a gallimaufry

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.

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?