a gallimaufry

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, by Theodora Goss

(Yanina Movchan, Embrace, from here; her website is here)

It’s been pretty hot here and so, when not concocting horrible puddings, I’ve been ignoring the work I should be doing, also my daughter, and lying as close to a fan as possible, reading. And I can heartily recommend this book as the perfect way to forget that it’s 42^oC in your garden, and that you have a pile of work, and, indeed, a child.

Mrs Poole frowned and put her hands on her hips. ‘I’m worried about Miss Mary and the rest of them, that’s all. I wish they would write us a proper letter—telegrams are like those Egyptian hieroglyphs they have now at the British Museum. You never quite know what they mean. As for Alpha and Omega, and I don’t know why you couldn’t have called them sensible, decent cat names, like Tom and Puss—just keep them out of my kitchen. Two dead mice they left on the floor yesterday! I stepped on one of them this morning and had to clean the bottoms of my slippers with carbolic!’

‘Well,’ said Catherine, reasonably, ‘I think that comes under the category of doing their jobs, don’t you think? After all, you said they could stay as long as they caught mice. They must have overheard you. And two dead mice are better in the kitchen than two live ones, aren’t they?’

‘Hrumph!’ said Mrs Poole.

        MRS POOLE: I would never make such an undignified sound! [...]

Just then, the front door bell rang.

        MRS POOLE: It was actually half an hour later, but if you want to put lies into your book, don’t let me stop you!

        CATHERINE: It’s more suspenseful this way.

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, apart from having a brilliant title, is the second in a trilogy which began with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (published last summer). In the first book, we were introduced to the Athena Club, a group of female monsters from famous nineteenth-century texts (mostly – Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde never existed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story but they are plausible inventions). Goss re-imagines these monsters, their stories and the stories of their creators, re-casting the monsters as likeable heroines struggling with their unusual abilities, and their creators as monstrous scientists who have abandoned all ethical constraints in their work.

In this second book, Goss takes on Dracula. When the Athena Club – Mary, Diana, Justine Frankenstein, Beatrice Rappaccini and Catherine Moreau – receive a letter from Lucinda Van Helsing begging for their help, they immediately make plans to assist her. But before Mary and Justine can leave for Vienna, a telegram arrives from Mina Murray: Lucinda has been kidnapped. It seems that, like the members of the Athena Club, she has been subjected to dreadful experiments – by her own father. The Athena Club must race to rescue Lucinda, discover the latest fiendish plot by renegade scientists and expose it to the Annual Meeting of the Société des Alchimistes in Budapest, while evading capture by old enemies and destruction by a new and deadly foe, and ingesting vast quantities of cake. It’s fast-paced and entertaining, a book for which the terms ‘madcap’ and ‘romp’ were surely designed; it’s also charming and rather funny.

Goss, many of whose wonderful short stories are formally inventive, has said that the forms of the gothic texts she draws upon are themselves monstrous, and she has tried to reflect this in her Athena Club books. So her tale of derring-do, which is being written down by Catherine, is frequently interrupted by other characters, who comment on – and complain about – the story and on Catherine’s way of writing, adding extra information they deem important. This revising of well-known stories is a collaborative act among the characters who have been ‘wronged’ in the classic versions. It’s also a way of highlighting the inherent partiality, unreliability even, of any one version of a story – Van Helsing’s perspective of events in the novel might be radically different to that of the Athena Club members, in fact sometimes even Catherine’s perspective is different to someone else’s. Furthermore, it reminds us of how an author must shape a text, imagining what she doesn’t know, leaving out some details and including others (Catherine has to deal with interpolated protests about all of these things from her friends, as in the piece I quoted above in which the housekeeper, Mrs Poole, takes issue with her writing). Sometimes she even has to change the language in which the characters are speaking:

‘He does, actually,’ said Greta. Suddenly, she grinned, and Justine could see the street urchin she had been behind the carefully trained maid. ‘Don’t ask me how I know that.’

Justine could not help smiling in response. ‘Very well, I shall restrain my curiosity.’

        DIANA: Wait a minute, you were telling Mary’s story, in her voice and everything. And now you’re telling Justine’s.

        CATHERINE: Well, Mary wasn’t there, so I can’t tell this part from her perspective, can I?

        DIANA: It just seems ... weird. [...]

        JUSTINE: Catherine, I seem to remember that Greta and I were speaking in French.

        CATHERINE: If you want this section to be in French, you’ll have to write it yourself.

‘Perhaps I’ll tell you another time how I learned where the Emperor keeps his handkerchief!’ said Greta, in French, for that was the language she and Justine were speaking. ‘It is, at any rate, an amusing anecdote [...]’

It’s a clever device and I have to say it works better in this book than in the previous one, enriching the reader’s understanding of the characters, keeping the tone light and balancing the more outlandish happenings.

Although it’s not strictly necessary, if like me you’re a homeworky sort of person it is worth (re)reading the classics on which Goss draws (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Island of Dr Moreau, Frankenstein, The Great God Pan and Rappaccini’s Daughter, and for this volume, Dracula, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and Carmilla). Certainly, seeing how Goss re-works these texts is one of the many pleasures of her two novels and they are all classics for a reason, they’re no hardship to read. (Now I’m sounding like a teacher again...)

All in all, this is superior fun and ideal summer holiday reading...

(Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, By the Lake, oil on canvas, 1918; from here)

could this be the least attractive pudding ever?

 

I mean, I admit I haven’t done it any favours in my choice of serving bowl (well, there wasn’t really a choice, it was that or nothing). But I don’t think it’s supposed to look like that...

Should you be wondering, I made it using a jar from the Hema (on offer! For one euro!). On the label it does actually clearly call itself ‘Bavarois’ but my eye was drawn to ‘Blueberry Cheesecake’ underneath it. Now I suspect that is the flavour of bavarois, but at the time I thought that it was cheesecake mix. Cheesecake, yum! First mistake.

I had to whip 500ml of cream, so I got out the electric handwhisk, conveniently forgetting that I had had a little accident with it the last time I used it. After a nasty burning smell, one of the whisky attachments thingies flying out across the kitchen, and inflicting a minor electric shock on myself, I realised it was beyond hope. So I got out the balloon whisk and sat down to whisk by hand (surprisingly messy).

Just as I was thinking, ‘Oh good, this is finally thickening up before my arm falls off’, the cream separated and started turning into butter. Why was that? I’m thinking it was the heat, it is quite warm here. It certainly wasn’t from over-enthusiastic whisking.

It is hot and I’d used up all the cream in the house so as the buttery/whey mix didn’t actually taste bad I decided to throw caution to the winds and the contents of the jar into the bowl. And so you see the result. The English translation on the label cheerily suggests that ‘For an extra attractive touch, pipe a rosette of whipped cream on top before serving’ but I won’t be doing that thanks anyway. I’ve put it into the fridge. Perhaps it will magically transform into something tasty and less reminiscent of blackberry vomit.

Revelations of a Lady Detective, by William Stephens Hayward

No, I had never heard of either this book or this author before. My path here was a winding one, starting off with Hugh Greene’s collection of later Victorian and Edwardian detective stories, Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. (Which I recommend!) Quite how I ended up ordering a second-hand copy of Revelations of a Lady Detective, I don’t now recall, but it began with looking up Loveday Brooke on the internet, thence to Victorian female detectives more generally. The only reason I was able to read it at all was its republication in 2013 by the British Library. It is now out of print again, but the BL copies mean that anyone can find a copy without having to pay vast sums for it.

Avoiding the urge to mention London buses, I’ll just say that this was first published in 1864, just months after Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective was issued, the very first work of fiction to feature a professional female detective as a heroine. Did William Stephens Hayward grind his teeth and throw his inkpot at the wall on discovering this? Quite possibly, and who can blame him. Yet this was not the beginning of a literary trend, for the next British lady detective did not recount her adventures in print for over twenty years (in Leonard Merrick’s Mr Bazalgette’s Agent, since you ask, and also reissued by the BL). All of this information appears in Mike Ashley’s excellent introduction to the BL edition.

(This appears to be the original cover illustration, in which Mrs Paschal is wearing the crinoline from which she wriggles in pursuit of a mysterious man in a black mask)

Our lady detective is Mrs Paschal, over forty and a widow who has taken up this ‘strange, exciting and mysterious’ career on the sudden death of her husband, which left her in dire financial straits. She tells us that her ‘brain was vigorous and subtle’, that she ‘was well born and educated, so that, like an accomplished actress, I could play my part in any drama in which I was instructed to take a part’ and that ‘For the parts I had to play, it was necessary to have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited, confidence’ and creativity. Later, she adds, ‘owing to frequent acquaintance with peril, I had become unusually hardened for a woman’ and that she is often considered ‘a Jonathan Wild in petticoats’. She also casually lets slip that ‘in her younger days’ she had been ‘employed as a barmaid at a large refreshment saloon at one of the railway stations’, which raises a few questions either about her good birth and education or about her marriage. Certainly, whatever her cases throw at her – being locked in an underground tunnel, eavesdropping a band of murderous Italians in a ruined mill, disguising herself as a nun or entering a thieves’ den – she remains cool and ingenious. However, this does not win her everyone’s respect:

I have met people who have turned up their noses at me for being a female detective or thief-taker, as they have thought fit to term me, but I never forgot the insult, and have had my eye upon them [...]

Revelations of a Lady Detective is not a novel but a series of short stories, the reminiscences of Mrs Paschal. They are very different from twentieth- and twenty-first-century detective stories in that the identity of the villain is never secret, nor are there any surprising twists. Rather, we are invited to admire the ingenuity with which Mrs Paschal gets her (wo)man. There are few murders; instead, most of the cases concern threatened property or inheritance. As Mrs Wareham tells Mrs Paschal of her son:

I am not angry with him [...] I am only sorry and regretful. I know he will see his folly some day, and then I shall forgive him all his unkindness, all his insolence, and all his ungentlemanly conduct, without one word of reproach, because I know he is not to blame. [...] There is one thing, though, which is becoming very serious. She has designs upon his property. [...] it would be extremely mortifying to me to see the splendid estates which have been in the family for centuries pass into other hands.

Not everyone in Revelations of a Lady Detective is as concerned with material wealth as Mrs Wareham but I found it interesting to reflect that in our modern culture we gravitate towards stories about murder, whereas William Stephens Hayward judged his readers to be at least as interested in stories about theft and fraud. I wonder how representative this is of Victorian detective fiction in general?

Reading these stories I was struck by how clearly they are related to gothic and sensation fiction. So there is a mysterious countess, stolen diamonds, a wicked abbess, a secret society of Italian revolutionaries, moonlit catacombs, poison and identical twins, all stocks of the gothic. Only the supernatural is missing. Also interesting is the number of female characters besides Mrs Paschal, both victims and criminals; while they tend not to have great depth, the Countess of Vervaine and Incognita in particular are memorable characters and excite Mrs Paschal’s grudging admiration and sympathy, even as she works against them.

William Stephens Hayward may not have been the best writer of his generation – and there are some sloppy bits, most noticeably when a character’s father dies on one page and is alive again on the next, and the name Wareham is overused – but these stories are entertaining enough to be something more than literary curios and I’m very glad to have read them.

on why holidays are good

Well, that was more of a break than I’d intended! It seems that even people who only work part-time sometimes need a holiday too, and I’m just back from two weeks of jauntering about England visiting unlucky friends and family and probably leaving a trail of odd articles of dirty laundry behind me. We learnt about the pioneering plastic surgery performed during the Second World War on pilots and aircrew who were badly burned at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead; we marvelled at Viking musical instruments and also a massive Viking poo at the Jorvik Centre in York; we revisited the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, despite the National Trust still a magical place; and we went several times to the Ipswich Museum, where the Egyptian Gallery has inspired my daughter to mummify the next unfortunate pet to die (she has even purchased a small canopic jar for the stomach; I am hoping that I can steer her more in the ship-burial direction, coward as I am).

Before my holiday I was tired, depressed and grappling with the problem I expect most of us deal with, of what is the point of any of this when there is so much misery, cruelty and destruction in the world. How can people bear such suffering as so many do, and how can we bear to witness it and yet do nothing effective to prevent it? Now I feel better but this is because I have distanced myself from it, and that feels wrong somehow, selfish and solipsistic. People who are fleeing war or poverty don’t have the option of taking a holiday, enjoying their garden, reading lovely novels or picnicking with friends. So although I feel happier at the moment, I do not know how to resolve this. Any suggestions gratefully received. :)

Anyway, back to the holiday and cheerier themes. As ever, I forgot to take any photographs. But! I also went a bit wild in the bookshops. For this we can all blame my parents who generously gave me a book token for Waterstone’s. (Although even I cannot blame them for the church-fête and charity-shop acquisitions.) So, I shall show you my haul and am keen to know which ones you have read and what you thought of them...

(The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson, because I love the Romantics and I love reading biographies of talented women; The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley, because her first novel was fun; The Encyclopaedia of the Dead, by Danilo Kiš, because both Kaggsy and Nicholas Lezard recommended it; Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics, because how could I not after reading HeavenAli’s review? Starlings, by Jo Walton, because she seems an interesting writer and short stories are a good way to get to know someone’s work)

(Emily of New Moon, by L.M. Montgomery, because how is it I don’t have a copy of this already? The Storm Keeper’s Island, by Catherine Doyle, which is obviously for my daughter and not at all for me; Peter Pan and Wendy, by J.M. Barrie, this is actually really for my daughter and is illustrated by Mabel Lucie Atwell sentimentally but sweetly)

(Here is the frontispiece from Peter Pan and Wendy, how could I reasonably resist?)

(The Complete Fairy Tales, by Charles Perrault, which is a kind gift from Hayley of Desperate Reader and which I only just managed to prise from my mother’s hands; Folk Tales of the British Isles, edited by Kevin Crossley-Holland, my star score from the Samaritan’s Bookshop at only £2.50, I am still cackling with glee over that one how lucky am I? In the background a dragon made by my daughter is posing nonchalantly)

(And a handful of detective novels, The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin; False Scent and Death at the Dolphin, by Ngaio Marsh; I like to have a little pile of detective novels, children’s books and other easy reads for when I am lazy or tired and I now have definitely enough to keep me going for a while)

That is not all: I have forgotten to photograph another charity-shop purchase, Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman, which I am devouring at the moment. It is lovely. Meanwhile, as if that weren’t enough, I came home to find Theodora Goss’s new novel had arrived, yippee!

(There appears to be a Christmas decoration as well as a dragon in the background, oh dear...)

And while I was away, Shiny New Books had their Booker Anniversary Week, to which I contributed short pieces on Troubles, by J.G. Farrell (winner of the Lost Booker), The Sea, by John Banville, and The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. I enjoyed all of them very much but I have to admit my favourite was Troubles. The other reviews are excellent and it forms an interesting if partial survey of changing literary tastes and fashions.

Normal service here will be resuming, in the mean time please do comment with your opinions and advice and I hope that you have been enjoying the summer so far.