A preposterous plot told by the world's most miserable narrator in prolix and hysterical language. And French.
Imagine that when you are young you live for several months with your godmother and her son and another girl and then, when you have grown up, you meet the son again, over several months repeatedly, working closely with him, and you fail to recognise him. Seems unlikely? Not only does this plot point happen but, a little later, you meet the girl you lived with and fail to recognise her! And then you meet a priest a second time and fail to recognise him! Same unlikely plot point in triplicate.
Add the ghost of a nun and another nun whose death has caused one of the most unlikely love objects in fiction to dedicate himself to chastity.
These are the best bits of a plot that often just rambles. I get that the story is based upon the author's early life as a teacher in Brussels but novels are different from memoirs in that a novel is supposed to have a structure.
Add to that a narrator who is dedicated to being a martyr. Apparently she is a grown woman before she first encounters a mirror. She reflects (pun intended, sorry): “Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the ‘giftie’ of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret; it was not flattering, yet, after all, I ought to be thankful; it might have been worse.” (Ch 20) This 'it might have been worse' seems to sum up her victim's attitude to life. “I see that a great many men, and more women, hold their span of life on conditions of denial and privation. I find no reason why I should be one of the few favoured.” (Ch 31)
But this makes her incredibly bitter. I noted as early as chapter 14 that she is dreadfully censorious, no wonder she has no friends. Later she acquires friends who for some unfathomable reason seem to like her even as she disapproves of them. Basically, if they are happy she assumes they must be shallow. And goodness help them if they happen to be:
- Royal: “Her features, though distinguished enough, were too suggestive of reigning dynasties and royal lines to give unqualified pleasure.” (Ch 20)
- Irish: “She might possibly have been a hanger-on, nurse, fosterer, or washer-woman, in some Irish family: she spoke a smothered towel, curiously overlaid with mincing cockney inflections.” (Ch 8)
As for the Roman Catholics! This self-righteous prig listens to readings from a book containing “tales of moral martyrdom inflicted by Rome; the dread boasts are confessors, who had wickedly abused their office, trampling to deep degradation high-born ladies, making of countesses and princesses the most tormented slaves under the sun. Stories like that of Conrad and Elizabeth of Hungary, recurred again and again, with all its dreadful viciousness, sickening tyranny and black impiety: tales that were nightmares of oppression, privation and agony.” She believes RC priests are laying fiendish plans to entrap her into their religion which, she assumes, is akin to devil worship.
Add one of my pet hates, passages in a foreign language which are untranslated, as if the author is sneering at those of us whose French is sufficient for a few words here and there but not for whole paragraphs. I imagine I missed some important plot points but I don't care.
Add the usual corkscrewed sentences of Victorian prose:
- "no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe's antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of homesickness than did her infant visage." (Ch 2)
- “And he mentioned a name that thrilled me - a name that, in those days, thrilled Europe. It is hushed now: its once restless echoes are all still; she who bore it went years ago to her rest: night and oblivion long since closed above her; but then her day - a day of Sirius - stood at its full height, light, and fervour.” (Ch 23)
Over 500 pages of small print.
Reader, I hated this book.
Selected quotes:
- “Epidemic diseases, I believed, were often heralded by a gasping, sobbing, tormented, long-lamenting east wind.” (Ch 4)
- “What honest man on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?” (Ch 10)
- “Take up that pity ... in both hands, as you might a little callow gosling squattering out of bounds without leave.” (Ch 25)
February 2026; 507 pages
First published in 1853
My Penguin Popular Classics paperback was issued in 1994
