a gallimaufry

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis

A little while ago I started reading Juliet Barker’s The Brontës; in fact I even decided to write about it on here as I read it. Unfortunately, like so many Parry projects, it fell by the wayside. There were two causes for this failure: one was that the Barker book was just too big and heavy to bring on the bus with me, which meant that I had ‘bus reading’ and the Barker, and I can’t really cope with reading more than one book at once so in the end the bus reading conquered the Barker. And then Brexit happened and I was too absorbed in politics – and then suddenly months had passed and I’d lost the momentum. But of course, I felt guilty about it.

However, bus reading or no bus reading I am inspired to pick it up again and this is entirely due to Samantha Ellis’s Take Courage, which is a sort-of biography of Anne Brontë. According to Ellis, Anne is the neglected, forgotten Brontë, usually considered – when considered at all – as mouselike and pious – boring, really. (And I would certainly agree that when people think about the Brontës, they think first and foremost of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.) Ellis herself had always been an Emily devotee, though she also admired Charlotte’s ‘toughness and spirit’. However, on a visit to the Parsonage in Haworth, Ellis reads Anne’s last letter:

‘I long to do some good in the world ... before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.’ This catches at my heart, and makes me breathe hard suddenly. I put the letter down. This Anne knew what she wanted. She had published two novels and many poems. She didn’t want to have to stop. She was courageous, she was tough, and she wanted more life.

Ellis is transfixed; she connects to Anne emotionally, and begins to suspect that what she had believed about Anne was untrue. So begins her journey to find a more interesting Anne, someone who turns out to be feminist, radical and courageous – not unlike Ellis herself, in fact. Reading Anne’s novels, she realises that they were not only undervalued when they were first published, they are still undervalued now.

Ellis’s first problem is that so little of what Anne wrote remains: two novels, some poems (though many have disappeared), five letters, four diary papers, two of which were co-written with Emily (they had a habit of writing a diary paper every four years, giving an update of their lives; they wrote them together if they could or separately if they were apart) and some marginalia in a few books. Otherwise she has to rely on what others wrote about Anne, and those of Anne’s possessions that still survive. Her solution is clever: she devotes each chapter of her book to one of the people closest to Anne – including the heroines of her two novels – ending with Anne herself. Each person ‘represents’ an aspect of Anne herself – so Maria, her mother, contains her origin story, her attitude towards motherhood and marriage; Tabby, the elderly servant, contains her love of the moors and nature. This approach reminded me of Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, which creates a frame around the central character by which we learn to know him. I thought this worked really well.

(Sketch of Anne by Charlotte Brontë, ca 1834; found here)

Ellis also eschews any attempt at objectivity or impartiality. This book is driven by her enthusiasm and liking for Anne, which gives it an enormous amount of energy and personality. She speculates fearlessly and, one can’t help feeling, perceptively, on how Anne might have felt or reacted to various situations (‘Anne must have...’ pops up frequently). She tells us about her own life as she researches Anne up in Haworth, visits the places associated with her life, contemplates her own life and new relationship, and she tells us too about her reactions to the material she reads about Anne’s life:

her optimism makes me sigh. I don’t want Anne to be the good girl diligently slogging away. It seems more fun to be Charlotte and Branwell, raging and sneering at their bosses, or Emily, hating employment so much that she mostly avoided it. I don’t want Anne to be excited about setting off for her first job in April 1839 when, at the time, all her siblings were at home and writing like the wind.

In doing this, Ellis takes some risks. One is that she mines Anne’s creative writing, especially her poetry, for Anne’s own opinions. Are her poems on her religious doubts, for instance, really expressions of her own struggles with faith? Might they not be partly or even entirely manipulated by Anne’s artistic skills to create certain effects? To give a doubting reader hope, for instance, rather than articulate her own fears? Or a mixture of both? She extends this to the writings of others: she implicitly suggests that the sisters Rose and Jessy Yorke in Shirley, for instance, are Charlotte and Anne – or how Charlotte perceived their relationship – based on no evidence I could see. I felt that Ellis might be right, but she might not be; I think the role of the imagination in shaping and transmuting biographical facts should never be underestimated and this made me uncomfortable sometimes.

Another risk is that Ellis’s partisanship for Anne, while cheering and necessary, colours her judgement and, for one thing, leads her to resent Charlotte. As I wrote above, I haven’t yet finished the Barker biography so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this, and from what I have read Charlotte does seem to have been quite a difficult person. However, Ellis does seem to put the worst interpretation on everything Charlotte does. For instance, Ellis believes that Charlotte suppressed Anne’s writing, but perhaps she was trying to protect her reputation (or doing a bit of both?); and it is just possible that in deciding to hold Anne’s funeral without her father, she was right and expecting Patrick to come and bury yet another child would have been too painful to him. It seems to be, in the world of the Brontës, that if you champion one you have to decry the others and that you can only be either/or about them. Ellis first goes to Haworth, after all, to promote her previous book, which pitched Wuthering Heights against Jane Eyre.

Yet taking risks like these creates a lively and affectionate read, through which I zipped in marked contrast to my attempts on Barker’s monumental, scrupulous, scholarly work, and the nice thing about the literary world is that we can enjoy both books and their different strengths. For Ellis’s analysis of Anne’s literary works, especially her novels, is brilliant and rightly reveals their daring, their radicalness and their ‘realness’. In Agnes Grey Anne lifted the lid on life as a governess, showing the ugly reality in which even ‘proper gentry’ behaved badly (this piece of news seems to have shocked the gentry). She also crafted a romance between a man and a woman which was both realistic and based on mutual respect (no glowering Byronic heroes here). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not only went beyond the ‘marriage plot’ (in which a novel is concerned only with the story leading up to the wedding), it looked unflinchingly and scandalously on alcoholism and a husband’s abuse of his marital rights – and it gives us a feminist heroine who fights for her and her son’s future.

(The dining-room at Haworth Parsonage with – I think – Anne’s writing desk on the table; photograph found here)

AND did you know? because I did not – unless you are reading an edition of Tenant which is based on Stevie Davies’ 1996 edition – or a first or second edition (lucky you) – then you are almost certainly reading a butchered text. !!! Most modern editions are based on a rackety edition published in 1854, years after Anne’s death. The publisher, Thomas Hodgson, wanted to issue the book cheaply, so hacked bits out to make the book fit one volume. This version has become the one most frequently reprinted ever since. Ellis lays a ‘mutilated’ edition beside the Davies edition and is shocked at the difference. Some removals seem to have been purely to cut the page count; others to subtly reduce the radicalness of the original. When I read this I jumped right out of bed and ran to my bookcase to check my own copy: yes, I do have the framing story, but other parts, including Anne’s preface, have been removed. Horrors! I’ll have to buy another book! And I’ll have to buy Agnes Grey, because I’ve never read it. Oh dear. What a painful duty.

In short: if you don’t know much about the Brontës, this strikes me as a great place to start. If you already do know a lot about the Brontës, you will enjoy revisting them in the company of a clever and opinionated friend.

Disclaimer: Samantha Ellis generously donated this book as part of a bundle of her work to be auctioned in the Authors for Grenfell fundraiser; and when I won it she inscribed all the books for me. Of course I only bid on her bundle because I like her work anyway, but it’s always nice to know that an author is a kind person ...

brexit and brontë

(Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore – but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.

Illustration by Niroot Puttapipat of Quatrain 70 of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald;
London, Folio Society, 2009; found here at the artist’s blog)

It’s been a little while since the last gallimaufry of links and, since I’m not feeling like writing (periodically, all the hate, violence, greed and intolerance in the world make me despair as I’m sure they do you and this is one of those times), here are a few posts you may find interesting.

For those of us despairing at the sheer depressing idiocy and duplicity that has characterised the Brexit debate on both sides, yesterday’s frolics on the Thames provided some light relief even as it reinforced doubts about the nation’s sanity:

One day, years from now, when I’m sitting in my armchair by the fire, my son will come up to me and ask, ‘Daddy... what did you do during the EU referendum?’

And I’ll put down my newspaper, remove the pipe from my mouth, and I’ll say, ‘Well, son. I went on a boozed-up boat trip down the Thames with Nigel Farage while men from Ukip shouted ‘Get a job!’ at Bob Geldof as he flicked V-signs at them from a pleasure cruiser and Scottish fishermen squirted water at rival campaigners in a dinghy and Members of Parliament gazed from the Commons in disbelief and 100 people on a bridge sang Rule Britannia.’

(Michael Deacon in the Telegraph; there’s a paywall so if you can’t access it, do read his tweets about it instead, they are hilarious)

If you are concerned about refugees, do consider signing the UNHCR’s petition urging governments to protect them and ensure their rights. (via Neil Gaiman)

It’s not often there’s good news about the environment, but here’s a nice story about Văcărești, an abandoned plot of urban wasteland in the heart of Bucharest which has been reclaimed by nature.

Spanish Lit Month 2016 is around the corner in July. As I am reliably unreliable when it comes to any sort of readalong (cough, Little, Big) I am planning to read Julián Ayesta’s Helena, or The Sea in Summer because I believe that even I can manage 124 pages in 31 days. (Although I’m not quite confident enough to add my name to the list.) Richard is also co-hosting a readalong of The Man Without Qualities; I would love to join in as I’ve meant to read this for ages but see above, unreliable. I have a collection of Musil’s short stories so might indulge in a Sympathy Read.

And 165 years after dining with Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë has been cleared of a ‘dress gaffe’ (though not of contributing to a ‘gloomy and silent evening’.

(The dress Charlotte didn’t wear, from here)

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, part two

At the end of my previous post about the family, Patrick Brontë had failed to find a second wife for himself and stepmother for his six children. This meant falling back onto Plan B: school. On the recommendation of a couple of family friends, the two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, aged just nine and eight, were sent off to Crofton Hall. Unfortunately, it was expensive, and Patrick had other children to educate…  

(Undated etching of Cowan Bridge, found here)

A new ‘School for Clergymen’s Daughters’ was being opened at Cowan Bridge and seemed an answer to Patrick’s prayer: the fees were half those of comparable schools and its list of patrons included some of the most eminent people in the land. So Patrick escorted Maria and Elizabeth there on 21 July 1824; three weeks later, he brought Charlotte, and in November, Emily, who was only six. By December, poor little Maria was showing signs of consumption but the school did not inform her family; it wasn’t until the middle of February, when she was seriously ill, that the school wrote to Patrick. He came immediately and took her home, where she died in May. Even as the family was nursing Maria, Elizabeth was falling ill with consumption too. There was an outbreak of typhus at the school and on doctor’s advice the girls were sent to the seaside – except for Elizabeth. She was sent back to Haworth in the company of a servant.

Patrick travelled to Silverdale the very next day to bring Emily and Charlotte home, and they never went back to Cowan Bridge. Elizabeth died in June. The remaining children were of course deeply traumatised by what had happened. It was particularly hard, Juliet Barker writes, that Maria and Elizabeth were the eldest; they were the ones who had led, whom the others had looked up to. Motherless children and orphans became a fixture of the remaining sisters’ writing.

Juliet Barker argues that Cowan Bridge was no worse than most schools of its time and in fact better than many. Children and adults were susceptible to fatal diseases the causes of which were not always understood; pupils dying at school was therefore a depressingly common phenomenon and Cowan Bridge’s record was not too bad. Still, the argument that ‘other schools were worse’ in terms of health and punishment is hardly an exoneration of Cowan Bridge. There’s no question that the food was unpleasant, unhygienically prepared and inadequate. The dirty kitchen was responsible for the outbreak of typhus. The girls were cold in winter and, most damningly, expected to wear thin shoes and pattens on their walks. This frequently resulted in wet feet, an invitation to illness –especially consumption. While Charlotte’s depiction of Lowood in Jane Eyre was fictional and based on a small girl’s perspective, particularly alive to cruelty and injustice, it was accurate enough for many former pupils to recognise its original as Cowan Bridge and distressing enough for readers of the time to be horrified by it; its regime may have been the norm but that didn’t make it acceptable to everyone in the nineteenth century.

(One of the little books by Charlotte, from here, where there are lots of nice images of the little books)

Back at Haworth the years passed, the pain grew bearable. The children read voraciously; in addition to their books at home they had access to the circulating libraries in Keighley and copies of Blackwood’s Magazine which they borrowed from a neighbour. Blackwood’s, with its Tory politics, satire and reviews of new works of biography, history, travel and fiction, had a profound influence on the siblings’ writings. Sadly, Emily’s and Anne’s early writings have not survived, but many of Branwell’s and Charlotte’s tiny books still exist. Juliet Barker writes very interestingly about the Gothicky stories of Glasstown and Angria, and the way in which they often formed a sort of artistic conversation between Charlotte and Branwell, a game they enjoyed playing with each other. In the stories they mock their sisters and each other and attack each other’s favourite characters. Barker claims that previous biographers have used Charlotte and Branwell’s cheerfully prolific references to drunkenness to argue that Branwell was already boozing (at the age of thirteen!) – but they don’t argue the same of Charlotte, an interesting double standard.

But the spectre of school and of a governessy future never entirely receded and when Charlotte was fourteen she was sent off to Roe Head School (a considerable improvement on Cowan Bridge which I feel slightly undermines Barker’s earlier position that Cowan Bridge was sort of all right really). Although it was tough for Charlotte, especially at first, she made friends – two were lifelong – and entertained her fellows by telling them stories – a sort of creative lifeline for her, too, away from Branwell and the little books. She also excelled academically. Later she was to return to teach, a less happy experience. Emily and Anne were also sent to Roe Head in due course but Emily only lasted three months before falling ill and being sent home. Barker speculates that while all the sisters found school difficult, Anne and Charlotte had a much stronger sense of duty and obligation than Emily, who simply could not and would not abide the restrictions.

(Drawing of Roe Head school by Anne Brontë, c. 1835–37; found here)

It’s hard not to feel angry on Charlotte and Anne’s behalfs, and not just because there were so few avenues available to them as middle-class women who must earn their livings so they were forced into something that made them miserable. Patrick dissuaded Charlotte from considering a writing career as being too uncertain. This was no doubt true, yet while Charlotte was gritting her teeth teaching French etc. to mischievous girls at Roe Head, Branwell was faffing about at home – shall I become an artist or a writer? Artist? Writer? – and writing hilariously entitled letters to the editor of Blackwood’s insisting that he read Branwell’s work and hire him at once as the next James Hogg. Patrick’s indulgence of this seems doubly odd as everyone seems to have agreed that Branwell was a totally crap painter. And while I’m on the subject, Branwell doesn’t seem at any point to have been sent off to school. So at this stage of the biography, the Brontë men are rather taxing my patience despite Juliet Barker’s even-handedness.

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, part one

It was only when I started seeing reviews of Claire Harman’s new biography of her, that I realised that 2016 was a Significant Year: the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. Stefanie’s and Jenny’s brilliant reviews made me wild to read about this extremely talented and erm slightly unusual family, and I knew I had a copy of Margaret Lane’s biography… but who knows where that is? It may be at my parents’ house, but even though that poor book has lain unread for ten years on a shelf or perhaps even in a box, suddenly I could not wait even a couple of months until I next visited them. I needed Brontës right now! And although the Harman biography looked very good, I decided to succumb entirely to Brontëmania and ordered a copy of Juliet Barker’s biography of the whole family, described as ‘definitive’.

Definitive it may very well be, but it is also enormous. Huge! Bigger than my Collected Shakespeare! When the postman arrived, we had to remove the front door simply to get the book in the house! I can only read it if K kneels before me holding it up and open, as a human lectern! And it’s so heavy he weeps all the time he’s holding it! Progress through such a large book is thus necessarily slow and, the Parry brains being no longer what they could be, I feared that I might forget the beginning before I reached the end. Then I thought: I’ll write about it as I go along!

Before I started, I believed I knew a few things about the Bs:

1. Patrick Brontë, the papa, was a mean old tyrant.
2. Branwell, the brother, was a useless drunkard. And his paintings were crap!
3. The children lived an isolated and friendless life, with only the moors, their imaginations and assorted dogs called Gnasher and Psycho for companions.
4. Everyone (except Papa) died of consumption, either due to the horrible cruel school where the girls were sent by their mean old papa, or due to the poisonous fumes of the churchyard by their house, I don’t really know which but it was definitely grim and Victorian.

Already, it seems that I may not have been correct about all of these...

(Photograph of Patrick Brontë around 1860; found here)

The biography starts off with several chapters concerning Patrick’s life before becoming a father. I admit that I was impatient to get onto some wailing and moorland, but this section is both useful for understanding the children’s domestic environment and important because it gives us a more rounded figure of Patrick than the mean old git of popular legend. Born in Ireland of farming stock, Patrick managed to secure himself a place at St John’s, Cambridge: he was clearly very intellectually able but without an immense amount of hard work and determination he would never have succeeded. At university, surrounded by the sons of the richest families in Britain, he struggled to make ends meet yet was almost always top of his class. He also managed to make some useful friends who helped him to his first job as a curate in the Essex village of Wethersfield. Here he had a fairly easy life and contracted an engagement with Mary Burder. Precisely what happened next is unclear, but it seems that Mary’s uncle – her father was dead, but the family was reasonably well-off – took a dim view of Patrick’s future prospects and Irishness. He forbad the marriage and whisked Mary away from Wethersfield to his house. Embarrassed by this and convinced that God had acted through the uncle (Mary was a Nonconformist and marrying her was a bit problematic for Patrick’s conscience and career), Patrick gave her up, found another job and moved away; Mary continued to hope for some years after. Eventually, bitterly hurt, she realised that their engagement would never be renewed and believed she had been jilted.

Not so much is known about Patrick’s wife, Maria Branwell, whom he met when she was helping her aunt with the domestic side of running a school, Woodhouse Grove, and married in 1812. She had grown up in Penzance in middle-class comfort and a whirl of social activity until her father died when she was twenty-five (her mother died a year later). Her letters seem to suggest she was more playful and perhaps light-hearted than Patrick. What would life have been like for our future authors and their siblings had she survived? For after bearing six children in as many years, she contracted what was probably cancer of the uterus and died; her suffering lasted a harrowing seven and a half months.

(Maria Branwell, artist unknown, at around the age of 15 according to the internets; found here)

Maria’s great concern seems to have been for the future of her children, and it must have been heartbreaking for her to know she would never see them grow and that they would be marked by her loss. But her death brought another problem. She left five daughters and, despite all Patrick’s hard work, it was clear that none of them would be independently wealthy through him. If they failed to marry, they would have to earn their own livings. In the early nineteenth century, pretty much the only respectable form of employment for an unmarried middle-class woman was teaching, either as a governess or in a school. Without a mother, however, the Brontë girls would fail to acquire the education necessary for such employment – unless they went to school. And school cost money and Patrick did not have much money.

In the two years following Maria’s death, therefore, Patrick desperately sought a second wife. Did he realise that a man of limited means with six small children whose wife had only recently died was perhaps not the most attractive prospect as a husband? He seems to have proposed or tried to propose to three women and managed to do so in a way that left them no longer on speaking terms with him. One of these women was none other than poor Mary Burder. Patrick seems genuinely surprised that she might have been wounded by his behaviour a dozen or so years previously.

So far, Juliet Barker has been rather at pains to rehabilitate Patrick Brontë from the damning portrait painted by Elizabeth Gaskell and sometimes perhaps bends a bit too far the other way. That drive which served him so well in his career may have rendered him rather blinkered when it came to others’ sensitivities. He also had a lot of calls on his time which surely would have kept him from spending a lot of time with his children – although in Victorian England, that was not remotely unusual. Discharging the pistol which you slept with from the back of the house every morning was, on the other hand, definitely unusual however you try to gloss it.

Next time: horrible school and juvenilia.

The Angelic Avengers, by Pierre Andrézel/Isak Dinesen

(Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen at her desk at home in Rungstedlund, 1955; from the archives of her Danish publisher, Gyldendal; found here)

Recently I read a biography of Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman (and very good it was too). Thurman naturally enough discusses Dinesen’s work and the circumstances which gave rise to it, and of course discussed the only novel she published, The Angelic Avengers. This was written during the war while Denmark was under the ‘protection’ of the Nazis; Dinesen just made it up as she went along for ‘a little fun’, in contrast to her manner of composing her tales, which involved much more polishing, and published it in Denmark in 1944 under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. (I don’t know if there’s any significance to Andrézel, it makes me think of donkeys! Because of the French âne and Dutch ezel.) The press quickly discovered the author’s true identity, although Dinesen steadfastly refused to admit she had written it, and it was judged by the standard of her tales and savaged. Perhaps because this experience was so upsetting, perhaps because she herself felt that the book was substandard, Dinesen only publicly acknowledged The Angelic Avengers as a work of hers in an interview with the Paris Review in 1956 (the English translation, which she made herself, was published in 1946 and 1947 when she was desperate for money; another possible reason for her to distance herself from it).

Intrigued by this, I ordered a copy at once! I must say that I think the savaging was completely unjustified, although yes yes, her tales are greater works of art. Perhaps it is to Dinesen what Orlando is to Virginia Woolf. It’s fun, a playful gothic tale of damsels in distress that’s perfectly suited to these chill dark days. It is set in Victorian England and is indeed quite silly, but there is more to it than pure melodramatic escapism and it is all written in Dinesen’s delightful, elegant prose.

[Zosine] once more turned towards the others. ‘No one, no one on earth,’ she passionately exclaimed, ‘can realize what I have gone through, what I have experienced during these days and nights! It is a terrible thing to be deceiving all the people round you! But at the same time it has in it a kind of fascination. It is an affair to exert all one’s faculties. It is a fatal game; it is wicked, I believe! But still it is a game, one feels as if one might go on for ever! But now I am more tired than I had thought it possible to be! It is when danger is over that one sits down to die. I am happy, but my strength has gone, and I am changed! I believe I have grown old!’

Orphaned Lucan Bellenden, daughter of a scientist, is forced to flee her position as a governess by the unwelcome proposition of her employer. She seeks refuge with her schoolfriend, the wealthy Zosine. However, Zosine’s fortunes are about to change drastically, and the two girls try to find work via a London agency, through which they are selected by the philanthropic, kind Reverend Pennhallow and his wife to be their companions in place of their lost daughter and receive a proper education. But all may not be as it seems – dah dah daaaaah! (For once I’ll try not to spoil the plot.)

The oppression of women is a core theme in The Angelic Avengers.The two girls must support each other and save themselves from the dreadful fate which awaits them. The masculine world is portrayed as threatening and exploitative. A male employer may propose that his children’s governess become his mistress, and her only recourse is flight (Dinesen admired Jane Eyre and there are many references to it in The Angelic Avengers: here the Mr Rochester figure is abusive). Without a male protector, young women are vulnerable; poorly educated but not working class, their avenues of employment are few and mainly labelled ‘governess’. Men devise, run and are the consumers in the (female) white slave trade. Of course the girls end up happily married at the end (I don’t think that’s a spoiler!) to nice young aristocrats whose inherited fortunes seemingly are not founded on the pain of other human beings, but in a nice twist on the traditional fairy tale of the hero who wins a princess at the conclusion of his adventures, these young men are very much rewards for the heroines’ bravery and spiritual strength rather than active helpers or interesting characters.

For when the girls face a terrible evil, the young men are no help at all, nor is the rich papa. The only support Lucan and Zosine receive comes from another woman, an apparently mad black former nanny, even more dispossessed than they, yet courageous and loving. The central moral question the book poses through their plight is: how does one respond to evil, particularly when one is powerless? Zosine and Lucan each find slightly different answers to that question. Revenge, as it turns out, causes moral sickness in the administrator. The book argues that the destruction of evil requires forgiveness and compassion. This cannot have been an easy message to write or to read in ‘protected’ and post-war Denmark.

This is a melodrama, and thus there are a lot of extremes and far-fetched elements, some of which involve playing  with literary conventions and expectations of the gothic. In another echo of Jane Eyre, the fortune of Zosine’s beloved papa has been built up in the West Indies – on slave labour. Through Olympia, the nanny, Dinesen shows this distressing basis to European wealth: yes, Dinesen’s language isn’t what we would use today, and Olympia herself doesn’t question an order in which she is expected to serve, but her story of the horrible white man feeding on slave flesh is a vivid metaphor for the exploitation of the black West Indians by the whites. Whites preying on blacks, men preying on women: the nineteenth century is an ugly time.

Despite all this, The Angelic Avengers never takes itself too seriously. Something Zosine says to Lucan has been picked out as an epigraph for the novel, and it’s very fitting:

You serious people must not be too hard on human beings for what they choose to amuse themselves with, when they are shut up in a prison, and are not even allowed to say that they areJane Eyre prisoners: if I do not soon get a little bit of fun, I shall die!

Oh, and I’ve just discovered that it was made into a film in the US in 1948!

(Images are of the British and Danish covers of the first editions of The Angelic Avengers.)

On rereading Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

‘I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking. I wandered, on a moonlight night, through the grass-grown enclosure within: here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of cornice. Wrapped u in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms – however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me: at last I gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap: you turned an angle of the road: I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke.’

It’s a long time since I first read Jane Eyre, I must have been about fourteen or so, and while I remember enjoying it my impression of it has since been overlaid by the Orson Welles film – a lovely film but I do not think it represents the novel very well at all. Things which surprised me on this rereading: how flawed all the characters are and how much more it is than the relationship between Jane and Rochester. Also (perhaps in reaction to The Golden Bowl) how extraordinarily light and rich the prose is, how quick the pace.

Since I am thinking about fairy tales a lot at present I was particularly struck by the fairy-tale elements in the novel. Amateur Reader points out that narrator-Jane herself refers to the passage to Bertha’s room, ‘with its two rows of black doors all shut, [is] like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle’, and although the murderous monster is the wife rather than the husband, certainly the forbidden chamber keeps his terrible secret (and Bertha ultimately throws herself off the battlements to elude Rochester’s outstretched hands, so perhaps he is not entirely innocent of her death in some sense). However, like Hayley at Desperate Reader I think the echoes of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ are strong too, with Jane as the dependant in the household of the brooding, moody Rochester, at the end of the novel returning to him and bringing him back to life. The decaying old house in the forest is also reminiscent of the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted palace surrounded by briars. In his conversations with Jane, Rochester allows his imagination to play freely with the idea that she is an elf, a fairy, and Mrs Reed would probably agree with him that she is some sort of changeling. Mrs Reed herself is a wicked stepmother, Brocklehurst a wolf (‘What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a great nose! and what a mouth! and what large, prominent teeth!’) and Blanche a wicked stepsister who is vanquished by Cinderella-Jane. Jane is also an intrepid heroine who, upon learning her partner’s true nature, must undertake a quest to restore him, in the vein of stories like ‘East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon’. The novel ends with a marriage, as all good fairytales should.

These fairytale elements are overlaid with folk lore and the supernatural – narrator-Jane refers to the ghostly hound the Gytrash when she first sees Pilot gliding through the hazel in the moonlight, and to will-o’the-wisps; her dreams of Thornfield in ruins are prophetic – which all somehow make more plausible the terrors of the Red Room, the madwoman haunting the attics and creeping down to stare at Jane in her bed, Rochester’s remorseful cry which Jane hears far away with St John.

(Fritz Eichenberg, ‘A long grace was said an a hymn sung’, illustration for 1943 Random House edition, filched from Jane Eyre Illustrated which is a fascinating site)

Did I say that the novel ends with a marriage? That’s not quite true, is it? The novel ends with St John and his imminent demise. It is the fourth death in the novel (and yes, I cried when I read Helen Burns’s), and each death invites a consideration of the life which preceded it. Jane’s constant struggle is to live a ‘good’ life, to be true to herself, while yet being virtuous – not necessarily religious. Indeed, once out of Lowood she doesn’t seem to be much of a churchgoer. During the novel Jane comes into contact with different forms of Protestantism – Eliza Reed’s, Helen Burns’s, Brocklehurst’s and St John River’s. Brocklehurst, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, is easily dismissed as a hypocrite who starves and bullies children and causes their deaths. Eliza is also hypocritical as her religious ways do not blunt her spite; her obsession with the rubric and decision to retire to a convent reveal her to be a woman interested only in her own salvation and unprepared to work in the world for the good of others. St John, unlike Eliza, is an active Christian whose purpose in life is to save souls and this draws Jane’s admiration (also, he saved her life!), but he is like Eliza too for he is without love (see 1 Corinthians 13). Helen teaches Jane a great deal, not least to survive the horrors of Lowood. It’s very clear that while her philosophy is self-abnegating, it is an entirely justifiable way for a dying child to make sense of her brutally short and powerless life. I wish I knew more about nineteenth-century Christianity because I am sure there is a lot more to all this than these simplistic sketches suggest.

(Helen Sewell, ‘In sleep forgot sorrow’, illustration for 1938 Oxford University Press edition, also from Jane Eyre Illustrated)

Religion isn’t necessarily in opposition to fairytale, although organised religion seems to stifle the imaginative life the fairytale may represent. I think the two work together. Jane is a sort of pilgrim, but also a missionary who ‘saves’ Rochester. While he witters on about elves, she is often grooming his morals. Perhaps this missionary quality is what in her is sympathetic to St John (it’s true that he’s not a likeable character but narrator-Jane is at pains to emphasise that he has the qualities of a hero). At the end of the book both of them have succeeded.

Rats. This was supposed to be a short post written as a break from revising for my Flemish-language exams.

(The first illustration is by Dame Darcy for this illustrated Penguin edition)