a gallimaufry

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson

We lay upon the sloping Turf. Earth & sky were so lovely that they melted our very hearts. The sky to the north was of a chastened yet rich yellow fading into pale blue & streaked & scattered over with steady islands of purple melting away into shades of pink. It made my heart almost feel like a vision to me.

Dorothy Wordsworth, wrote the literary critic Ernest de Sélincourt, was ‘probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public’. I appreciate that is a fairly defined category, but the excerpts of her Grasmere Journal quoted in this brilliant biography reveal a truly great nature writer who has not had her due.

(Silhouette of Dorothy Wordsworth, taken in 1806 when she was thirty-four. From the Wordsworth Trust)

Wilson focuses on the two and a half years of the Grasmere Journal, the pinnacle of Dorothy’s literary achievement, written while she and her brother William were living in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. She is a sensitive reader of what Dorothy writes – and what she doesn’t write – and always works from Dorothy’s own words to discuss Dorothy’s childhood, her life before moving to Grasmere and her life after William married Mary Hutchinson, as well as Dorothy’s own character. The woman who emerges from these pages is complex, passionate and creative: Wilson describes her as a Cathy to William’s Heathcliff.

When Dorothy was six and William seven, their mother died, and Dorothy was separated from her four brothers and sent away to live with an aunt in Halifax. Aunt Elizabeth was kind but Dorothy was never to see her childhood home in Cockermouth again, she wasn’t even allowed back for Christmas. It’s hard to imagine the traumatic effect this must have had on her; it certainly laid the ground for her lack of self-esteem and her need to construct a happier existence through writing. At the age of fifteen, three years after her father’s death, she was sent to live with her grandparents as ‘a professional poor relation’. The grandparents were a ‘joyless’ pair who found Dorothy ‘wild and intractable’; however, Dorothy was now able to become reacquainted with her brothers, whom she had not seen for nine years. She immediately formed a close bond with William, a bond that was to have many of the elements of romantic love in it, for they found themselves in each other.

When William went away to Cambridge to study, Dorothy missed him enormously. Fortunately, after eighteen months she was invited to live with her uncle and his new bride in Norfolk, where she quickly became indispensible as ‘head nurse, housekeeper, tutoress of the little ones or rather superintendent of the nursery’ as her aunt gave birth to a new baby every year. However, she and William corresponded constantly and became even closer. In 1794, aged twenty-two, Dorothy left her uncle’s Norfolk rectory to go for a ‘pilgrimage’, a long walk, through the Lake District, and after this they set up house together in a string of different places, ending in Dove Cottage.

Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journal for William to read. Far from being artless, her diary entries were the products of intense and accurate observation and careful selection of words. Wilson contrast them with her letters to her childhood friend Jane Pollard. In the letters, Dorothy’s ‘emotions are fashionably exaggerated’; they are ‘so different from the sharpness, shyness, and indirection of her journal entries that it is sometimes hard to believe they are by the same woman’. Wilson notes that occasionally Dorothy wrote two versions of the same day’s events in her journal, evoking quite different emotions. She portrays Dorothy and William’s intense love for each other as symbiotic and feeding off each other. There are echoes of the journals in William’s poetry of the time. Had Mr Mybug been a feminist, he would have undoubtedly claimed that Dorothy wrote William’s poems. The more likely explanation is that William and Dorothy discussed their impressions together before writing them down, or that William read her journal entries and used phrases from them in his own work. Dorothy was valued not only by William, but also by Coleridge and De Quincey, by all who knew her, for her great responsiveness, her sensitivity to what she saw and heard.

(A page from the Grasmere Journal, showing a description of daffodils at Ullswater; the Wordsworth Trust; found here)

After William’s marriage the fire went out of Dorothy’s writing and she seems to have subsided into a more conventional rôle as maiden aunt, helping with the upbringing of the children. Wilson argues that she should not be seen as a ‘victim of nineteenth-century femininity’, yet it is simply impossible not to wonder what her literary career might have been had she had the opportunities of her brother. It does seem at least she has finally received the biography she deserved; Wilson really is an exemplary researcher and writer and as well as looking out for a copy of Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, I’m keen to read more of Wilson’s work.

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.

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (4)

(James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 3, 1866, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; found here)

Amazing news! I have finally finished rereading The Portrait of a Lady. And it is clear to me that if I am not to be reduced to reading nothing more demanding than the oeuvre of Enid Blyton, I had better start spending less time on the internet. My attention span appears to be the size of a gnat’s these days.

Despite my mental feebleness I have thoroughly enjoyed the novel and am keener than before to read The Wings of a Dove which, Graham Greene assures me in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, is a variation on the same basic plot. I have been thinking more about what I wrote last time, James’s wonderful ability to use metaphor to turn an emotional or cognitive state into a concrete image; an example being about Henrietta’s nosiness into Goodwood’s private business: ‘this enquiring authoress was constantly flashing her lantern into the quiet darkness of his soul’. Do other writers do this and I just haven’t noticed, or is it a peculiarity of Henry James’s? There seems something very particular about it.

Even though I have read the novel before I had completely forgotten the most significant revelation near the end of it and was completely gobsmacked. The actual ending was open yet bleak as James’s endings always seem to be (well, of those of his works I’ve read), and yet perhaps not completely bleak. Isabel returns to Rome because she has promised Pansy she will, repaying a betrayal (not Pansy’s!) with loyalty. And Ralph has left her the use of Gardencourt for a year; the novel has proved Ralph to be prescient and so perhaps Isabel will not stay long with horrible Osmond after all.

Which brings me to something I haven’t yet been able to resolve: what are Isabel’s rights? She married a American in Italy but in an American church. Which nation’s jurisdiction applies to her? Were she British and married in Britain, her property and money would have become her husband’s, but perhaps the US or Italy had more liberal laws? (This is assuming that Isabel might overcome her reverence for the institution of marriage and its duties.)

Another possible bright light at the end of the novel is Henrietta’s future. True, there is not one single precedent of a happy marriage in this book and true, Ralph’s previous experiment in bequests ended disastrously. Like Isabel, I’m a tiny bit sorry that she is going to marry, but at least they know each other well. And this time Ralph seems to have directed his legacy more wisely, in giving his money to Henrietta to start a newspaper and work. I was quite annoyed on Henrietta’s behalf to discover that in this edition of The Portrait of a Lady, revised by James in 1907, the author altered passages about her to make her more of a caricature. She deserves better than that!

Having spent so much time with the characters and known them so deeply, I cannot stop wondering about what will happen to them... Thanks again to Dolce Bellezza, for precipitating this, even though I’ve finished so much later than everyone else in the readalong!

(Antonio da Correggio, Adoration of the Child, 1518–20, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; from here; surprisingly – to me, anyway – ‘Henrietta had a special devotion to this intimate scene – she thought it the most beautiful picture in the world’; perhaps from this we are meant to realise that Henrietta too would like a family?)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (3)

Civilisations have risen and fallen since I started rereading The Portrait of a Lady, but I am now on the home straight. (Meanwhile, I haven’t read my February What Shall Helen Read? book, Small Island, but I shall as soon as I finish this.) Now that Marie Kondo and I have parted ways (more on this soon!) I have a little more time for Henry James and I thought I’d pause and think about this next part that I’ve read.

(John Singer Sargent, Villa di Marlia, Lucca, 1910; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; found here)

We have skipped forward three years, and Isabel is now unhappily married to Gilbert Osmond who has turned out to be a prize git who really wanted a wife he could shape to reflect his own ideas – a bigger version of the tiny Pansy, I suppose, who is devoted to her papa and does everything she can to please him. Isabel feels that Osmond does have a reason to feel aggrieved, because she was so eager to impress him during their courtship she perhaps made it seem that she was less independent and energetic than she really was. In a way she feels aggrieved with him too, but acknowledges that no one compelled her to marry him: she chose of her own free will. She feels that part of her choice was wanting to bestow her money on her husband, whom she believed a fit recipient. Without her fortune, would she have married him? It seems unlikely that he would have married her.

Considering how disastrously her own marriage has turned out, Isabel’s decision to interfere in Pansy’s future merely to curry favour with Osmond shocked me. She justifies this to herself by remarking that Pansy is docile and obedient, as if these qualities mean that she has no views or feelings of her own. In another novel perhaps the doll-like Pansy would turn out to be a psychopathic killer, but I don’t recall The Portrait of a Lady ending in a bloodbath. Isabel wishes to deny Pansy the freedom to choose for herself that she, Isabel, was able to exercise. In fairness, perhaps Isabel feels that her own bad choice of a mate proves that girls in love do not have very good judgement and someone wiser and more experienced should take charge. Still, it is surprising that she considers herself to be that person, what with her record of character misjudgement... Fortunately, she now seems to be rethinking her interference, if only because she is becoming increasingly doubtful of Lord Warburton’s motivation in offering for Pansy’s hand. But I fear that Pansy’s future will be as grey as that of every other married woman in the novel. Even if she is allowed her choice of Edward Rosier, I am not sure she would be happy, since his appreciation of her principally as an aesthetic and pure object is not so very different from Osmond’s attitude towards Isabel (though Rosier seems a bit silly rather than malignant).

I am enjoying James’s way of using unexpected, detailed and beautiful similes to describe his characters; he uses physical things and spaces to delineate their metaphysical states. He has just described the Countess as:

like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle, a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her.

For me, it’s the flourish of ‘the remarkably pink lip’ which really makes this simile so precisely suited to the Countess; it’s particular and makes the simile concrete; it conveys something of her hard, frivolous and licentious character. And the rattle is her silly chatter, her rattle-pate. But I really love this description of the Osmond marriage, which turns their relationship into a physical space:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

Such a horrific evocation of the kind of living entombment Isabel must now endure.

(Romaine Brooks, Le Piano, 1910; found here)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (2)

I’m inching further along with The Portrait of a Lady. I realise that in my last post, I never once mentioned why I love Henry James’s writing so much – with the proviso that I do not love it quite so much, though I admire it, in The Golden Bowl. With his long, supple sentences and his exquisitely tuned choice of words, James can track every subtle shift in a character’s train of thought or emotion. He describes their rich, inner lives precisely and with nuance. He examines his characters’ motivations scrupulously and sympathetically; he allows them to be many things at once and experience many, maybe conflicting, feelings at once.

No detail is too tiny because every detail reveals something about a person. So Ralph, when he learns from Henrietta that Casper Goodwood has paid a visit and perhaps proposed to Isabel after she had told Ralph that she was expecting no visitors, experiences a pang, ‘and it was a new pang to him to have to suspect her of duplicity. On the other hand, he quickly said to himself, what concern was it of his that she should have made an appointment with a lover?’ Henrietta enlightens him immediately: Isabel had not expected Goodwood because Henrietta had sent him.

‘Isabel was cruel?’ – and Ralph’s face lighted with the relief of his cousin’s not having shown duplicity.

‘I don’t exactly know what passed between them. But she gave him no satisfaction – she sent him back to America.’

‘Poor Mr Goodwood,’ Ralph sighed.

And we know exactly how heartfelt that sigh was without James having to write anything further.

Even Goodwood, about whom I was not very complimentary in the last post, is presented as a complex individual, powerful and certain and yet also uncertain and humble. Although yes, still a bit stalkerish.

(James Tissot, A Widow, 1868, private collection; from here)

And so on to Madame Merle, who has now fetched up at Gardencourt as Mr Touchett lies on his deathbed. (Unfortunately for me, my daughter watched the cartoon film of The Sword in the Stone a couple of days ago and Madame Mim keeps popping into my head whenever I see the words ‘Madame Merle’ which is adding a layer to my reading of the novel that I think I can safely assume Henry James did not foresee.) Like the Touchetts, Madame Merle is a sort of hybrid although she veils her origins and Isabel initially thinks she is French as she appears at least to have sloughed off those ‘American’ characteristics of directness and simplicity, and steeped herself in European culture. Mrs Touchett remarks that Madame Merle loves mystery and she seems exotic to Isabel and a rôle model for her. Madame Merle is accomplished at everything the leisured upper classes most value: she is beautiful, witty but not too witty, worldly and adept at conversation; she plays the piano, sketches and embroiders with skill; she is well connected and knows the best people in Europe. She strikes Isabel as superior to other people; Isabel also considers herself to be somewhat superior to others and here is Madame Merle as the embodiment of all she most admires. She has perfect ‘taste’. Isabel is not uncritical: she recognises that for all her charm Madame Merle is unemotional and lacks ‘wildness’. However, she feels that Madame Merle has much to teach her.

Madame Merle, like Mrs Touchett, has not been happily married; she hints at a stormy past before she was widowed. As an older woman, is Madame Merle an alternative figure to Mrs Touchett of what Isabel, still forming herself, might become in later life?

I have also now met Gilbert Osmond. Interestingly, Osmond’s appearance is described in detail twice – more, I think, than that of anyone else in the book, including Isabel’s. The word ‘fine’ is often used of him, both of how he looks and of his taste. Osmond appreciates Isabel as an aesthetic object, something to own and display like his ‘bibelots’, an expression of his fine taste. Isabel, on being shown his collection, worries not that she will ‘expose’ not ‘her ignorance’ but ‘her possible grossness of perception’, a lapse in taste. Meanwhile, Madame Merle’s taste has been offended by Osmond’s sister, the Countess. (The Countess is also unhappily married!) The Countess immediately realises what Madame Merle has planned and accosts her; for Madame Merle this is ‘one of her pretty perversities’; she finds her ‘manner was odious’ and her expressions ‘coarse’. Directness and honesty, here, are offensive; lying and manipulation, however, are not. Madame Merle and Osmond seem to have refined themselves out of much sense of morality.

As for Pansy, what a cipher she is proving. ‘A convent flower’, ‘innocent’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘insipid’, she is treated by everyone like a baby yet they discuss her marrying the next year.

(John Everett Millais, Hearts are Trumps, 1872; Tate collection)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (1)

I am rereading this as part of a readalong organised by Dolce Bellezza. I notice that I acquired my copy in October 1994, a period of my life when I wrote my name and the date of purchase (and sometimes, the place of purchase!) in slightly pretentious handwriting at the front of each book I bought. At that time I had just graduated and was working in a bookshop while trying to find a job in publishing. I had managed to study English literature for three years without actually reading a word of James and I decided to start with his most famous work. As far as I remember I loved it, but found Isabel Archer mysterious and quite inscrutable.

As this is a readalong I plan to write two posts about it, as I read through it. These are some of my initial thoughts, up to Chapter 16 and Isabel’s encounter with Casper Goodwood.

(Sir John Lavery, The Lady in White, Manchester Art Gallery, from here; this is the painting used on the cover of my Oxford World’s Classics edition though incorrectly attributed there to ‘James Lavery’)

One thing that struck me more forcibly this time than I remember on my first reading is James’s needling of the English upper classes, with Ralph Touchett being an honorary member of that sect. My attention was caught in a description of Isabel’s drives in the countryside by a reference to ‘patches of ancient common and glimpses of empty park’ which I could not help interpreting as a reference to enclosure and to the holding of vast tracts of land by the aristocracy for their pleasure in contrast with the ‘ancient common’, land which belongs to the people and is grazed by their flocks and worked by them.

 While Isabel settles in to life at Gardencourt and enjoys its beauties, Henrietta Stackpole is less amenable and directly critical of Ralph’s ‘idle’ life (‘when I have to work like a car-conductor’) and ‘sophistication’ which, to her mind, has more than a tinge of dishonesty about it; her class-consciousness is sharpened by her awareness that Ralph is constantly and covertly mocking her. Lord Warburton is depicted as a true ‘noble’ man; he espouses land reform and is considered a ‘radical’. However, he is vague when pressed about actually relinquishing any of his own property; he’s a romantic without real substance, according to Mr Touchett:

He has elegant tastes – cares for literature, for art, for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure – more perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. [...] His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as he is; he’s too much liked.

Mr Touchett has been ‘watching these people for upwards of thirty-five years’, with less hostility than Henrietta Stackpole. Still, he points to the difference between the US and Britain:

You [Isabel] and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first.

Ouch – Britain is not a true democracy after all. The aristocracy, Mr Touchett explains, is an obstacle to this, well regulated though the country is.

For these leisured people, to amuse and be amused are central tenets of life. ‘You may do what you please [...] if you’ll amuse me till seven o’clock,’ as Isabel tells Ralph. People, including strangers with ‘an introduction’, are invited to country houses to visit. Lady Pensil’s place in Bedfordshire (Bedfordshire, according to Mr Bantling, is ‘tiresome’, tiresome being the opposite of amusing and therefore a damning epithet) offers ‘genuine English sport’ and ‘theatricals and picnics and that sort of thing’, the games with which the wealthy pass their time. Ralph assures Henrietta ‘You’ll amuse yourself much more in Bedfordshire’ than at Gardencourt’ – with two resident invalids and a chatelaine who is rarely there, Gardencourt is generally quiet, ‘not English at all’, ’dull’ and without entertainments, what would a visitor do there? ‘[W]ill they make themselves agreeable to me?’ wonders Isabel about the English. With no other purpose than entertaining each other, it is important to all the characters that the social surface remain smooth, charming, agreeable.

The other aspect that struck me is how condescending many of the male characters are to Isabel. (Even more to Henrietta, who is just that bit further off the feminine ideal of the time.) Casper Goodwood, whom 1990s Helen might have thought romantic in his pursuit of Isabel across the ocean, I now perceive as stalkerish in his refusal to accept no for an answer and his insistence that he knows what is best for her. Ralph badgers his mother: what are her ‘plans’ for Isabel’s future; he is taken aback when she declares that she has none and Isabel is a free agent. Even the generally sympathetic Mr Touchett gets all scoffy when Isabel asks him about books and boasts that he has no use for books since he learns through direct observation and experience of the world; actions that are denied Isabel by her gender. Worst of all: both Ralph and James feel that Isabel somehow needs to suffer in order to become wise and there’s a sense that they are wishing it upon her...

And finally, a foretaste of what may happen:

Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett. He never expressed this analogy to the girl herself, however; for if Mrs Touchett had once been like Isabel, Isabel was not at all like Mrs Touchett.

I interpret this as suggesting a number of things: that, like Mrs Touchett, Isabel will make an unhappy marriage but that she will also find a way to assert her independence anyway, unconventionally if need be. I also note that Mr Touchett seems to take no responsibility on himself for those aspects of Mrs Touchett which he once admired and yet seem to have been mostly crushed out of her by marriage to him. I am wondering if there might be a thread here about bright, sensitive young girls being failed by marriage.

the perils of updating classics: Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey

(Illustration from A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870)

The Austen Project – instigated presumably by HarperCollins, who are publishing its fruits – has commissioned six well-known authors to provide ‘new’ versions of Jane Austen’s novels. Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, Alexander McCall Smith and Curtis Sittenfield have tackled Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Emma and Pride and Prejudice; the others have not yet been issued. I read Trollope’s Sense & Sensibility a few years ago and have just finished McDermid’s Northanger Abbey and I have to admit I am underwhelmed by both. Not that Trollope and McDermid are poor writers or that the books are not enjoyable, but that their works act as perfect examples of the dangers of updating older novels.

Whether by instruction or choice, both writers have stuck quite closely to the original plot and characters and while they have done their best, the jarring notes this approach produces just highlights how much society has changed in two hundred years. Elinor, Marianne and Catherine are teenagers in these modern versions as well as in the originals, and I struggled to believe that middle-class parents these days would jump for joy at the prospect of their seventeen-year-old daughter getting engaged. The authors also felt constrained to have their characters meet each other face to face, as would have been necessary in Austen’s time, when nowadays surely the telephone would have been employed (a particularly egregious example is Henry Tilney’s panicked overnight drive down to see Cat after he discovers that she’s been thrown out of his father’s house; if you were truly worried that someone had not got home safely why wouldn’t you phone, text or email them first?).

For me, Trollope’s novel worked less well than McDermid’s. Trollope’s characters never struck me as much like modern teenagers – at least McDermid’s Cat Morland made liberal use of her mobile: Trollope was a bit vague about social media – and oddly didn’t seem to have any friends. Elinor is forced to quit her degree in architecture in London because the family are moving to the West Country to downsize. It’s as if student grants and student digs don’t exist, and it’s only at the end of the novel that the family discovers there are universities outside London anyway. While Trollope always writes fluently, her retelling lacked Austen’s sharpness and, far from commenting acutely on modern manners, which might be in the spirit of Austen, she describes a class so upper-upper-middle and so divorced from mainstream society that it was difficult to believe it existed or have much patience with the perceived travails of its characters. However, I did think that Trollope did an extremely good job with Mrs Dashwood, who was convincingly impractical, vague and self-indulgent.

Despite being disappointed with Sense and Sensibility, I had high hopes of Northanger Abbey and overall I felt that this version worked better. McDermid cleverly substitutes Edinburgh during the Festival for Bath during the Season, and this works very well. She also, as Austen did, uses her book to poke sly fun at fiction, in this case literary snobbery, although again she shies away from much social commentary. But like Trollope, where McDermid follows Austen too closely, things go awry. The most marked instance of this is Cat’s love of vampire fiction, and her growing concern that the Tilneys are vampires. McDermid failed utterly to convince me that any seventeen-year-old girl could possibly believe that vampires really exist. It might have worked better had she substituted crime fiction for gothic horror and have Cat fancy General Tilney a serial killer, but even so she would have needed to work harder to build up Cat’s delusion so that the reader could understand if not necessarily share it.

If you are in need of a pleasant and undemanding read, then both of these novels are fine. But what they showed to me is that it’s better to be freer with your material than either Trollope or McDermid felt they could be. Longbourn by Jo Baker, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (not the film!) and Bride and Prejudice are all more successful works; they don’t seek merely to replicate but to winkle out aspects of Pride and Prejudice that can be used in interesting ways to create something similar but fresh.

Do you know of any good Austen adaptations?

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 ...

Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature, by Humphrey Carpenter

(Arthur Rackham, illustration for The Wind in the Willows, New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1940; found here)

Before you ask, no, not that Humphrey Carpenter: this Humphrey Carpenter wrote a number of biographies, including one of Tolkien, and some children’s books, including Mr Majeika. He was also the editor of the first Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, published a year before Secret Gardens. In his preface he explains the purpose of his book:

About twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, it occurred to me that the great English children’s writers from Lewis Carroll to A.A. Milne formed some sort of identifiable literary movement, like (say) Bloomsbury or the Georgians or the Romantics. And the vague ambition began to gather in my mind of one day writing a book about them. It was to be concerned largely with their personal psychology, which I could perceive to be in many ways very odd.

Convinced that ‘the work of the great children’s writers between about 1860 and 1930 formed some sort of discernible pattern of ideas and themes’, Carpenter set out to discover ‘why so many authors in this period of English history had chosen the children’s novel as their vehicle for the portrayal of society, and for the expression of their personal dreams’. After a brief survey of the history of children’s literature up to the middle of the nineteenth century, he divides his book into two parts: the first (‘Arrears of Destruction’) deals with Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald and Louisa M. Alcott, the second (‘The Arcadians’) with Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne and a writer you have perhaps never heard of, Richard Jefferies. There’s a final chapter at the end on children’s literature since the Second World War, with particular reference to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philippa Pearce and Alan Garner.

The writers of the first group (Kingsley et al.), Carpenter argues, destroyed what had formed the foundations of writing for children up to that point and not only that but tore down the very basis of society in their works. In the case of Kingsley, Carroll and MacDonald, it was established religion and faith in God that was attacked; in the case of Alcott, it was the family unit. The men were tormented by religious doubt and also perhaps unconventional romantic-sexual inclinations (certainly I’m not sure I’ll ever read The Water-Babies again in quite the same light); Alcott, according to Carpenter, suffered from some sort of gender dysphoria coupled with the need to provide for her family and take on the responsibilities that her father had declined – take his place, in fact. These books destroy but do not offer any positive replacement for what their authors railed against.

The second wave of writers had to build something out of the ruins left by the first, and this they did by trying to recreate the experience of childhood. Carpenter posits that all of them, in different ways, wished to recapture an idyllic and rural childhood. (The exception here is E. Nesbit, who had a less happy time as a child and so constructed idyllic settings from her imagination.)

With Christopher Robin and Pooh in the enchanted place, Carpenter (while complaining about the sentimentality of this chapter) believes that the Arcadian phase of writing for children ended. His next outstanding children’s novel is The Hobbit, which, far from offering a golden world of talking toys or flying boys, is set in a place of deep anxieties, fraught with creatures who wish to harm the hobbit and his companions and where treachery and intrigue are the order of the day. It is ‘a bitter adventure’ that Bilbo undertakes. Subsequent British writing for children, Carpenter argues, far from picturing childhood as a special and magical time, is about the necessity of growing up.

Well. I had a complicated reaction to this book. One the one hand, it is an entertaining read, its prose clear and straightforward to read. I liked the main groupings of the books and, when Carpenter moved away from the psycho-analytical angle, his insights. On the other, there did not seem to be a lot of common ground between all these writers and their works, other than those I’ve mentioned in the summaries above, which are pretty broad similarities due to time and social context. I did not feel that the psycho-analytical angle yielded much. Also, I did not think that he made a good case for the inclusion of only one American writer, Alcott, and not Mark Twain or Joel Harris, for instance. And his dislike of E. Nesbit’s work was so strong (he calls her a ‘hack’) that it was hard to see what she was doing there either, considering his avowal to discuss only outstanding children’s literature. I am not sure, therefore, that he altogether achieved his purpose.

(Arthur Hughes, illustration for At the Back of the North Wind, London: Strahan, 1871; found here)

Furthermore, Carpenter was clearly a man of very definite opinions and I disagreed wholeheartedly with a lot of what he wrote (despite obviously being considerably less knowledgeable about the subject than him). Disagreeing with an author is, of course, not a bad thing per se and disagreeing with Carpenter was actually fun. His standards for children’s literature were, I felt, absurdly high. Quick to condemn the works he studies as ‘brilliant and a failure’ (The Water-Babies), ‘rambling ... predictably monotonous’ (The Princess and the Goblin), ‘dull’ (Little Women), ‘condescending’ (pretty much Nesbit’s entire oeuvre), ‘sentimental’ (parts of The Wind in the Willows and The House at Pooh Corner, and scores of ‘lesser’ works – sentimentality seems to be the worst crime a writer can commit in Carpenter’s book), he is not quite as quick to define their good qualities. There is little sense here of the peculiar magic of many of the works discussed; perhaps he felt he would be preaching to the converted? In fact, only the Alice books and most of Beatrix Potter’s work escape some degree of censure. Fans of Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and C.S. Lewis should probably have a drink before reading his views on them, and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is ‘ridiculous’ and ‘crude’.

However, I did feel that taking a psycho-analytical approach to the works, though interesting, was ultimately limiting. And the case of Lewis Carroll’s childhood further shows that it can be problematic. Some biographers speculate that Carroll was deeply affected by the death of his mother and was unhappy at school; Carpenter quotes a few letters to argue that exactly the reverse was true: his mother’s death hardly affected him at all and school wasn’t that bad. It’s impossible to evaluate whose version is more accurate and so using one of them as a reliable basis for understanding his works seems unwise. (Especially when it conveniently fits with your theory...) As for his analysis of Louisa M. Alcott (who looked ‘mannish’ like her mother and thus must have longed to be a man), I thought it was outrageous and entirely lacking in sensitivity or nuance. In fact, his analysis of women’s writing overall was poor (he seemed to think that Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses is just a poor shadow of Alice).

My other quibble though is a minor one: he discusses Beatrix Potter’s books purely in terms of their text and with not one single reference to the illustrations. And yet, the illustrations are fundamental to the stories. Delicate, pretty, civilised, they provide the veneer of respectability which the stories themselves, concerned with eating or being eaten, undermine and satirise. We all want to live in Tabitha Twitchett’s lovely house in the Lake District and yet we would not want to share our home with someone who plans on baking our children, like Samuel Whiskers. I recently read The Tale of Kitty in Boots, an unpublished Potter work discovered in 2015 and published a year later with illustrations by Quentin Blake. Granted it is not one of her finest works, but Blake’s illustrations – and while I love his work, he would not have been my choice for this – only reinforce the violent comedy, never complicate it. There is no sense that Kitty is trespassing on social norms, just that this is a rollicking tale of cross-dressing and rabbit-eating.

That was a massive digression... It’s an imperfect book reflecting its times, but it does give a good overview, I think, of the development of children’s literature over 150 years and some useful potted biographies of some of the most important writers in the field. And many of Carpenter’s insights are brilliant: the destructiveness of the early books, the idea of Christopher Robin as a sort of watchful god of love who yet never intervenes, the richness of the layers of The Wind in the Willows. Worth quarrelling with.

(E.H. Shepard, illustration for Winnie the Pooh, London: Methuen, 1926; found here)

The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs, translated by Jeremy Moore

One of the benefits of sorting through my books, rearranging them and pretending I’m going to get rid of some – no, the creating more shelf space aspect isn’t going too well – is that I am excited all over again about the books I have. And squirrelled away in a forgotten corner of the TBR mountain was this 1898 novel by a Belgian novelist, Pierre Louÿs, which I bought when I lived in Crouch End a very long time ago indeed. I have to say I bought it entirely for its cover, which shows Marlene Dietrich in The Devil is a Woman, a film loosely based on this novel. The Woman and the Puppet itself draws on an episode in Casanova’s Memoirs and on Bizet’s Carmen, according to the cover copy.

In the novel, a Frenchman, André Stévenol, is enjoying the carnival in Seville when he glimpses a mysterious and very beautiful woman. On his way to a rendezvous with her he encounters his friend Don Mateo, who knows the woman, Concha Perez, well – very well. In fact, he has had a long and complicated affair with her, and his recounting of this forms rest of the novel (bar the final chapter).

Don Mateo first sees Concha on a train when they’re travelling through snowy, moonlit mountains. He is thirty-seven, she is fifteen. He calls her a child, but emphasises her womanly characteristics – her well-developed bust, her mouth. She sings rude folk songs and fights with a gipsy. Six months later, he meets her again, this time in Seville, at a cigar factory, where hundreds of women work for a pittance. Because the factory is so hot, most of the women (except for those Don Mateo calls ‘the prudes’) work stripped to the waist. Don Mateo visits the factory to ogle the women – and since he’s allowed to walk around alone, without a supervisor, as a ‘special favour’, it is pretty clear that this is not his first visit for this purpose. He is surprised to find Concha there – she is fully dressed – and they flirt a bit and he gives her some money and she takes him home to meet her mother.

Very quickly Don Mateo becomes besotted with Concha despite her youth, and visits her every day, showering her with money so that she no longer has to work in the factory. Concha teases him, and seems to enjoy his company. After three months, he takes her mother aside ‘and spoke to her quite frankly and in the most pressing terms’.

I told her that I loved her daughter, that I intended to join my life to hers, and that although, for obvious reasons, I couldn’t agree to any kind of openly acknowledged relationship, I was nevertheless determined to let her share in a deep and exclusive love to which she couldn’t possibly take exception.

And yet Concha does take exception to this magnanimous offer and she and her mother disappear.

But the following spring, when Don Mateo is returning from the theatre, he hears someone calling his name from a barred window – Concha. She offers to become his mistress. Joy! But... every time he visits her, she’s feeling unwell, or wearing special drawers with reinforced gussets, or... Then she says,

‘My sweet, can’t you just be satisfied with everything I’ve already given you? [...] my entire body is yours to hold and caress [...] Isn’t it enough, all that? In that case, perhaps it’s not me that you love, but only what I refuse to let you have? Any woman can give you that, so why ask it of me, of someone who resists? [...]

Thus every night I held in my arms the naked body of a fifteen-year-old girl who may have been brought up by nuns, but whose social status and moral disposition ruled out any idea of physical purity on her part. [...] There could be no conceivable excuse for putting on such an act, and none was given.

Don Mateo soon sees himself as the puppet of the title, being played by this girl. But he can’t resist her resistance, he is drawn to what he sees as her purity – manifest in her (extreme!) youth, her protests, that convent upbringing – and her sensuality – anyone from that class must be a hussy! she’s a Moor and all Moorish women are like that, and she is getting naked in bed with him. In case you were wondering, Don Mateo has a low opinion of women, perhaps as a result of his encounters with Concha Perez, who behaves more and more outrageously as the novel progresses. He is made profoundly uneasy by the thought of a lot of women spending time together – either in the boarding house in Cadiz where the dancers lodge together, or in the Seville cigar factory where hundreds of women work for a pittance. What do they talk about, these women? (Depravity, obviously.) What do they get up to? (Depravity, again.) ‘I hardly dared imagine what might be going on in such a city of women.’ A woman’s physical allure is her great asset – Don Mateo notes that because Spanish women mature so fast, they are only beautiful for a brief time – and after that, it is understood, they are no longer interesting to him. His attraction to and obsession with Concha is entirely physical, and her interpretation of his attraction to her I quoted above seems entirely accurate. If he is a puppet, it’s only because he allows himself to be.

(Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Straw Maniken, 1791–92; Museo del Prado; Don Mateo refers to it while lamenting how Concha treates him)

Concha teases and torments Don Mateo with a glee that is very pleasing. It seems there is nothing she cannot do and then explain away (and I was amazed at how frank this novel was about her activities). She extracts a lot of money from him, even a house; there is always an element of calculation in her and she is a brilliant opportunist. She lies so much and so cheerfully that it is impossible to tell when she’s being honest or quite what her feelings are, yet over the course of the novel she seems to acquire a dependence on Don Mateo which is not only financial. And Concha knows poverty and desperation and what options are available to women to scrape a living – which Don Mateo, with his private income, cannot comprehend, not that he ever bothers to try. I found the final twist a bit disappointing and unworthy of the sort of person I had imagined Concha to be, but in terms of the play of power and humiliation in which the two characters engage over the course of the novel it makes a sort of sense and is an interesting surprise.

The author, Pierre Louÿs, wrote what Wikipedia charmingly calls ‘delicately obscene’ poetry and a volume of prose poems by a friend of Sappho’s, Bilitis, which he pretended to have translated but had in fact made up. He was friends with André Gide, Claude Debussy and Oscar Wilde; he has drawn praise for his depiction of lesbianism and female sexuality; he was honoured as Officier de la Légion d’honneur and The Woman and the Puppet has inspired five film versions, including Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. It seems odd, therefore, that he’s not better known in English – though perhaps the sauciness of much of his work is offputting to Anglo sensibilities...