Your little nature lover

Start with I Am A Bunny by Ole Risom, illustrated by Richard Scarry.
Progress into Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne,
and Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem. Then
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and
The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

Wren Bay

http://storybookwoods.typepad.com/storybook_woods/wren-bay-intro-and-chapter-1.html

Could you write a whole novel about getting a household under control? I think I could. I don’t know how interesting it would be to anyone else, though. Wait, isn’t this what my blog Snapdragons is about?

The Woman In White

The Woman in White

There are a few glaring gaps in my knowledge of Victorian novels, and Wilkie Collins used to be one of them. Though few of his novels are still familiar today (The Woman In White and The Moonstone being the two most famous), in his heyday he was a bestseller in the ranks of Dickens–and a great friend of Dickens, with whom he made many literary collaborations and who personally edited some of his work.

The Woman In White was Collins’s first blockbuster novel, and even today it is easy to see why. Widely billed as one of the first “sensation novels”, the Woman In White is still today a breath-holding page-turner of a book… and so, so smartly written to boot.

In format, the story is told chronologically as the formal statements of several narrators concerning the adventures of Laura Fairlie. The narrative is book-ended by Walter Hartwright, a drawing-master who first meets the woman in white and then becomes embroiled in fallout of her deadly “secret” which will lead to the “ruin” of Sir Percival Glyde, Laura Fairlie’s fiance.

As we switch from narrator to narrator, we feel the switch palpably. In the same way that Charlotte Bronte’s Lucy Snowe cannot be relied upon as an impartial narrator of her story, none of these narrators are capable of seeing or understanding the situation in its whole; indeed there are many parts where the reader knows more and many where the reader apprehends things that have been left out.

Though the novel was initially released as a serial, and we begin to feel it towards the end as Collins begins to run out of steam, the early and middle parts of the story must have been exhaustively laid out ahead of time. Handfuls of words come back with shocking significance two and three hundred pages later; things that Collins has talked us out of remembering affect the entire flow of the story. Most excitingly, Collins bucks many literary trends and refuses to make his good characters all good–his bad characters all bad–or let the automatic assumptions of the reader to very often play out. Indeed, one of the central assumptions of the whole book turns out to be a complete sham. I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself, though.

Having enjoyed the book so thoroughly, I discovered that a 1997 movie version of The Woman In White starring Simon Callow as Count Fosco existed (!!!), and just had to see it. What a mistake, and what a blessing. The TV movie has characters by the same name and puts them in generally the same kind of distress, but there the similarity ends. Characters are merged and mended, scene after scene is made up out of thin air, crimes of the most boring and sordid sort (murder! child abuse!) are committed that were never committed or thought of in the book, and that incidentally is one of the things that made the book so exciting, the fact that the villains were never dreadful in quite the way one expects. In the TV version, even Sir Percival Glyde’s “secret” is changed completely. You aren’t going to spoil one bit of the book for yourself by watching the movie first.

Do, do, do read this book if you’re up for a very long Victorian thriller that will keep you awake far into the wee hours, with your heart pounding in your throat and your mind racing to figure out what will happen next. I only wish I had a hundred such Victorian novels left to read that had a chance of being so good.

Howard’s End

Howards End

I’ve just finished re-reading another of my Top 5 books (which are, for the record, The Story of Holly and Ivy, A Little Princess, Villette, Howard’s End, and Vanity Fair). I have a long and not always pleasant history with Howard’s End. When the movie was released my mother took me to see it in the theater, and I loathed it. I took this loathing back to my junior high English class, and expressed it when my arch-enemy praised the film. I was roundly sneered upon and told that I “wasn’t mature enough” by both the arch-enemy and the English teacher. None of this made me feel well-disposed toward the possibility of reading the book, so I didn’t.

Then in college I took an Edwardian novels class, and it became unavoidable. I settled down with the critical edition the professor had picked out and read it.

And loved it.

As soon as I finished it, I read it again. I marked it up. I re-read it every few months; I still do re-read it every few months. It’s one of my Top Five, you know?

And for the class, after having read the book, we watched the film, and again I loathed it. I don’t mind seeing Jude Law and Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in my mind as I read the book, but somehow, the movie manages to lose everything that is warm and charming and mysterious about the story. It isn’t that Forster can’t be successfully translated onto film, because A Room With A View does just that brilliantly; it’s that whoever made this film had no sense of humor at all.

So, almost twenty years, one B.A. in Victorian & Edwardian novels, one M.A. in new philology, one Ph.D., and a dozen re-readings later, I’m sorry to inform my arch-enemy and junior high school English teacher that I still LOATHE that movie. Obviously I haven’t matured.

About the book, though: one of the things that keeps drawing me back to it are the wonderful cozy scenes at Wickham Place, full of tea-times and clever talk. The other thing is that I do not understand the book. I feel sure that Forster is getting at something, but quite what he’s getting at has always eluded me. This time around, though, I got something more.

Interestingly, I’m getting something more because in the last couple of years I have spent some time thinking about Forster’s naughty novel Maurice, at the end of which two homosexual men run off to find a place, somewhere in the woods, where they can live in their own way, unbothered by society. Howard’s End, amazingly, is exactly the same. It is a portrait of people who are ruined by the rules and pressures and expectations of society, and who fortunately have the means to escape it entirely–each in their own separate way, some intentionally and some not. Death, incarceration, motherhood, old age, and sensible necessity force Wilcoxes, Basts, and Schlegels out of London and into Hampshire. Without the ceaseless, irritating ebb and flow of families and city, all of these people become–in their own ways–human.

I’m proud of myself this time around because I have at least managed to understand the book more thoroughly than the person who wrote the introduction to it, in my edition. That person is interested in Henry and Margaret’s sex life, which is judged to be no good because when Miss Avery shows Margaret the bassinet at Howard’s End, Margaret “turns away without speaking.” This person missed the scene in which Margaret doesn’t get along with Dolly’s children, and also her ending monologue about the million subtle differences between people that give life color–her own difference being that she does not like children. Not only was Mr. Introduction distastefully obsessed with sex, but he blundered into the same inhuman path as Capitalism, Urbanism, and Society, in assuming that Margeret must of course want children, and be upset because she expected none.

I am satisfied with this re-reading, and looking forward to the next. Do have a spin yourself–it isn’t a long book, and some of it is delightful. Let me know what you think.

Waverley

Waverley

I have recently turned back to Sir Walter Scott’s famous novel Waverley after many years of letting it lie fallow. I was assigned to read this book twice as an undergraduate, and on the first assignment I failed to get very far. I was, granted, nearly halfway through the book as the pages turn–but the action had yet to start. For this single fault, though, we must forgive Sir Walter, because the second half of the book is a gripping page-turner.

Waverley is largely credited as being the first historical novel. Published circa 1805, it is a fictional recounting of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion in the Scottish highlands. Its popularity encouraged Scott to write a whole series of novels afterward, collectively called The Waverley Novels or The Scottish Novels. Ivanhoe is one of them, though it is set in the medieval period and I found the dialectic impossible to tolerate, even for the sake of a good story. Waverley was read and admired by Jane Austen. In later years, Scott would use his clout to get a green American writer into the English newspapers–a writer named Washington Irving.

Waverley is epic in its scope and cinematic in the telling. Scene after scene is described–or, in many cases, cleverly not described–to maximize its picturesqueness in the reader’s mind. Waverley’s military training–his ride through Scotland–the approach to Tully-Veolan–the highlanders (for there are many, dear reader, and they read like Klingons)–the tower of Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Iain Vohr–the lakeside hideaway of Donald Bean Lean… I should stop, we are almost now halfway through the book, and the plot will kick in soon. Why on EARTH Steven Spielberg or James Cameron or Peter Jackson hasn’t picked this book up, filmed it, and made the blockbuster of the year–or the decade–out of it is beyond me. Scott has practically written the screenplay for us; I feel sure that if one omitted the descriptive passages, the dialogue left would be perfectly movie-length. And oh! The views over the Scottish highlands! The Klingon-like highlanders, in one scene several thousand of them all at once and armed for battle! The political intrigue! The… I shall say it… drawing and quartering. The happy, triumphant, yet bittersweet end. Ah me.

So if you have taste and patience for wordy pre-Victorian novelage, please do try Waverley. It’s worth getting through at least once in a lifetime. It’s not only the first historical novel, it’s also an early adventure novel, surely a forerunner to H. Rider Haggard and everything that followed after him. Read it! Read it! Read it!

A Little Princess

A Little Princess

And now, I shall blog about my favorite book. A daunting task, no? Given its far-reaching repercussions in my internal world, though, this is not likely to be the only time I write about this book.

In my memory, my mother and I watched a television adaptation of this book some time in the 1980s. In my memory, Charles Dance played Mr. Carrisford and Maggie Smith played Miss Minchin. IMDB begs to differ–in the 1986 adaptation, Carrisford was played by Nigel Havers and Miss Minchin by Maureen Lipman. Ah, well, so much for memories.

Some time in my childhood I was given a paperback copy of the book. I know that I had it for some time before finally, around the age of ten, reading it. It was probably, if you’ll call Frances Hodgson Burnett a Victorian author, my first Victorian novel–and it is the one to which every other novel has had to stand up. In the twenty years since I first read this book I have pretty well exhausted Victoriana’s stock of fiction, and I must say that while there are plenty of gems, there is still no other book that gives me more pure pleasure in the reading.

A gifted little girl is left at a boarding school by her rich father. She is doubly blessed in being a Very Good Girl, the kind that a Victorian novel needs as a heroine, and being alternately Very Rich (which Victoriana likes) and Very Poor (which makes Victoriana slobber all over itself). Sara Crewe is gifted in precisely the way a little girl reading this book is likely to be. She loves to read, she loves to pretend, she is solemn and affectionate about dolls, she is sensitive about sharing the things she imagines, and she never (bless her, and may we hope to be the same!) has cause to be ashamed of her behavior. She is not uniformly sweet, but when she angers, she does so for the right reasons, at the right person, to the right degree, for the right length of time. In short, she is a goddess.

And oh, the domestic accoutrements. Perhaps I got my luxurious materialistic ways from the early parts of this book. It includes a “shopping sequence”, which always makes me love a book:

There were velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs, and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats with great, soft ostrich feathers, and ermine coats and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings in such abundant supplies that the polite young women behind the counters whispered to each other that the odd little girl with the big, solemn eyes must be at least some foreign princess—perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah.

There are also plenty of lists of tantalizing food, which again make me love a book:

It’s got cake in it, and little meat pies, and jam tarts and buns, and oranges and red-currant wine, and figs and chocolate.

This is the description of Ermengarde’s “hamper” from her nicest aunt. As a result, I have spent many happy hours in my life imagining what I would send in a hamper to a child at a boarding school. Alas, no opportunities have yet presented themselves–but I encourage you to try the exercise. It’s especially lovely around Christmas time.

Another feature of this book that is calculated to make me love it is the aspect of dolls. Sara gets her doll Emily right at the beginning, and the central event of the story arc features Sara’s “Last Doll” at her eleventh birthday party. Of course there is yet another delightful list:

There were lace collars and silk stockings and handkerchiefs; there was a jewel case containing a necklace and a tiara which looked quite as if they were made of real diamonds; there was a long sealskin and muff, there were ball dresses and walking dresses and visiting dresses; there were hats and tea gowns and fans.

Anyone who was a little girl in the great era of American Girl, before Mattel bought it and ruined everything, remembers that the delicious descriptions of each doll’s historically accurate clothing and accessories were almost more enjoyable than having the things would have been. At eight and nine and ten I snagged the catalogues and read them again and again and again, with the keenest delight I have ever felt. To be a child, and to want and admire a doll, is a magical thing.

Just around the same time that I first read A Little Princess, Christmas of 1990, when I was ten years old, my mother bought Samanatha for me for Christmas. She bought the doll, all of the books, and the folio of patterns for Samantha’s clothes. She and my aunt together sewed all of Samantha’s outfits that were available at that time (the school dress, the Christmas dress, the sailor’s middy, the birthday dress, and the cloak with muff and hat). Every summer I went to a day-camp where we sat and sewed quilts and other little things for American Girl dolls. In the early 2000s, when I began to make some real spending money of my own, I bought most of the other available outfits. And my aunt made me one more dress for Samantha–a dark blackish-brown velvet one, made from an 18″ doll pattern rather than Samantha’s own, and which is a little tight and short on her.

This girl had her doll, her Emily, and by gosh–the doll had its own sumptuous wardrobe and its own “short, tight black frock”. Though I hadn’t explicitly connected the two in my mind until a few days ago when I began to re-read the book, it’s true that the two put together created a wonderful synergy in my childhood that follows me even today.

I didn’t play with Samantha very much. Mostly, I took her out of her box and changed her clothes every now and again. However, she means the world to me. She is the greatest Christmas of my childhood–my Red Rider BB gun, if you will. Every time I open her box and go through her things, I remember the delicious elation that I used to feel when reading the old catalogues. I get quite silly over dolly tea sets and doll’s dolls and bears. I even just bought myself a set of doll-sized chest of drawers and washstand, which I will convert into jewelry boxes, but oh–the desire to stuff Samantha’s things into those drawers is so very strong.

Ermengarde quite beamed with delight.
“Oh, Sara!” she whispered joyfully. “It is like a story!”
“It IS a story,” said Sara. “EVERYTHING’S a story.”

After the Funeral

After the Funeral

Gazing at my lovely rows of Agatha Christie Mystery Collections, I began to ponder over the several of them that are really famous. Not only are her half dozen very famous books so because they are better written than the rest, but they tend to move outside of the box, in terms of solvability. I won’t name names but you won’t mind if I tell you the devices… in one there is no murder at all. In another, one of the victims is the murderer. In another, the narrator is. In yet another, the detective is. In yet another, everyone is. Old AC must have really enjoyed herself.

There were a few I read, though, that stuck with me not because of cleverness but because of pure charm. In one, for instance, the murder weapon is a fish paste sandwich. In another, everything in the end comes down to tea shops and Vermeer. I so enjoyed remembering these “charming” books that I decided to re-read one of them, After the Funeral. There was, in the end, both less charm (and much more of the business of murders) than I remembered, but also much more, as it turned out that I had remembered it as being about three separate books. This is a confusing, fun, classic Agatha Christie mystery, written pretty shortly post-war when she was at the height of her game, both an experienced writer but not yet losing her edge. What a delightful confection of a book. Do read it.

His Grace of Osmonde

His Grace of Osmonde

It took me a while, but I have finished reading His Grace of Osmonde. If you recall, this is… not quite a sequel or prequel, but rather a simultaneous novel. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote A Lady of Quality and, it seems, so fell in love with Clorinda Wildairs that she wrote a second novel about Clorinda’s “mate”, Gerald Mertoun, also known as the Duke of Osmonde.

As a book it wasn’t very interesting. Burnett wanted opportunities to instruct the reader on how to feel about Clorinda’s story, and took the Duke’s lifelong interest in her as a way to do so. She also, apparently, wanted to smooth over some kerfuffles that were caused by the original book. What was going on in Clorinda’s head? Were her good manners entirely put on, and underneath was she still the raving, selfish, lordly creature of her youth? Well, no, Burnett explains to us. Clorinda actually made a quick transition from wildcat to pussycat, and really is a tender and loving person. Well, we’re glad we got that straight, Fanny.

Secondly, and more largely, there was the issue of manslaughter, and of keeping the secret from her husband. No doubt as Burnett wrote the first novel she was thinking of how brave and noble Clorinda was to save her loved ones from her own moral burden, but there are other ways to interpret her actions: as cowardly, self-serving, and dishonest towards her husband. Burnett makes quite sure that we understand that this is not the case, and writes an additional scene–beyond the timeline of the first book–in which the Duke lets Clorinda know that he knows, and that everything is cool between them.

While I think that both books would be immeasurably improved by combining them into one (though the exciting breakneck pace of the first book would be tempered by doing this, many of its faults and mysteries would also be more comfortably explained… also, it would make the important material in the second book more palatable), I am also a little disappointed by the fact that the second book was written at all.

I sympathize with Burnett, who, like Thomas Hardy and his Tess, seems to have fallen in love with her character. Of course one wants to write more about the lady Clo. Of course one wants to read more. However, what was so exciting about the first book is the way that it completely flaunts Victorian prescriptions about what a novel and a heroine should be, while actually following the rules. Clo swears, drinks, hunts, fights, screams, screws, sells herself, and kills… and yet she is a noble and gentle heroine who accomplishes all of the tender domestic things we’d like to see her accomplish. The second book mitigates her. It tames her, explains her, softens and tenderizes her, anoints and forgives her.

Quite frankly, I could have done without. Oh well.

A Lady of Quality

A Lady of Quality

I am going to work my way through my favorites of Frances Hodgson Burnett, and today’s book is her 1896 novel A Lady of Quality. Now: in order to talk about this book I have to spoil it, and really, most of what’s so exciting about this book is the experience of reading it cold, without expectations. So… when you have some time look up the free etext on Gutenberg.org, linked above, and have a read-through.

I’ll wait.

Waiting.

Stop reading if you don’t want it spoiled.

Okay: I read this book last week and have, since, become more and more excited about it. This isn’t a very famous book of FHB’s, and as an English major who specializes in Victorian literature, I know precisely why. It doesn’t follow the rules of Victorian literature. For a couple of days after I read it, I thought that it was just a badly structured novel. Then I began recalling what I know about novels.

1. They should have a story arc. It does. It follows Clorinda Wildairs from her birth to the securing of her happiness. In this way it is extremely conventional.

2. A good 18th/19th century British novel should follow a sympathetic protagonist from birth to the securing of his or her happiness. Ditto… though the “sympathetic” part may have applied not at all to Victorian ladies, who would have been turned off by… well… everything about Clorinda.

So technically, this is a very good, classic novel. Why does it seem disjointed and badly structured? Because so many things that we expect are going to happen simply don’t–specifically, Clorinda does any number of un-heroine-like things, such as

1. Swearing
2. Cross-dressing
3. Having extramarital sex
4. Marrying for money instead of love
5. Sneering at “good” people
6. Committing manslaughter

After each one of these transgressions we expect her to be punished. For any one of these she is, of course, A BAD PERSON and the Victorian furies ought to be all over her. But they simply never descend. Clorinda is such a lady of quality that she is her own tutor, her own servant, and her own best friend. When the time comes to put away childish things, she does. When she promises to marry someone, she does, even though it immediately becomes inconvenient. When she ought to behave discreetly, respectfully, and demurely, she does. She’s simply so smart that she can handle not only everyone around her, but herself. Unlike every other Victorian heroine, who has an adventure due to her own lack of self-control and forethought (Lizzy Bennett: do hold your tongue dear. Jane Eyre: keep your head on straight you silly nincompoop. Tess: douche), Clorinda handles every difficulty and necessity that comes her way with perfect aplomb. As a result, she is rewarded with perfect bliss.

There is another book by FHB, His Grace of Osmonde, in which FHB re-tells Clorinda’s story from the POV of her eventual husband. FHB loved this character so much that she managed to get two novels from her life story, and with the second, a chance to make up even more fun stories about wild Clo. I am in the middle of it right now, and it is indeed a re-telling of Clo’s story rather than an exciting novel of its own, so I won’t give it its own report… but I do know that it’s there, in case you, like me, are thrilled to death with what should be a gem of a novel for the student of Victoriana. Enjoy!

Emily Fox-Seton

Emily Fox-Seton

Are you a fan of Francis Hodgson Burnett? Did you compulsively re-read A Little Princess and The Secret Garden as a child? Did you come back to them as an adult and find them ten times as enchanting as you remembered? Then you need expand. Burnett wrote even more books that are well worth reading, though they’re not often published today.

Case in point: Emily Fox-Seton. This is a compilation of the long story The Making of a Marchioness and its novel-length sequel The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. These books follow Burnett’s dependable formula in which a sympathetic character is kind to everyone around her and, as a reward, is given a secure, comfortable life. We all like that. The second part of Emily Fox-Seton’s story, though, is an apotheosis of domestic fiction, in which Emily undergoes various heart-tugging problems (made worse by her preposterous modesty) and is made the toy of dastardly villains. It’s a little embarassing to read, but a delightful must for lovers of the genre. Like a car crash, you want to look away, but can’t.

So try this, have some fun with it, and forgive it for being as bad, and delightful, as it is. Hey–all of the links in this post are to FREE gutenberg.org texts! W00t!