a gallimaufry

Salem Chapel, by Margaret Oliphant

Well, my cunning plan for monthly reading round-ups has obviously failed, so it’s back to traditional reviews for me for now. The main problem is that at the end of each month I’d forgotten what I’d read and anything interesting I might have thought about it. Make notes, Helen? Perhaps I will. Perhaps that can be my new year’s resolution.

I only finished Salem Chapel a few days ago so I can at least vaguely remember it... It’s a slightly odd novel, imagine if Barchester Towers was walking down the street and was suddenly assailed by East Lynne and you might have an idea. Peopled with the kind of full-blooded characters, from Mr Tozer, the dependable butterman and deacon, to Adelaide Tufton, the acerbic and relentlessly curious invalid, that I delight in a Victorian novel, it does become a page-turner when the melodramatic subplot gets going and I stayed up late anxious to find out what happened...

Fresh from theological college, John Vincent arrives in Carlingford as the new Dissenting minister for Salem Chapel. Brimful of idealism, he sees himself tending to the destitute and delivering sermons so inspiring he will soon be mixing with the town’s highest echelons of society. Alas! The poor, though poor, are not quite as needy as he had anticipated and his congregation is drawn not from the upper classes but from trade. Not only are they smug about their wretchedly middle-class ways, but they expect him to participate in their endless tea meetings and pay them social calls as well. Vincent pleases them by preaching so vigorously that pew subscriptions soar, but then promptly falls in love with the young dowager Lady Western, who is of the Anglican persuasion. Mrs Tozer, Mrs Pigeon and Mrs Brown all heartily disapprove of young men chasing ladies above their station (especially when there are unmarried Tozer and Pigeon daughters around) and so Vincent quickly loses his bloom and finds himself struggling to retain the confidence of his congregation – who pay his wages and therefore call the shots. Respectability and value for money are both highly prized in Salem Chapel, and mooning after Lady Western casts doubt on whether the new minister represents either of those ideals. Vincent, certain of his superiority to the cheesemongers and greengrocers of his flock, is blind to his danger.

An anomaly among the Salem Chapel worshippers is Mrs Hilyard, a thin, sardonic woman with a secret past and an endless pile of sewing. And far away in Lonsdale, a mysterious gentleman begins to court Susan, Vincent’s beautiful sister. Could there be a connection here? Reader, there most assuredly is – and thus the sensation part of the novel bursts in.

According to Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote the excellent introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition, Margaret Oliphant (a widow with three children to feed) seems to have introduced the sensation plot in order to increase sales, but was herself unsure of it. Beside the acute observations of Carlingford life, and the wonderfully drawn characters – the Tozers, Mrs Vincent, Lady Western – the sensation plot does come over as histrionic peopled with cardboard figures. Nevertheless, its unnaturalness does reflect the feeling, when something so terrible happens, that it is all a nightmare, unreal, discombobulating. And although it might be artistically weaker than the realist novel into which it irrupts, it does raise the stakes and make for compulsive reading, while testing Vincent and the chapel-goers and finding them, in their different ways, wanting.

The very extremity of the crisis somehow points up the ridiculous binaries that govern everyday life. It excites the prurience of Carlingford but, conveyed to them principally through the newspapers, does not belong to everyday life and fails to awaken their empathy. Far from rallying to their embattled minister, they chafe at his absences and failure to place them above his own family.

Oliphant uses the drama to point up the hypocrisies of Victorian society in general and the cruel double standards that existed against women. And yet,while the men have power and freedom and so delightfully prefer death to dishonour for their womenfolk, the female characters are not without resource. They wield the soft power within their community and, when the chips are down, avenge and escape without male assistance. Even the self-deprecating Phoebe has her eye on the main chance. As Tozer, endlessly politicking but outmanoeuvred by Mrs Pigeon, says, ‘it’s all along of the women, sir – it’s them as is at the bottom of all the mischief in a flock.’

(Portrait of Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Sandys, 1881, thus almost twenty years after she wrote Salem Chapel; National Portrait Gallery; found here)

Habetrot

‘Habetrot’ is an Anglo-Scottish version of ‘Rumplestiltskin’ (Brothers Grimm) or the East Anglian ‘Tom Tit Tot’; I read it in The Virago Book of Witches, edited by Shahrukh Husain (the original source is A Dictionary of Fairies by Kate Briggs and if anyone would like to republish this so I could afford to buy a copy please do, I would be so happy). Funny and female centred, it is now definitely my favourite version.

In both ‘Rumplestiltskin’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the heroine is brought to the attention of a king through the vain boasting of a parent, and in both these stories the king is hardly ideal husband material since he threatens the girl with death if she fails to spin either straw into gold or five skeins a day for a month each year. The girl’s saviour demands a high price: Rumplestiltskin wants her first-born child; Tom Tit Tot wants her. In each case, the girl can avoid this price if she discovers the creature’s name – which she does, by accident and via someone else.

‘Habetrot’ is very different. The story has a very domestic and even comic feel to it, with a lassie who hates spinning and instead scampers about the countryside, and an exasperated mother who needs her to earn some money so locks her up until she’s spun seven skeins. After a day of failing to produce anything decent, the lassie escapes and discovers Habetrot, who offers to spin the skeins for her. The price? There is no price. Habetrot swears the lassie to secrecy and tells her to call on her if ever she needs help.

(Illustration by Morris Meredith Williams from Elizabeth W. Grierson, The Scottish Fairy Book; London: Fisher Unwin, 1910; found here)

‘Habetrot’ seems to be either in explicit conversation with one of both of the other versions of this tale, or truncated. The lassie discovers Habetrot’s name herself quite easily, but there is no especial reason why she shouldn’t know it as Habetrot is kind and helpful and never seeks to take advantage of her. So this seems an odd detail to include. Perhaps there was once a longer version where it was significant? Or perhaps it is because the tale is built on one of the other versions, and this detail has persisted.

After Habetrot has spun and delivered the skeins, the lassie, feeling peckish, cooks and eats seven black puddings. On discovering this her mother rushes out and shouts:

‘My dawtie ha’ spun se’en, se’en
My dawtie ha’ ate se’en, se’en
An a’ afore daylicht.’

This catches the attention of the young laird. In ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the mother sings ‘My darter ha' ate five, five pies today’, but quickly changes it to ‘My darter ha' spun five, five skeins today’ out of embarrassment when the passing king shows an interest. The clear difference here is that the East Anglian mother lies out of shame over her daughter’s greed, but the Scottish mother is equally proud of her daughter’s spinning and her appetite. The joke presumably is that the appetite is not for eating black pudding but for another activity which might prove attractive to a young man. And as soon as he sees the lassie he asks to marry her.

But it is the ending that particularly pleases me. The laird never threatens his fiancée but he does witter on about all the lovely skeins she’ll spin for him after they’re married, so Habetrot tells her to bring him down to the burnside. She then lets the couple into a chamber where she and her friends are. The laird is horrified at their long lips, and they explain that although they were once bonnie, their lips have grown long from spinning. Habetrot tells him,

‘Yir ain lassie’ll be the same, bonnie an she is noo, for she’s fair mad about the spinning.’
‘She’ll not!’ said the laird. ‘Not another spindle shall she touch from this day on.’

And so everyone gets what they want. The laird marries the pretty lassie, she can roam the countryside with him instead of spinning, ‘and every head of lint that grew on that land went to old Habetrot to be spun’, presumably enriching her.

(Illustration by John D. Batten from Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales; London: David Nutt, 1894; found here)

It is hard to know, without being aware of the story’s origins, whether the differences of ‘Habetrot’ from the German and East Anglian tales are intended to be directly compared with them, or not. It is definitely tempting to see this as a consciously female ‘retelling’ of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Tom Tit Tot’ but I don’t have any evidence for this.

In the other versions, there is a real power imbalance between the king and the girl and he threatens with death; in ‘Habetrot’ the laird seems amiable and with the help of Habetrot the lassie can manage him and achieve the life she wants. In this version, laziness (or dislike of domestic tasks) is rewarded – after all, isn’t the point of marrying a rich man to get out of having to do those tasks you don’t like? – and apart from being locked up for a day the lassie suffers very little.

The lone male imp or little man of the other two stories is replaced in ‘Habetrot’ by a small community of women who are ready to help the lassie rather than exploit her. While we might not be delighted at the reinforcement of the primacy of female beauty as currency in the world, the sly way in which Habetrot uses it against the laird to help the lassie feels like a victory. So too does the idea of a secret group of magical little women hidden on the other side of a self-bored stone who feel no need to aspire to beauty. With female characters driving the story and with humour, ‘Habetrot’ strips out the darkness of the other tales to give our female characters a more unequivocally happy ending.

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

on Beatrix Potter and Brer Rabbit

Perhaps you missed the slight kerfuffle about Beatrix Potter recently? I certainly did; it wasn’t until I was chatting on the phone on Sunday with M that it came to my attention. M had read about it in The Times; Beatrix Potter was being accused of cultural appropriation by some crazed academic because Peter Rabbit was a talking rabbit like Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit stories were originally told by enslaved Africans. We both thought this seemed a bit silly.

Curious, I found the article in The Conversation by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall. It is a really interesting article! I am so glad to have read it. If you are a Potter fan, I urge you to do the same. And if you are a fan of Enid Blyton, for once she comes out of it well!

(Beatrix Potter, illustration for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Frederick Warne, London, 1902; found here)

Zobel Marshall makes a compelling case that Potter knew and loved the Brer Rabbit stories of ‘Uncle Remus’ and drew on them for the plots of some of her stories as well as some of the language. Fearful of plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism, Potter herself never publicly acknowledged the link; since then very few academics have acknowledged the link either.

Finally, Zobel Marshall sites this refusal to discuss Potter’s use of Brer Rabbit as part of a wider appropriation of Black culture, in which Black culture is used by predominantly white culture and not acknowledged.

I mean, can any of this actually be disputed? The article is measured and well argued. I do disagree with her claim that the plot of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, of the trickster stealing food, being the ‘plot [that] is the main storyline in most of Potter’s tales’. The plots of most of her books are quite different. Still, I was curious about M’s interpretation of the article, based as it must have been on what they read in The Times. And a cursory Google brought up a list of furious headlines in the right-wing press.

I couldn’t read The Times article because it is behind a paywall. I think it must be this one. I note the use of the word ‘stole’; not a word that Zobel Marshall used once in her article, as far as I could see. However, inflammatory headlines in the Daily Express (‘Beatrix Potter Accused of ‘Copying’ African Slaves’ Stories for Peter Rabbit) and the so-called news site GB News (‘Now Peter Rabbit is Under Threat by Woke Mob as Beatrix Potter Attacked’) were followed by reasonable summaries of Zobel Marshall’s article so perhaps the Times article is also better balanced.

Not so Libby Purves’s reaction in the Daily Mail: ‘Academic Accusing Beatrix Potter of Stealing Peter Rabbit Needs a Lie Down.’ To be honest, I never have high hopes of the Mail and this is an opinion piece, but I do respect Purves and was therefore very disappointed by what I read. Purves admits that what Zobel Marshall writes is ‘fairly convincing’ but the problem is her tone: ‘her essay seems to be designed to whip up indignation and division between cultures — and, I suppose, supply a box-fresh new dose of white guilt’. Purves then goes on to explain that cultures have always borrowed from and influenced each other, which is not Zobel Marshall’s point, and to complain about the term ‘cultural appropriation’.

(A.B. Frost, illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris, published by D. Appleton and Co., 1911; found here)

Purves uses Zobel Marshall’s article to make a wider point, and I intend to do the same with hers. I find her reaction absolutely typical of those people who lose their wigs when the National Trust dares to include information in their properties that a family enriched itself through slavery or who immediately tell you, when the topic of slavery comes up, that Black Africans profited from slave trading too. Why are they so frightened about accepting historical fact? Why can’t we say that some British families profited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade? Why are we only supposed to feel pride in our past and not shame as well? Why can’t we acknowledge it if we draw on another cultural tradition for our own creative work?

Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated wonderful books that we still enjoy today, and she drew on the stories of Brer Rabbit to do so. See – it’s not difficult to make a start, is it?

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!

 

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

(Steps, by Simon Marsden)

I started to write this at the beginning of the half-term holiday, for Hallowe’en and to participate in Witch Week. It was a sullen, grey day, we’d had to cancel the little party for my daughter due to tighter Covid restrictions and even the prospect of an extra week’s half-term holiday was failing to lift my spirits. So I did not get far with it, but now that the sun is shining and the positive rate of new infections is at last falling, everything seems a lot better and I seem to be regaining the urge to write.

Here, belatedly, are my thoughts on Women’s Weird, a most enjoyable collection, and on ‘ghost stories’ in general. It is Friday 13th, so a not inauspicious day for something uncanny.

The book is exactly as the title describes it and includes work by American and British authors from the tail end of the Victorian period until 1940. Although many of them are well known (if surprising: I had no idea that D.K. Broster wrote ghost stories, although why shouldn’t she?) – and include These include E. Nesbit (of course!), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – only a couple of the stories appear in other, similar anthologies (of which I seem to have rather more than I thought, perhaps they have been spawning while I wasn’t looking), so there is plenty of new material here for long-standing fans of creepiness.

Crucially, these aren’t just effective ghost stories. Edmundson has been looking specifically for ‘Weird’ stories, and she discusses what Weird is in her (excellent) introduction to the collection. As a very bald summary of her definition, Weird stories engage with the supernatural but are ‘something more than the traditional ghost story’, eliciting ‘a profound sense of dread [H.P. Lovecraft’s words]’ as well as ‘a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness or conviction or even memory [Mary Butts’ words]’, ‘an alternative path for the exploration of the numinous [Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s words]’. The stories seek to unsettle through disturbing manifestations of the supernatural, shaking our complacent view of reality. This collection, Edmundson explains, reflects the fact that ‘During the late Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, women’s supernatural fiction became much darker as newer, more ominous presences emerged [...] This collection surveys some of these experimental forms to show how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy.’

For me, a spooky story provides two experiences: the story while you’re reading it, and the story when you’ve finished it. Obviously all literary forms do this, but it seems to me especially significant in this genre. While you’re reading it, you should feel chilled, horrified, unsettled. This is difficult for a writer to achieve. Readers are cynical and they know the tropes. Don’t disturb the ancient grave or hiding place; don’t ignore the old tales. Evil deeds have consequences. Don’t be a sweet young wife or (in this collection anyway) a dog. (In fact, it may be wisest to focus on a sense of inevitability about the story than to attempt a shocking twist.) But the end of a ghost or Weird story often forces you to reinterpret what has gone before: perhaps it offers an explanation, perhaps a catharsis. A good story does both elements satisfyingly well; an exceptional story explores something else at the same time and means that you can reread the story even if you ‘know the ending’ and still find new and interesting aspects.

So, the first story in the collection, ‘The Weird of the Walfords’, contains few surprises for the seasoned reader of haunted tales. The young heir to the Walfords hates the ancestral family bed in which so many of his forefathers have died; when he inherits Walford Grange he takes an axe and chops it to pieces. Of course, bad things ensue. But what is young Humphrey really trying to destroy along with the bed? What does it represent to him – death, the stifling responsibilities of an aristocrat to the buildings and things he is supposed to keep in trust for the next generation? And in a weird and horrible way, does he get what he wants in the end?

(Ecclescraig House, by Simon Marsden)

I like best stories that don’t explain away too much. For me, ‘Let Loose’ – a truly spine-tingling account of an architect (and his dog!) who descends into a bone-stacked crypt to copy a wall-painting – is most effective when you don’t quite know what’s happening. The explanation was a bit weak, frankly, in comparison with the power of the haunting and left me with too many questions which I won’t pose here because I don’t want to spoil it for you. In creating an atmosphere of dread and winding up the tension, it is supremely skilful. It is also significant because it invents a structure of ghost story (according to Wikipedia: 1. characterful setting; 2. gentleman scholar; 3. antiquarian object whose disturbance awakens a supernatural being) which was later to be associated with M.R. James. Let it now be associated with Mary Cholmondely!

‘The Twelve Apostles’ by Eleanor Scott follows in this Cholmondely tradition and is also an excellent example of its kind. Even though you know what’s coming, and are muttering to yourself, ‘No no no don’t do it’, it’s still shocking.

(Melrose Abbey, by Simon Marsden)

‘The Shadow’, by E. Nesbit, is as different as can be from ‘Let Loose’. There is no ghost, only a shadow haunting a modern house and three people in it: a young married couple and their friend Miss Eastwich who visits them after the (never-named) husband asks her to come and cheer up his sweet young wife Mabel, who is poorly. The husband fears it is some curse; he must have a guilty conscience but he claims he does not, and we never find out – though perhaps it is connected somehow with Miss Eastwich...

Specifically feminist concerns feature in many stories, such as ‘The Giant Wistaria’ and ‘Kerfol’, while Margery Lawrence subverts a symbol of ordinary domesticity and the feminine rôles of wife, nurse and cook in the delightfully sinister ‘The Haunted Saucepan’. ‘The Book’, by Margaret Irwin, describes the collapse of a middle-class family in a truly nasty case of evil influence.

My favourite of all, however, was the last one: ‘With and Without Buttons’, by Mary Butts. Two bored sisters are irritated by their neighbour and decide to cook up a ghost to frighten him. Is what follows their own creation, gone horribly out of control, or something else that was just waiting for an opportunity? It is one of a pair of stories – the other being D.K. Broster’s ‘Couching at the Door’ – which turns articles of women’s clothing into something life-threatening (to men).

Hallowe’en and Witch Week may have ended but this time of year is perfect for stories like this – and a second volume, Women’s Weird 2, was published just a few weeks ago. And remember: Covid 19 restrictions are depressing, but at least you’re not being menaced by powers beyond the grave.

(The photographs in this post are all by Simon Marsden, whose beautiful book The Haunted Realm captured my imagination as a teenager. His pictures derive their eerie, Weird atmosphere from his use of infrared film)

The end of the holidays (warning! a long post!)

(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)

With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.

So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).

First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.

Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.

(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)

Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?

I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.

Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.

I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.

I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.

Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.

Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...

So how was your summer?

Armadale, by Wilkie Collins

(John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, oil on canvas, first exhibited 1859; Tate Britain; found here)

Hello again! I’m sorry, I haven’t felt like writing here for weeks – for no particular reason, we are all fine, the cats are fine, the hens are fine though on strike (and when they do bother to lay an egg, as often as not they just let it fall out wherever they happen to be and then stand on it). After a rush of children’s books and detective novels about which I felt I had nothing interesting to write, I have been wallowing in the Victorian delights of Armadale and I have Thoughts.

First serialised in 1864–66, Armadale is a wonderful chunk of nineteenth-century fiction which is usually classed, alongside Lady Audley’s Secret et al., as sensationalist, but in my opinion is more of a gothic novel. It contains everything you would wish to find in such a book: intrigue, murder, deception, fraud, a secret diary and a wicked lady whom you rather hope will triumph in her criminal ways though you fear she won’t. What makes it to my mind more gothic is its bold splash of the supernatural: its reliance on dreams, coincidences and fate to suggest another way of reading the world, its exploration of identity and its central use of the motif of the double, an old favourite of gothic writers including E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley and James Hogg.

(Portrait of Wilkie Collins by Napoleon Sarony, 1870; found here)

There are five Allan Armadales. Yes five! Fortunately, this is not as confusing as it might be. Allan Armadale (I) has a son, also named Allan Armadale (II), who is a reprobate. AA(I) disinherits AA(II) and decides to leave his fortune to Allan Wrentmore, his nephew, if AW will change his name to Allan Armadale (III). Surprise! He does. AA(II) then journeys out from England to ‘Barbadoes’, where AA(III) lives, befriends him and pays him a bad turn. AA(III) has his revenge on AA(II). AA(II) has a son, born in England, guess what his name is, yes it’s Allan Armadale (IV), while AA(III) also has a son and he is Allan Armadale (V). AA(V), who knows the secret of his father’s revenge, changes his name to Ozias Midwinter and adheres to his father’s deathbed admonition to avoid AA(IV) and anyone connected with him.

But of course, Midwinter fails and becomes fast friends with AA(IV). One night they are stranded on a ship with an ominous connection to AA(III)’s revenge on AA(II), and AA(IV) dreams a dream which Midwinter interprets as a prophecy. Can Midwinter avert the doom which awaits AA(IV)? Especially since AA(IV) refuses to entertain the idea that there is either a prophecy or a doom?

The friendship of AA(IV), kind-hearted but impulsive and not terribly bright – on his way to becoming a Bluff Squire in middle age – and Midwinter, clever, passionate and sensitive, is unusually intense. One character distinguishes between them as the light Armadale (AA(IV)) and the dark Armadale (Midwinter – who is mixed race). They form a sort of split self, the one associated more with the surface world, the other with what is hidden.

They fall in love with the same woman. Their closeness provokes jealousy in the women who love them and who understand they will only ever have second place in these men’s affections. (Miss Milroy loses her hold over AA(IV) when he admits to her that when she believed he was thinking lovingly of her, he was in fact thinking of Midwinter;  Miss Milroy Flounces.) Even when Allan and Midwinter quarrel, they cannot give each other up for long. Apart, they fret and do badly. Midwinter is tormented between his desire to remain with Allan and guide him (because he is a bit of a fool), and his fear that by doing so he will fulfil the prophecy in the dream. He knows that they have a secret bond, created by their fathers, but it’s a bond he can never reveal to Allan.

(George Housman Thomas, illustration from Armadale, 1866; found here)

Into their world of gentlemanly honour comes Lydia Gwilt. Obviously she is an Adventuress. Clever and beautiful, she has a dark past, a laudanum habit and a disreputable friend by name of Mrs Oldershaw; she also has a proper reliance on Revealing All in her diary and a very snarky tone on occasion. Collins bills her past as being worse than prostitution, but when eventually it is revealed it is actually very sad and if you cannot root for Miss Gwilt to succeed in her wicked schemes you are dead to me.

Dreams, water, darkness, dawn and evening all play their part to suggest a liminal, unstable world behind the sunshine and the large country house. The split self of the two Allan Armadales is reflected in this dual world. Midwinter is associated more closely with the liminal elements; AA(IV) with the trappings of the solid, daylight world. The significant moment when AA(IV), Midwinter and Miss Gwilt encounter each other for the first time, fulfilling the initial image in the prophetic dream, occurs on the twilit Norfolk Broads, a strange landscape where water and land are mixed, and where at that moment water and night are balanced against land and day. Both AA(IV) and Midwinter love sailing, though AA(IV) seems more enthusiastic than competent, and they are happiest together on the water. But of course, this carries a risk, especially in this novel. Drowning is a repeated motif.

And coincidences abound! Needlessly far-fetched, it might seem. For instance, AA(IV) unexpectedly comes into a fortune when three adult male relatives of his die unexpectedly. One dies in connexion with a character who will later become significant; the other two are killed in an avalanche while rushing back for the first character’s funeral. It is all rather unconvincing and presented in a way that makes it even more unconvincing, but it is also completelly unnecessary. Collins had no need to have so many heirs between AA(IV) and the inheritance and no need (in terms of plot) to link the first death with the character who later becomes significant. Instead, he chose to push at the bounds of what readers will accept in order to suggest to us that perhaps this is not a preposterous coincidence, perhaps this is fate insisting on a certain outcome and even using certain people to that end.

Is the dream really prophetic? Can what it foretells be prevented or are the characters fated to live it out? Midwinter is the only character to take it seriously, yet he chooses to rationalise himself out of what he believes to be the only way to thwart it. Ultimately, it is the lawyers and the doctors and the vicars who ferret out most of the mystery, and all of the strange and dramatic happenings have a plausible explanation in rational terms. Still, this novel seems to tell us, there may be another pattern beneath the surface which we would perhaps do best not to ignore if we wish to keep our selves united.

Have you read Armadale or any other of Wilkie Collins’s novels? I’ve ordered a copy of No Name and await it impatiently...

(T.F. Goodall, Sunset on the Broads, oil, 1931; found here)

Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell

John Barton’s overpowering thought, which was to work out his fate on earth, was rich and poor; why are they so separate, so distinct, when God has made them all? It is not His will that their interests are so far apart. Whose doing is it?

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, published in 1848, was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel. That subtitle is telling, for, although the book loosely follows the eponymous heroine’s teenage years and romantic entanglements, perhaps its greatest achievement is its portrayal of working-class life in an industrial town at the time. (Obviously I have no first-hand experience of life as a Victorian weaver but it feels very authentic and reviewers of the time appear to have taken it as such.)

Gaskell was clearly interested in the clash between workers and mill owners (especially the nouveau riche), a subject she was to return to in her better-known North and South. In that novel, the struggles between the classes are filtered through the eyes of Margaret, a member of the southern gentry. In Mary Barton the struggles are not filtered and the suffering of the poor struck me a great deal more directly. I was also surprised by the radicalness of Gaskell’s vision: what sets Mary Barton apart from much other Victorian fiction is its assertion that there are no deserving and undeserving poor, just poor people.

Esther, Mary’s aunt, who hovers like a draggled ghost above the narrative, is a clear example. At the beginning of the novel, when Mary is fourteen and her mother pregnant, pretty and vivacious Esther disappears and it is widely believed she has run off with a mysterious lover. The grief this causes Mary’s mother may contribute to her death in childbirth just a few weeks later. Halfway through the novel, Esther reappears, petitioning Mary’s father John as he walks home one night. She and her little daughter were abandoned by the lover some years ago; when the child became sick poor Esther had no way of earning money for medicine other than prostitution. Now her child is dead, her reputation lost, and she lives a sort of half-life selling herself on the streets and drinking gin. John and other characters disapprove, even despise Esther for what she has become (at first, at least), but her predicament is shown to be entirely derived from desperate poverty and limited options, not vice.

(Engraving of the exterior of a cellar dwelling, 1838; Manchester Libraries; found here. For some reason the pipe-smoking woman is a pleasing sight)

The precariousness of working life is forcefully depicted. When a weaver, Davenport, falls ill with typhus, his family cannot afford coal or food and huddle in a damp, insanitary cellar waiting for death to take them all. If work falls off at the mills, there is simply no money and families starve. If wages are reduced, parents are forced to give what little food they have to their children in the hope of keeping them alive until better times. Child mortality is brisk: no family, not even the very-slightly-better-off ones like the Bartons and the Wilsons, is immune. In the face of this, the workers do their best to support each other. Although Davenport succumbs to his illness, Barton and Wilson give what little money they still have to his family to pay for the burial and feed them. Doors are never locked; the best is always given to visitors; strangers will help each other. (This picture of working-class solidarity is not simplistic: during the strike ‘knobsticks’, or strike breakers, are attacked and even murdered by angry workers.)

(Group of Manchester workers, 1848. James Cox, centre in the front row, surrounded by some of the men he worked with. The photograph was taken circa 1848. James Cox came to Manchester from Ireland in 1846 during the famine years. He first lived near Oxford Road Station, Mary Street, an area known as 'Little Ireland'. He also worked on the Manchester Ship Canal in the later years of the 19th century. Printed on the back: James Whittaker, Fairfield. Manchester Archives; found here)

In contrast, the only wealthy family in the novel – former workers themselves – lives apart from the rest of the town. Their doors are locked and guarded by servants and their hospitality is for their own sort, and by appointment. They are more comfortable, but somehow the way that the weavers drop in on each other, share what they have, invite friends round to tea and then rush to the shops to buy eggs and bacon to serve them is a more appealing way to live. The accumulation of wealth and valuable possessions in comparison is a sort of burden on the rich and dulls their sense of community.

This is demonstrated most clearly when the delegation of striking workers meets the mill owners. The workers represent their community and their demands have moral force: they ask for what is right and just. Most of the mill owners, on the other hand, see their interests as separate from that of the wider society. They do not understand their factories as pooled labour and capital working together, but as their property. While the speech of the workers is impassioned and eloquent, the employers’ words are dry and reveal only their selfishness and fear.

(Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century; found here)

The clash between the classes is reflected more specifically in Mary’s story, her courting by the wealthy Henry Carson and by the foundry worker Jem Wilson, and the brutal murder which is initially believed to be by a rival lover but is in fact politically motivated. The murder and its resolution model Gaskell’s great theme: that we are not so very different and we should trust each other more. In the end, there are two bereaved fathers, each of whom loses a son because of the other’s adherence to class identity over human sympathy.

That class identity is more than politics but also culture is reflected in elements of the novel’s form. As it was intended for a middle-class readership, it contains epigraphs from well-known ‘canonical’ poems alongside the lyrics of Chartist songs, nursery rhymes and working-class ballads. Footnotes explain Lancashire dialect words to a more cosmopolitan audience, often referring to the works of Chaucer as if giving these words a veneer of literary respectability.

Poverty, social injustice and murder are not the cheeriest subjects for fiction and for many of the characters there is to be no conventional happy ending; however, this is a far from nihilistic novel since redemption is available to everyone, even the murderer and the prostitute. And Gaskell’s characters are believable and engaging. If you’d like an alternative to yet another film adaptation of Emma, read this!

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.