More obscure lives by Woolf: Edgeworth and Day

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Simon Lavery

More on the ‘Lives of the Obscure’ in V. Woolf’s The Common Reader, vol.1.

Last time I noted her portraits and analyses not just of the literary greats like Austen and Eliot, but also the vignettes of marginal, forgotten characters, mainly women, whose obscurity seemed to resonate with her poignantly. This is what follows the mention of Miss Biffen:

It is Mrs Dyer who pours out tea for them in Clifford’s Inn. Mr Charles Lamb has just left the room. Mrs Dyer says she married George because his washerwoman cheated him so. What do you think George paid for his shirts, she asks?

These sketches, apparently random and fragmentary, cohere into an impressionistic whole, a galaxy of minor stars. She goes on:

Gently, beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the star dust of innumerable lives.

More fragments follow, sense impressions, then she notices an ‘enormous wheel’ careering down a Berkshire hill in the 18C. Suddenly the young son of a bricklayer jumps out ‘from within’ and it’s smashed ‘to smithereens’:

This is Edgeworth’s doing – Richard Lovell Edgeworth, we mean, the portentous bore.

This must be one of his crackpot invention/experiments; Woolf doesn’t think it necessary to explain, preferring to let the weirdness speak for itself. Her attention turns to ‘his two volumes of memoirs’ and his extraordinary life:

Byron’s bore, Day’s friend, Maria’s father, the man who almost invented the telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges…a man meritorious, industrious, advanced, but still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore.

This Anglo-Irish politician, writer and inventor (1744-1817), is said by Wikipedia to have invented the caterpillar track, among other things, and he was the father of the novelist Maria Edgeworth. He seems to have been an unpleasant character. As Woolf says of this gifted egoist he married four times – two of the wives were sisters Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd (the former a writer and proto-feminist who shared his interest in educational theory) – and fathered with them not 19 (as Woolf says) but 22 children. He and his even more unpleasant friend Thomas Day were prominent members of the Lunar Society (c. 1765-1813), a loose association of scientists, philosophers and artists forming the Midlands Enlightenment; other members included Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgewood, the entrepreneur and ceramicist – see this review in the Guardian of Jenny Uglow’s book, The Lunar Men: the friends who made the future, 1730-1810. London: Faber, 2002. Its name alludes to their practice of meeting for dinner and conversation at each others’ houses on the Sunday nearest the full moon so that they could ride home illuminated by it.

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768. It depicts one of the ‘natural philosophy’ experiments with the vacuum device invented by Boyle. Public domain via National Gallery, London/Tate Gallery: Wikimedia Commons

Edgeworth wrote with daughter Maria a tract on education heavily influenced by Rousseau’s theories. He in turn influenced boring Day, who hardly distinguished himself by proposing to Edgeworth’s sister, and to Honora before she married his friend – who had also fallen in love with her while still married to his previous wife. Not surprising they were friends, really.

He attracts Woolf’s attention because of his associations with ‘diffident, shrinking figures who would otherwise be drowned in darkness’. It is through their eyes, she says, that we see him: a tyrant unaware of his own cruelty, bemused that his wife had ‘taken a strong dislike to Mr Day’ – that serial proposer.

Here Woolf acknowledges one of the ‘pitfalls’ of ‘this nocturnal rambling among forgotten worthies’: it’s difficult, she explains, to stick ‘strictly to the facts.’ This is especially true of Day, ‘whose history surpasses the bounds of the credible,’ showing more of the characteristics of fiction. Mrs Edgeworth must, she speculates, have ‘dreaded’ visits from her husband’s friend, ‘with his pompous, melancholy face, marked by the smallpox’, his antisocial manners, his desperation to marry (he’d taught himself to dance in the vain hope of winning the hand of Honora’s sister, later Edgeworth’s wife; as Woolf says, she, ‘of course, refused him’) and his fawning encouragement of Edgeworth’s crazier schemes. Honora’s friend the poet Anna Seward perhaps misguidedly described Day as ‘a sable-haired hero.’

Then we hear of Day’s now notorious scheme to create for himself the perfect wife by adopting two young orphan girls and bringing them up according to some tenets supposedly taken from Rousseau. The more successful girl he’d marry – he named her Sabrina Sidney.

Woolf’s account of how Sabrina failed to pass Day’s exacting tests for a wife is slightly askew. She implies he rushed in a rage after rejection by Elizabeth:

flew into a passion at the sight of her; fired a pistol at her skirts, poured melted sealing-wax over her arms, and boxed her ears.

From what I’ve read these details are accurate, but Day didn’t perform these violent acts out of temper, but as trials calculated to imbue Sabrina with the calm stoicism, fortitude and endurance in the face of the greatest provocation that he felt ideal in his prospective wife. Not surprisingly she disappointed him profoundly when tested so cruelly, by screaming and displaying all of the undesirable flightiness and intemperance, as he saw it, of her sex.

Woolf doesn’t mention that Sabrina, after being cast off by Day, married another man, was widowed, and ended her days as a housekeeper to the family of Fanny Burney’s brother.

She does conclude, with pointed accuracy, what the ‘inconsistent philosopher’ Day’s character really was like:

at once humane and brutal, advanced and hidebound…

This section of Obscure Lives ends with a bizarre scene in which Edgeworth is decribed in a disturbing meeting with an unkempt, ‘mad clergyman’ in an ‘untidy house’ with a garden full of celestial globes. A beautiful young girl brings them tea, ‘a scholar and an artist!’ the clergyman exclaims – but Edgeworth can’t determine if she’s the old man’s daughter, mistress, or what: ‘Who was she?’ And why was the house so filthy, the front door locked? ‘Why was the clergyman apparently a prisoner? Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth’s head…’

‘Something was not right’, he sadly concludes.

The essays in The CR vol. 1 aren’t only essential reading for their discussions of the literary giants, but also for passages of strange charm like this.

I’ve drawn here on Jenny Uglow’s article on Day in the Guardian in 2002. See also the 2013 novel by Wendy Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife, reviewed in the Guardian that year, which points out ‘Day was a paradoxical character: he became known for his charitable work, giving away much of his fortune to the poor though never giving much thought about Sabrina and her well–being after he abandoned her. He was an adamant abolitionist while at the same time making Sabrina practically his slave’

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, vol. 1 – obscure lives

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Simon Lavery

Yesterday I introduced this compilation of 21 literary reviews and specially written essays by Virginia Woolf brought out by the Hogarth Press in 1925 shortly before Mrs Dalloway was published.

The table of contents of vol. 1. The paper isn’t great quality: the ink has bled and blotted slightly

The range of subjects is broad. She covers authors and texts from the Pastons and Chaucer in the 14C to her contemporaries. The majority consider English prose fiction writers from Defoe, Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot to Conrad and Joyce, but she also analyses the Russian greats, especially Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. There’s an excursion into Greek drama, too; fellow blogger Melissa posted about it recently here.

Woolf also reflects on the essay genre itself, with pieces on Montaigne, one of its inventors, and the main English practitioners.

Other prose genres are discussed, from the diaries of Evelyn to the memoirs and other writings of the likes of the Duchess of Newcastle, with her desire for fame. A unifying feature that threads through most of the essays is the nature of reading and writing in different historical periods, and the reflexive, creative relationship between readers and authors. I hope to return to this aspect of the collection after my holidays.

I wanted rapidly to post here about one essay that stood out for me, and brought to my attention an aspect of Woolf that I hadn’t noticed before in the novels: she can be very funny. She makes a point of turning her analytical attention to marginal, largely overlooked and forgotten figures in the past – perhaps, as I noted yesterday, out of a sense of fellow-feeling as a woman in the early 20C. In her introductory paragraph to ‘Lives of the Obscure’ (presumably an ironic take on hagiographical ‘Lives of the Saints’) she playfully pictures herself as a sad antiquarian, taking out a ‘life subscription’ to a ‘faded, out-of-date obsolete library’, perhaps in her holiday haunt of St Ives, for she imagines it by the sea, ‘with the shouts of men crying pilchards for sale’ outside. It’s a library largely stocked unpromisingly ‘from the shelves of clergymen’s widows, and country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives care to dust.’

The only other people there are clearly as lost a cause as this fictitious, unflattering version of herself: ‘The elderly, the marooned, the bored’ – they don’t seem to want to read these texts, just shelter from the world’s bustle:

No one has spoken aloud here since the room was opened in 1854.

Then she weirdly depicts the books themselves as just as lost – perhaps dead, certainly not expecting to be disturbed, so long have they been neglected:

The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why reopen those peaceful graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over his spectacles, and resenting the duty, which has indeed become laborious, of retrieving from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763, 1080, and 606.

The first of three sections in this essay opens by absurdly stretching this conceit to great comic effect:

For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost – a Mrs Pilkington, a Rev Henry Elman, a Mrs Ann Gilbert – waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old secrets well up to their lips. The divine relief of communication will soon again be theirs.

There’s a seriousness underneath this surreal playfulness: it’s that recurring theme of the almost symbiotic relationship between texts, writers and readers. By opening these dusty, unread, largely tedious volumes the modern reader in a sense restores to life these long defunct minor figures.

She goes on with an amazing and scintillatingly impressionistic portrait of several groups of people from around 1800 onwards, principally the Taylor and the Edgeworth families, but including such vivid miniatures as the sad story of one Fanny Hill (no relation, I presume, to the eponym of Cleland’s racy novel) who ill-advisedly married a dashing but treacherous Captain M. who predictably treated her abominably. She returns years later, ‘worn and sunk’, when formerly she was ‘so sprightly’:

She was living in a lone house not far from the Taylors, forced to drudge for her husband’s mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her fortune, ruined all her life.

And so the ‘words toil persistently through these obscure volumes’:

For in the vast world to which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something inescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it.

The portentous imagery perhaps parodies that of these old memoirs, but does so affectionately, without patronising or condescending (well, not too much). And Woolf is genuine in perceiving this ‘flotilla’ borne along to her over a century later, making a connection with her and taking on new life, despite its ancient strangeness, and she acknowledges its jaded, once-sprightly significance:

It is one of the attractions of the unknown, their multitude, their vastness; for, instead of keeping their identity separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one another, their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolving, and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years so that we can lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance of countless lives, and pass unhindered from century to century, from life to life.

Despite the ironic tone she’s not entirely joking any more. The figures she goes on to delineate, those faded portraits she dusts off, include all kinds of strange figures, like a Mr Elman talking in Brighton to Miss Biffen, who has no arms or legs: ‘a footman carries her in and out. She teaches miniature painting to his sister.’ One wonders how. Years later in his rectory he’ll think of her and other ‘great men’ he thinks he’s known, ‘and making – it is his great consolation – string bags, for missionaries.’

Wonderful. There I’d better stop. I hadn’t intended lingering so long on this essay, but it beguiled me. I’d like to show the other outlandish characters and extraordinary vignettes in it brought lovingly back into the light – maybe another time.

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, vol. 1

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Simon Lavery

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. Vol. 1, Vintage Classics paperback (2003). First published by the Hogarth Press, 1925

Many of the essays in this first volume of The Common Reader first appeared as book reviews, many of them in the TLS. She revised and reworked this material and added more essays specially written for this collection. She was seeking to produce a shaped text that resembled the kind of reflective conversation that might be held around a Bloomsbury dinner-table on the topic of the art of reading.

I’m about to go on holiday, so intend returning to an examination of these essays in more detail when I return. As a taster, here’s her short introductory essay that acts as a foreword or preface: it explains her intentions and emphasises what seems to be the unscholarly, amateur and idiosyncratic nature of her enterprise (she tackles some of the major canonical authors, but deliberately includes many obscurities – she clearly sympathised with the obscure ones). This apparently self-deprecatory tone (highlighted by the ambivalent, gender-free use of ‘common’ in conjunction with the notion of ‘reader’) disguises her true serious artistic and personal role and agency as reader and writer, already adumbrated in the character of Rachel in The Voyage Out, her first novel, published in 1915, in which the protagonist’s choice of reading indicates a spirited and independent determination to avoid the literary choices and tastes of the male-dominated (academic) world and its authoritative canon, favouring, for example, the elemental power and wildness of Wuthering Heights over Jane Austen’s more demure depictions of the emotional life of women (there are essays on both subjects in this first volume).

Here she presents her manifesto for her own canon, defending her own approach and literary philosophy and instincts, later mapped out more broadly and systematically in non-fiction works like ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and ‘Three Guineas’. Being a woman and therefore excluded from the benefits of the classical education enjoyed by males of her class, she was conscious of her ‘outsider’ status as a critic – despite being formidably well read, having access to her father Leslie Stephen’s extensive library – she too was determined to exercise the right to choose her reading and to express her views on what she’d read. Despite the ‘amateur’ tone, then, of this opening essay, she had a serious and positive aesthetic. More on this in later posts, hopefully.

The Common Reader: introductory essay

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. “ . . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

This could almost serve as a template for those of us who attempt to write blog posts on literary topics: we acknowledge our deficiencies and the superficiality or eccentricity of our criticisms, but strive to ‘write down a few of the ideas and opinions’ – no matter how insignificant – that might just contribute to the distribution of bookish honours. Except, to my mind, ‘honours’ is too grand a term for my own enterprise. I’m content to settle for ‘ideas and opinions’, and hope that they will stimulate thought, debate – and more reading.

Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Simon Lavery

Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season. Virago Modern Classics, 2006

In a Summer Season takes its title from the opening line of the medieval alliterative poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman. This alerts us to the likelihood of a story that will involve a quest for a good, honest life and essential truth in the face of vice and worldly obstacles – a search for a vision of what the world might be, uncorrupted. This will involve epiphanies and life-changing experiences.

The surprising amount of sex in the novel is largely due to the mid-life crisis of the protagonist, Kate Heron, an attractive woman in her early 40s who lives in a comfortable former vicarage in a middle-class commuter neighbourhood of big houses and what Kate sourly calls ‘Underwriter Georgian’ developments (it’s the Thames Valley, just an hour by train from London). It’s the era when Kate’s class of women didn’t work (husbands did that) and kept servants; Kate has the eccentric cook-housekeeper Mrs Meacock and an irascible gardener.

After the death of her first husband Alan she’d quickly married again, a year before the action of this novel begins. Her second husband is a charming but irresponsible ‘drifter’ called Dermot, ten years her junior, only ten years older than her son Tom. His only interests are gambling and drinking and feeling sorry for himself. Kate’s maiden aunt, Ethel, who lives with her in a state of sadly genteel dependency, considers Dermot a fellow ‘parasite’ – a view that’s harder on herself than on Dermot. At least she teaches cello to Kate’s untalented 16-year-old boarding school daughter Louisa, on the long summer holiday during which the novel’s action takes place, emphasising that sense of change and mutability that the title hints at. Ethel encourages in Lou the passion for classical music that Kate’s late husband shared with his wife and daughter, and which bores Dermot and Tom (who prefers jazz) – they’re like twins, not stepfather and son. Two Hamlet types (more on that later).

Most other people in this affluent, worldly neighbourhood assume Dermot married Kate for her money. Even he dimly perceives the truth of this, though he likes to think he’s passionately in love with her – hence all the sex – and this enables him to convince himself that he is no parasite. Kate’s self-deceit mirrors his: for her the sex sustains and justifies this mismatched marriage; she’s allowing lust to cloud her judgement and overcome her growing sense of guilt and shame. Even teenaged Louisa perceives that her mother is competing with her older brother Tom’s string of girlfriends, of whom Kate feels jealous, and that in marrying Dermot she thought she’d be getting a sexually fulfilling partner and a loving son. He’s the Oedipal Hamlet to a Gertrude who doubles as Ophelia.

In a series of keenly observed scenes characters and relationships are revealed: Kate at the hairdresser’s, apparently unaware that dyeing her greying hair and ‘making herself look young for her husband’ makes her seem pathetic – or maybe she chooses not to see this. In the opening scene she visits Dermot’s wealthy, elegant mother Edwina, who never rises from her bed before noon, and who greets Kate superciliously:

“That’s a nice suit,” she said in a surprised voice.

Kate had felt just right, perfectly dressed for a day in London, until Edwina had come downstairs. She still thought she could not have chosen better and wondered if what was wrong with the effect – and something was now seen to be – was herself. She hadn’t a London face like her mother-in-law’s, her skin was a different colour and she looked too healthy for the dark suit – a country woman dressed up in London clothes.

In the introduction to this VMC edition Elizabeth Russell Taylor writes that In a Summer Season has a ‘nugatory’ plot, and no ‘concern with consciousness or big themes’. She cites Taylor’s comment that she could ‘never write about tragedies’. But the novel has other elements like those in Hamlet, and there are verbal echoes that subtly indicate this.

When Kate’s closest friend Dorothea died some years earlier, the widower Charles – the two couples had been best friends – left to work overseas, taking his daughter Araminta with him. Halfway through the novel they return, bringing to a crisis Kate’s crumbling confidence in feckless Dermot, as she realises Charles has the cultural sophistication and emotional maturity she’d loved in Alan, and which Dermot so palpably lacks. Araminta has grown up to become a beautiful but shallow young woman, training to be a fashion model. She’s the same age as Kate’s son Tom: 22. He unwisely falls madly in love with her, but she’s not cut out to be his Ophelia, for she enjoys simply flirting and being admired by men, preferring Dermot’s carefree superficiality – and propensity for driving his sports car too fast. All very tangled and ominous.

When the two families resume their intimacy Charles ruefully admits he ‘hardly knows’ his glamorous, vampish daughter. She makes him feel ‘as old as Polonius’, he jokes. Kate’s reply, that she can’t understand why Polonius was always made to look so old, subtly reveals her own discomfort at playing Gertrude to child-like Dermot (and his twin soul, Tom).

Dermot behaves like a petulant child. She gives him ‘motherly smile[s]’, indulging his latest hare-brained money-making scheme (growing mushrooms in an outhouse). When Charles and Kate share a private joke about a woman they know (who’d introduced Kate and Dermot, so it’s not a trivial topic) name-checking a character in Alan and Kate’s favourite novel, The Spoils of Poynton, Dermot, culturally void, is nonplussed and feels excluded – adding to his default emotional state of disgruntled thirty-something moody adolescent, unable to understand why he’s so angry with everyone.

When he finds James’s novel lying around and reads the inscription in it that Alan had written for Kate – a couplet from Donne’s ‘The Anniversary’, with the line ‘Who is so safe as we?’, he again feels excluded and ignorant, ashamed when he realises he’d missed the literary allusion, and that the grown-ups had pretended not to notice in order not to embarrass him. Kate, on the other hand, is aware that the “safety” she’d found with Alan has been lost with Dermot.

Dermot’s mother Edwina, briefly mentioned above, ‘a proper Harrods woman’ in his dismissive opinion because of her passion for shopping, is a poor role model for him. When Kate in the opening scene pays her a duty call (Dermot is too feckless to endure visiting his mother and exposing himself to her misguided attempts to find him a job he might hold down) Edwina proposes her latest business scheme for Dermot – as hare-brained as his mushroom-growing. Sensing Kate’s resistant embarrassment, she says she’s worried about her reprobate son, and had hoped that marriage would ‘make him settle down.’ Her elder son Gordon had ‘always said so’, and he’s a ‘model husband and father… An actuary. “Whatever the hell that may be,” Dermot had said.’ As ‘industrious’ and ‘utterly selfless’ as his father had been (a Claudius figure?). She’d always wondered why Dermot was ‘so different’:

“Perhaps he takes after you,” Kate said. Her voice was bold, and no longer under control.

To her surprise, Edwina’s face softened. She looked dreamy and pleased with herself. “I was certainly a handful when I was a girl,” she said. “Gracious, the escapades, the parties, the young men. ‘She is like a butterfly and no one will ever manage to catch her,’ they used to say.”

“Then Patrick [Dermot’s father] caught you and shut you up all alone in the drawing-room, while he went off to work on his papers.”

“It was the beauty of his voice I couldn’t escape. The Irish in it.”

The ironies in this brief exchange are typical of the novel’s subtlety throughout. For Edwina goes on to mention that although Gordon has no ‘trace of it’, Dermot has that Irish brogue ‘only when he was trying to get round [her].’

“Oh, it was a very happy marriage. I had everything I wanted. He worshipped the ground I walked on . I was just a little bored sometimes in the evenings.”

“Harrods being closed,” thought Kate.

Kate allows herself this moment of superiority over Edwina’s shallow complacency, but is blind to the similarity of her own Freudian-Shakespearean domestic/marital trap with Dermot.

I’ve posted in the past about these ‘Madame Bovary’ narratives that deal with commuter-belt middle-aged women in despair at the dreariness and lack of fulfilment in their lives, their dim sense of being defined only in terms of their husbands, from Evan Connell’s Mr and Mrs Bridge to Taylor’s own short stories. The ‘summer season’ in which the narrative takes place heightens the sense of temporariness and looming disaster for the meticulously, perceptively anatomised central characters, all with their own defects and thwarted dreams. I particularly like prurient Aunt Ethel, and teenage Louisa with her hopeless schoolgirl crush on the virginal curate with the wonderful name of Father Blizzard.

Apologies for writing at such length; this novel is packed with so much understated, apparently inconsequential but essential and artfully constructed detail that it’s difficult to do it justice in brief.

PS 11 July: I asked fellow bloggers to supply links to any posts they’d done on IASS: in case you don’t scroll down through the comments to find them, here they are:

Liz Dexter, Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home

Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings has links to four of her own posts HERE

…and this link is to her roundup of other bloggers’ posts who’d joined in her readalong – including HeavenAli’s

Trollope’s Framley Parsonage – 2

Posted on July 6, 2018 by Simon Lavery

Yesterday I looked at Anthony Trollope’s unheroic heroes in Framley Parsonage. By this the fourth Chronicle of Barsetshire he’s starting to get the hang of women, too. So far the romantic heroines have tended to be typically demure Victorian angels in the house, with maybe a hint of feistiness. There were some dragons among the older women, and some bourgeois and aristocratic snobs. But then in Doctor Thorne he introduced Miss Martha Dunstable and several other strong, clever women, and upped his game.

There she served as a recipient of innumerable unwanted marriage proposals from gold-digging men anxious to get their hands on her fortune. It was Frank Gresham’s honest half-heartedness in this task, put up to it by his mother, who was anxious to save the mortgaged family estate, that endeared him to that wealthy heiress, and showed she had more depth and class than the landed gentry among whom she moved with amused scorn.

In Framley Parsonage she’s mysteriously aged a decade, for she’s now said to be in her forties. This time it’s the irresponsible gambler and cadger Sowerby who’s interested in marrying her money, but it’s the resourceful Mrs Harold Smith (née Harriet Sowerby) who shows more mettle and spirit than her reckless, irresponsible brother. She loves him, and is his true ‘ally’ in seeking to save him from destitution, and again Trollope shows how well he can do a morally murky character and make her attractive:

He was probably the only human being that she did love. Children she had none, and as for her husband, it had never occurred to her to love him. She had married him for a position; and being a clever woman, with a good digestion and command of her temper, had managed to get through the world without much of that unhappiness which usually follows ill-assorted marriages. At home she managed to keep the upper hand, but she did so in an easy, good-humoured way that made her rule bearable.

So she’s clever, ruthless and scheming, but has a sense of humour and fierce loyalty to that undeserving, extravagant scoundrel Sowerby (though even he is shown to be not all bad). She’s befriended Miss Dunstable with a view to helping him. She’s quick-eyed enough to realise that this heiress:

was to be won, not by indulgence of caprices, but by free and easy intercourse, with a dash of fun, and, at any rate, a dash of honesty…[She] was not, perhaps, herself very honest by disposition; but in these latter days she had taken up a theory of honesty for the sake of Miss Dunstable…

This astuteness had enabled her to become ‘intimate’ with Martha. She advises Sowerby to ‘tell her the truth’- not hide the fact that his ‘first object is her money’. When he chickens out of doing this ungallant act himself, she does it for him. Enterprising and bold, too. She’s discerned that those countless other suitors annoyed Martha by pretending to love her; she’s far too perceptive to fall for that, and simply despises their duplicity and transparent greed.

Ch. 24 is called ‘Magna est veritas’ – the truth is mighty – a Latin tag that Miss Dunstable cites when Harriet makes her pitch on behalf of her brother. She’d been taught it, she says with typical irony, by the Bishop of Barchester, who’d added some more, ‘but there was a long word, and I forgot it.’ She too has a wicked sense of humour, and her interlocutors often have trouble figuring out her true meaning – which is what she intends.

Miss Dunstable urges her on, but Harriet falters at this obviously deceptive pose of self-deprecation:

There was a hardness about Miss Dunstable when matters of business were concerned on which it seemed almost impossible to make any impression.

These two are well matched. Even though she does what she’d intended, saying her brother isn’t dying for love of Miss Dunstable, but harbours ‘as true a regard’ for her ‘as any man of his age does have’ (he’s 50)…’For any woman of mine’, returns the heiress – ruthlessly honest and tough. ‘They are very hard to manage,’ says Harriet to herself, ‘thinking of her own sex’.

It’s not going well, she knows. When she says Sowerby intended coming himself to make his proposal but thought she’d speak more ‘openly and freely’, Miss Dunstable sees through this, too. His intentions were ‘honourable’ she’s sure, she says: ‘He does not want to deceive me in that way.’ Implying, of course, that his deception is of another order:

It was impossible to help laughing, and Mrs Harold Smith did laugh. ‘Upon my word you would provoke a saint,’ said she.

This is arguably a funnier, more subtly done scene than anything in the previous three Barsetshire novels (though I’ve probably forgotten some already), and the humour arises naturally out of the characters and the carefully observed situation that’s been created for them. Both women are shown as resourceful, quick-thinking, shrewd and sharp (a word much used hereafter in the novel about Miss Dunstable) – and able to laugh at themselves and at the absurdity of life. There’s not much laughter of that rich quality among the men, that I recall.

Miss Dunstable refuses this ungracious (if unflatteringly honest) proposal: she explains bluntly to Harriet:

…he wants to marry me because I have got that which he wants. But, my dear, I do not want that which he has got, and therefore the bargain would not be a fair one.

She pays Harriet the dubious compliment of using the language of commerce, for the proposal was presented as a commercial transaction – one in which Miss Dunstable, with admirable frankness, acknowledges she has nothing to gain.

There are other finely portrayed women characters in this novel, but that’s perhaps enough on them for now. I need to read something very different to clear the mind from rural Barsetshire before the fifth Chronicle.

Trollope, Framley Parsonage – post 1

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Simon Lavery

In my final post on Trollope’s third Chronicle of Barsetshire, Dr Thorne (1858) I suggested a central theme was the revitalising effect of marriages between the jaded old land-owning families like the Greshams, or the atrophied aristocrats like the de Courcys, and the energetic new blood of the rising moneyed classes as represented by Dr Thorne’s daughter Mary, who conveniently became a suitable match for Frank Gresham in the eyes of his family (and her own) only when she inherited a vast sum of (new) money. Marriage was shown to be, in many ways, another way of accessing power or sustaining privilege; love matches like Mary and Frank’s were a rarity.

The cover of my OWC paperback is a detail from ‘The Statute Fair’ by George Bernard O’Neill

Similar themes are central to Framley Parsonage (started in serial form in Cornhill Magazine in 1860; published in book form 1861). In fact the ‘marriage plot’, such as it is, involves an almost identical situation: young Lord Ludovic Lufton wants to marry penniless but spirited Lucy Robarts, who had come to live with her 26-year-old brother Mark, a childhood friend of Lord Lufton, whose autocratic mother had gifted the living of the local church of Framley to the young cleric, but who strongly opposes such an unsuitable (in her lofty opinion) match.

As in the previous novels, the heroes are far from perfect, the villains hardly villainous. Mark is less than enthusiastically identified by Trollope’s narrator as the hero of this novel as early as p. 5:

…he was no born heaven’s cherub, neither was he a born fallen devil’s spirit…He had large capabilities for good – and aptitudes also for evil, quite enough: quite enough to make it needful that he should repel temptation as temptation can only be repelled.

He soon shows his weakness by accepting an invitation to visit the unscrupulous and dangerous Whig MP friend of Lord Lufton, Nathaniel Sowerby. He represents everything about West Barsetshire that the Tory East, reigned over by Lady Lufton, despises, considering his like and his patron the ‘great Whig autocrat’ the Duke of Omnium little short of demonic. In defying her and rebelling against her ‘thraldom’ by visiting first Sowerby and then the satanic Duke himself (though our narrator never shows him doing anything too untoward; this is largely Lady Lufton’s prejudice), he begins the descent into a financial quagmire among ‘sharp’ and ‘dishonest’ loan sharks and leeches like Sowerby and those he’s deeply indebted to. Like Arnold in Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume, he’s ‘ambitious’ for status and determined to ‘rise’ in the world. Trollope again shows here that ‘Clergymen are subject to the same passions as other men.’

But this is a gentler novel than the previous three. The threats to the stability of traditional, idyllic and pastoral Barsetshire – ‘the old agricultural virtue in all its purity’, as the narrator calls it – are less dangerous. There’s never much doubt that Mark will ultimately be ok, and the happy outcome for the central romance (Lucy and Lufton) even less suspenseful than Mary Thorne’s with Frank Gresham.

As ever, Trollope shows little relish for the romantic stuff. A glance at the title of the final chapter will give the game away. Even his portrayal of Lufton as ostensibly the romantic protagonist is equivocal. When Lucy’s pride prevents her from accepting his first impetuous marriage proposal, even though she loves him dearly, our narrator goes on:

I know it will be said of Lord Lufton himself that, putting aside his peerage and broad acres, and handsome, sonsy face, he was not worth a girl’s care and love. That will be said because people think that heroes in books should be so much better than heroes got up for world’s common wear and tear. I may as well confess that of absolute, true heroism there was only a moderate admixture in Lord Lufton’s composition; but what would the world come to if none but absolute true heroes were to be thought worthy of women’s love? What would the men do? and what – oh! what would become of the women?

Later, when he flirts with another woman, the narrator anticipates a critic saying ‘Your hero…is not worth very much’; but, he continues, ‘Lord Lufton is not my hero’ – and he’s ‘imperfect’. Like Dr Thorne in the previous novel, then.

Back to this scene: even Lucy is under no illusions about him – or herself:

Lucy Robarts in her heart did not give her dismissed lover credit for much more heroism than did truly appertain to him; – did not, perhaps, give him full credit for a certain amount of heroism which did really appertain to him; but, nevertheless, she would have been very glad to take him could she have done so without wounding her pride.

For she’s not behaved because of entirely noble motives, as our narrator, with ironic delicacy, reveals:

That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. [There’s that cheerfully, slyly open complicity with his readers that we’ve seen in the previous novels] A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen – makes hardly more of herself, or her own inner self…than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest stage of degradation.

As a prostitute, that is. So far, Lucy is positioned on the high moral ground. Not for long:

But a title, and an estate, and an income, are matters which will weigh in the balance with all Eve’s daughters – as they do with all Adam’s sons. Pride of place, and the power of living well in front of the world’s eye, are dear to us all.

It’s obvious where this is going now:

Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny – what more or what better could the world have done for her? And now she had thrown all that aside because she could not endure that Lady Lufton should call her a scheming, artful girl! [This that lady duly does, and worse]

It’s this amused, ironic narrative voice, nuanced characterisation and open distaste for sensational or romantic fiction’s stereotypical figures that redeems these Chronicles from the so-so plots and sometimes plodding narrative. Next time I’d like to consider other aspects of this ‘hodge-podge’, as Trollope called this novel with his customarily arch self-deprecation.

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