. Critics as diverse as G H Lewes, George Eliot and Lucasta Miller hail it as Charlotte's most sophisticated piece of work and yet everyone seems to agree that it is an uncomfortable read and far less likable than Jane Eyre. The ending on its own has people tearing their hair, let alone the number of readers who seem to take issue with Lucy Snowe, the novel's heroine. Rarely have I begun a book with so much trepidation - was it possible that I could actually enjoy Villette?
Admittedly, my first impression was one of relief - Charlotte had returned to the first person style with her third novel and so the prose is much easier to follow than Shirley. Rather than the to-ing and fro-ing around curates and mill politics, we know from the very beginning who the focus of the story is. We first meet Lucy Snowe as a teenager, living with her godmother Mrs Bretton for reasons which are never made clear. Also in residence is Mrs Bretton's son John Graham Bretton, known as Graham. Six year-old Polly comes to stay with the family after the death of her mother and she becomes strongly attached to Graham. Eventually, Polly is reclaimed by her father and Lucy returns home.
Flashing forward several years, Lucy is without family and takes up a position as companion to a Miss Marchmont. Lucy finds contentment but then her employer dies and so a new position must be sought. Despite knowing very little French, Lucy decides to try her luck in Belgium, travelling to the town of Villette (fictionalised version of Brussels) and by chance finding a job as nanny in Madame Beck's Pensionnat for young ladies. Over time, she also takes up a role teaching English. Madame Beck is highly efficient, ruthless in pushing for what is best for herself and her school and unprincipled in the lengths she will go to in surveillance over both pupils and teachers alike. Despite all of this, Lucy appears to thrive.
Villette is a baffling novel though, centred around an inscrutable heroine. We never find out more about Lucy's shadowy past and why she has no family. She never confides in us about the source of her melancholy. When her editor suggested including more detail on it, Charlotte Brontë went through and removed what little information there was. She wanted Lucy to be an enigma. Unlike Jane Eyre, we have no potted history of childhood trauma, there is just a blank. Lucy will tell us exactly how much she wants to - which is very little. When she encounters Dr John, the young English doctor who visits the Beck school, much later we discover that Lucy had recognised him from long ago, but she only tells us when she absolutely has to. She will not even tell us the true end of her own story, instead bidding us farewell and shutting the door in our face.
In context though, Villette becomes a little clearer. Published in 1853, it is widely held as the most autobiographical of Charlotte's novels. Writing after the deaths of her three closest siblings, it is not hard to see where Charlotte drew inspiration from in writing Lucy's sadness. It is a difficult thing to read a book which is so clearly the product of an unhappy mind and there were times when I did have to take a breather. Giving Lucy the last name of 'Snowe', Charlotte wanted the character's chilliness to be apparent to the reader. The character of Dr John was based on Charlotte Brontë's publisher George Smith, who it seems likely that she was in love with. Smith recognised himself in fictional form and was disappointed when his alter ego dropped out of the main narrative in the third volume, but Charlotte was insistent that Lucy could not and must not marry Dr John. Villette is most definitely not a marriage plot, it was written by a woman who had no expectations of marital happiness and who instead wrote of finding a way of getting through one's life alone.
There is a kind of claustrophobia to the novel which depresses the action still further. We almost never see the sunlight, the action takes place in small rooms, the gloomy schoolroom, the grim weather of the small town Villette. Lucy shuts an unruly pupil in a cupboard, she tries to hide her personal possessions in a trunk, she buries a cache of letters in the garden - this is a story centred around small spaces. Even the characters seem unable to escape, returning in recycled form with different names - Polly becomes Paulina, Graham returns as Dr John (spoiler!) - despite the apparent implausibility of the significant players from Lucy's early life reappearing when she moves overseas. The school feels like a prison, with the wardress Mme Beck patrolling the vicinity and checking through personal possessions. Disturbingly, there are elements of this which appear to be a representation of Charlotte's real experiences while living and working in Brussels, a period in which she fell deeply in love with Monsieur Heger (a probable model for M. Paul Emmanuel) and felt a resentment towards his wife. Charlotte was always against a French translation of Villette lest the Hegers get hold of it and recognise themselves in fictional form. Unsurprisingly, a pirated version appeared anyway but they proved remarkably discreet.
I can only feel for Charlotte if Lucy Snowe is a representation of herself - is there any other heroine in English literature quite so emotionally strangled? Oddly, I was reminded of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine yet the reader feels a sympathy for Eleanor but poor Lucy seems to repel us instead. Even as far back as publication, Harriet Martineau found Lucy's longing for erotic love to be too much. The idea of a woman wanting physical and emotional fulfillment was too radical a thought even among literary circles. In truth, Charlotte was using Lucy to confront the Loneliness Problem two centuries before Eleanor Oliphant and she was doing it in a far more confrontational way. When Dr John tells Lucy that she ought to be happy, she reacts angrily that happiness is not a potato, that can be cultivated and watered out of nothing. Lucy wants to be loved but over the course of the novel it becomes clear that she is not destined to be so.
The characters of Ginevra and Paulina are interesting foils to Lucy, offering opposing alternatives of how to find love and yet neither is appealing to Lucy. Ginevra is a consummate flirt who uses her wiles to get expensive presents, even from those like Dr John who cannot afford them. Paulina is adult-like as a child and then childlike as an adult, never able to fully grow up since it does not suit either her father or indeed Dr John to perceive her as a woman. In a fascinating exploration of the virgin-whore dichotomy, both Ginevra the whore and Paulina the virgin are able to attract Dr John but by contrast, he only tells Lucy that had she been a man, they might have been friends. Like his real-life equivalent, he can have no romantic interest in a woman who refuses to compromise her intellect and someone who will not play up to be either virgin or whore. Lucy accepts this with her typical reticence and if she falls into despair about Dr John's rejection, the reader is never allowed to know.
I found myself particularly troubled by the character of Paulina, or Polly. The concept of the 'child-wife' crops up so often in Victorian literature, from Dora in Bleak House to Dorothea and Rosamund in Middlemarch and now here. It is this idea that a wife must be mentally inferior to her husband, must be unable to worry her pretty little head about his affairs and that she is to be considered as a child next to him. The husband is parent rather than spouse. Sexual attraction is frowned upon yet Charlotte Brontë makes clear that it exists, that these doll-girls are viewed in a sexual manner. The six year-old Polly fusses around her father, spending a huge amount of time embroidering a handkerchief for him and bleeding over it as she does so. A blood-spattered piece of white cloth has obvious connotations. When Polly reappears as a seventeen year-old, she does so in a white dress covered in red speckles, and it is on this occasion that Dr John rescues her at the theatre and their relationship appears sealed, again mirroring the idea of sexual consummation. During Lucy's drug-fuelled hallucination, her view of Paulina at the fair is almost like the theft of Persephone. Paulina's whole existence is to be dependent and to have no will of her own and yet to be happy about it. Although Polly gets a happy ending, there can be little doubt that Charlotte regards her as an odd little fairy and Lucy's distaste for her is never far away.
Polly is not the only grotesque however, there is also the ghastly Mme Walravens who emerges from the shadows like a crone witch. Even Mme Beck has her Mrs Danvers qualities. Then there is the periodically appearing nun, the explanation for which to me felt rather inadequate. Lucy herself is such a ghostly figure that I felt more that she was battling against becoming a crone like these others - she has had multiple incarnations across Villette, so much so that Ginevra half-jokingly asks, 'Who are you?' Caroline in Shirley contemplated how best to conduct herself as an old maid, is Lucy too looking for future patterns of behaviour? Certainly, Villette is a story centred around the experience of living life alone, an anti-marriage-plot not in the sense of being opposed to matrimony but in acknowledging that it is not something open to all women. Marriage does not find everyone yet we all trudge on regardless. It may well be that Lucy never does find love but at least we hope that she does not lose her self.
Villette is a tough read. To be locked within the perspective of a heroine like Lucy was not always pleasant. Lucy is prickly, awkward and unfriendly. When she has to spend time caring for a disabled pupil alone during the long holiday, she repeatedly refers to the child as a 'cretin' and discusses at length how disgusting it is to be around her. Lucy is no Jane Eyre, there are no pert opinions and the back-and-forth which she has with M. Paul Emmanuel becomes argumentative and heated as opposed to playful and witty as in Jane Eyre. Yet Lucy can surprise us. She appears genuinely fond of Ginevra. She may hide her feelings very successfully, but we know that she loves Dr John and so we see her courage in deciding to put thoughts of him aside. Later we witness her quiet devastation when M. Paul Emmanuel declares his intention to leave yet we know that somehow she will survive. Lucy may hide her character from us, may insist that she is an insignificant person unworthy of notice but she betrays herself and her own courage and we catch tantalising glimpses of the real her. Slowly but surely, I warmed to her and to the message that I felt Lucy's creator was trying to convey.
Brooding about the Brontës this year helped me to realise that although we are so familiar with the Brontë brand as a whole, each of the sisters did have their own distinct areas of interest. They were three individuals who happened to all be writers rather than one group. While Emily went for the melodrama and Anne for the social issues, Charlotte always hit her stride when she concentrated on the position of women. While Shirley floundered in the mess of mill-town politics, with Jane Eyre and Villette, Charlotte proclaims loudly that women are people too. The strange thing though is that while Jane demands her independence and her right to her own choices, Lucy is far more reactive, an observer within her own life. Lucy is older than Jane and has had to learn wisdom. She knows that she is not guaranteed happiness no matter how much she may wish for it. Yet it is Lucy who achieves true independence and Jane who succumbs to a domestic fate. Jane may seek a new servitude, may flee Mr Rochester when he would have her compromise herself and depart St John Rivers when he asks more than she is prepared to give but although it is she who marries him, she nonetheless marries. With the character of Lucy Snowe, Charlotte creates a character who is a self-made successful businesswoman who survives unmarried.
I have always argued that none of the Brontë fiction really count as romances (I would say the same of Jane Austen) but I think the reason why people cannot take to Villette is that one cannot even feign a love story here. While foolish readers may argue that Heathcliff is just misunderstood or that Mr Rochester simply made some poor choices, even those mental gymnastics will not work with the casually indifferent Dr John and the volcanic M. Paul Emmanuel. There is nothing to hold on to. Charlotte Brontë wanted us to see Lucy, the representative of the legions of similarly superfluous women, and realise that some people live their lives alone. Lucy watches as Ginevra stoops to lies and petty treachery to get what she wants, Lucy observes as Paulina acts the part of a child. Lucy finds neither path appealing and carries on her own way. Villette is a book that states that life is tough and sometimes it does not let up but before we get too depressed, let us remember Lucy, the cold-eyed lady at the core who will not allow the world to destroy her....more
As with many of the 'classics', I was unsure of whether or not I had read this. I think I may have been confused because I did see some of the BBC series. Anyway, having started into it, it rapidly became clear that I had never in fact read a word of it. Three Men in a Boat is one of those glorious books where very little actually happens but which are handled so cleverly that you never really notice. Most surprising of all, this is a piece of Victorian literature which is genuinely laugh out loud funny; Dickens et al may have wit, but Three Men in a Boat serves up pure hilarity. At the time, the book was sneered upon for its simplicity and perceived 'vulgarity', but it is that which makes it seem so alive today. Unlike so much other literature of the era, even those that are indisputable masterpieces, there is no feeling of it being terribly 'written', it is more as if we are just listening to someone chatting about their boating trip. To read something with such immediacy across the distance of a century is really quite something - for a book once dismissed as only fit for the 'Arrys' and 'Arriets' of the world, it has had a truly impressive legacy.
The story begins - although it is hardly a story, being mostly based in fact - with Harris, George and J deciding that they are all terribly unwell and really in need of a holiday. After some backing and forthing over the merits of various destinations, a boat trip is settled upon and the three of them of set out, although only once they have had the necessary delays, confusions and prevarications (Waterloo station causes issues). To be fair though, the joy of Three Men is not to be found via its summary - it's all about the anecdotes along the way. I did recognise the description of how Uncle Podger hung up the picture - when I was in school, they read it to us every year as a description of attitude. I genuinely think that teachers used to think us so half-witted that we wouldn't notice that we had heard it before. One year, the teacher giving the assembly claimed Podger had been his own relative. This sums up so much about my high school education.
The snippets about Harris are highlights within the book, whether it be his singing or his strategy for getting through Hampton Court Maze, yet still I think that the star of the show just might be Montmorency the fox terrier. As the three hapless individuals try to make dinner, everything and anything goes into the pot to make an Irish stew, 'Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say'. Further set pieces regarding his propensity for scrapping are also great fun - I think that Montmorency just might be one of my new favourite fictional canines.
Living in Oxford and having gone for more than a few walks along the river by Iffley lock, there was also a certain amount of recognition. The detailed, although perhaps hyperbolic, tales of boating fun do give a fascinating glimpse into what the river would have looked like when the book was first published. The ridiculous girls in their spotless boating clothes that could not possibly get wet, all of the various mishaps around towing, the nightmare of camping in a boat - there is so much that makes this book utterly perfect. Still though, the passage where J rants about the pointlessness of antiquities gave me goosebumps as he pondered whether 'The "sampler" that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as "tapestry of the Victorian era" and be almost priceless'. Reading this while sitting on a bench outside a National Trust property felt particularly prescient - why do we treasure old things that are passed beyond the bounds of usefulness?
Three Men in a Boat was written as a guidebook but is so very much more than that, it is an insight, a glimpse of people who are not so very different to ourselves. The three men squabble like children, are utterly useless and yet end up having the time of their lives. It made me laugh so much to read how the concept of the man-child male was clearly not a modern invention - Harris, George and J are a long way past childhood but also clearly not grown up. Three Men in a Boat surprised me in being a true comic masterpiece and very possibly a personal new staple comfort read....more
I discovered this while looking up books set in Oxford, my adoptive hometown. High-spirited, surreal and often plain absurd, The Moving Toyshop was first published in 1946 and is a true vintage classic. One of the sequences towards the end was the inspiration for the climax of Strangers on a Train although Crispin never actually received any screen credit. If, like me, you are someone who prefers their crime fiction more towards the cosy end of the spectrum, then this is an ideal read for the Christmas period.
In pre-war London, Richard Cadogan is a poet with a mission, a mission to go on holiday. Having scrounged money from his publisher, he high-tails it off to Oxford. Arriving close to midnight, he wanders down Iffley Road and spots a shop with its shutters open. Wandering in and then into the adjoining flat, he finds the dead body of a woman who seems to have been strangled. Pretty much immediately after that, he is knocked unconscious but when he awakens, both the dead body and the toyshop have vanished.
With applications for assistance from the police ineffective - no body, no toyshop, no crime - and Cadogan dismissed as eccentric or drunk, there is only one thing to do. Cadogan decides to call upon his old friend Gervaise Fen, Oxford don, man of apparently limitless energy and enthusiasm and owner of the fabulous car Lily Christine. The Moving Toyshop is not Mr Fen's first outing as detective but it is apparently his best known. This is a mystery where the conundrum is very much by the by - the joy of the story is the banter between Cadogan and Fen. Discussions include the most unintentionally loathsome characters in literature and the most unreadable books of all time and occasionally the pair of them have to do battle with an angry Janeite.
In many ways, The Moving Toyshop is a love letter to Oxford. On Cadogan's arrival, he reminds himself that it matters little what he does since Oxford 'is the one place in Europe where a man may do anything, however eccentric, and arouse no interest or emotion at all'. Later, it is noted that the 'improbable has less weight in the City of Oxford than in any other habitable quarter of the globe'. Characters are assembled 'by a means peculiar to Oxford - vague promises of excitement accompanied by more definite promises of drink'. The inner whirrings of Oxford are central to the plot, from the regulations around the presence of undergraduates in licensed premises to exactly what Parson's Pleasure really was. It would be too far to label the novel nostalgic, but with its pre-war setting there is the real feel of a Golden Age thriller.
The Moving Toyshop is a larger-than-life mystery with heavy helpings of farce. There is a feeling of hyper-reality, with the characters appear to be almost knowing players as the denouement unfolds. Few thrillers could have quite so many literary references, meaning Toyshop is a particularly perfect piece of crime fiction for book lovers. Still, I enjoyed most the way in which Crispin makes use of his setting, with Oxford coming alive on the page as Cadogan and Fen scamper around the city's sites and landmarks. This is one of those exceptional novels where a lack of logic matters little - you just want to go back to the beginning and read it all over again....more
Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those novels which has faded into legend – my own mother described it to me as a true story, bracketed with the Mary Celeste as one of those inexplicable mysteries to which no answer will ever be found. But it is not true, it is not even a true rumour – the mystery of Hanging Rock originates in this exquisite novel, sitting at a scant 200 pages and managing to chill the spine without ever appearing to break a sweat. Lindsay summons up the unease of the story that just might be true, that has the feel of urban legend while still retaining the elegance of the Victorian era. Managing to be both beautiful and terrible, this was a stunning story.
Set in 1900, Lindsay begins with all of the grace of a Victorian novel, ‘Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees outside the dining-room windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive.’ It is like an inverted Jane Eyre which begins without any possibility of a walk, but instead all of the young ladies of Appleyard College board the open carriages to head off on their idyllic picnic on St Valentine’s Day. The girls have spent the morning exchanging cards and giggling over gossip, pristine in their long white frocks and silk sashes. The picture is too perfect – we know something is about to go horribly wrong.
After lunch, Miranda with the golden hair, Irma with the dark curls, Marion the clever one and Edith the school dunce decide to climb further through the scrub and up into the rock – or rather, the first three did and Edith tagged along, desperate for acceptance. Edith is fat and adults frequently make regretful observations about her ‘very limited intelligence’. Some time later, Edith comes running back to the others in a state of hysterics, unable to recall anything that has happened. The other three girls are nowhere to be found. Also missing is Greta McGraw, one of the chief governesses. The other adults and the remaining girls spend hours searching but are forced to return to the college empty-handed. The College Mystery begins.
Written in 1967, this novel is quietly terrifying – it has some fascinating themes regarding class and colonialism. The principal characters are all white Australians, attempting to transplant English values to the Australian Bush. There has always been a greater mysticism to the wilds of Australia than to their American equivalents, even the suggestion of something almost occult. The Hanging Rock is like a creature disturbed from its slumber, possessing a magnetic attraction towards those who get too close. The watches of all those at the picnic mysteriously stop, the group are unable to keep to Mrs Appleyard’s tightly controlled schedule – the strict rule of time is overwhelmed by the Rock. The four girls want to go a little closer, marvelling at the beauty – only Edith is revolted by the natural surroundings and thus she is the only one not sucked in by it. There is a suggestion of colonial values cut loose, with corsets left asunder and the unnerving feel of the wild fighting back.
Even back at the college, control begins to slip. Mrs Appleyard appears every inch the English schoolmistress, complete with cameo portrait of her late husband at her throat but whether she has relevant experience prior to arrival ‘was never divulged’ and her iron-clad authority begins to crumble speedily – she is both pompous and pathetic and as the status she has striven so hard to achieve enters its death throes, she becomes very, very dangerous. Mrs Appleyard frets irritably about it being Miranda, Marion and Irma that went missing – her most beautiful, her most intelligent and her richest pupils – and wishes it could have been fat Edith or even the orphan Sara. Sara Waybourne is such a pathetic creature – left behind from the picnic for failing to learn her poem, living in a room that is still full of Miranda’s belongings, apparently abandoned by her guardian, the poor child’s fate echoes closely that of Sara Crewe in A Little Princess and Mrs Appleyard is ill-disposed to mercy. With Mrs Appleyard’s own murky origins, one almost wonders if her revulsion for the child is somehow born out of recognition.
There is something trope-ish about Miranda – the golden girl with the beautiful hair and the kind heart. Watching her and her companions walk up the rock is young Michael and his uncle’s groom Albert – Michael develops a fascination with her and with the Rock itself. Studies have been done about our cultural fixation with blonde hair and the miserable fates that apparently await those who bear it (Buffy the Vampire Slayer was written to lampoon that very stereotype). Miranda is like an angel ascending rather than a true human girl vanished – all three girls dressed in white, wholesome and pure, well brought up young ladies without a breath of scandal to their names – perfect victims. Neither of the other three inspire the same attention as Miranda though – it even seems that Lindsay herself is more interested by Miranda, but as a character defined by her absence, she was difficult to connect with.
I cannot claim to be an expert on Australia – I haven’t set foot in the country for twenty-odd years and even then I was a baby, but the cultural landscape of Australia is rather unique. There is something so savage, so wild, in that for which they are most famous. Their national hero is Ned Kelly, wearer of the tin pan body armour. Banjo Paterson is their best-known poet, with ‘Waltzing Matilda’ their unofficial national anthem. Picnic at Hanging Rock made me think of the real life case of Azaria Chamberlain, the baby carried off by a dingo, which led to her mother being falsely charged with murder – without considering any kind of supernatural element, the Bush is a dangerous place where due caution has to be respected.
I was also reminded though of the film Jindabyne, centred around the responses of a community to the murder of a young woman; the crime takes place at the beginning of the film and the killer is very much a background character, we see him helping repair the church, doing his shopping, dumping the dead girl’s car but he is never caught or even suspected – the action is focused on those who discover the body and how it affects their lives. The final shot however shows the killer sitting in his car, watching for his next victim – the threat remains. The same theme of the unresolved threat is what makes Picnic at Hanging Rock quite so terrifying – with no way of knowing what caused the disappearances, there is no way of preventing it from happening again. I did read that Lindsay drafted and then excised a chapter which revealed the Rock’s secret but for the story as a piece of art, I am glad she made that decision.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a rare mystery in that it does not feel like a tale for a cold night, it is a story of a brilliant summer day, so perfect that it devoured four of the picnic-goers. It never needs to rely on foul weather or dangerous conditions – the very silence of the girls’ disappearance adds to the terror. I was looking up theories online and saw some rather outlandish imagined versions involving alien abduction or foul play by Michael and Albert but I think that what Lindsay has created is far more elegant, even graceful, the tight control of Appleyard College’s colonial rule is completely undone by one mere flicker from the Rock, everything else they all do to themselves. It is so easy to be caught up by the beauty of the picnic, the Edwardian dress, Lindsay’s calm yet compelling prose, yet behind it all there is a landscape and a people being pillaged. I read this in almost one sitting – I have never seen the film although I now really want to – it was an intense reading experience and one I can imagine that I will be returning to in a vain attempt to gain further understanding into the mystery of Hanging Rock.
This book has been my discovery of #BroodingabouttheBrontës - while I knew that Mary Taylor had been one of Charlotte Brontë's two best friends (the other being Ellen Nussey), I had had no idea that she had written a book. While Ellen Nussey very much made being Charlotte's friend her raison d'être, Mary Taylor was clear on having her own life and so her novel is a work set entirely apart from that of the Brontës but serves as a fascinating companion piece within the era. It took Mary Taylor decades to write this book and there is such passion and fierce determination behind it, it reveals so much about someone who clearly meant so much to Charlotte. Mary Taylor eventually emigrated to New Zealand, having failed to convince her friend to do likewise. She believed that a woman's first duty was not to marry, make a home or produce children but to support herself - a revolutionary idea for the era. In this, her only novel, Taylor uses the stories of four women to make clear why she believes this and also the consequences for those who fail to do so. I have always argued that Anne Brontë was a feminist author, but while her novels contain muted feminist beliefs, Mary Taylor is loud and proud about what the world has to offer women and what duties they owe to themselves.
The titular heroine is Sarah Miles, a country girl and grocer's daughter. The novel opens with her pestering her parents to allow her to go to school, believing that those that have schooling earn more than those without. Set in Yorkshire, the working-class characters speak with a broad dialect - the subtitle to this work is 'A Yorkshire Tale of Sixty Years Ago', (published in 1890, this sets it as broadly the 1830s,) making this as much a retrospective of Taylor's girlhood as it is a feminist call to arms. Set around the fictional town of Repton, Taylor observes a flourishing mill town and the shifting class system, and particularly how this affects the position of women. The teacher who Sarah aspires to learn from is Maria Bell, a young woman who had grown up a vicar's daughter but, now orphaned, is forced to make her own way in the only respectable profession available to women - teaching. Her best friend is Dora, who grew up across the field and whose widowed mother made a seriously ill-advised second marriage to the impoverished local squire. The fourth heroine is Amelia, youngest daughter of the local mill owner Mr Turner; Mr Turner is also Maria Bell's uncle and so he is naturally mortified that his niece is working for a living.
Via her characters, Taylor makes the recurrent complaint that women are not encouraged to know their business. Dora's mother had assumed that her new husband had a vast estate because he had an old name, she thought that his scruffy home needed only a 'woman's hand' to brighten it. She was wrong - the family had lost nearly everything through Mr Woodman's poor management and he had no compunction in swallowing up the tiny income which came directly to Dora's mother. On the premature death of the latter, Dora was left utterly destitute - a true Cinderella and with no chance at all of a Prince Charming. Similarly, on arriving at Repton, Maria meets Miss Everard, an old friend of her mother's and despised local spinster. Miss Everard describes nervously how she has gone from daughter of local gentry and living in the grand house, to living outside it and renting it to Mr Turner - and then to receiving no rent at all. She is shy of even implying that she has been cheated, frightened of requiring charity but unable to understand what has befallen her - there is no point of recourse, nobody who can help.
There is a painful contrast between Sarah's childhood ambition to be rich and the stark reality of her circumstances - wealth is beyond her reach. She hopes to find skills and opportunities via attending Miss Bell's school, but realises quickly that Miss Bell is just as ill-informed as herself. Via Sarah, Taylor asks what is the point of learning accomplishments such as piano and drawing when they serve no practical purpose. Maria has them and the only living she can scratch is to simply pass on these useless skills to the next generation. Sarah is repeatedly scolded for her refusal to learn piano but she remains stubbornly recalcitrant. I adored Sarah and her rough manners which to me only served to emphasise her high integrity. Maria Bell was perhaps a more traditional heroine, imbued with patience and nobility of spirit but with a very human side as she struggles to make a living in a world governed by factors that are completely beyond her control. After a bad harvest and with a downturn at the mill, female education moves down the priority list and so Maria's flourish school shrivels.
The whole of Repton suffers during their economic recession, with Taylor's anger clear behind her carefully crafted prose. It is injust - not merely unfair - for someone to work and work but still collapse and starve. It reminds me of how David Cameron lauded 'hard-working families' during the last election even while his government snatched away their benefits. At one point the characters read a newspaper article explaining why the working classes do not deserve the vote, with the velvet-worded hypocrisy clashing sharply with the roughly-spoken local commentary. Taylor is defiantly siding with the Chartists.
Yet still, Taylor is a restrained narrator. She puts her opinions in the mouths of her characters and only occasionally makes asides to the reader. Miss Miles is a morally intense novel but it could have seemed far more didactic with less engaging characters. Despite its blatant feminist agenda, it is never anti-men. Even the men who do wrong are excused as it being a mere part of their nature - the duty of women is not to avoid men, but rather to rely on themselves for their own happiness. It is a rallying call, not a condemnation. Taylor even seems to draw on her own experience in the correspondence between Maria and her friend Dora, the latter only able to survive her horrendous circumstances by clinging to the memory of Maria's higher moral standards. The healing power of female relationships is championed, with even a budding almost-friendship between Sarah and the lady Miss Amelia.
Mary Taylor aged 59 on an all female mountaineering expedition in Switzerland (far left) With the downfall of the Turner family fortunes, Amelia's fate is the most Gothic of the narrative. Previously the family darling (the pretty one, the well-educated one, the high-spirited one), Amelia shames her sisters by suggesting that they might work to get themselves from their financial peril. Sarah is let go as their housemaid since they cannot afford her wages, but notes that they are far more pitiful than she since they are neither permitted nor skilled to seek their salvation. I was reminded of the bound feet of Chinese women - try bound lives, far worse. Unlike Jane Eyre, Amelia is like a bird in a cage, ensnared in a net and unable to set herself at liberty. Every hope of rescue is blocked by either family pride or her own. Amelia's eventual end inverts that of Dora, who has been in far darker circumstances but who is determined to survive. When she seeks to make a living, eyebrows are raised and whispers spread - Dora knows that people would prefer it that she should fade like a tortured martyr and leave a blessed memory to sigh over, but instead she has the will and temerity to survive. Amelia cannot set aside her dignity and so is unable to embrace her independence, but Dora cares not.
We sense Taylor's impatience with this kind of lethargy - in a time that praised the angel in the house, Taylor was clear that deliberate martyrdom held no virtue. Two of her characters do find husbands, although both via tortuous routes (Sarah at one point punches her beloved in the face, a probable first within Victorian literature). Although she never married, Taylor is not suggesting that the marital state is one to be avoided. Maria could very easily be a saintly heroine but instead, Taylor has the old maid Miss Everard instruct her to be happy. In this, the latter is echoing Taylor's own letter to Ellen Nussey regarding Charlotte Brontë's imminent nuptials. Nussey had been consumed with jealousy and claimed to Taylor that Charlotte was being untrue to herself and refusing to 'bear her lot' as a spinster. Dismissing the letter as 'wonderful nonsense', Taylor lays into Nussey without mercy, telling her that if it is Charlotte's 'lot' to be married, she can 'bear that too', and that if it is a new thing for Charlotte to consider her own personal happiness rather than what she owed other people, then it would be better that she made it a habit. Again, there is no nobility in unnecessary self-sacrifice, Taylor has no patience with these Victorian virtues and instead she would have women make their own choices, be informed and be happy.
I feel that this is a novel that has been forgotten undeservedly. It is resolutely unadventurous in terms of perspective - this is no Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights - but via her heroine Sarah, Taylor takes us to the working classes by our visit into Sarah's home, the middle classes through her schooldays with Miss Bell, then the nouveau riche upper classes due to Sarah's service in the Turner household. The four women of her novel provide a thorough cross-section of female Victorian society and the possibilities (or lack of possibilities) available. I habitually make notes while reading and this book prompted four pages of reflections - in terms of social commentary, it is fascinating but Taylor's own views speak forth with eloquence and passion. I have had a respect for Taylor for years, ever since reading about her relating an anecdote where someone had asked her about the form of her faith, to which Taylor had indignantly replied that this was 'a matter between God and me', to which Emily Brontë responded, 'That's right' - but with Miss Miles we have a novel which is both compelling but also incredibly personal. In a world where women such as Ellen Nussey preferred to sit playing the piano and looking elegant, Mary Taylor rejected such norms - in short, like Jane Eyre, she decided that she 'would rather be happy than dignified' and I salute her efforts to convince other women to carve the same path....more
Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings is a new paperback release from Penguin, offering an anthology collection of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, including snippets dating back to when the author was just eleven years old. The book offers fascinating and at times tantalising glimpses of the author in training, a young girl writing purely for her own amusement and that of her family, but then every so often she turns a particular phrase which betrays her as the woman who would go on to write some of the finest novels in the English language. Love and Freindship is at times a dense and dis-orientating read but for the true Austen fan, there is much to be enjoyed.
The reader is able to observe Austen’s early experiments, as she mimics Henry Fielding’s hyperbolic style, Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel but then there are those moments of Austen elegance which signposts her own genius in embryo. More so even than with her later novels, one feels as though we are able to hear Jane’s own voice, with many of pieces in Love and Freindship being written for public performance. Many of her stories feature dispassionate descriptions of disastrous events – not unlike Voltaire’s Candide – and I could imagine her reading them aloud in a dead-pan tone to family applause.
Down the centuries, Jane Austen has been repeatedly misconstrued as a romantic novelist, but in Love and Freindship, it is underlined that she was always a satirist before anything else. In works such as The Beautifull Cassandra, she describes how her heroine (named for her own sister Cassandra) fell violently in love with a bonnet, using the same expressions of affection more usually reserved for a lover. In some ways, Love and Freindship seems more like a collection of miniature high-spirited farces – but yet there is such pleasure watching Austen work with such enthusiasm. While nobody can doubt the beauty of her later works such as Persuasion, there is a sadness to some of its tone which is entirely absent here.
In style, many of the works are indeed reminiscent of some of the Bronte juvenilia, with the same unfinished style but yet there is a greater confidence about how she deploys the one-liner. Were she alive today, I could imagine Austen as a consummate stand-up comedian. In the titular story Love and Freindship, we stand on the sidelines and snigger as two young women wreak havoc in the lives of all they come across – cheerfully explaining to the daughter of their benefactor that she cannot love the man her father wishes her to marry since he is only her father’s choice and anyway, the man’s hair ‘is not auburn’. They then point her in the direction of a fortune-hunter and wave her off to Gretna Green. The women of Austen’s juvenilia take turns fainting and go to machiavellian lengths to get their own way about marriage yet the naughtiness always remains within the realms of a parson’s daughter’s innocent imagination.
Still, although activity of a sexual nature is only ever implied, it is surprising how dark the subject matter of Love and Freindship can be. One young heroine gaily confesses to having killed all her family and perjured herself repeatedly. In another snippet, a heroine formally applies for a young man’s hand and is angry to find herself rebuffed. Two sisters plot to manipule their elder sibling into marrying a man they know she does not care for. Babies bite off their mother’s fingers, some heroines take to drink, the cult of sensibility is skewered repeatedly as insincere and as ever, Austen has little time for the fools of this world. There is much of cruelty – while in her later novels, the false friends such as Miss Bingley or Elizabeth Eliot are background figures, here they are allowed to run wild. Austen is having a great deal of fun – not yet restricted by the prudish nineteenth century mores, her stories bubble with the energy of the bawdy Georgian era.
A fine example of this is Austen’s History of England; Christine Alexander’s excellent introduction casts further light on this account by ‘a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian’, complete with illustrations by her sister Cassandra. Alexander notes that Cassandra’s artistic gifts were of no less esteem within the family than Jane’s comedic ones. Much of the obvious humour within History of England is similar to the much later 1066 and All That but the true punchline comes from the inside joke which is going on between the two Austen sisters – each of the portraits of monarchs within the History have been modelled on members of the Austen family. Their Aunt Leigh-Parrot is drawn as the much-loathed Elizabeth I while Jane herself becomes the saintly Mary Queen of Scots while various Austen brothers are shown in the guises of their namesake kings. Given that even Mrs Austen is the subject of mockery here, one feels that the reader is being let in on an instance of private humour between two young girls chafing against parental rule.
As the reader travels through Love and Freindship, Austen’s tone becomes more polished and her subject matter moves away from the ridiculous and suffices itself with the ironic. In Catherine, or the Bower, her heroine is allowed a mini-rant about the social conditions for women of small fortune. The book closes with Lady Susan, the epistolary account of an adulterous aristocrat where the villainess herself takes centre stage. Love and Freindship is teasing, leaving at the moment where Austen prepares to take flight. It is a piece best enjoyed by the fans, but its appeal is far beyond that of completism, rather it encourages a fuller appreciation of Jane Austen as an artist – while Virginia Woolf may remark that she is hard to capture in the act of greatness, Love and Freindship shows us how hard she worked to perfect her craft – but I think what is loveliest of all is how obviously she enjoyed herself while was doing it. Read this and the image of grim-faced Aunt Jane disintegrates forever....more
This novel has intrigued me for years, so I was really pleased to finally read it. Like Picnic At Hanging Rock, which I read earlier this year, it is one of those books which has become somewhat overshadowed by its film adaptation, in this case the 1971 production starring Julie Christie. It is something of a study in nostalgia, narrated by a man in his sixties looking back at his twelve year-old self and opening with the immortal line ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.‘ Leo is looking back from the mid-point of the twentieth century to 1900, the dying days of the Victorian era, to the summer when he acted as messenger for his friend’s sister and a local farmer. It’s a curious study on being in the state of both knowing and not knowing, reflecting on memories only half recalled and secrets ignored or misunderstood. Leo is both wide-eyed innocent boy and shrivelled old man. The novel reads like a Victorian one but yet we venture forward into the twentieth century- in essence, the book is itself the go-between, making for a reading experience that is strangely unsettling.
Memory is a big theme here – the older Leo finds his childhood diary with the zodiac symbols on the front and believes he remembers little of the summer he was twelve, but as he leafs through the pages, it all comes powerfully back to him. He is once more the awkward young boy from the fading middle-class background, staying with a richer friend for the holidays at Brandham Hall. The family name was Maudsley but it takes him some time to remember that his friend’s name was Maurice. Leo has had an awful term at school, bullied for using fancy words and getting out of it by apparently casting a spell which causes his tormentors to fall off a roof. Slightly drunk on his own power, Leo is fascinated by the zodiac and the symbols on the front of his diary. Leo is still a child happy in the world of make-believe and he cannot perceive the adult truths of what is going on around him.
Leo is smitten by his host’s elder sister Marian, who takes pity on him for not having any summer clothes. Leo had tried to use his powers to keep the weather cool but he is saved in a more practical fashion by Marian taking him shopping for a cool green suit. He is her Robin Hood, although to his shame he realises that the colour also indicates that he himself is ‘green’ – a symbol of his innocence. From there on, Leo watches the thermometer with fascination, trying to force the mercury to rise, keen for ever greater heat. The novel features all the classic set-pieces of vintage summer, with high tea, cricket matches, bathing outdoors and playing about in haystacks. It’s all very idyllic, but more is going on beneath the surface.
Marian is being courted by the aristocratic Hugh Trimingham, whose face has been horribly scarred by the war. Mrs Maudsley wants the two to marry. However, Marian does keep asking Leo to run down to the local farm and pass on messages to local farmer Ted, because of a little business that he has been helping her with. With Maurice in bed with suspected measles, there is nobody to question Leo’s whereabouts – he is a child and expected to play out of doors. Much of the novel’s charm comes from Leo’s sweetness, his habit of taking things literally and his adult regretful affection for his younger self’s foibles. Leo is unabashed about the fact that his opinion of Hugh Trimingham improved when he discovered that the latter was a Viscount – why on earth would it not? When Hugh tells him ironically that nothing is ever a lady’s fault, Leo takes this maxim at face value and thus attempts logical gymnastics to absolve Marian from all blame. He is a child, with a child’s simplistic view of the world, unaware of the dynamics being played out right before him.
Leo’s world of make-believe enters into his role as go-between. For him, Marian is the Virgo on the Zodiac just as he himself is the lion, seeing Ted as Taurus the bull. Hugh refers to him as ‘Mercury’ due to his usefulness in carrying Marian’s messages. This again underlines the heat – as young Mercury scurries around, the tension and temperature of the situation escalates. Later Leo triumphs over Ted at a village cricket match, being lauded as the young ‘David’ who smote down ‘Goliath’, again emphasising the role Leo will later have in Ted’s destruction. In the stables, Leo spots deadly nightshade, also known as ‘belladonna’, foreshadowing the beautiful lady who will be quite so deadly.
I read afterwards that Ian McEwan was directly influenced by The Go-Between when writing Atonement and the parallels are indeed very obvious. Both are stories told by people looking back from later life on their younger selves and regretting how their own lack of experience led them to cause others tremendous harm. While Atonement’s Briony obviously despises herself for her crime, Leo is more circumspect – he has spent his life unable to find love or meaningful friendship, harrowed by the events of that year but indeed he does appear less culpable. Is it perhaps that crucial year’s difference, that Briony was thirteen and Leo only twelve – ought Briony to have known better? To have seen more clearly? Yet for both, they look on the working-class young man aspiring towards the upper-class woman and regard him with contempt.
Social class is the over-arching theme of the novel – Marian and Ted love each other passionately, but Leo does not understand why they can never be together. Marian accepts that she must marry Hugh, but reacts angrily when Leo attempts to suggest that she ought to stop writing to Ted. Leo himself is aware that he is of a lower social class than the Maudsleys and attempts to hide it. He has no summer clothes because his mother cannot afford him, and he knows that the only reason that Maurice believed him worth befriending is because Leo’s house name ‘Court Place’ sounds more aristocratic than it actually is. Later when Leo is keen to leave, his mother makes him stay because she thinks it will be good for him to get to know the right kind of people. However, even these people are anxious to move up with Mrs Maudsley equally keen on her daughter’s union with a Viscount. Mrs Maudsley’s horror at discovering her daughter’s relationship with Ted illustrates the immovability of social class – a situation memorably illustrated by the cricket match where the battle lines are clearly drawn between the workers and the aristocrats.
The adult Leo looks back on events with sorrow, re-visiting the village and praying for all those involved. His visit to the elderly Marian is complicated by both her self-delusion but also by the fact that the social hierarchy which had been so unbending in 1900 has been rendered meaningless fifty years later. The Triminghams are no longer the deities that they once were – life has changed utterly. The role of the go-between is to be despised, the messenger loathed for the content of the message rather than for anything they had done. I remember when I was still working in one of the Oxford Colleges, I found myself apologising to the Senior Tutor when she expressed disappointment over the exam results I had reported to her – but then I remembered that I had neither taught the students nor sat the paper so my contrition was misplaced. Leo became uncomfortable about the messages he was carrying, altering one and causing chaos in so doing. In the final lines of the novel, he takes up the mantle of go-between once more, asked by Marian to explain matters to her grandson. There is a tragedy to The Go-Between but more than anything there is a beauty. It is not so very long after the events of the novel that the First World War arrived, killing off both Maurice and his elder brother – many other tragic events ensued afterwards so that Marian’s grandson’s anger towards her seems wrapped up in so many other crimes. They have all been cast out of Eden and we mourn the loss of an innocence much wider than that simply pertaining to Leo. This book was truly exquisite – spell-binding....more
I loved this book. It's the Gone Girl of the Victorian era - popular fiction at its very, very best. So often reading classic fiction can end up feeling somehow worthwhile or virtuous rather than pleasurable but Lady Audley's Secret was pure fun. I had half-heard a Radio 4 adaptation a good few years ago so I was basically familiar with the titular secret but that by no means spoiled the entertainment. This is a fantastic example of Victorian sensationalist fiction, depicting the contemporary concerns of morality and madness with a side order of high melodrama. Lady Audley seems so fair and angelic, gentle both in word and deed. How fortunate that Sir Michael should find her to be his bride. Cue ominous music and a crackle of thunder.
Lady Audley's Secret is a novel which is far from subtle. Right from the earliest pages, the skin prickles with anticipation for the inevitable revelations - Lady Audley is not what she seems. Mary Elizabeth Braddon spends her first chapter explaining in exquisite detail just how beautiful Audley Court truly is and going over the Audley family pedigree. It was a subject of much local murmuring therefore that the baronet Sir Michael should propose to a young lady of no higher station than that of governess. He was in advanced years with an eighteen year-old daughter of his own while the young Miss Lucy Graham surely not out of her teens and with no known family. In most other Victorian novels, this would have been a subject of much rejoicing and the climax of a marriage plot. But this is Chapter One and between Lucy's initial trepidationn and the words she speaks to herself, 'No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations [...] every trace of the old life melted away - every clue to identity buried and forgotten' - we know that Sir Michael has made a horrible mistake.
Initially, the only party to be truly inconvenienced is Alicia Audley, Sir Michael's rowdy tomboy daughter, who resents having to give up the housekeeping keys and loathes her new stepmother. Lady Audley barely bats an eyelid at this however, secure in her husband's devoted affection. It is only when Robert Audley, nephew to Sir Michael, pays a visit that matters start to become complicated. Robert is indolent and disinterested, immune to the attentions of his cousin Alicia and disengaged from his supposed career as barrister - he has no clients. However, the return of his friend George Talboys from Australia brings out a new side to Robert. George had been disinherited upon his marriage and felt obliged to abandon his wife and child to seek their fortune prospecting for gold. Now back in England as a rich man, he discovers that his wife has perished in the intervening three years. Determined to console him, Robert decides to take him on a visit to the beautiful Audley Court. During their visit, Lady Audley avoids meeting George but he does catch sight of her portrait, which appears to affect him profoundly. Shortly afterwards, he goes for a walk near the well and mysteriously vanishes. Shocked and unable to think of what might have happened (really?), Robert is determined to discover the truth behind his dear friend's disappearance.
Sensation fiction took the features of Gothic literature and transplanted them into the Victorian middle class domestic sphere. The Victorian ideal of the wife being the 'angel of the house' was a central one so the idea of a golden-haired and apparently angelic young lady actually being (spoilers!) a murderous she-devil is truly scandalous. Lady Audley's Secret also reflects the anxieties of the Industrial age with people being far more able to travel with the advent of rail travel. Whereas previously, the people of Audley could know all of their neighbours and their individual family histories, now they have been obliged to accept Lucy Graham's account of herself and thus fallen for her devious lies. Lady Audley's maid Phoebe is noted repeatedly to look very like her mistress, emphasising that not so very much separates the lower and upper classes. Of course, while so much of Lady Audley's Secret may appear far-fetched and even absurd, it is surprisingly reflective of the life of its author.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon's father abandoned the family when she was five and she subsequently spent several years on the stage to help support her family. In her mid-twenties, she met and fell in love with John Maxwell, a publisher. She appeared to marry him and the two had six children, along with the five children he had from his previous marriage. However, it later transpired that the two had been living in a knowingly bigamous union as Maxwell's first wife was still alive but insane and kept in an asylum in Ireland. This caused a public scandal and all of the household servants gave notice. Only upon the death of Maxwell's wife was Braddon able to marry him legally. One could be forgiven for wondering whether Braddon perhaps had some sympathy for the predicament of Lady Audley.
Indeed, Lady A is a fascinating character to view from the twenty-first century. As with Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp, sensibilities have shifted since her creation. I found it difficult to sympathise with George Talboys skipping out on his familial responsibilities to go chasing gold and I could easily imagine why his wife might feel that desperate measures might be necessary to save herself and her child (such as, for a random example, faking her own death, changing her identity and seeking a new richer husband). Would it really have been more virtuous for her to sit on her behind and either starve to death or end up in the workhouse waiting for the feckless idiot to come home?
Comparisons are often made between Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, both being roughly contemporary examples of sensational fiction. Most striking though is the contrast between the heroines of these books, Lucy Audley and Laura Fairlie. Both women have fair hair but there the similarities end. Laura Fairlie is one of the most inert heroines in literature, requiring her sister to stand as translator between her and the world and unable to understand basic statements. She declines to extricate herself from undesirable scenarios as that would involve making active choices and allows herself to be committed to an asylum. She is the Victorian feminine ideal, unsullied by any adult behaviours or thoughts - or indeed any thoughts at all. I like to imagine how Lucy Audley would have reacted if transplanted into that novel. I don't think that Count Fosco or Percival Glyde would have lasted very long against her. The well might have gotten a bit crowded.
Yet while The Woman in White presents the male vision of the feminine ideal, Lady Audley's Secret is a far more female-centric novel. Unlike Collins, Braddon actually understood women and had also had to make her way through Victorian society as a woman. There is a kind of glee in how she describes Robert Audley going about his investigation and gradually realising how dangerous women can be. 'To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.' So many of the characters pause to rhapsodise about about Lady Audley's beauty and to equate it with obvious goodness but Robert now knows better. The angel of the house has claws and it is a foolish man who sits in the parlour and fails to watch his back.
Indeed, Robert's distrust of femininity seems to grow as the novel progresses. Robert watches Lady Audley serving tea and notes how gracefully she goes about it. She is the perfect devoted wife and yet he realises that the whole thing is an act. You can fake being a lady and you may even sneak it past your husband's nose - treason! Later, Robert falls in love with George Talboys' sister Clara more or less because she looks identical to George and thus is presumably less tainted than most females. For all that Robert was the force for good within the story, bravely trying to uncover George's terrible fate, he never feels particularly heroic. Indolent by nature, George's disappearance and the mystery behind his uncle's new wife have given him a purpose which he never had before. Indeed, he is seen as an early form of the literary detective. The scenes between him and Lady Audley crackle with tension but for all of that, I just resented him for getting in her way.
Lady Audley's Secret is a classic page-turner that spins the concept of the Victorian child-wife on its head. There is something fascinating too about the way the spectre of madness hovers over the story. Is Lady Audley mad or bad? In our age of improved understanding around mental health, it is jarring to hear characters dismissed and their behaviour excused since they are 'mad'. The label 'mad' covers many maladies and no further nuance is necessary. If Lady Audley herself claims to be mad, do we believe her? Or could this be the last grasp of the desperate woman trying to get out of a trap? The Radio 4 adaptation implied that Lady Audley wriggled free at the last moment and I prefer to think that myself. Lucy Audley was a woman who managed a sulky stepdaughter, a dense but devoted second husband, an absentee but annoying alive first husband, a lazy lawyer and a blackmailing former servant and she did it all with a sweet-faced demeanour. Do we really want to see her lose?
There is something deliciously subversive about the way that Braddon creates a female character who breaks all the rules and just may have gotten away scot-free. Lady Audley's Secret is a novel where women do not have to be wary of the nefarious male and instead it is the nefarious male who has to watch out. For the modern reader, the book might at times appear cheesy with its thunderstorms, convenient wells and timely coincidences but Braddon writes with such verve and enthusiasm that this feels just part of the fun. Braddon betrays the secret that women sometimes have minds of their own, even back in Victorian England. Proving that classic literature does not have to be hard reading, Lady Audley's Secret is an underrated classic and a fantastic escapist read. In a world that demanded women be Laura Fairlies, I am so glad that Braddon thought to create a Lucy Audley....more
So, a couple of months ago I read Bleak House and then after that, I read its spin off, Tom All Alone's. Anyway, Tom also stirred in some of The WomanSo, a couple of months ago I read Bleak House and then after that, I read its spin off, Tom All Alone's. Anyway, Tom also stirred in some of The Woman in White for fun and my curiousity was piqued. To be fair, my curiousity is very piquable. I got through Bleak House by making big strides forward during the Easter Holidays and for The Woman, it was very much the same except over half term. I'd actually never read anything by Wilkie Collins before, although I knew that he wrote Victorian melodramas back in the day. Collins is a famous novelist but not in the same way as his friend and contemporary Dickens - the latter was the Father of the Nation. Collins is described by my mother as a writer of 'high quality trash' ... believe it or not she meant it as a compliment.
For people not in the know - The Woman in White is widely regarded as the first ever mystery novel and certainly amongst the fore-runners of detective fiction. People went nuts over this book when it was first written. Plays were written, perfumes were concocted, sheet music was arranged, bonnets were made, children were called Walter. It never entirely went away, there is currently a musical showing somewhere which I actually might go and see ... if only to see if Laura Fairlie can be portrayed as someone convincingly alive. Anyway - yes, The Woman in White was a blockbuster of its day, enabling Collins to finally quit the day job and to go professional with the writing.
Did you enjoy Pride and Prejudice, but maybe you thought that it wasn't quite Northern enough? Hmm? Did you think that Mr Darcy could do with some touDid you enjoy Pride and Prejudice, but maybe you thought that it wasn't quite Northern enough? Hmm? Did you think that Mr Darcy could do with some toughening up? Do you prefer your love stories with a bubbling background of social agenda? If the answer to all of these questions is yes, then read North and South. Or at the very least, click below:
I first read Mansfield Park as a thirteen year-old, full of hope of finding another Pride and Prejudice. It's fair to say that I found it a little disI first read Mansfield Park as a thirteen year-old, full of hope of finding another Pride and Prejudice. It's fair to say that I found it a little disappointing. Lionel Trilling claimed that 'Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park' and on first reading I would have agreed with him. Over my first few Austen in Augusts, I never felt particularly motivated to reread it. But then something strange happened. The more I read literary analysis about Jane Austen's novels (and really, who doesn't do that in search of a good time), the more I felt curious about Mansfield Park. Between The Genius of Jane Austen revealing fascinating theatrical context and Jane Austen the Secret Radical suggesting subliminal subversive messages, I was suddenly keen to take another look for myself. And when I did, I made a discovery all of my own. Barely twenty pages in, I spotted something that I would never have noticed as a wide-eyed thirteen year-old. "Oh", I said to my partner, "It's all about sex".
Far from being Jane Austen's dullest novel, if you scratch beneath the surface, you realise that it is the book which most directly confronts sexual politics. Also, moving more or less straight from reading Northanger Abbey to this made for quite a striking contrast. While Northanger is raucous and high-spirited, Mansfield is far more measured. You really get the sense that this is Austen at her most confident. This book is her at the top of her game. The only problem is that people so often come to Austen expecting romance but that was never what she was about. While most of her other novels can be shoehorned into the romance structure, with Mansfield it is impossible to ignore that the plot fails to fit the structure. If you want hearts and flowers, go elsewhere.
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