It’s 1935 in Uz, Nebraska, a twenty-five-year old town with a population of fewer than 300. A prairie witch (whose name we eventually learn) takes theIt’s 1935 in Uz, Nebraska, a twenty-five-year old town with a population of fewer than 300. A prairie witch (whose name we eventually learn) takes the “deposits” of townspeople’s bad—or good—memories through an emerald-green earhorn while in a trance, removing those experiences from the depositor’s mind to keep them safe in her own body. Asphodel Oletsky is a fifteen-year-old basketball player and unlikely witch’s apprentice whose memory of her murdered mother fills her with a bottomless rage. Her uncle, Harp, is baffled by the miraculous sparing of his wheat crop, and his alone, from the devastating dust storm of Black Sunday. Cleo Allfrey is a Black photographer sent West by the Resettlement Administration to frame and fix propaganda images for Roosevelt’s New Deal. And the scarecrow in Harp’s field is suddenly, alarmingly, awake and full of memories. From these five viewpoint characters, Karen Russell weaves The Antidote, a characteristically gripping and surreal novel that’s also a moving exploration of grief and loss, a reckoning with the true history of how the West was settled, and a resonant but never obvious angle on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900).
It’s no good asking who the Wizard, the Wicked Witch, Dorothy, the Tin Man, etc., are. The Antidote isn’t exactly a retelling or a revisitation. Baum’s novel has been interpreted as allegory about, amongst other things, moving off the gold standard, the plight of American farmers, the plight of American industry, the inherent evil of the American West and Native Americans in particular, political revolution in general, and the military performance of US soldiers in the Spanish-American War. Where Russell finds her connections is in these themes: the plow of empire, the oppressive potential of money, the abdication of personal responsibility for collective wrongdoing. As the novel unfolds, its shape becomes clearer: it’s both a story of speaking truth to power as consolidated in one man (a corrupt sheriff), and a far more complex and cynical indictment of the power for evil that lies in everyone. Cleo Allfrey’s time-traveling camera reminded me of the goggles in Russell’s short story “Haunting Olivia”; the photos it takes show both the near and distant past, as well as many possible futures. Combined with Harp’s speech at the climax of the novel, their purpose is to show the people of Uz (and “us”—the readers—and perhaps also “the US”, the nation) that their prosperity is built on theft from, and the murder and displacement of, Native Americans (always called “Indians” here, because it’s still the ‘30s) and unfair treatment of Black settlers. The people of Uz can reclaim those memories and try to make reparation, or ignore them and keep ruining their own land; their choice will determine their future. The fact that they riot when shown Cleo’s photos is telling, but no less disappointing for that.
Still, within the ecological and social messages of the book, there’s a groundedness in emotion and an investment in the characters that stops it from being preachy. The witch’s description of her time in the unwed mothers’ home is a story in microcosm about finding love and joy in darkness, and also reinforces the idea of the power of collective action. (She muses that the people who kept her and other pregnant women imprisoned there were outnumbered; had the women chosen to act together at any of various points, they could have freed themselves.) Her love for her lost son motivates her throughout the book, and when that storyline is finally resolved, it’s perfect and devastating. Dell’s love for her mother fires her athletic ambition and her tentative romance with her best friend and teammate, Valeria Ramos (which is beautifully conveyed, the girls’ combination of confidence and shyness with each other just right for their age). Harp loves his murdered sister and his niece but also seeks personal absolution through truth-telling, and it’s his perspective that shows us the historical irony of Poles forced off their land by German imperial interests moving to America and doing the same thing to another group of marginalised people.
As a recasting of Baum’s concerns for the Anthropocene, The Antidote succeeds fabulously, and is also entertaining, compelling, and well-written. My sole complaint is that the ending takes a smidge too long to wrap up—but really only a smidge, it’s a question of a dozen or so pages. Do seek this out if you’ve enjoyed Russell’s work in the past, and even if you haven’t tried her yet. I’d only read that one short story of hers before, but found this highly rewarding. Source: NetGalley; publishing 13 March....more
A short, very French novel about a high school philosophy teacher (we’ve barely started the premise and we’re already into “very French”) who, depressA short, very French novel about a high school philosophy teacher (we’ve barely started the premise and we’re already into “very French”) who, depressed and demoralised by her job teaching boisterous and disinterested teenagers in a working-class suburb, starts taking exotic dancing classes, then begins working nights at a stripclub. Parts of this I liked a lot: the balance of Joséphine’s new confidence and satisfaction with her too-slow awareness of the drug problems that plague some of her new colleagues, for example. Her growing relationship of mutual respect with a pupil is also good, demonstrating how much better she is as a teacher when it isn’t the only part of her identity. Other parts I found alienating; she’s often unkind about other women, their bodies, their sexualities and choices, in a way that seems unexamined by the author, although perhaps something is missing in translation. As well, Joséphine is one of those literary heroines who seems not to have family members, non-work friends, or outside interests; I’m sure those people do exist, but I don’t enjoy reading about them. If your only activities are “teach” and “strip”, you’re not that interesting a character. There’s explicit comparison of Joséphine’s “life of the mind” and her “life of the body”, but frankly she doesn’t seem to use her mind in a particularly exciting or productive way, and so her use of her body feels oddly sterile, too. Maybe that was the point, that stripping isn’t the quick fix for all of her problems that she thinks it is? Anyway, interesting, but a little too short and opaque and vaguely self-pitying for me to entirely like it. Source: bought new with gift cards...more
had assumed this was a reread, but actually I don’t think it is. Still, it felt familiar because the whole novel is a yoinked-out plotline from The H had assumed this was a reread, but actually I don’t think it is. Still, it felt familiar because the whole novel is a yoinked-out plotline from The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760). I’ll probably come to appreciate it more after I’ve written a thesis chapter on it. It’s hard not to be irritated by a novel written by a Cambridge-educated cleric in which a woman’s unchastity—even if the decks of plot and characterisation are stacked as high as possible to make readers feel sympathy for her—is unequivocally described as sinful behaviour for which repentance is the only redress. My argument, which I wrote about six weeks ago and haven’t looked at since, appears to be that Dodd gives his penitent prostitute a greater subjectivity and individuality than the rest of the texts associated with the Magdalen House charity, thus posing a powerful challenge to anti-prostitution writing’s narrative conventions from within their own ranks. I can support that from the text itself, but not without effort. Might need to iterate on it. Source: Internet Archive...more
Last week I was on a short research trip to Chawton House Library (held in the manor house in Chawton village which Jane Austen’s brother inherited; hLast week I was on a short research trip to Chawton House Library (held in the manor house in Chawton village which Jane Austen’s brother inherited; her own former home is also in the village and can be visited, though they are, confusingly, not the same place). The staff and curators there were absolutely excellent. Discovering that I was working on a novel by Mary Robinson that was an early example of English Gothic, and also has resonance with French politics and the Revolution, one of them brought me this, a tiny little chapbook in delicate condition that describes the travails of an individual in the prisons of Bonaparte’s France. Politically speaking, this is all rather odd and intriguing—is the author suggesting that monarchical France was better? Surely not, given the existence and widespread abuse of lettres de cachet—but literarily, the whole thing is a delightfully awful mess. The characters are entirely forgettable (there’s a star-crossed couple and also a noble and generous spurned lover; names? Other defining traits? Nah) and the pacing is totally off, with multiple long-lost uncles appearing on the penultimate page with no warning and no further elaboration. That isn’t even the worst choice this anonymous author makes: the villainous monk whose enmity has precipitated all the imprisonment gets his comeuppance when he strikes a prisoner in the face; the prisoner spits mercury (??! how did he get that??) into the monk’s eye, which (I guess) penetrates to his brain and kills him instantly. This happens in the penultimate paragraph. But this stuff wasn’t written to be undying literature; it was written to be cheap, daft entertainment. It isn’t a particularly good example of cheap, daft entertainment—there were better ways to do this kind of hack writing, even in the era—but it makes more sense when you know that’s what it is. Mostly, it’s just such a fun thing to have had access to. And it does constitute an interesting little curio. Source: Chawton House Library #loveyouracademiclibrary...more
Read for my PhD, on my supervisor’s advice; I appreciate that this is niche, but am covering it because I read almost the whole thing straight throughRead for my PhD, on my supervisor’s advice; I appreciate that this is niche, but am covering it because I read almost the whole thing straight through, instead of just one or two chapters. Hunt argues that the murders of the King and Queen of France created deep rifts in the thinking of ordinary people; the King was so consistently seen as the father of his country, and his body as sacred and untouchable, that killing that body meant needing to come up with another story about fathers and families, not just about politics. Gearing up to killing the Queen was easier in some ways but harder in others: Marie Antoinette was never seen as the good mother of France, but the cultural narratives around her before her death made her out to be a degenerate whore and reached a crescendo by alleging that she’d committed incest with her own son, thus corrupting the future of the nation. The novel I’m currently writing about—Hubert de Sevrac by Mary Robinson—was published in 1796 and deals with a French nobleman disinherited by both the Revolution and the machinations of the family servant, with many arguments in the novel about the purpose of nobility and the legitimacy of paternal authority, so it all seems relevant. Still have to work out how to fold Hunt’s ideas in to my chapter, though. Source: Senate House Library #loveyourlibrary...more
Hubert knocks Robinson's earlier novel Vancenza into a cocked hat by, basically, being the same thing (a Gothic novel with an embattled heroine, gloomHubert knocks Robinson's earlier novel Vancenza into a cocked hat by, basically, being the same thing (a Gothic novel with an embattled heroine, gloomy architecture, unexpected heritages, forbidden loves, intergenerational vengeance, etc.), but a LOT more of it. It’s three times as long, which it does not need to be, and contains some truly excellent props: a secret chapel housing a rusty dagger, an ebony crucifix with “REMEMBER” carved on the back, underground passages beneath a sketchy monastery, attic chambers containing imprisoned madwomen, mystery ladies giving out rings in dark forests, on and on it goes. There’s actually quite a bit about the nature of nobility and oppression, and whether the French Revolution was morally righteous, but you don’t want to hear about that. There are a ton of plot holes, and I had to pause five pages from the end to unravel the layers of secret identities, but you just can’t be mad about it. I’d never recommend Hubert de Sevrac to anyone not specifically interested in this kind of thing, but it has its good points; it might be melodramatic, but it’s also hard to put down. ...more
Hubert knocks Robinson's earlier novel Vancenza into a cocked hat by, basically, being the same thing (a Gothic novel with an embattled heroine, gloomHubert knocks Robinson's earlier novel Vancenza into a cocked hat by, basically, being the same thing (a Gothic novel with an embattled heroine, gloomy architecture, unexpected heritages, forbidden loves, intergenerational vengeance, etc.), but a LOT more of it. It’s three times as long, which it does not need to be, and contains some truly excellent props: a secret chapel housing a rusty dagger, an ebony crucifix with “REMEMBER” carved on the back, underground passages beneath a sketchy monastery, attic chambers containing imprisoned madwomen, mystery ladies giving out rings in dark forests, on and on it goes. There’s actually quite a bit about the nature of nobility and oppression, and whether the French Revolution was morally righteous, but you don’t want to hear about that. There are a ton of plot holes, and I had to pause five pages from the end to unravel the layers of secret identities, but you just can’t be mad about it. I’d never recommend Hubert de Sevrac to anyone not specifically interested in this kind of thing, but it has its good points; it might be melodramatic, but it’s also hard to put down. ...more
Hubert knocks Robinson's earlier novel Vancenza into a cocked hat by, basically, being the same thing (a Gothic novel with an embattled heroine, gloomHubert knocks Robinson's earlier novel Vancenza into a cocked hat by, basically, being the same thing (a Gothic novel with an embattled heroine, gloomy architecture, unexpected heritages, forbidden loves, intergenerational vengeance, etc.), but a LOT more of it. It’s three times as long, which it does not need to be, and contains some truly excellent props: a secret chapel housing a rusty dagger, an ebony crucifix with “REMEMBER” carved on the back, underground passages beneath a sketchy monastery, attic chambers containing imprisoned madwomen, mystery ladies giving out rings in dark forests, on and on it goes. There’s actually quite a bit about the nature of nobility and oppression, and whether the French Revolution was morally righteous, but you don’t want to hear about that. There are a ton of plot holes, and I had to pause five pages from the end to unravel the layers of secret identities, but you just can’t be mad about it. I’d never recommend Hubert de Sevrac to anyone not specifically interested in this kind of thing, but it has its good points; it might be melodramatic, but it’s also hard to put down. ...more
~~The usual caveats apply regarding the impossibility of “spoiling” a book of nearly two hundred years’ standing with its own Wikipedia page, and the ~~The usual caveats apply regarding the impossibility of “spoiling” a book of nearly two hundred years’ standing with its own Wikipedia page, and the presence of plot details in the following.~~
Previous Gaskell experience: I read Cranford in 2009 as a high school senior, North and South ten years later (terrific; Pride and Prejudice with socialists), and Wives and Daughters a few months after that, on a plane to America (I remember virtually nothing of it apart from liking it, which is a shame; I should read it again).
Here, in brief, is the plot of Ruth. Ruth Hilton, the child of a country cleric, is orphaned in her early teens and sent—by an executor of her father’s will chosen for his standing in the neighbourhood, but who has never met her—to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in the nearest town. While there, she meets and forms a slightly inappropriate friendship with a wealthy young man named Mr. Bellingham. Her employer turns her out upon discovering the friendship, and Bellingham easily prevails upon her—fifteen years old, naive, terrified and alone in the world—to come to London with him, where she becomes his mistress, and pregnant. A holiday in Wales ends badly when Bellingham falls ill and is swept away by his deeply unsympathetic mother. Ruth, left alone again, still pregnant, and now suicidal, is picked up by a kindhearted, hunch-backed Dissenting minister, Thurstan Benson, who is there on holiday. She comes to live with him and his spinster sister Faith, delivers her child (a boy), and—pretending, with the Bensons’ help, that she is a widow—becomes involved in the life of their town, Eccleston, even becoming nursery-governess to the young daughters of a pompous local businessman, Mr. Bradshaw. The truth emerges and she is ostracised, but her dedication to penitence, mildness, and self-sacrifice wins out: she is the only person willing to work as a nurse during a brutal typhus outbreak, and the town recognises how much they owe her. Discovering that Mr. Bellingham (who, under a different name, has been elected MP for Eccleston) has also fallen ill, she insists that her duty is to nurse him too, after which she is infected with typhus and dies within days.
It is a tragedy, and the bare enumeration of the plot can make it seem melodramatic and quintessentially Victorian. As I read, though, I was struck again and again by what (mostly) rescues it from being these things. One is the absolute sincerity—clearly deeply grounded in personal faith—with which Gaskell writes about religious faith as a form of salvation and delineates the hypocrisy of society at large. The other is the strong resemblance Ruth bears to a much older narrative form: the sentimental penitent-prostitute narrative.
Penitent-prostitute narratives are old, but they start getting really popular in the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time that charities and institutions for “rehabilitating” prostitutes are becoming a major social interest of the philanthropic class. (It should be clarified, also, that “prostitute” was a label with very broad applicability: women who had been men’s mistresses, had premarital sex but not for pay, or even just developed close friendships and been regularly alone with men, could be referred to as prostitutes.) Sentimental prostitute stories have a number of shared characteristics. The “fall” of the woman is involuntary, usually a result of extreme innocence and sudden financial need. Little time is spent on the details of living by transactional sex. Individual charity is the means by which a woman is “saved” and “redeemed” from a life of prostitution. Religious awakening and moral recovery are analogised. Finally, the process of redemption is frequently completed through the death of the penitent fallen woman.[1]
How does Ruth stack up? An involuntary fall: check. Ruth is fifteen, terrified at the imminent loss of her livelihood, and has nowhere else to go. Extreme innocence and financial need: check. Orphaned and jobless, she also has so little understanding of the world, and of money, that an opportunity to flee the inn where Mr. Bellingham has told her to wait for him disappears because she has no cash, and fears she’ll be arrested if she leaves without paying for her tea. Skipping over the details: giant check. The reader has no firm evidence that Ruth and Bellingham have been sexually intimate until after he’s abandoned her, when her pregnancy is revealed. Individual charity as instrument of redemption: giant check. The Benson siblings take Ruth into their lives and home, while the only mention of a structural or state-administered solution is the heartless Lady Bellingham’s attempts to have Ruth placed in an institution precisely like the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes. Religious awakening as the path to moral recovery: GIANT CHECK. This might be the biggest check of all. Thurstan and Faith Benson are Dissenters, Protestants who aren’t affiliated with the Church of England, and their religious convictions lead them to offer Ruth shelter. Her spiritual development is at the heart of the book: learning to disregard the cruelty of the world in the confidence that God does not love her any less, and teaching her son to live bravely in the same firm belief in his own identity as a child of God, is crucial to her processes of recovering and maturing. Redemption completed through death: you know it’s a giant check here too. Not only does Ruth die; she dies after nursing her completely unworthy seducer, winning the moral victory a decade and a half after the fact.
The question is, what is a sentimental prostitute narrative doing posing as a mainstream novel in 1853?
The height of such stories’ popularity was sometime in the last quarter of the 1700s. That’s an easy seventy-five years before Ruth is published. Most of my doctoral thesis deals with the expansion of literary representation options for women who had histories of transactional sex during this time, up to the point where, in 1825, Harriette Wilson became a bestseller by fusing the roles of top-shelf courtesan and authentic (if flippant) author. Such a fusion was barely thinkable in the 1760s and ’70s, when the stories of such womens’ lives were—if written at all—written by men, not the women themselves, and certainly not considered major mainstream publishing events. But by 1825, the situation has changed. So what changed—again—between 1825 and 1853? What brought the zeitgeist full circle in a century, so that open sexual transgression and open literary authority were unthinkably separate, then collided together and became, briefly, possible to combine, then separated again?
I actually do not know. But I would quite like to find out. This is, unfortunately, something of a failed review, because this question has grabbed my interest. I can tell you, however, that Ruth is worth reading. With far greater depth of character and variety of expression than its generic predecessors, it’s a genuinely gripping read: what will become of our beleaguered heroine, and how will her strange passivity win out in the end? You might find Ruth an occasionally irritating protagonist—at times, I was frustrated by her portrayal as a paragon of virtue in every way, save for one teenaged mistake—but I don’t think you can find her a hypocritical one. Her personal moral code is sincere; Gaskell lets us watch her grow and become more of who she really is over the years, and she really is this quiet, kind, unassuming person. You couldn’t ask for a more polar opposite to, e.g., Lizzie Eustace, and although Ruth dies and Lizzie lives, Gaskell’s point is the one made in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
[1] See, for instance, Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mary Peace, “The Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain: ‘Well-Grounded’ Exemplarity vs. ‘Romantic’ Exceptionality”, in The Eighteenth Century 48:2 (Summer 2007); Jennie Batchelor, “‘Industry in Distress’: Reconfiguring Femininity and Labor in the Magdalen House”, in Eighteenth-Century Life 28:1 (2004); and D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2005).
This is the third book in my 2024 B-Sides reading project, an attempt to explore the lesser works of authors whose “big” or “famous” books I’ve already read....more
I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. It wasn’t the premise that made me wary (young LA woman grieving her father’s death enters a relationshI didn't expect to like this as much as I did. It wasn’t the premise that made me wary (young LA woman grieving her father’s death enters a relationship with a local dominatrix)—I’m fascinated by the dynamics of sex work and BDSM, especially as it pertains to managing grief and loss. What put me on alert was the sense that this might be a disaster-woman novel (subgenre: sexy disaster), and some reports that the protagonist, Echo, was bland and inscrutable. Happily, for me, neither of these things were true. Echo is a disaster, but her father is dead—lost in a freak accident while rock-climbing over a dangerous stretch of beachside cliff—and she certainly has distinctive characteristics: as the child of a German-Dutch mother, her experience of life in LA is not unthinkingly accepting; she loves the sea, surfing, whales; her teenage career as a model and low-budget-film actress has shaped her in particular, not altogether healthy ways, and now (at twenty-four!) she’s aging out of her potential. But what I liked most about Permission was its very precise, beautifully rendered articulations of what trust in a domme/sub relationship actually means, the extent to which such a relationship can bring you to moments of almost mystic growth, development, epiphany. (Dominatrix Orly’s live-in house-slave, Piggy, is a fantastic secondary point of view character for this alone.) So commonly, books about contemporary sex make their characters weirdly emotionless; this doesn’t....more
Re-read during a week’s sojourn in Glasgow and surrounds. It’s not original to say that Trollope’s anti-heroine, Lizzie Eustace, is reminiscent of ThaRe-read during a week’s sojourn in Glasgow and surrounds. It’s not original to say that Trollope’s anti-heroine, Lizzie Eustace, is reminiscent of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp—others have done so—but it’s true. The difference, I think, is that Lizzie can’t accept short-term losses for long-term gains, and Becky can. (Perhaps the real difference is a class one: Lizzie doesn’t grow up in genuine poverty, and Becky does.) Lizzie’s early, calculated marriage to a sickly lord who dies young produces a familial conflict over a magnificent diamond necklace, worth £10,000 in the 1860s (about £1.5 million in today’s money). Lizzie insists that it’s hers outright; the lawyers insist it belongs to the estate. She won’t give it up; the lawyers won’t give in. Around the central conflict swirl mercenary “friends”, MPs and Under-Secretaries, shady jewelers and dodgy gentlemen-about-town. Trollope’s books are always long, but always completely involving: he’s as much a world-builder as any sf/f writer, and far better at writing women than Dickens. If you want a new Victorian obsession, start here. My copy, the Oxford World’s Classics edition from 2011 edited by Helen Small, has two helpful appendices, explaining the Palliser novels’ internal chronology and real-world political contexts....more
Perfectly competent literary histfic, but a good example of a book that seems sort of purposeless. It's about the famous Victorian lesbian Anne ListerPerfectly competent literary histfic, but a good example of a book that seems sort of purposeless. It's about the famous Victorian lesbian Anne Lister, but before she became famous. It deals with her first love affair, at school, with a mixed-race Anglo-Indian girl named Eliza Raine, which is historical truth—this is all documented—but God it's awfully sad, particularly because Raine is really our protagonist and her whole life after leaving school seems to have been one long battle with rejection, loneliness, and outright madness. It's just a little hard to know what the point of the novel was. To represent Lister as a young, charismatic, selfish person (as opposed to the older, charismatic, selfish person that her letters and diaries have revealed her to be)? To reiterate the (already known) oppressions facing queer women and women of colour in the era? Does either purpose require 300 pages of prose fiction?...more
PhD reading. Incredibly useful to me, probably not of interest to anyone else. Grass’s period of focus is after mine, but his introductory chapter argPhD reading. Incredibly useful to me, probably not of interest to anyone else. Grass’s period of focus is after mine, but his introductory chapter argues that the steep rise in autobiographical publishing at the start of the 1800s paved the way for a more general literary understanding of subjectivity as something that can be commodified, produced and packaged for consumption—leading to the great Victorian novels of first-person experience, like David Copperfield. I’m working on two memoirs by courtesans in precisely that early-century time period, and Grass discusses one of my authors (Harriette Wilson) explicitly. ...more
Read somewhat on location, on long-distance trains through Switzerland and France. This is based on a real-life historical person, the Great Tarare, aRead somewhat on location, on long-distance trains through Switzerland and France. This is based on a real-life historical person, the Great Tarare, also known as the Glutton of Lyon, who worked in late eighteenth-century France as a kind of sideshow freak eating pretty much anything—offal, nails, dead rats—had a brief stint in the French Revolutionary Army as a potential spy (it didn’t work out), and whose career was alleged to have culminated in the consumption of a human baby. Blakemore’s achievement is in creating a tone and register that combines repulsiveness and beauty, horror and innocence, as we see Tarare’s life through his eyes. Violence, poverty and neglect are all defining factors of his existence, but so is his extraordinary capacity for locating transcendence in something as quotidian as the limpid eyes of a cow or the body of a young man bathing in a stream. (His queerness is brilliantly portrayed as something Tarare understands from a young age but also can’t act upon, not so much because of societal homophobia as because he has no understanding of his entitlement to love.) It’s beautiful and sad, the kind of book that made me heave a bittersweet sigh after the last page was turned. ...more
Thesis reading. I’m not sure how much of this I’ll be able to use, but there’s an extremely useful long-ish section at the beginning which lays out, iThesis reading. I’m not sure how much of this I’ll be able to use, but there’s an extremely useful long-ish section at the beginning which lays out, in quite some detail, what various amounts of money per year in eighteenth-century novels actually represent, in terms of purchasing power, long-term stability, class position, etc. It’s very handy information, especially given how few of us could really confidently state the material difference between £300 and £3,000 a year in Austen’s time....more
You wouldn’t think an eighteenth-century novel would make good airplane reading, but you would be… well, actually, you’d be half-right. This particulaYou wouldn’t think an eighteenth-century novel would make good airplane reading, but you would be… well, actually, you’d be half-right. This particular eighteenth-century novel is highly engaging, with many of the best scenes taking place on board Royal Navy ships as our protagonist Roderick becomes a ship’s surgeon, participates in the Battle of Cartagena, does a bit of privateering, and finds long-lost relations in Argentina. It’s also thick—not as thick as Pamela or Clarissa or Tom Jones, but thicker than your Daniel Defoes—so it’s a bit of an effort to hold up in a confined space while trying to keep your elbows from intruding on your neighbours. And, readable though it is, it does still take a bit more brain power than an airplane book is generally meant to. I liked it an awful lot, though. Hadn’t read Smollett since I was about seventeen, so it was nice to come back to him and find that he is indeed rather good....more
Second reading, July 2024: This is a PhD text for me, and I read it once last year, finding it silly and underbaked. As it turns out, the key to this nSecond reading, July 2024: This is a PhD text for me, and I read it once last year, finding it silly and underbaked. As it turns out, the key to this novel, as to almost all things, is sustained attention. Rereading it again before starting to write the relevant thesis chapter, I realised I’d missed a good deal the first time around, like the way Robinson uses a Gothic-castle setting to index her heroine’s social status. Initially it’s young Elvira’s beloved home, described as sheltering, protecting, idyllic, and secure, but when her guardian is killed, the lexis changes, and it becomes gloomy, oppressive, and isolated—just as Elvira, and her foster sister Carline, are now isolated from any legitimate source of protection and financial support. There’s plenty of skill and thoughtfulness in the composition here, even if Robinson does insist on insta-death (complete with caps, italics, and exclamation points) when Elvira finds out [spoilers] her fiancé is actually her half-brother. (“She made an effort to rise—–Her strength failed—-she sunk into the arms of DEATH!")
First reading, July 2023: Most of the time I am fairly against the idea of a static and objective literary canon, but when I read a novel like Vancenza for PhD purposes it becomes very obvious why, exactly, Jane Austen is such a big deal. Imagining what she could have done with this material, you can see more easily when there’s paint-by-numbers characterisation, interpersonal dynamics that aren’t maximised or elaborated, hackneyed moral lessons (the subtitle is “the Dangers of Credulity”, draw your own conclusions) or preposterous plotting (the dénouement relies upon barely-averted incest and insta-death). It is not just a function of the period: lots of novels in the 1790s and 1800s were like this, but by no means all. Austen wrote the initial draft of Pride and Prejudice around this time even though it wasn’t published until 1814. Mary Robinson deserves more critical attention (obviously I think this or I wouldn’t be working on her), but it’s not because Vancenza is an unjustly ignored masterpiece....more
Reread, January 2025: I read this again for a book group I’m newly involved with, which is run under the auspices of Chawton House and focuses on liteReread, January 2025: I read this again for a book group I’m newly involved with, which is run under the auspices of Chawton House and focuses on literature from the (very) long 18th century. The last time I read it, I found it incredibly frustrating and even unpleasant, at times; it’s a novel that relies on prolonged misunderstanding, a plot device that has made me frantic with anxiety since I was a small child. One of the great things about discussing a novel with other people, though, is the different angles you get on it. The opening chapters of The Natural Daughter are strongly reminiscent of stage comedy: the dialogue between our heroine Martha, her sanctimonious sister Julia, and her ill-matched parents, her peevish father and obtuse mother, is very funny and feels zingy in the manner of Restoration drama. There was an excellent observation in discussion about the general behaviour of men in this novel: Austen’s heroines always get to marry someone decent, but the love interest here is—although not evil—somewhat famed as a heartbreaker, and the rest of the men are either genial buffoons or malevolent hypocrites. My contribution was to do with the ambivalence of Robinson’s portrayal of Martha’s “naturalness” as an actress and writer. She turns to writing to support herself, as Robinson did, but finds that she’s too sincere to be able to adapt to the fickle and lowbrow literary market; yet her stage acting is superb, precisely because she’s unaffected and convincing; her social status in the real world, however, is constantly menaced by her inability to “dissemble” or “flatter” wealthy unworthies. It’s a very curious combination of traits, and reflects, I think, a wariness about adaptability, a sense that its value depends on context and on an unquantifiable type of personal integrity. Source: old personal copy
Original review, July 2023:You know when you’re watching a movie and the protagonist is caught in some compromising situation like, idk, they’re standing over a dead body holding a pair of pruning shears, and the antagonist(s) are all like “aha! YOU are the killer!” and actually our hero-/ine was just doing some pruning and stumbled over the body and the cause of death wasn’t stabbing-with-garden-shears anyway but they don’t EXPLAIN any of this, they just meekly go to jail and start working on their appeal, and you’re screaming “JUST TELL THEM THE HEDGE NEEDED SOME WORK” at the screen? The Natural Daughter is like that, but for “dead body”, read “illegitimate baby”, and for “pruning shears”, read “basic human decency”. A better novel than Robinson's previous one, Walsingham, but wildly stressful....more
Read for my PhD. A sentimental picaresque in which the nearly 500 pages of tribulation suffered by our hero because of (directly or indirectly) his riRead for my PhD. A sentimental picaresque in which the nearly 500 pages of tribulation suffered by our hero because of (directly or indirectly) his rival in love and fortune, his cousin Sir Sidney Aubrey, is negated in the final two chapters by the revelation that Sidney is actually a woman. There’s a lot of fun to be had in picking out the cross-dressing and the queer readings (especially if you know the spoiler from the start, which you should), but good Lord, Walsingham futzes around a lot, trying to save people from highway robberies and evictions and generally just getting arrested himself. (He must get arrested at least three times over the course of the novel—I should go back and count.) Like Tom Jones if Tom Jones weren’t funny....more
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