The passing of time

...can be such a strange thing. It’s been two years today, and we still miss you terribly, Dewey.


(I also wanted to let you all know that I’m going to take a short blogging break until some time in early December. I’m going to be out of town this weekend, and between that and grad school assignments, I really need some time off. I hope those of you in the US have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’ll see you in about a week.)

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The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

The Taste of Sorrow is a historical novel that retells the lives of the Brontë sisters, from their early childhoods until shortly after Charlotte’s wedding. As some of you might remember, earlier this year I read and fell head over heels in love with Morgan’s Passion, which is about the lives of four women who were involved with the Romantic poets. I approached these two books from two very different perspectives, though, because while I had read several biographies of Mary Shelley, Byron and the rest of the Romantic gang before, I only knew the very basics about the Brontës’ lives.

Jude Morgan explains in a short interview included in my edition of the book that he tried hard not to deviate from the known facts of Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s lives. What he did inevitably fill in were the personal gaps: the feelings and motivations driving these three women’s actions. But biographical or historical accuracy is not the reason why I loved The Taste of Sorrow. I appreciate knowing that it’s there, but because of my limited knowledge, I wouldn’t have noticed it if it had been absent. Still, I agree with Violet when she says that this and Passion are the best books based on real historical figures she’s come across to date. It’s not so much a matter of how true to life they are, but of how well Morgan makes the people he writes about come to life.

I remember that one of the first things I ever read about the lives of the Brontës was a short essay by a Portuguese writer describing how Emily, a strong and resourceful woman, had simply “given up” and allowed herself to die after her brother Bramwell’s death. This conjures a tragic and semi-heroic image of sacrifice; of a distressed damsel allowing herself to fade away because her grief is too much to bear. (On a side note, where do I join the queue to kick the shins of those who claim that Bramwell wrote all the novels? Just asking.) Fortunately, Morgan’s approach in The Taste of Sorrow is the polar opposite of this. There is nothing romantic or heroic about tuberculosis killing several members of the same family one after another. There’s nothing pretty or glorified in his description of their illnesses and deaths. It’s messy and it’s ugly and it terrifies them – understandably so, because they were human beings and they wanted to live.

But of course, their premature deaths are far from the only thing the book is about. The Taste of Sorrow is a novel that completely respects Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s humanity. We can’t of course know if the characters we find in the pages of this book actually match the human beings they were, but nevertheless, they are human beings - complex, flawed, easy for readers to love. They also aren’t crazy or slightly “damaged” geniuses, or world-changing heroines, or characters in a melodrama. They’re just three women who lived isolated lives, who needed to earn their living, and who from a very early age turned to stories for comfort.

Returning to the issue of accuracy—which I suspect might matter more to other readers than it did to me—I would venture to say that Jude Morgan did a great job of extracting the likely human beings who lurk behind the Brontës' novels. This is inevitably arguable, because not all readers would imagine the same person based on their stories—but Morgan’s version of the person who wrote Jane Eyre, for example, matches my own perfectly. His Charlotte felt absolutely right to me, and this no doubt contributed to how much I connected with this book.

When it comes to themes, The Taste of Sorrow is unavoidably about being a woman in nineteenth-century England and having a rich intellectual life. Anne, Emily and Charlotte don’t necessarily attempt to change the world, but they do very much feel its limitations and restrictions (which again puts me in mind of what I was saying last week about these subtle, less overtly political novels still being very much feminist texts). Morgan deals with the different expectations surrounding the Brontës and their brother, with their father’s reaction to Charlotte’s desire to be published, and with their eventual decision to use male pseudonyms with sensitivity and insight. And likewise with the accusations of “coarseness” that inevitably followed the revelation of their gender, or with their rejection of the notion that strong emotions of any kind in women should be surrounded by shame.

The Taste of Sorrow is also very much about the imagination, about why we tell and read stories, about the differences—or similarities—between our “real” experiences and our inner lives. Emily in particular is someone who doesn’t always distinguish between one and the other, but this is not presented as a form of madness – just as a way of being in the world. The Brontë sisters turned to writing to find the emotional and intellectual stimulus they did not find in the outside world. I don’t want to use the word “escapism” because I fear its connotations of cowardliness or evasion - and writing was probably the bravest thing they could have done.

The Taste of Sorrow made me not only want to read more about the Brontës, but it also read them again. I’ve yet to try Anne, but I already had plans to fill that gap in 2011. And I think I’m also ready to give Wuthering Heights a second try. Who’s your favourite Brontë sister? Why?

Favourite bits:

‘I don’t think we should invent horrors,’ Ellen said later, quivering, downright. The screams of one girl had brought Miss Wooler down on them in stately reproach. ‘It isn’t right. Lord knows, they are plentiful enough in real life.’
‘That’s why we invent them,’ Charlotte said. ‘To take the edge off the real ones.’

‘We are not supposed to say,’ Charlotte pronounces now. Her own voice crackles on her ear, harsh and sibylline in the midnight silence. ‘Anything we feel, we are not supposed to know we feel. If we do know, there is something morally wrong with us. If you like a man – not even love him, but like him enough to be drawn to him, to think you might possibly love him – you aren’t supposed to know that either. You are supposed to go drooling about like an emotional infant.’

‘I don’t presume to speak for all of womankind, Monsieur Heger. Indeed, I don’t think such a thing is possible. I would contend that there is not such a great difference between men and women as you suggest. The perilous truth is how alike we are.’
‘Perilous?’
‘Oh, yes. It would be a Jericho blast to acknowledge it. Walls would tumble. We would all have to alter our positions.’

They read it too: Lovely Treez Reads, Savidge Reads

(Have I missed yours?)

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Dry Store Room No. 1 by Richard Fortey

Dry Store Room No. 1 is an informative and entertaining history of the London Natural History Museum, from its foundation as a wing of the British Museum in the late eighteenth century, through its transition to its current impressive, cathedral-like and very Victorian premises in 1881, and to the present day – when, impressive though it no doubt still is, it has become more of an attraction and less of a research institution, to Fortey’s clear regret.

Richard Fortey, a renowned palaeontology specialising in trilobites, worked at the Natural History Museum from 1970 to 2006. He describes his first day on the job as the equivalent of being told, “Amuse yourself—for money.” Don’t we all dream of jobs we would feel this way about? Fortey’s passion for the Museum and everything it represents comes across very clearly in Dry Store Room No. 1.

With humour and enthusiasm, he takes readers on a virtual tour of the South Kensington building, and also on a tour of the Museum’s history. Fortey shares all sorts of anecdotes about the colourful personalities who worked there over the decades: from Sir Richard Owen, Darwin’s archenemy, who was the Museum’s first superintendent; to the eels expert who was a great believer in the Loch Ness Monster; to the nemotades scholar who, in Fortey’s words, “is reminiscent of the Ancient Mariner except that he ‘stoppeth one in three’ to explain the importance of nematodes in understanding habitat diversity.”


Photo Credit
(Sadly there’s also the far less amusing story of the Botany Keeper who was known among the female staff as “Octupus Ross”: “Women were warned never to go into the lift with Ross, or they would risk an attack of the tendrils. It was regarded as a kind of occupational hazard of working in the Botany department. The women concerned seem to regard their memory of the encounter with amused resignation.” Do they really? Such “amused resignation” sounds to me just like the stuff rape culture is made of.)

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What I liked the most about Dry Store Room No. 1 was the ease with which Fortey mixes science, social history, and entertaining curiosities such as the story of the 1913 Piltdown Man hoax (of which, interestingly enough, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the suspects. Fortey explains that it’s highly unlikely that he was in fact responsible, but I couldn’t resist sharing this with you nonetheless.)

A history of an institution that has been around since the late eighteenth century will inevitably also be a history of our idea of what museums are and what they should represent; and in this case, also a history of how scientific research is done. This aspect of Dry Story Room No.1 fortunately does not disappoint. The Victorians were far from perfect, but we owe a lot to their endless curiosity, their public-mindedness, and to their passion for what they called self-improvement.

Yours truly admiring the trunk of the giant Sequoia tree.

Dry Story Room No.1 is not only informative and fun to read, but also genuinely funny – and not in that “Ha-ha-I’m-cracking-a-joke” sort of way science writers have been known to be guilty of. Fortey is clearly someone who’s very passionate about science and nature, and also someone whose sensibility seems very close to my own. He was the perfect virtual tour guide, and a pleasure to spend time with.

Favourite bits:

The Natural History Museum is, first and foremost, a celebration of what time has done to life. If the world is to remain in ecological balance, there is a pressing need to know about all the organisms that collaborate to spin the web of life. The planet’s very survival might depend upon such knowledge. I want to drag all visitors to the Museum up to the tree and explain about time, and how we exist atop a vast history that has made us who we are, and that we ignore that history at our peril. But if I did, I fear that I should be branded with the same label as that funny old man who comes up in the street to tell you about his messages from angels.

I understand that there is now a Creation Museum in Kentucky. Its own creators doubtless regard it as a ‘balance’ to all those pesky ‘evolutionary’ museums. It is interesting that the embodiment of respectability for an idea is still a museum, as if a Museum of Falsehoods were a theoretical impossibility. I look forward to a Museum of the Flat Earth, as a counterbalance to all those oblate spheroid enthusiasts.

Who are we, one species among so many, to obliterate the work of millions of years of evolution? Are we like the Greek gods acting on whimsy? Unfortunately, it is difficult to persuade everybody of this moral position. It appears on few political manifestoes, except as a kind of harmless truism, vaguely akin to ‘we must be kind to pretty furry things’. It is so much more important than that. I don’t want the only record of a species to be on a video archive, or one of those gloomy, pallid faces peering out of a jar in the Spirit Collections.

They read it too: Pages Turned

(Yours?)

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Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.

Cranford is an episodic novella, or a novel-in-stories, about the small town that gives it its title and its mostly female, unmarried, of a certain age, and impoverished but genteel population. The story is narrated by Miss Mary Smith, a young woman who doesn’t live in Cranford herself, but who keeps visiting the town because of her friendship with some of the Cranford ladies, particularly Miss Matty Jenkyns. The first few chapters of Cranford could probably work as short stories, but as the story progresses, new episodes become more and more dependent on what came before.

The first thing you need to know about Cranford is that it’s laugh out loud funny: literally so, in a people-around-you-will-give-you-Looks-and-ask-what’s-so-funny sort of way. This does not of course mean that it isn’t also serious, or that there aren’t plenty of moving, emotionally resonant little moments. The town of Cranford has a bit of an Avonlea feel to it, and Gaskell’s mix of humour, sorrow, irony and tenderness is not unlike L.M. Montgomery’s.

What I liked the most about Cranford was the fact that it unapologetically focused on usually undervalued people and stories. The ladies of Cranford may be unlikely heroines, but look and behold, they do have stories to tell, and they’re not only interesting but universally human. Cranford is a story about what goes on in the hidden domestic sphere; in the private world of unmarried women; in small and seemingly uneventful towns. All these are settings where most would assume nothing of interest could ever happen, but Gaskell clearly takes great pleasure in proving them wrong.

Another interesting thing was seeing Gaskell poke fun at all the social conventions of Cranford while at the same time showing the kindness and humanity hiding behind it all. The Cranford ladies are all very prim and proper—and yet perhaps they are not. To quote from the introduction, “beneath the Cranford ladies’ attachment to outmoded forms and a strict sense of propriety […] there is true humanity.”

The more we get to know these characters, the more this “strict sense of propriety” is eroded, and the more their surface level prejudices – against “trade”, or foreigners, or people who marry “below their rank” – are challenged. Cranford has the same warmth, compassion and humanity I so loved about North and South. Yes, people make up rules about what is Proper and what is not; about who is one of Us and who is one of Them, and they vow to show to mercy to those who fall outside the lines they draw. But in Cranford they’re always meeting living, breathing exceptions that make all these rules fall apart and force them to redefine these lines. Rigid and abstract ideas about propriety become much more flexible when confronted with real human beings – as they well should.

Question: how good is the 2007 BBC adaptation? I don’t normally like movie tie-in covers, but I saw one of Cranford the other day, and I have to say it looked just right. Judi Dench perfectly matches by mental picture of Miss Mattie. I’m seriously considering adding both this and North and South to my Christmas wishlist.

A few passages that made me laugh:

The Cranfordians had that kindly esprit de corps which made them overlook all deficiencies in success when some among them tried to conceal their poverty. When Mrs Forrester, for instance, gave a party in her baby-house of a dwelling, and the little maiden disturbed the ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out from underneath, everyone took this novel proceeding as the most natural thing in the world, and talked on about household forms and ceremonies as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants’ hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could never have been strong enough to carry the tray upstairs, if she had not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes.

I have often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small economies - careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction - any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance. An old gentleman of my acquaintance, who took the intelligence of the failure of a Joint-Stock Bank, in which some of his money was invested, with stoical mildness, worried his family all through a long summer’s day because one of them had torn (instead of cutting) out the written leaves of his now useless bank-book; of course, the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well, and this little unnecessary waste of paper (his private economy) chafed him more than all the loss of his money. Envelopes fretted his soul terribly when they first came in; the only way in which he could reconcile himself to such waste of his cherished article was by patiently turning inside out all that were sent to him, and so making them serve again. Even now, though tamed by age, I see him casting wistful glances at his daughters when they send a whole inside of a half-sheet of note paper, with the three lines of acceptance to an invitation, written on only one of the sides. I am not above owning that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible. My pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use india-rubber rings, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine. To me an india-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have one which is not new - one that I picked up off the floor nearly six years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance.

They read it too: Becky’s Book Reviews, Random Jottings, It’s All About Books, Giraffe Days, A Good Stopping Point, Good Books & Good Wine, The Sleepless Reader, Notes from the North, Eclectic/Eccentric, 5-Squared, Page After Page, Shelf Love, The Avid Reader’s Musings

(Have I missed yours?)

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Also! Have you signed up for the 2010 Book Blogger Advent Calender yet? The calender is now in its fifth year, and it’s a perfect chance for bloggers from around the world to share their Holidays traditions (whatever holidays they celebrate). I had a lot of fun participating in the past three years, so I thought I’d spread the word so those of you interested don’t miss out.

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Consequences by E.M. Delafield

E.M. Delafield’s 1919 novel Consequences is very different in tone from her more famous Diary of a Provincial Lady – though it could be argued that despite the superficial differences, they have some thematic similarities. Consequences opens in 1889, when its protagonist, Alexandra Clare, is twelve years old. It then follows Alex for the next twenty years. Like any late Victorian young lady of her social stance, when she comes of age she is introduced to society and into the marriage market. But Alex is a shy and awkward girl, domineering with her siblings but submissive to the point of annulling her personality with those she doesn’t know well. Unsurprisingly, she fails to attract a husband, or to even make any friends. The title of Consequences refers to the results of an education that prepared girls for little more than to be decorative objects and men-magnets. In Alex’s case, the consequences are complete helplessness, a lifetime of acute loneliness, and a despair she can barely articulate.

Consequences has quite a lot in common with my favourite Persephone to date, Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady: both are early twentieth-century novels that look back on the late Victorian period and mercilessly denounce how it let down its young women by completely failing to prepare them for life – or for any form of life that deviated from the very strict script it was supposed to follow: that of engagement, marriage, and motherhood. As a result, both are suffocating, powerful, and absolutely heartbreaking novels.

However, Delafield differs from Ferguson in that she shows the consequences of a Victorian upbringing not only in the lack of external opportunities for anything other than marriage, but even more so in the psychological marks it left on women and girls (though there is certainly also a psychological element in Rachel Ferguson’s character Grace). The approach Delafield chooses is difficult to pull off successfully: by making Alex so awkward and helplessness, she perhaps risks having readers blame the victim and add to the problem. But I think Consequences is an effective novel exactly because despite everything, Alex is difficult not to sympathise with. How could she have known better? How was she to be expected to look after herself? Nobody ever taught her how to do anything at all.

Personally I could relate to Alex’s social awkwardness; to her defeatism; to her retreat into silence when she begins to feel unwelcome or self-conscious. For that, and for everything else, my heart broke for her. But all along I wondered if it a large number of readers wouldn’t find her off-putting, just like many of the book’s other characters find her off-putting. Interestingly enough, this Persephone edition includes two contemporary reviews of Consequences at the end which reveal exactly that: in both cases, Alex is blamed for her helplessness. The fact that her younger sisters managed to do better for themselves is pointed as an example that her fate is in fact the result of nothing but her own personal failings. If only reality were as simple as that.

I imagine that it’s possible that some readers would argue that there’s nothing feminist or even particularly revolutionary in presenting a woman as powerless and dependent as Alex, especially when this is done without comment. But the excellent foreword by Nicola Beauman includes a passage that addresses this exact argument:

[…] Fiction which is not overtly feminist, which, in other words, describes women’s lives without openly railing against their flaws and restrictions but makes the reader understand them, nevertheless, this kind of fiction is almost more upsetting than straightforward, politically feminist fiction.
[…] In all these novels, indeed in virtually every Persephone book, women are starved of freedom but choose to conform. They do so for love of their families and, just as much, from an unwillingness to tackle society head on; and they take refuge in humour, in self-deprecation, in ‘keeping busy’, in ‘mustn’t grumble’. Yet, and this is a very important yet, these books are still deeply feminist. Each and every one of them is asking – does it have to be like this?

This is exactly how I feel not only about this and other Persephone books, but also about, for example, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Victorian sensation novels. They expose all the restrictions surrounding women’s lives in the Victorian era, even if don’t overtly comment on the absolute unfairness of their situation, and even if they tell the stories of women who choose to conform in the end. I find that for modern sensibilities, that’s perhaps even more effective than a less subtle approach, which would inevitably run the risk of being perceived as preachy, heavy-handed, or even anachronistic.

Another interesting thing about Consequences is the fact that it’s possible to read quite a lot of lesbian subtext into Alex’s repeated infatuations with girls and women. I’m not sure how confident I can be about this reading, because the truth is that the social life of a Victorian girl like Alex would rarely have put her in contact with members of the opposite sex in any way conductive to the development of real intimacy. It’s possible that these same-sex passions were the result of her hunger for connections; it’s also possible that they were much more. The text is silent about whether or not there was any element of sexual attraction to them, but this is not something a 1919 novel would likely have been open about. In any case, I don’t want to stubbornly insist on this or that requirement for reading her attachments as romantic passions to be considered “valid”. It’s interesting to consider that there might have been yet another layer buried under the countless feelings Alex could never have voiced. If so, this is simply one more tragedy to add to the many that formed her life.

Favourite passages:

She had been led to expect, from constant veiled references to the subject, that as soon as she grew up, opportunity would be afforded her to attain the goal of every well-born girl’s destiny – that of matrimony. Girls who became engaged to be married in their first season were a success, those who had already twice, or perhaps thrice, been the round of London gaiety with no tangible result of the sort, had almost invariably to give way to a younger sister, so that she, in her turn, might have ‘the chances’ of which they had failed to profit.

‘You seemed to be gettin’ on very well with the man on your other side – not the one who took you down, but the oldish one,’ she said afterwards in a pleased voice.
‘I never found out his name,’ said Alex. ‘He told me he wrote books. It was so interesting; we were talking about poetry a lot of the time.’
Her mother’s face lost something of its smile.
‘Oh, my darling!’ she exclaimed in sudden flattened tones. ‘don’t go and get a reputation for being clever, whatever you do. People do dislike that sort of thing so much in a girl.’
Alex, her solitary triumph killed, knew that there was yet another item to be added to that invisible score of reasons for which one was loved or dislike by one’s fellow-creatures.

‘But I thought we were quite rich.’
Lady Isabel flushed delicately.
‘We are not exactly poor, but such money as there is mostly came from my father, and there will not be much after my death,’ she confessed. ‘Most of it will be money tied up for Archie, poor little boy, because he is the youngest son, and your grandfather thought that was the proper way to arrange it. It was all settled when you were quite little children – in fact, before Pamela was born or thought of – and your father naturally wanted all he could hope to leave to go to Cedric, so that he might be able to live on here whatever happened.’
‘But what about Barbara and me? Wasn’t it rather unfair to want the boys to have everything?’
‘Your father said, “The girls will marry, of course.” There will be a certain sum for each of you on your wedding-day, but there’s no question of either of you bein’ able to afford to remain unmarried, and live decently. You won’t have enough to make it possible,’ said Lady Isabel very simply.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

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Buy Graphic Novels for the Holidays

Buy Books For the Holidays is a project started by Amy a few years ago, with the aim of encouraging book lovers to spread the bookish love and support authors and publishers during the holiday season - and also to give them plenty of suggestions of what to buy if they’re stuck for ideas. This year the project is being run by Jodie, and when she asked me to contribute with a themed list, I knew I just had to make it about graphic novels. I tried to make a list that would have something to appeal to lovers of every genre, and at the same time I avoided very obvious choices such as Persepolis or Maus. Not, mind you, because I don’t think these are excellent books, but because they’re the first recommendations anyone interested in exploring graphic novels is likely to get. Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing my full list, just head over to the Buy Books for the Holidays site. Hopefully the list will also be useful to anyone interested in giving the medium a try but unsure of where to start.

Speaking of the holidays and shopping, I so enjoyed this list of gifts for book lovers posted by Kimbofo at Reading Matters the other day. And as I explored the links Kimbofo posted, I discovered this wonderful I Capture the Castle tote bag. Isn’t it beautiful? Almost as beautiful as this To Kill a Mockingbird shirt which I found via Heather.


What are you coveting this holiday season? And what are you planning to get your loved ones? Personally I haven’t quite decided yet, mainly because I’m too busy panicking due to the fact that I won’t be able to do any shopping before late November, when a big grad school project is due. Eek. Wish me luck! (And if I’m a bit scarce around the blogging world for the next ten days or so, you’ll know why.)

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Shelves: I haz them

The little attic flat I moved into recently only had the very basics in terms of furniture, and “the very basics” did not include (somewhat puzzlingly for the likes of me) shelves of any kind. At first I wasn’t going to do anything about this, as I’m only living here temporarily, after all. But one year is not that short a time, and considered the piles of books that already covered my floor after only two months, getting some inexpensive shelves began to seem like a very wise idea. An afternoon of work and two hammered fingers later, behold! my brand new bookshelf:


Here are a few close ups, in case you want to do some proper book snooping and read the titles. You can click on the pictures to further enlarge them:


Top to bottom:

• Children’s and YA, mysteries, speculative fiction, and Zombies versus Unicorns (I am and always will be Team Unicorn, of course.)
  
• Historical fiction, general fiction, and bookmarks.
  
• Non-fiction, Viragos, and classics.

• CDs, videogames and DVDs.
  
• My boyfriend’s TBR shelf.
  
• Library school stuff.

It’s amazing how much less chaotic and more homelike the place feels now that there’s a proper bookshelf in it!

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Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden

Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind was originally published in 1982, and it was one of the first YA novels to portray gay characters in a positive light. Some of you recommended it to my after my less than thrilling experience with Empress of the World earlier this year; I had the chance to pick up a used copy recently and shortly thereafter noticed that the lovely Amy at Amy Reads had just acquired it as well. We therefore decided to read and review it together: I’ll be incorporating some questions Amy asked me into this post, and over at her blog Amy will be doing the same with the questions I asked her.

Annie on My Mind is the story of Liza and Annie, two high school seniors from New York who meets by chance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Liza and Annie feel attracted to each other immediately, which comes as a bit of a surprise to Liza because she never considered she might like girls that way. This realisation isn’t what the novel is about, though; Annie on My Mind is about the development of their relationship and about the one thing – only hinted at in the beginning – that nearly drives them apart.

Amy asked me, “How did you like the way the story was told, as the main character flashing back?”. Annie on My Mind actually begins one year after Liza meets Annie: Liza is now studying architecture at MIT, and debating writing a letter to Annie but struggling to get the words out. I was quite happy with the flashback structure – I liked how it added emotional resonance to Liza’s narration, and I liked how knowing something big was coming kept me turning the pages. However, I found the third person interludes between Liza’s first person flashbacks pretty awkward, to be honest, and I could have easily done without them. But at least these were both short and few and far between, so they didn’t bother me too much. And just so you know, this is pretty much my only complaint about the whole novel.

Amy’s next question was, ”Reading the book you know something is going to happen because of how the letters go. Were you surprised at what it was that caused the issue when it is finally revealed?”. Without giving it away, I can say that yes, I was surprised. I was expecting a version of what most often happens in glbtq YA (and to real glbtq teens, sadly): family shenanigans. It’s not a spoiler to say that Liza and Annie are separated because of other people’s reactions to their being gay, but there’s an interesting twist in how this happens.

Something that comes into play in what happens is social privilege: Liza is the daughter of an upper middle-class family and goes to an exclusive private school, whereas Annie’s family lives in a tiny apartment in a shabby building and she goes to a school where social problems run rampant. It was interesting to see the difference in how these two very distinct social worlds react to homosexuality. Annie never does tell her parents and grandmother, but in Liza’s world, the matter of keeping up appearances is a heavy factor. Also, it was saddening (though not surprising) to see her seemingly liberal parents’ attitudes change when confronting homosexuality in the concrete rather than the abstract. Sadly I can’t say much more than this without giving the whole story away, for which I apologise!

Finally, Amy also wanted to know what my favourite part of the book was. It’s actually really hard to pick just one, as there was so much I loved about this sort novel. I loved the bit where Liza and Annie read Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller and realise that there are other lesbian couples out there. I also loved (again, this will be vague to prevent spoilers) how Garden dealt with the whole issue of the public and the private when it comes to gay couples – the people who react to Liza and Annie’s relationship negatively do so by reducing it to a “sexual perversion”, and therefore they feel entitled to both scrutinize their sexual lives as if they had no right whatsoever to privacy, and to act as if they had no feelings for each other beyond “lust”. This is something you see a lot in how homophobes portray homosexuality, and it upsets me beyond belief. Garden did such a great job of exposing and denouncing this kind of discourse in a way that is impossible to ignore but feels completely natural to the story.

On a related note, I loved how Annie on My Mind dealt with the whole issue of passion. Obviously physical passion is not what Liza and Annie’s relationship is all about, but it is a part of it, and they have the right to feel it and to experience it. But because they are not only gay but also teen girls, in their case the abjection that often surrounds same-sex sexuality only adds to the abjection surrounding female sexuality in general. The inevitable result is plenty of awkwardness and misery and reluctance until they’re ready to even talk about it. As I was reading this novel, I kept remembering something Renay once said about lesbian characters in literature lacking passion so often. I think this is part of the reason why, and I love that Nancy Garden addressed it and made it one of the novel’s main themes, while at the same time portraying the passion her characters do feel underneath all that awkwardness very well indeed.

As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I highly recommend Annie on My Mind. It has aged extremely well and has none of the dated feel you sometimes find in older YA. And it’s a beautiful and powerful story, which (in some ways unfortunately) remains very relevant today.

They read it too: The Lesbrary, Book Maven’s Blog, Reading Rants!

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Presenting: A Year of Feminist Classics

My bloggy friends Amy, Emily Jane, Iris and I have been plotting a reading project for 2011 for some time now, and it's so exciting to finally be able to share it with everyone else! For all of 2011, we're going to read from a list of fiction and non-fiction feminist classics. We're doing one book a month, and we'll alternate in leading what we hope will be interesting discussions about what we're reading, about the historical context of these texts, and about their relevance to the present day. We'd absolutely love it if others readers joined us - you certainly don't have to commit to the whole twelve months to do so. For more details on how the project will work, please visit the A Year of Feminist Classics blog. And of course, if you think this is a good idea, feel free to grab the button and spread the word!

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The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

That day its beauty was an affront to me, because like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon.

Rebecca West’s 1918 The Return of the Soldier, the very first WW1 novel by a woman, tells the story of Christopher Baldry, a captain who, as the result of a war injury, loses his memory of the past fifteen years of his life. Baldry is sent to hospital, where instead of asking for his wife Kitty, he says he wants nothing more than to see Margaret Allington, the woman he was in love with fifteen years before. Only Margaret is now married to another man, and to complicate matters further, she belongs to a different social class.

The Return of the Soldier is narrated by Chris’ cousin Jenny, who is staying with his wife Kitty at Baldry Court when the two receive the news of his injury. The news come from none other than Margaret Allington herself, who discoveres what had happened before they did due to Chris’ amnesia. Going up to a genteel house and telling a lady that she knows more of her husband than she herself does is intensely painful to her – Jenny realises this, of course, but Kitty shows Margaret no mercy.

The fact that The Return of the Soldier is as much about the class as it is about the Great War becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses. The initial chapters were actually somewhat uncomfortable for me to read, because West portrays the full force of the upper class’ contempt for Margaret with no restraint whatsoever. Kitty and Jenny hate Margaret “like the rich hate the poor”; she’s portrayed as grotesque by virtue of being plain and having no money; her mere existence is an unforgivable intrusion on the perfection of Baldry Court.

But of course, Rebecca West does this for a reason, and as the story progresses this picture begins to alter. Through Chris’ eyes, and eventually through Jenny’s as well, we begin to see this woman’s humanity, and all that lies beyond the reach of money or social stance. There’s no overt authorial comment on Kitty’s snobbishness, but there doesn’t need to be. The facts of the story speak for themselves.

All through this short novel, Jenny’s narration builds up a mood of loss, missed opportunities and nostalgia. Her initial account of their perfect pre-war life begins to break apart, and what surfaces in its stead is a world of suppressed feelings and unacknowledged problems lurking behind the seemingly perfect Baldry Court life. The Return of the Soldier is a mediation on the then unacknowledged psychological effects of the Great War, on memory and identity, on social class, and on the concepts of sanity, adulthood, responsibility and truth. For all its brevity, it’s a very moving book.

Favourite bits:

Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By night I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No Man's Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety - if it was that.

Yet all through the meal I was near to weeping because whenever he thought himself unobserved he looked at the things that were familiar to him. Dipping his head he would glance sideways at the old oak panelling; and nearer things he fingered as though sight was not intimidate enough a contact, his hand caressed the arm of his chair, because he remembered the black gleam of it, stole out and touched the recollected salt-cellar. It was his furtiveness that was heartrending; it was as though he were an outcast and we who loved him stout policemen.

I felt a cold intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed him so much saner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded with the inessential and the irritating. I was even willing admit that this voice of what was to him reality out of all the apperances so copiously presented by the world, this adroit recovery of the dropped pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him. But that did not make less agonizing this exclusion from his life.

Reviewed at:
A Book Sanctuary
A Work in Progress
Verity's Virago Venture

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The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

As the title tells us, The Great Silence: Living in the Shadow of the Great War is a social history of the years that followed the 1918 Armistice. Its main focus is on how people coped with the seemingly insurmountable losses they had suffered, and eventually found a way of resuming their lives. After something as devastating as WW1, it seemed impossible that life would ever go back to normal, and as often happens in these cases, it proved necessary to find a new way to define “normal life”. Juliet Nicolson particularly focuses on Armistice Day itself, on the Peace Parade that marked the one year anniversary of the end of the war, and on the funeral service for the Unknown Soldier that took place in 1920, and for which a single body was brought back from the battlefields of France to symbolise the thousands that had never been recovered. Through the stories of both ordinary people and historical figures, Nicolson gives us an account of the personal side of all these events.

The Great Silence is very much the kind of social history I tend to devour, and for this reason I knew from the start was inclined to like it regardless of whatever flaws it might have. Although these turned out to be many, this was exactly what happened. I find the early twentieth-century almost as fascinating as the Victorian era, and as such I appreciated the opportunity to immerse myself in the period. I loved the personal approach Nicolson uses, and even liked her flair for what can only be described as historical gossip; I loved the emphasis on the social changes that followed the Great War and on the transition into the ‘roaring 20’s’; I enjoyed learning more about the devastating Spanish flu, about the Interwar literary scene, and about now-forgotten episodes such as the heartbreaking story of the Skye shipwreck (two hundred soldiers who had survived the war lost their lives a mere twenty meters from land. How horrible is that?). Overall, there was plenty to love in this book.

However, The Great Silence somewhat overlaps with another social history book I read this year, Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, and as I don’t think the two books are even in the same league the inevitable mental comparison did not favour it at all. Possibly I’m saying this because Virginia Nicholson is a writer whose sensibility is much closer to my own, but I found Juliet Nicolson’s approach disappointingly superficial at times. As I was saying before, I did for the most part enjoy her forays into historical gossip; but at the same time, when I come across a passage such as the following,

Men were not the only lustful offenders. A laundress, Ellen Henson, had become pregnant three times during her husband’s absence at the front. Mr Henson stopped giving his adulterous wife any money and removed the children from her custody.

...I cannot help but wish it had been treated as more than a scandalous tidbit. Surely there’s a lot more to explore here? Not to mention that I don’t think wartime affairs were mainly motivated by what she calls “lust”. The Great Silence is sadly not nearly as complex as I hoped when it comes to gender, class, or glbtq issues (‘No one minded, much’ anymore? Really?). Add to this remarks about the “growing insolence of the servant class”, or pearls of wisdom such as “drugs were only part of a growing promiscuity spreading across all classes of society”, and as I’m sure you can imagine I was pretty annoyed at times. I’ll take my history without overtones of moral disapproval, thank you very much.

The Great Silence seems to be a book with a bit of a tendency to idealise the social structure of the pre-war past, but despite this and all my other “buts” – and they are not small “buts” – I’m still glad I read it. Nicolson has an eye for detail, writes very readable and often moving prose, and captures the mood of the period exquisitely. If you’re interested in the early twentieth-century, you too are likely to enjoy this – just bear in mind that it’s not exactly an in-depth analysis, and brace yourself for some eye-roll inducing remarks. Despite all the things that irked me, I still look forward to picking up Nicolson’s Edwardian social history, The Perfect Summer: Dancing Into Shadow in 1911.

Interesting bits:

Walking through the rain on 11 November 1918, with some fellow Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, Vera [Britain] slowly registered that the streets were brightly lit for the first time in four years. Her joylessness grew with the same speed as the elation that surrounded her. No adored brother and no longed-for fiancée were here to celebrate with her; there was therefore nothing to celebrate. That evening, finding it impossible to recapture ‘the lost youth that the war had stolen’, she too realised for the first time ‘with all that full realisation meant’, that the world had altered irrevocably and that ‘the dead were dead and would never return.’

Many of the most extreme of war wounded cases had not come back to their own homes at all. They were hidden away in institutions, allowed out occasionally to take the air, objects of fascination and pity, to be stared at and then hastily ignored by the able-minded going about their business. ‘Don’t look,’ John Leigh Pemberton’s mother would caution her young son as they walked along the front at Westgate-on-Sea, passing the gas-blinded soldiers.

In one gentleman’s club, where men professed themselves uninterested in buying the book [Marie Stopes’ Married Love], the demand for the library copy was so huge that members were restricted to one hour of reading before being asked to hand the book on. Marie Stopes received five hundred letters a day consulting her on all aorts of personal problems: just under half of them were from men. The open language she used when discussing the pleasure of a healthy sexual relationship was successful in its intention to ‘electrify’. Married Love sold two thousand copies in the first two weeks after publication and was reprinted seven times that year.

(Have you posted about this book too? If so, let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

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Just a very brief note...

...to let you know that sign-ups for this year's Book Blogger's Holiday Swap are now open. If you want to participate, make sure you hurry up - you have until November 14 to sign up. After three years of hosting the swap I had to bow out this year, as my life is a little too hectic at the moment to allow me to work on a project this time-consuming. Fortunately, some of my lovely co-hosts from last year - Amanda, Amy, Jen, Jen, Kelly, Lenore, Lena and Nicole - volunteered to take over, and they have come up with some excellent ideas to minimise lost or otherwise missing gifts and make sure everyone has a great swap experience. I can't wait to find out who my "Santee" will be!

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Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco

Our only hope was the support of the world. We’d expected that for months and years. We thought they would stop it. But they didn't do anything.

(From a testimony by a man from Goražde)

Safe Area Goražde is a non-fiction comic about the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. As the title indicates, Sacco specifically focuses on the experiences of the people of Goražde, a supposedly UN-protected town where the Muslim population of Bosnia could take refuge to avoid the ethnic cleansing being undertaken by the Bosnian Serbian army. However, the designation “safe area” was often not much more than theoretical, and Goražde often came close to being the site of a similar tragedy to the one that took place in Srebrenica (another designated “safe area” where over 8000 people lost their lives).

Joe Sacco spent four months in Goražde in 1994 and 1995, and in Safe Area Goražde he not only retells his own experiences, but also includes detailed testimonies by the people he met there. I’m not going to talk about the social and political context of the war in Bosnia in much detail here, because after only one book I don’t feel like I know nearly enough to sum it up without oversimplying it. Suffice to say that Joe Sacco does contextualise what’s happening, and I don’t think that even the most uninformed of readers (among which I sadly count myself) will ever lost or fail to relate to the very human drama of the people of Goražde.



Safe Area Goražde reminded me of Half of a Yellow Sun, of Deogratias, of the many WW2 books I’ve read over the years. In all of them, the process is the same: someone decides that a group of fellow human beings is not, in fact, properly human, and that the world would be a much better place if they were to be slaughtered. And so the cycle begins – a cycle of indescribable violence, terror, and of inevitable mutual distrust. A cycle where hate breeds hate, and where the peace and harmony of the past seem gone never to return.

In the case of Goražde, what was particularly difficult for many of the Muslin people Sacco interviews was the fact that the members of the Serbian army who turned against them had in many cases been their neighbours, their lifetime friends, their almost-brothers. All it took was a moment to severe the ties formed over a lifetime. In some of the stories, you can tell that Muslins and Serbs alike are moved by little more than fear, but whatever motivated those who took arms against their former friends, the damage was done.

It saddened me to read, again and again, testimonies of people who said they didn’t think Muslins and Serbs could live side by side in peace ever again. I can very well imagine sharing their fear and anger if I were in their shoes, but at the same time, this is exactly how the cycle of dehumanisation and mistrust begins again.


I should tell you that Safe Area Goražde is at times an incredibly violent book, but this is the kind of violence that has a clear purpose – it’s not meant to shock, but to shake the reader out of the kind of sense of distance and complacency we tend to slip into far too easily. I find the comics medium particularly effective when it comes to this, as it can make people see the horrors that took place during a war without the immediate shock value of, say, a photograph or a film. Sometimes graphic violence can cause people to refuse to engage with a story out of pure self-preservation (and I wouldn’t ever blame anyone for doing this). But I find that comics, particularly black and white ones, are less prone to causing that kind of gut-reaction, but at the same time still maintain much of the sheer power of an image.

Joe Sacco is very critical of the role the UN and the international community in general played – or failed to play – in the war, as well as of the concept of a “safe area” and of how absolutely bogus it was. And given the circumstances, I cannot blame him at all. As I said before, I don’t feel I know enough to discuss the politics of the war in any amount of detail, but the fact remains that massacre after massacre took place in Europe in the 1990’s, while the world stood by and watched. And of how many places could we say the same since then?

All of this is very recent history – I clearly remember hearing all about Bosnia in the news in the early 90’s (though mostly about Sarajevo), but I was too young at the time to be properly aware of what was going on. The impression I have, however, is that even people much older than myself were only dimly aware of what was happening, and that even today there’s a large amount of ignorance or embarrassed silence surrounding the whole subject. Which is why books like this matter so much – they make history impossible to ignore. If you have a moment to spare, I urge to read this post about Srebrenica by a fellow book blogger, as it’s sure to make this particular chapter of history feel much less remote. And then find yourself a copy of Safe Area Goražde. It’s quite a wake up call, and it’s an amazing and unforgettable read.


They read it too:
Regular Rumination
Valentina’s Room
Boston Bibliophile

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Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg

William Stolzenburg’s Where the Wild Things Were is a passionate and very accessible account of the devastating ecological impact of the disappearance of big predators – be it killer whales on the seas, sea stars in small rock ecosystem, or wolves, bears and mountain lions on land.

Stolzenburg’s book combines natural history and cautionary environmental writing with several case studies that illustrate Hairston, Smith and Slobodkin’s Green World Hypothesis, known today as trophic cascade. According to this hypothesis, the balance between predator and prey is crucial for biodiversity. To put it simply, the only reason why terrestrial herbivores don’t consume entire forests is because predators are there to keep them in check. Once these predators disappear, the whole ecosystem is tipped out of balance. The forests themselves begin to be at risk, as they can no longer support the increasing herbivore population, and as a result the many other life forms they support are threatened too.

Humankind has been directly and indirectly responsible for the disappearance of great predators for centuries now, and Stolzenburg describes the consequences this had had on several parts of the world. When Hairston, Smith and Slobodkin first presented their hypothesis in 1960, there wasn’t enough experimental evidence available to make it more than a conjecture, but as Stolzenburg shows us, this has long since ceased to be the case. Where The Wild Things Were presents a series of examples, all of which illustrate the same point - but don’t worry, this doesn’t make it a repetitive book in the least. Stolzenburg’s powerful writing and the dire reality of what he’s describing make this as gripping and unsettling as a nature thriller – but unfortunately, it’s all true.


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The point Where The Wild Things Were is trying to make does need a lot of illustrating, as unfortunately, even as the evidence piles up, the idea that we need predators still meets with an incredible amount of resistance. I’m sure there are many reasons for this – fear, convenience, financial or political interests, and the fact that a large portion of humankind has yet to accept the fact that we aren’t and will never be in full control of nature – but sadly the consequences are the same regardless of people’s intentions or motivations. As predators disappear, so do countless other species, and a lot of the time this loss of biodiversity is irreversible.

As you can imagine, Where The Wild Things Were is quite an upsetting book, but it also has moments of great beauty: William Stolzenburg writes with passion, enthusiasm, and a deep respect for nature in all its complexity. His love for predators goes beyond their role in maintaining biodiversity: even if we disregard their ecological impact, there’s no denying that wolves, tigers, lions or grizzly bears have a deep hold on our imagination. We fear them, we are fascinated by them, and we know how much they enrich the world.


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If Where The Wild Things Were repeatedly made me want to cry, it wasn’t only because it made me aware of the rate at which species are disappearing, or of how much we have already lost. It was also because it made me realise that the mere existence of these animals moves me, and that I don’t want to live in a world from which they are gone.

Favourite bits:

As the lianas gained control, they spread atop the canopies, blocking the light, smothering the trees. The seedlings and saplings of the Guri forests were dying faster than they could be replaced. No more monkeys, no more ants, no more trees. “The end point of this process,” Terborgh and his colleagues would later write, “is a nearly treeless island buried under an impenetrable tangle of liana stems.”
Said Freely, “I wish everyone could go to Guri. Because I think our message would be crystal clear then, if they were actually able to see this place.”

“We can now say,” Martin continued, “that limiting predators has costs—costs to forestry, and costs to wildlife. If you want to protect land without wolves, you risk losing birds, plants, et cetera. Wolves can thus be management tools. That may sound shocking, but the more one examines our work, the more we can say that this could be a solution, the only solution in some areas, to the problem caused by overabundance of deer.”

Not only does the slime rise, but over time it actually begins to look good. Slime has become the norm in many young minds (among them young conservation biologists). And the younger the observer, the more acceptable the slime. It is the phenomenon made known by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly as the shifting-baseline syndrome. The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellent, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents. Generation to generation, the world decays and the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime. On land, the big cats and wolves become feral house cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks even lower and becomes even heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually, nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondaracks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland.

Reviewed at: nothing of importance, Words by Annie

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Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Aurora Floyd is a Victorian Sensation novel which tells the story of a young lady of the same name. Miss Floyd is the only daughter of Archibald Floyd, a rich banker who, due to his wife’s unexpected decease, is forced to raise his child on his own. From a very young age Aurora regrettably develops, we are told, some quite unfeminine interests such as race horses and dogs. But that’s not the worst of it – the worst is a secret in her past; a secret surrounding her hasty dispatch to a finishing school in Paris; a secret known only by father, daughter, and certain individuals who know their silence is worth the price of gold. And that, I’m afraid, is as much as I can safely tell you about the plot.

Aurora Floyd is not quite as popular as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and I guess I can see why: this is a novel with a slower pace, and while still quite suspenseful, it’s perhaps not plotted quite as tightly as its predecessor. But you know, I think Aurora Floyd is actually my favourite of the two: it’s more ambiguous, more daring, and it raises even more question about what was and was not “natural” behaviour for women than Lady Audley’s Secret does.

I will not, of course, be telling you exactly what Aurora Floyd’s secret is, but it’s quite easy to guess from the very beginning that what she’s trying so hard to hide must involve some sort of misdemeanour of a sexual nature. Of course, in the eyes of Victorian society, anything involving female sexuality was not at all a mere misdemeanour. And yet – and this is where Mary Elizabeth Braddon earned my undying love – Aurora is never demonised. More: she’s not meek, apologetic, or even regretful. She’s a sensible young woman who believes that the past is the past, and that she should be allowed to carry on with her life.

Like I said, I will at all times make sure I don’t give away any plot details, but I still feel that I ought to include a spoilers warning for this paragraph and the following two, simply because I’m sure you’d be able to put two and two together and arrive at conclusions that might tell you more about the story than you want to know going in. Braddon describes Aurora as a woman “whose worst sin had been to mistake a bad man for a good one--the ignorant trustfulness of a child who is ready to accept any shabby pilgrim for an exiled nobleman or a prince in disguise”. She also tells us,

But then, if she had been faultless, she could not have been the heroine of this story; for I think some wise man of old remarked that the perfect women were those who left no histories behind them, but went through life upon such a tranquil course of quiet well-doing as left no footprints on the sands of time; only mute records hidden here and there, deep in the grateful hearts of those who had been blessed by them.

I loved the ironical remarks about the Victorian womanly ideal that Mary Elizabeth Braddon sprinkled throughout the story (about which more soon). Now on to my most spoiler-y comment, which has to do with the fact that the other person involved in Aurora’s past mistake is revealed to be a man of great physical beauty – and this, of course, has all sorts of implications about sexual attraction and the fact that a genteel young woman actually acted on it. The other thing that is never overtly addressed is sexual experience – Aurora probably has it, and Braddon very clearly points out that this does not in any way make her a worthless or unethical person. As much as I’d love to ascribe any belief to the contrary to Victorian ideology, this is a point that still needs to be made: lack of sexual “purity” is not, and has never been, the measure of a woman’s worth.

The impetuous, sensual, dark-eyed Aurora is often compared to her cousin Lucy, who represents the ideal of Victorian femininity. One of my favourite things about Aurora Floyd was the fact that Braddon used the interfering Victorian authorial voice in extremely ingenious ways. I’ve mentioned before, when discussing Middlemarch, that I don’t really agree with the view that Victorian narrators close down the interpretative possibilities of a story. In the case of Aurora Floyd, what the narrator does is perform a sort of sleight of hand – on the surface, Lucy is praised and Aurora is condemned, but of course that in reality Aurora is portrayed as a much more interesting character, and of course that the narrative doesn’t actually frame her past in disapproving terms. I loved the narrator’s slightly mocking tone when describing, with apparent approval, Lucy’s complete meekness and obedience to her husband. Braddon is wonderfully ironical, and she knows both how to be contrary and how to subtly let events speak for themselves.

There are two other characters who are repeatedly compared and contrasted: John Mellish and Talbot Balstrude, who are first introduced as Aurora’s suitors. Talbot and John mainly differ in the fact that one wants a trophy wife, whose chastity and meekness while make a statement about his own identity, while the other wants a person to love, be loved by, and share his life with. For all that it is sensational, Aurora Floyd is actually remarkably free of sentimentality or of attempts to idealise romantic love. In fact, it presents an almost modern and very no-shenanigans approach to love and relationships. Braddon was clearly very much aware that life and love do not necessarily follow a script.

Braddon was also clearly aware that there was no tragedy in a woman not staying forever with her first lover; that people can and do fall out of love, and that as heartbreaking as that may be, life has a way of carrying on. She also knows that a woman’s life story does not end once she’s married – and neither does the story of her love life. Relationships keep changing and evolving, and there’s as much about married or otherwise long-term love worth writing about as there is about courtship. I found her attitude extremely refreshing even in 2010, let alone in 1863.

Of course, as modern as it might be, this is still a novel inescapably entrenched in the ideology of its time: Aurora Floyd is ambiguous at best about class, combining a certain awareness of social privilege with ideas of innate nobility and of “coarseness”; and sadly it’s just downright appalling in its portrayal of disability. These are obviously not things that should be dismissed or swept under the rug, but I remain enthusiastic because there’s still so much about this story that goes against the grain of Victorian society and remains relevant today.

Aurora Floyd might not be as immediately gripping as Lady Audley’s Secret, but it’s an excellent, excellent novel: it’s full of irony and humour, and it raises almost alarmingly modern questions about gender roles, power dynamics, romantic relationships, and female sexuality. Also, it has what it is in Victorian terms a scandalous and subversive ending – my very favourite kind.

Interesting bits:

Have I any need to be ashamed of my heroine in that she had forgotten her straight-nosed, grey-eyed Cornish lover, who had set his pride and his pedigree between himself and his affection, and had loved her at best with a reservation, although Heaven only knows how dearly he had loved her? Have I any cause to blush for this poor, impetuous girl if, turning in the sickness of her sorrowful heart with a sense of relief and gratitude to the honest shelter of John's love, she had quickly learned to feel for him an affection which repaid him a thousand-fold for his long-suffering devotion?

And, indeed, I am disposed to take objection to that old proverb, or at least to believe that contempt is only engendered of familiarity with things which are in themselves base and spurious. The priest who is familiar with the altar learns no contempt for its sacred images; but it is rather the ignorant neophyte who sneers and sniggers at things which he can not understand. The artist becomes only more reverent as toil and study make him more familiar with his art; its eternal sublimity grows upon him, and he worships the far-away Goddess of Perfection as humbly when he drops his brush or his chisel after a life of patient labour as he did when first he ground colour or pointed rough blocks of marble for his master. And I can not believe that a good man's respect for the woman he loves can be lessened by that sweet and every-day familiarity in which a hundred household virtues and gentle beauties--never dreamed of in the ball-rooms where he first danced with an unknown idol in gauzy robes and glimmering jewels--grow upon him, until he confesses that the wife of ten years standing is even ten times dearer than the bride of a week's honeymoon.

Now, my two heroines being married, the reader versed in the physiology of novel-writing may conclude that my story is done, that the green curtain is ready to fall upon the last act of the play, and that I have nothing more to do than to entreat indulgence for the shortcomings of the performance and the performers. Yet, after all, does the business of the real life-drama always end upon the altar-steps? Must the play needs be over when the hero and heroine have signed their names in the register? Does man cease to be, to do, and to suffer when he gets married? And is it necessary that the novelist, after devoting three volumes to the description of a courtship of six weeks duration, should reserve for himself only half a page in which to tell us the events of two-thirds of a lifetime? Aurora is married, and settled, and happy; sheltered, as one would imagine, from all dangers, safe under the wing of her stalwart adorer; but it does not therefore follow that the story of her life is done. She has escaped ship-wreck for a while, and has safely landed on a pleasant shore; but the storm may still lower darkly upon the horizon, while the hoarse thunder grumbles threateningly in the distance.

(I love you, Mary Elizabeth Braddon.)

Reviewed at:
Savidge Reads

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