Thoughts on Jane Austen’s Husbands – and why Clever Men marry Silly Women

Tags

Barbara Pym, Jane Austen, Monica Dickens, Mr Bennet, Mr Darcy, Mr Knightley, Tania van Hasselt, Tanya van Hasselt, Why Clever Men Marry Silly Women

I make no apologies for repeating this article written by fellow-author Tanya van Hasselt back in 2017. Even today it is periodically referred to by fans of Jane Austen and of Tanya’s own contemporary books about marriage and family life.

‘Men of sense do not want silly wives’ says the wonderfully sensible Mr Knightley, that infinitely dependable hero whom everybody in Highbury – and Jane Austen’s readers – know to be an infallible guide. But who is really speaking here? Is Jane Austen having a secret laugh with us behind Mr Knightley’s back? After all, his own brother, astute and perceptive as he is shown to be, has married Emma’s sister Isabella who ‘was not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness.’

Clever men have a habit of marrying silly somen in Jane Austen novels. Not that they mean to; it’s as if Jane Austen observed from life that sensible, rational men can be remarkably stupid in matters of the heart. Mr Bennet married without taking the trouble to discover that underneath the sexual attractions of youth and beauty his wife was ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper.’ Not really a man of sense then, one can’t help thinking.

Mr Palmer has fallen into the same trap: ‘through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman’. Is the ironic inclusion of the word ‘unaccountable’ Jane Austen having another sly laugh at men?

A woman’s appearance is almost always what initially attracts and matters most to Jane Austen’s men. Even Mr Darcy, who we suspect has thought much on the subject, says of Elizabeth ‘she is not handsome enough to tempt me’, before eyeing her up and down and deciding that her ‘figure is light and pleasing’.

Sometimes even the possession of beauty or sex appeal doesn’t explain why silly women secure men of sense as husbands. ‘Mrs Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose sociekty can raise no other emotion than surprise at their being any men in the world who could like them enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment nor manner.’ But this excessively boring woman who talks of nothing bu her gowns has still managed to get a husband. Jane Austen’s explanation is simple and sarcastic enough. ‘The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible,intelligent man like Mr Allen.’

So how do these men of sense conduct themselves when they realise that while they may not have wanted a silly wife, they have got one by mistake? Honourably it appears, though Jane Austen is not in the business of writing explicitly about extra marital forays. Mr Bennet, we are told, ‘was not of a disposition to seek comfort, for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on in any of the pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments’.

Reading offers itself as an escape. Mr Bennet shuts himself up in his library; Mr Palmer buries himself in the newspaper. Lady Middleton, snobbish and less amiable than her sister Charlotte but equally vacuous ‘exerted herself to ask Mr Palmer if there was any news in the paper. “No, none at all,” he replied and read on.’

Silly women in Jane Austen novels do not care for reading. It is quite impossible to picture Mrs Bennet holding a book. Lady Middleton dislikes the Dashwood girls because they are well-read. Miss Bingley pretends to read, but only picks up a book because it is the second volume of the one Darcy is reading. Characters who don’t read are shown to be ill-educated and superficial.; Mr Darcy may sound intolerably condescending when he pronounces that a lady should improve her mind by exgensive reading, but it is clear that Jane Austen is generally in agreement with this principle, even if she can’t resist poking fun at its unfortunate effects in Mary Bennet.

These men of sense who marry silly women may resort to grumpy rudeness (Mr Palmer) or ridicule and mockery (Mr Bennet) or playing at cards (Mr Allen) but Jane Austen largely ignores any serious umhappiness in their marriages. As for the wives, silliness and good temper sometimes offers its own protection. Charlotte Palmer, pretty and giggling, prattles away, her sheen of stupidity sealing her off from the consciousness of what is going through her husband’s head.

In Jane Austen’s day marriage was the necessary goal for women, and understandably enough they had to use every weapon they possessed to achieve it. ‘My aunt Philips wants you so to get husbands, you can’t think’ – Mrs Bennet, Charlotte Palmer and Mrs Allen succeeded in this at any rate, so you could say they have the last laugh.

Jane Austen is careful to show us these disappointed husbands being thoughtful to other characters if not to their wives. But there is a touch of cruelty in her suggestion that stupid women deserve all they get or are too thick to have real feelings, and should be regarded as mere figures of fun. Although Elizabeth Bennet knows that her father’s treatment of her mother is ‘reprehensible’, as readers we are encouraged to forget about this in our enjoyment of his wit.

These unequal marriages give us some of the funniest scenes in Jane Austen’s novels. If we want a more sombre, serious look at the regret suffered by a man of sense marrying in haste we have to wait for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with its brilliant creation of Mrs Gibson – but that penetrating combination of comedy and tragedy deserves a post of its own.

Tanya’s own contemporary fiction about family life is currently on special offer at Amazon. The winner of a Barbara Pym Centenary Prize, she writes with “sly humour and acute insight into human frailty“. Why not treat yourself?

All Desires Known

£3.95 for the paperback. £0.99 for the kindle.

Of Human Telling

£3.83 for the paperback. £0.99 for the kindle.

The King in the Carpark

Tags

Bosworth Field, Craniofacial Identification, Dr Richard Buckley, Fotheringhay, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Josephine Tey, Julian Humphrys, Princes in the Tower, Richard III, Richardians, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, The Daughter of Time, The Wars of the Roses, Tudors, Winston Churchill

The Richard III Society commissioned Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the University of Dundee, to reconstruct the King’s features. The result was this face, looking younger and less careworn than the traditional portraits. Someone who looks calm, determined and thoughtful. But was he also a murderer?

Towards the end of August, my husband and I finally took a trip originally booked just before the Covid crisis. This was an organised three-day tour centered around the discovery of Richard III’s remains in a Leicester car park and included one lecture by medieval historian Julian Humphrys, on The Wars of the Roses, plus another by the archaeologist heading the dig, Dr Richard Buckley, entitled: ‘The King Under the Carpark – Greyfrirs, Leicester and the Search for Richard III. It also included guided visits to the impressive Richard III Visitor Centre in Leicester, to the Bosworth battlefield, and to the site of Fotheringhay, where Richard was born. It was a fascinating experience.

Richard is one of England’s most notorious kings and his death at Bosworth in 1485 – the last English king to die in battle – heralded not only the start of the Tudor dynasty but a still-continuing dispute about whether he had murdered the two young princes in the Tower.

Hundreds of words have been written on the subject, from those of Sir Thomas More, to Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the life and Reign of Richard III, to Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time, where a modern police officer undertakes a ‘cold case’ investigation into Richard’s alleged crimes. As someone interested in character and motivation I, too, have struggled to understand how a deeply pious man – apparently devoted to his older brother, Edward, and entrusted by him with the safeguarding of his sons after his death, could change in the space of months into a child murderer.

Despite having what we now know to be scoliosis, that Richard was both a brave man and a skilled fighter is never questioned. From his teens onward, he was in the forefront of three significant battles and at Bosworth charged Henry Tudor’s position, brought down his standard bearer and killed the six-foot-eight John Cheyne standing between him and the man taking arms against him. Had his horse not been brought down, he might have triumphed.

Richard was respected in the North and forward-thinking in laws he introduced. He refused monetary gifts when making his royal progress, saying he would prefer to have the people’s love. Although he had two acknowledged illegitimate children, he was not a womaniser like his brother Edward, to whom he had shown nothing but loyalty and devotion throughout his life. So why did things change after Edward’s death?

Some questions, like the whereabouts of Richard’s grave, have at least been answered. Others, like the fate of the two princes, remain a mystery. There is evidence that Richard was far from the villain painted by Shakespeare and that ‘facts’ to his detriment provided by Sir Thomas More are questionable. Yet it is also true that Richard seized the throne for himself shortly after his brother’s death and that his two nephews went missing while under his protection. But were they murdered? And, if so, by whom? One imagines that Henry VII would have made strenuous efforts to find out what happened to those boys (his wife’s brothers, after all) and would have relished the opportunity to provide proof not only of Richard’s guilt, but of his unfitness to be England’s king. Perhaps none could be found. Had the boys still lived, of course, they would have been an embarrassment to Henry and provided Yorkist sympathisers with a rallying point. Perhaps at least one of them survived, but needed to lead a discreet existence out of the public eye..

I would like to think the truth will one day come out. Until then, like Jane Austen and Winston Churchill, we must all agree to disagree.

Please note that I am a writer, rather than a historian, and the above ramblings are largely my own…

Barbara Pym: when knitting is needed

Tags

Embroidery, Jane Austen, Knitting, Oscar Wilde

‘I wonder if women brought their knitting when Oscar Wilde talked,’ said Piers.

‘I daresay not,’ said Sybil calmly, ‘but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have liked to.’

(At a dinner party in Barbara Pym’s novel A Glass of Blessings)

Sybil, the tolerant, perceptive mother-in-law of the heroine Wilmet in A Glass of Blessings, can be relied on. Knitting, embroidery, tapestry, sewing:  these could come to the rescue of women – and men too – on all sorts of occasions. It’s enough to make you envy those Jane Austen heroines who could bend their faces over their work to hide their emotions of irritation or boredom with whatever is going on around them.

Certainly the Lenten service Wilmet attends with its almost never-ending sermon would have been much more bearable if she’d had something to occupy her hands and despairing mind: We had been subjected – that seemed to be the only way to describe it – to an address of great dullness… Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still it went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness, like a great suffocating eiderdown.

Being a committed Christian and regular churchgoer, Barbara Pym heard a lot of sermons and you can’t help thinking some of them must have found their way into her novels. Did Archdeacon Hoccleve’s Judgment Day sermon in Some Tame Gazelle with its over-flowing stream of literary quotations beginning at the seventeenth century happen in real life? The congregation shifted awkwardly in their seats. It was uncomfortable to be reminded that the Judgment Day might be tomorrow.’ Another occasion for the soothing effect of needlework.

Embroidery can provide the motif for those preachers of sermons, as in Barbara Pym’s early novel Civil to Strangers: ‘Some people don’t put in enough stitches,’ repeated the rector, in a slow emphatic voice. ‘Isn’t that true of many of us? He leaned forward. ‘Aren’t our lives pieces of embroidery that we have to fill in ourselves? Can we truthfully say that we always put in enough stitches?’ Cassandra, the twenty-eight-year-old heroine, wakes up from daydreaming to realize that she is the ‘old lady’ whose embroidered firescreen has inspired the rector’s sermon; Janie, the rector’s good and dutiful daughter, is whiling away the time eyeing up the curate as a possible husband. Barbara Pym knew that even Excellent Women find it impossible to stop their thoughts wandering, and this must be a comfort to all of us.

It’s more than forty years since I started an embroidered cushion cover in a fit of over-enthusiasm and lack of self-knowledge. Somehow it got put away and forgotten, but it’s come out again now. Just the thing for keeping calm when politicians are fighting: I might even finish it. The wife of the President of the Learned Society in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women knew what she was about, during those endless anthropology lectures, sitting there with her knitting until she nods off to sleep…

Writing Competitions to Enter in August

Tags

Aesthetica Creative Writing, Cinnamon Pencil Mentoring Competition, Costa Short Story Award, Earlyworks Press Flash Fiction, Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Competition, Exeter Flash Competition, Exeter Story Prize, HISSAC Annual Open Short Story Sean O'Faolain Short Story, Hysteria Writing Competition, Impress Prize for New Writers, Jane Austen, NAWG Open Competitions, Norwich Writers' Circle Olga Sinclair Open Short Story Competition Jane Austen, Retreat West Novel Prize Earlyworks Press Flash Fiction

You may not be able to sit at the same bureau as Jane Austen – seen here at the Chawton Cottage – but don’t let that stop you entering one of the August competitions which are detailed below.

The Costa Short Story Award is for stories up to 4,000 words by writers resident in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Prizes are: £3,5000 £1,000, £500, with FREE entry. Closing date is 5pm on Monday 2nd August. Details: http://www.costabookawards.co

The Retreat West Novel Prize for unpublished novels. Prizes: Retreat West publishing contract and £500 advance. MS critique and editorial report. Entry fee: £15. Closing date 10 August. Details: http://www.retreatwest.co.uk

Earlyworks Press Flash Fiction, for flash fiction up to 100 words. Prizes: £100; cash and books. Entry fee: £5, £20 for up to 6. Deadline: 30 August. Details: http://www.earlyworkspress.co.uk

Aesthetica Creative Writing for short stories up to 2,000 w

ords, poetry up to 40 lines. Any theme, form or style. Prizes: £2,500 in each category, publication, books, plus editorial consultation for fiction winner and membership of The Poetry Society for the poetry winner. Entry fee: £12 poetry; £18 short fiction. Deadline 31 August. Details: http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/creative-writing-award

Cinnamon Pencil Monitoring Competition for 10 poems, 2 short stories or the first 10,000 words of a novel. Prizes: Cinnamon mentoring. Entry fee: £12. Closing date: 31 August. Details: http://www.cinnamonpress.com

Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Competition. Stories up to 250 words. Prizes: £1,000, £300, £150; £300 for a Scottish writer. Entry fee: £7. Closing date: 31 August. Details: http://www.storyawards.org

Exeter Flash Competition for fiction up to 750 words. Prizes: £200, £100, £50. Entry fee: £6. Closing date: 31 August. Details: http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk (Please double check as, although the flash fiction appears to have been cancelled, they are still asking for stories of “up to 750 words”, in addition to the Exeter Story Prize, detailed below)

Exeter Story Prize for short stories up to 5,000 words. Prizes: £500, £150, £100. Entry fee: £12. Closing date: 31 August. Details: http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk

Hysteria Writing Competition for short stories up to 600 words, poetry up to 12 lines, flash fiction of 100 words. Prizes: £25 in each category, publication. Entry fee: £1 per entry (That is NOT a typo). Details: http://www.indaph.me

NAWG Open Competitions. Poems up to 40 lines; stories 500-2,000 words. Prizes: £25o, £150, £50, publication. Entry fee: £5 each (£10 for three poems). Closing date: 31 August. Details: http://www.nawg.co.uk

Impress Prize for New Writers, for full-length debuts from unpublished fiction and non-fiction writers. Submit book proposal and sample chapter which totals no more than 6,000 words. Prizes: £500, publication by Impress Books. Entry fee: £25. Closing date: 31 August. Details: http://www.impress-books.co.uk

We live in changing times, so please take care to double-check all details before entering a competition, to avoid possible disappointment. Things can be changed or cancelled at short notice.

Good luck, and may the spirit of Miss Austen be with you…

In Love With Mr Darcy (and others…)

Tags

Coping with Rejection, In Love With Mr Darcy, Jane Austen, Mr Darcy's Love Letter, Pride and Prejudice, Superman, Val Wood

I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I fell in love for the first time – with Elizabeth’s Darcy. Warm feelings that have not greatly changed in the decades that have passed since.

For that reason I couldn’t resist entering last year’s Val Wood challenge (details of which you may have seen in our September blog): to write an imaginary love letter.

I learned in the fullness of time that my effort failed to either win or be shortlisted, though I was able to comfort myself that the ultimate winner had submitted a series of letters, with an unfolding story, which gave her more scope. Undaunted by this, I’m concentrating on the pleasure I had in composing Darcy’s imaginary words and the break that it provided from the hard graft of editing my novel. No writing is wasted. It’s like sketching is for an artist, the exercising of skills.

If you share my soft spot for Fitzwilliam Darcy, you might like to read my effort at putting myself into his shoes, and breeches…

Dearest, Loveliest, Elizabeth, 

You know – who better? – the difficulty I have always had in expressing my feelings. So, I take up my pen again, on this our first anniversary, to try and do better – and to explain how having you as my wife has transformed my life.

To begin with, I am no longer the man I was. Had my mother lived, she might have prevented me from becoming the self-satisfied prig you met at the Assembly Rooms at Meryton. She might have taught me that a living, breathing woman is so much more than a pair of fine eyes (entrancingly fine though yours are) and that knowledge of the fair sex should not be limited by lack of imagination.

When you promised to become my wife, it gave me pleasure to think of all that I could give you. Time, however, has shown me how obtuse that thought was – and what, instead, you have been able to gift to me. For you have become the teacher, and I the pupil.

Jealousy, of Wickham – and even of my excellent cousin, the Colonel, – helped to open my eyes to the value of things not material. And although I began by despising that opportunistic adventurer (an easy mistake, I fear), those feelings have changed to pity, for Wickham has always chosen pinchbeck over silver. Brass over gold. Transitory pleasure over lasting joy.

While you, my dearest, darling Lizzie, have taught me to be a man of sense and sensibility. Have taught me how to laugh. At your perceptive wit. At the nonsensical habits of society. At myself, and the fools we men so often make of ourselves.

When I now consider the marriages of my friends and acquaintances, I see too many wives transferred from the charge of their fathers into that of their husbands. The partnerships seem contented enough. But how blind they are to what might be – an alliance of equals, a communion of souls and bodies, a joint fortress against the vicissitudes of life.

For whenever I have my arms around you, my dearest heart, I am whole. You are the star in my night sky. My birdsong in the morning. And now that the two of us are so soon to become three, I cannot but observe that while my dear friend Bingley habitually smiles, I want to laugh out loud.

Your devoted husband,

Fitzwilliam

If, like the Val Wood judges, you weren’t seduced by my Darcy letter, you may prefer something in a more modern style, as composed by another member of ninevoices…

From: veb@bott.co.uk

To: wbrown@rcomptonchambers.com

29 February 2020 21.34

Superman

That’s what you’ll always be to me. Superman. I don’t suppose any of us would’ve thought that you would grow up to become a human rights lawyer. Getting that awful unelected, manipulative toad convicted was just so brilliant. Superman.

But then to me you were super boy, always taking on the world with your colander tin helmet and wooden sword, righting wrongs. You were the leader. The Outlaws followed wherever you led them. Outlaws, that was ironic, seeing that you became an upholder of the law.

I wanted so desperately to join your gang. I don’t blame you for not letting me. Thanks to Mummy I was never appropriately dressed for games in the woods. You were always kind to me and I like to think that was your genuine good nature and not because I was the brat who threatened to make myself sick by screaming. Actually, I couldn’t. You probably knew that. You were so clever. And obviously you still are.

A human rights lawyer. My hero. You know Hubert Lane is a hedge-fund manager. Fitting. We could’ve forecast that one, but did you know he wanted Daddy to register his company in the Caymans? But Daddy was having none of that. ‘I pay my taxes, he said, ‘besides I have my work cut out planning how to reduce the sugar content in Bott’s Table Sauce.’

I think my early hero worship of you was the basis of what became my love for you. I should be more like your sister Ethel and wait for a man’s proposal. That’s what this is, dearest Willyam – I always think of you like that because that’s how you used to say it. Look at the date, my darling. Please don’t make me wait another four years to take advantage.

Darling, I’m not asking for a ring, a white dress and all that pomp. We’re a modern couple and don’t need it. Sweetheart, isn’t it time that you and I moved in together? You could come to the Mayfair apartment Daddy bought for me. I somehow think that is not for you though. I’d be happy to come to yours in Islington.

What do you say, darling, darling Superman?

Yours for ever, Vi

If any of our followers fancy sending us their imaginary love letter, either for Valentine’s Day or as a celebration of Leap Year – just for the fun of it, no prizes, unfortunately – we’d love to see them. Sometimes we need to be reminded that writing is what we do to enrich and enliven our days. 

Happy Valentine’s Day!

 

 

 

Oxford delights: Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym

Tags

19 magazine, Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Georgette Heyer, Harriet, Jane and Prudence, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Lisa & Co, Nancy Mitford, Oxford, Petticoat magazine, Virago

What’s the connection between Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym apart from them being quintessentially English and writing splendidly funny novels?

Jilly Cooper’s introduction to the 2007 Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, tells the story of how she borrowed the novel quite by chance from a library and fell in love with it. ‘I shamefully lied to the librarians that I had lost it, paying a 3s 6d fine … over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite.’

Jilly Cooper was therefore the perfect and altogether delightful guest at a magnificent tea in Oxford, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbara Pym Society, as part of the Society’s weekend conference featuring Jane and Prudence.  Some of those attending might never have read a Jilly Cooper novel; others like myself have delicious youthful memories of revelling in her stories serialised in magazines like 19 and Petticoat, some of which were subsequently expanded into short romantic novels named after their heroines.

It’s in Harriet, partly set in Oxford and published in 1976, that we get a rather endearing echo of a scene in Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence; in both novels young girls remark to each other that thirty sounds so old but forty must be worse… whereupon they brood silently upon this horror!

Jilly Cooper might be more famous now for her ‘bonkbuster’ novels, starting with Riders in 1985, but perhaps the older among us will always have an affectionate soft spot for the irresistible heroes and scatty/naughty/dreamy/kind-hearted/unselfconfident/innocent heroines of the early romantic novels Bella, Emily, Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, Imogen and her collection of short stories Lisa & Co, first published as Love and Other Heartaches. They offered the escapist, romantic, comfort-with-comedy reading we sometimes needed when growing up.

As Jilly Cooper wrote of her short stories in 1981 ‘I cannot pretend that these stories are literature. They are written purely to entertain… Their mood is rooted firmly in the sixties, where we all lived it up… when the young were still optimistic about marriage, and believed that God was in his Heaven if all was Mr Right with the world.’

Jilly Cooper met Barbara Pym just once – at the Hatchards Authors of the Year Party in 1979 – a wonderful memory she will always treasure. I know I will do the same after meeting Jilly Cooper.

Anglican Women Novelists

Tags

Agatha Christie, Alison Shell, Barbara Pym, Book of Common Prayer, Capital punishment, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte M Yonge, Charlotte Maria Tucker, Church of England, Dorothy L Sayers, East Anglia, Elizabeth Goudge, Evelyn Underhill, Gaudy Night, Iris Murdoch, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Judith Maltby, Lambeth Palace Library, Margaret Oliphant, Monica Furlong, Murder Must Advertise, Noel Streatfeild, P D James, Prayer Book Society, Rose Macaulay, Shirley, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death

There have been more Anglican women novelists than you might think. 13 of them feature in Anglican Women Novelists – from Charlotte Brontë to PD James, edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, and published only this year. Two of the ninevoices were at its launch in the magnificent setting of Lambeth Palace Library in July.

The editors explain that to keep the book of manageable size they restricted it to writers who were British and deceased. But questions of selection are inevitable. Iris Murdoch is here? Yes, because although she lost her faith in Christ’s divinity, and was drawn towards Buddhism, her world was still infused by Anglicanism and she still attended Anglican services. The author of the Iris Murdoch essay (Peter S Hawkins) entitles it “Anglican Atheist”.

And why no Jane Austen, in whose novels the C of E features so much, when Charlotte Brontë gets in? Because between the two lie Catholic Emancipation and the repeals of the Test and Corporation Acts, meaning that other denominations could now take their place freely on the national stage: Anglicanism had lost its ‘default’ position as the nation’s faith and was becoming more of a denomination that you made a positive choice to join.

The essay on Charlotte Brontë (by Sara L Pearson) argues how much her life was rooted in the C of E and how much of her work does too. Shirley, we read, shows her “longing for the Church of England’s preservation and reformation”. In Jane Eyre the male representatives of the Church, Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers, are hardly role models, and their failings are compared with (and perhaps compensated for by) the qualities of female characters around them. Also, “the Book of Common Prayer haunts the pages of Jane Eyre … not only for its contents but also as a physical object”: it will have formed such an ever-present part of her childhood.

‘Dorothy L Sayers – God and the Detective’ is the title of Jessica Martin’s piece. She speaks of the role justice and punishment play in her detective novels. She makes the important point that Golden Age detective novels were written in the time when the hangman awaited the unmasked murderer: in that sense the stakes were higher, the ultimate retribution is always in the background.   Sayers had trouble with this, we read: she had “increasing unease with narrative arcs which must privilege orderly acts of justice over the wilder power of mercy”. She sees the limitations of this, and justice must come from elsewhere: “her plots have an invisible protagonist, and his name is Jehovah”. The essay then analyses Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death and Gaudy Night in this light.

The final essay is ‘PD James – “Lighten our Darkness”’ by Alison Shell.   She compares PD James to other Golden Age detective writers, principally Agatha Christie, concluding, “For all her own homage to Christie, her novels are far more violent and desolate than her predecessor’s; if Christie is the quintessential Golden Age detective novelist, James’ fallen world locates her within an Iron Age of crime fiction.” Evil is a reality: and the essay speculates on the degree to which PD James saw evil as a force in its own right. Her novels are steeped in the Anglican Church and its tradition. Churches (in a bleak East Anglia) provide the settings for many key events. PD James herself was a lover of the beauty of its traditional language and was a great supporter of the Prayer Book Society, set up to keep alive the glorious heritage of the Book of Common Prayer. Quotations from it recur in her work.

The other authors covered in the book are Charlotte Maria Tucker, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte M Yonge, Evelyn Underhill, Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Goudge, Noel Streatfeild and Monica Furlong.

Published by t&tclark, ISBN 978-0-567-68676-3 RRP £27-99

 

 

 

Dust Collectors

Tags

Anthony Trollope, Bryant and May series, Christopher Fowler, Diary of a Provincial Lady, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Jude the Obscure, Tanya van Hasselt, Woman's Weekly

That’s how my great-aunts dismissed books. Like all households they had Bibles, prayer books, a cookery book or two, and “ready reckoners” with curious rod, pole or perch measurements. The prayer books were miniscule with tissue paper pages and tiny print, but the horrors of childbirth could be imagined from The Churching of Women.

I have my grandmother’s Enquire Within upon Everything should I need to address the Younger Son of an Earl, prepare a potion for my children because I have made them sick with Brimstone and Treacle, or dance a Quadrille.

What did they do for stories? Woman’s Weekly perhaps, but I think it was taken for the knitting patterns. My mother had a collection of Home Chat magazines that might have contained stories, but I remember its “make do and mend” fashion pages.

Himself and I have shelves of dust collectors in every room. When it comes to novels he and I rarely read the same authors. A mutual favourite is the Bryant and May detective series by Christopher Fowler. Having finished The Water Room I suggested it could go to a charity shop. ‘No,’ he said, ‘when I’m old(!) I’ll have forgotten the plot and will read it again.’

I am not a re-reader of novels. (I can spend hours dipping into Enquire Within. I think I need paragraph 1530 Rules of Conduct drawn up by the celebrated Quakeress, Mrs Fry.)

Exceptions to my no rereading rule are Jude the Obscure – but not Tess of the D’urbervilles, too many dramatisations perhaps – and The Diary of a Provincial Lady, maybe the latter as I have a curiosity for outdated domestic detail, engendered by pouring over those early self-helps.

I think I may be alone among my fellow ninevoices. Tanya has declared that she will not read a novel unless she considers it will be worthy of rereading. This is evident from her character analyses of the works of Austen, Eliot, Trolloppe and many more. Often, too, she is reminded of passages from her favourite novels. However, she has inspired me to buy and rediscover Barbara Pym. I probably read library editions before: one way of limiting the dust collectors.

To read and reread, or enjoy the memory of the first experience? which may, of course, be faulty.

The most hateful character in fiction?

Tags

Fanny Price, George Eliot, Gilbert Osmond, Grandcourt, Gwendolen Harleth, hateful fictional characters, Henry James, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mrs Norris, The Portrait of a Lady

‘Make your nasty characters ten times nastier,’ advised the creative writing tutor. ‘Readers want strong definition so exaggerate the light and dark.’

She had a point. Even if you aren’t writing crime novels, it’s no good running away from the evil side of human nature. But it’s July 18th, the day that Jane Austen died 201 years ago, and I found myself remembering the careful subtlety of the unpleasant characters in her novels, such as Mrs Ferrars, Lucy Steele, General Tilney, Mrs Norris. Jane Austen never goes over the top.

If asked who we hate most, many of us would probably opt for Mrs Norris, the horrible aunt in Mansfield Park, because of the way she bullies Fanny Price, the terrified little girl taken away from her own family and Portsmouth home to live with her grand relations. Her vindictive spite continues to find fresh expression in the years that follow, but it’s the abuse of a defenceless child that we can’t forgive. Mrs Norris is both loathsome and entirely convincing: we know her. If Jane Austen had overdone Mrs Norris’ awfulness, she might have slid into a caricature and become less real.

Re-reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, I could see the same elegant restraint in the portrayal of the corrupt and manipulative Gilbert Osmond. We shiver because we see the trap Isabel has walked into, but it is not until chapter 42 that we know what she is suffering: ‘… it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one … under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.’  Her real offence ‘was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his – attached to his own …’

In my mind, Gilbert Osmond and the sadistic, chilling Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, husband of Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (described in the ninevoices post Emotional abuse from a monster husband – and a complex fascinating heroine)  now tie for first place as the most hateful men in literature, while Mrs Norris is still without a serious female rival. But this is perhaps from a sheltered and limited viewpoint. What other fictional characters do we fear and hate?

 

When only a Georgette Heyer will do

Tags

Barbara Cartland, comedy, Georgette Heyer, heroes, heroines, Jane Austen, Of Human Telling, regency romances

‘I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense’ wrote Georgette Heyer, ‘but I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from the flu.’

Nonsense Georgette Heyer’s regency romances may be, but there are times when they are just what the doctor ordered. From the first page we are taken into another world, knowing we are on safe ground where love and happiness will win through, in much the same way as Golden Age or cosy crime fiction leaves us with the reassurance that the baddies will get their come-uppance, good will triumph and order will be restored. Confidence and happiness is catching. Escapist literature gives us more than just a respite from our increasingly unpredictable and confusing world. It makes us feel better.

But why am I sounding so defensive? Perhaps because Georgette Heyer is sometimes viewed with disdainful superiority as being a literary stablemate of Barbara Cartland. Which is a mistake. This is not to criticise Barbara Cartland; I read one of her books when I was young and rather enjoyed it. If others had come my way, I’d probably have enjoyed those too. But anyone who has read more than a page of the regency novels of these two authors knows how entirely different they are.

It’s not surprising that Jane Austen devotees are often voracious readers of Georgette Heyer; it’s not only the regency setting and happy endings the novels have in common but the perfect grasp of comedy. We never tire of the humorous aspects of Mr Bennet, Mrs Elton and Mr Collins and so it is with the unforgettable comic characters who pepper Georgette Heyer’s books. Ask Georgette Heyer fans about which secondary character is the funniest and a clamour of opinions starts up, with Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child a hot favourite.

Nor is it surprising that feminists often approve of Georgette Heyer because rather than creating soppy, milky heroines subservient to men, she shows us strong-minded, spirited young women who think and act for themselves: capable and feisty like Deborah in Faro’s Daughter and Sophy in The Grand Sophy who give as good as they get to any man who tries to rule them, intelligent and sensible like Drusilla in The Quiet Gentleman and Elinor in The Reluctant Widow.

Love doesn’t come one-size-fits-all either. We are shown mature love developing out of friendship in Sprig Muslin, the growth of self-knowledge and confidence in The Foundling, and a perceptive examination of the difference between infatuation and commitment in A Civil Contract.

‘A crash course in romantic novels – Georgette Heyer say – and men might learn what’s expected of them’ I made a disappointed character say with joking irony in my novel Of Human Telling. For Georgette Heyer offers us heroes to meet every changing taste as we grow older: boyishly charming Lord Sheringham in Friday’s Child, autocratic Lord Worth in Regency Buck, reformed rake Damerel in Venetia, philanthropic Waldo Hawkridge in The Nonesuch, wild Lord Vidal in Devil’s Cub, unassuming, kind-hearted Freddy in Cotillion. They may be very different but they have one thing in common: we can feel quite certain that they will always be faithful to the women they come to love and marry.

Georgette Heyer fans endlessly re-read her novels, catch themselves using the regency slang used by her characters, and hoard their tattered paperbacks so that unlike popular thrillers or issue novels you rarely find secondhand copies in charity shops. As the entirely wonderful Freddy Standen in Cotillion would say, stands to reason!

A woman ‘must improve her mind by extensive reading’ pronounces Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and nobody can argue with the principle in spite of the haughty manner in which it is delivered here. But most of us need a varied diet – light-hearted, sun-filled novels as well as more serious, thought-provoking, questioning ones.

There are many other delightful authors whom we may turn to for sheer undemanding enjoyment or when we are feeling ill or in need of comfort. I only know that Georgette Heyer will always, like Sir Tristram Shield in The Talisman Ring, ride ventre à terre to my side.