"North and South" by Mrs Gaskell

Margaret Hale, a vicar's daughter, is raised as a poor relation in the posh London house of her aunt but when her cousin gets married she must return to the vicarage in the New Forest. This rural idyll also comes to an end when her father has 'doubts' and resigns his vicarage. They are forced to leave the Garden of Eden so dad can work as a private tutor in Milton, a smoky northern manufacturing town. Margaret flits about visiting the sick and debating economics and industrial relations with her father's first student, a mill-owner who wants to learn a bit of culture. Love blooms to the background of a strike and a riot but a proposal is indignantly rejected. Then tragedy in the form of death strikes and strikes again. Margaret flees back to London to her rich relations while her godfather Mr Bell acts the part of fairy godmother. Inevitably, the book ends with avowals of love.

I couldn't help thinking of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte who was a friend of Mrs Gaskell's (Mrs G wrote Charlotte's authorised biography). Mill-owner Mr Thornton is very like Mr Rochester, although Margaret does not have the hots for him like Jane does. Nevertheless, marriage is only possible after Mr T, like Mr R, has been cut down to size, not by being blinded and mutilated in a fire, but by going bankrupt, only to be saved when Margaret, having inherited money from Mr Bell, invests in his plant: the theme of the bad boy tamed. 

I found it hard to like the protagonist, Margaret. She starts out as a privileged snob, upbraiding the servant, Dixon - who is the only member of the household who actually does anything useful to keep it going - for speaking out of turn. She looks down on tradesmen and, upon reaching Milton, extends this disdain to manufacturers:

• “I like all people whose occupations have to do with land; I like soldiers and sailors, and the three learned professions, as they call them. I'm sure you don't want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you?” (Ch 2)
• “‘A private tutor!’ said Margaret, looking scornful. ‘what in the world do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the accomplishments of a gentleman?’” (Ch 4)

It takes the opposing arguments of Mr Thornton on the one hand and Nicholas Higgins on the other before she begins to realise that the old certainties of her 'Whig Ascendancy' upbringing are not so clearly defined. People in the South (which is equated with a rural peasant-based existence) may be content but that content has sapped their get up and go. On the other hand, Northerners (= those working in manufacturing industries) can't seem to sit still. “I suppose each mode of Life produces its own trials and its own temptations. The dweller in towns must find it as difficult to be patient and calm, as the country-bred man must find it to be active, and equal to unwonted emergencies. Both must find it hard to realize a future of any kind, the one because the present is so living and hurrying and close round him; the other because his life tempts him to revel in the mere sense of animal existence, not knowing of, and consequently not caring for, any pungency of pleasure, for the attainment of which he can plan, and deny himself and look forward.” (Ch 37)

I suppose it could be argued that this is a developmental novel, a sort of bildungsroman, except that the main change is that in Mr Thornton who starts providing his workforce with cooked lunches and even sitting down at table with them.

Margaret herself is sometimes hateful. When Boucher commits suicide, his widow, in the first flush of her grief, lays the blame on the millowners and the union and even his own children, citing them as reasons why he was driven to make her a widow. The narrator comments: “Margaret heard enough of this unreasonableness to dishearten her.” Unreasonableness? I found this breathtakingly cruel. Yes, the widow is being irrational, yes she is being selfish by considering only how her husband’s death affects herself. But anger is a typical response to bereavement. 

This book was written in 1854 - 5, a few years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto but this book has a fundamentally anti-meritocratic message. In the end Thornton is defeated by the strike because he has invested in machinery but is unable to fulfil his orders. Margaret, having inherited money, rescues him. The moral of the story is that progress must be rescued from entrepreneurial Armageddon by old money possessed by those who have done nothing to deserve it. This is still a world where birth into the established social order matters. As Bessy Higgins, who dies of consumption early in the story, says: “Some's pre-elected to sumptuous feasts, and purple and fine linen ... others toil and moil all their lives long.” (Ch 19). Such quasi-Calvinistic beliefs in predestination were exploited by the conservative establishment as a way of justifying the social order as being ordained by God. This is exemplified by the third verse of the popular hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ which asserts: "The rich man in his castle,/ The poor man at his gate,/ God made them, high or lowly,/ And ordered their estate.” This verse is frequently omitted in modern versions of the hymn.

I myself believed that a key way to achieve social mobility is through education, which was a major motivation behind my 33 years as a teacher. There is some discussion of education. In chapter 4, Margaret disdains the idea that manufacturers might benefit from being educated in literature (see above). In chapter 46, Mr Bell, who is a fellow of an Oxford College and therefore might be expected to value education, is similarly dismissive when it comes to a peasant’s daughter going to the parish school in Helstone (where she will presumably be taught to read and write): “The child was getting a better and simpler, and more natural education stopping at home, and helping her mother, and learning to read a chapter in the New Testament every night by her side, than from all the schooling under the sun.”

It might be argued that Margaret herself learns to value the poor: she makes friends with the Higginses. As early as chapter 10, she argues with Mr Thornton: “You consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the world, from whatever cause, as your enemies.” (Ch 10) It is true that successful people often despise the unsuccessful on the basis of 'If I could do it, why couldn't they', frequently downplaying the beneficial effects of luck (be it good health, or the right contacts, or being in the right place at the right time, or having the ability to work that bit harder) has on their own life. But I would argue that Margaret is worse. She too despises the Higginses and the rural folk when she returns to Helstone. She thinks she is better than them and therefore patronises them. But she has done nothing to deserve her privilege. At least Thornton worked for wealth AND recognises that he is lacking in cultural education which is why he takes lessons with Margaret's dad from the start.

Many critics seem to believe that Margaret does develop as a character by losing her nostalgic affection for the South. In these terms the North represents to future, the world of capitalism, where wealth depends on the exploitation of resources (and the ownership of those resources, including capital). The South represents the traditional world of feudalism, of the past, where wealth depends upon property acquired, usually, by inheritance. Margaret certainly comes to realise that change is not only inevitable but essential: “This visit to Helstone had not been all - had not been exactly what she had expected. There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all. Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother-earth." But, the passage continues, Margaret regrets the change: "Places were changed - a tree gone here, a bough there, bringing in a long ray of light where no light was before - a road was trimmed and narrowed, and the green straggling pathway by its side enclosed and cultivated. A great improvement it was called; but Margaret sighed over the old picturesqueness, the old gloom, and the grassy wayside of former days.” (Ch 46) In the end she is still a nimby.

As for the minor players, we are often in the dark: 

• We never discover what conscientious objections lead Margaret's dad to given up his cosy parish in the New Forest even though this is the catalyst that triggers the plot. 
• Frederick's mutiny and subsequent exile might have been developed in accordance with a theme of a principled battle against the established order (such as Mr Hale's, or the strike) and it could have been the occasion for Margaret to realise that her own family were law-breakers, but in the end he is little more than a plot point. There is some suspicion that the development of his story, which breaks upon us in chapter 25, might have been an injection of melodrama intended to revitalise sales of Household Words which had been flagging after the first few editions; it starts the seventh installment.
• Mr Bell is summoned half-way through the story to act as a fairy godmother, ensuring Cinders goes to the ball. 
• Dixon is the quintessential servant, a hugely loyal family retainer more necessary to Mrs Hale in her illness than either husband or daughter. And yet Gaskell can’t resist the opportunity to make her a figure of fun, when she is scared that if she goes to Spain she might be converted to Roman Catholicism (Ch 47). This relegates a character who could be three-dimensional into the stock clown-servant of traditional drama.
• Edith is the stereotypical spoilt young woman of a good family.
• Mrs Thornton, Thornton's mum, is a strong character. She is fiercely protective of her son, hating Margaret both for entrapping her son when he falls in love with her and also for rejecting him and making him unhappy. She is proud and fearless. I'm not sure there are any traces of the poor woman she must once have been but as a battle-hardened matriarch she works well.
• Thornton the love interest has some strong opinions at the start but once he has fallen for Margaret he is little more than her helpless admirer. And he disappears for most of the last third of the book (rather like Rochester disappears in Jane Eyre) to be brought back when things need to be resolved.

The story was originally published as a serial in Household Words, the weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens. Mrs Gaskell battled with him over a number of points, including the title 'North and South' which he imposed. There must have been a certain feeling of discontent in  that it was immediately preceded by Hard Times, the Dickens novel, which also dealt with industrial conditions in a fictionalised Manchester. In the Preface to the First Edition, Mrs Gaskell acknowledged that the "conditions imposed by the requirments of a weekly publication [including] ... certain advertised limits" meant that she found it "impossible to develop the story in the manner originally intended". The story initially bombed: the sale of Household Words declined precipitously after the first few installments which might be why the story becomes more exciting with the introduction of the Frederick's return plot.

Selected quotes:

• “It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime.” (Ch 3) The notes tell me that this story is from The History of Chec Chahabeddin in Turkish Tales published in 1708.
• “Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved Helston, the next morning.” (Ch 6)
• “North and South has both met and made kind o’ friends in this big smoky place.” (Ch 8)
• “I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.” (Ch 10)
• “Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power unjustly and cruelly used - not on behalf ourselves but on behalf of others more helpless.” (Ch 14) This is Margaret defending Frederick.
• “We, the owners of capital, have a right to choose what we will do with it.” (Ch 15)
• “She saw unusual loiterers in the streets: men with their hands in their pockets sauntering along; loud-laughing and loud-spoken girls clustered together, apparently excited to high spirits, and a boisterous independence of temper and behaviour.” (Ch 17)
• “One had to learn a different language, and measure by a different standard, up here in Milton.” (Ch 20)
• “Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm.” (Ch 28)
• “I’d as lief stand on my own bottom.” (Ch 28)
• “Nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously - the pharisee ostentatiously - the simple-hearted humbly - the poor idiot blindly” (Ch 43)
• “I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genie.” (Ch 46)
• “If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt.” (Ch 46)
• Henry Lennox, Margaret’s first suitor, is described as “pushing on in his profession; cultivating, with profound calculation, all those connections that might eventually be of service to him; keen-sighted, far-seeing, intelligent, sarcastic, and proud.” (Ch 47) He's a solicitor and the parallel with the solicitor husband, seeking connections for personal gain, in The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim was strong.
• “She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.” (Ch 48)

Some considerations:

• In chapter 15, Mr Thornton asserts: “We, the owners of capital, have a right to choose what we will do with it.” and Margaret responds “A human right” but sotto voce and, when asked what she said, she replies: “I said you had a human right. I meant that there seemed no reason but religious ones, why you should not do what you like with your own.” How should the phrase ‘human right’ as Margaret uses it be understood?
• I wondered at the choice of Milton (the first time it is mentioned it is called ‘Milton-Northern’) as the pseudonym for Manchester. The translation to ‘mill town’ is obvious but is there a hint towards the poet John Milton whose most famous poem, Paradise Lost, describes how Adam and Eve are cast out of the paradisaical Garden of Eden to earn their bread through labour. At the same time the idyllic New Forest village in which Margaret grows up is called Helstone. Is this perhaps ‘Hell’s Town’?
• The ladies at the dinner party given by the Thorntons talk of wealth. Margaret shows this by saying: “They took nouns that were signs of things which gave evidence of wealth, - housekeepers, under-gardeners, extent of glass, valuable lace, diamonds, and all such things” (Ch 21)
• One of the titles Gaskell considered for her book was ‘Death and Variations’. There are six deaths in it: those of Bessy Higgins, Margaret’s mother, Boucher, Margaret’s father and godfather Mr Bell. This last reflects that there are variations on the act of dying: “Nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously - the pharisee ostentatiously - the simple-hearted humbly - the poor idiot blindly” (Ch 43)

First published as a weekly serial in the magazine Household Words in 1854 - 1855. 

Published as a novel, with additional chapters, by Chapman and Hall in 1855

My Wordsworth paperback edition was issued in 2002

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other novels by Mrs Gaskell include

• Mary Barton (1848)
• Cranford (1851 - 1853)
• Ruth (1853)
• North and South (1854 - 1855)
• My Lady Ludlow (1858 - 1859)
• A Dark Night’s Work (1863)
• Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)
• Wives and Daughters (1864 - 1866)

She also wrote a biography:

• The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857)

"Silas Marner" by George Eliot

This classic novel is, especially given its relative brevity, a great introduction to the works of that great Victorian novelist George Eliot.

The Plot: spoiler alert

Silas Marner comes from "north'ard"; he was a member of a puritan sect who was accused of stealing money by a fellow member; who, we infer, had designs on the girl betrothed to Silas and framed Silas while Silas was in a "cataleptic fit". Silas, expelled from his home town, comes to Raveloe, a "Merrie England" village in the middle of the country. Silas, regarded with suspicion by the peasants because of his newcomer status, because he rejected the offered role of 'wise woman' after he suggested a herbal remedy, and because he doesn’t have a pint at the Rainbow. 

He's a weaver, like a spider, and all he lives for is work (in a social comment Eliot says that Marner changes to fit his loom: "Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation the the objects of his life, so that he produced the same impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart"; in the same way as in Huxley's Brave New World men are bred to for the assembly line to which they are destined). He needs very little money to feed and clothe himself etc and he no longer contributes to the church so he buries his savings. 

The other side of the coin [sorry about that] is that the rich are corrupt. The Squire's son Godfrey has embezzled from his father, loaning money to his brother, Dunstan, who threatens to expose the fact that Godfrey has married secretly. A plan to sell Godfrey's horse falls at the first jump [sorry again] when the horse dies (badly ridden by Dunstan, a metaphor for the ruling class exploiting the workers). Walking home in a fortuitous mist, Dunstan finds Silas out and steals his gold. 

The loss of his gold prompts Silas to seek help, walking into a comedy crowd scene at the local pub (it's always great to schedule the humour immediately after a moment of great drama - as with the porter scene in Macbeth which comes immediately after the murder of the King). This is the first interaction Silas has had with the village, and asking for help is the first indication that nobody can live entirely alone. Silas begins to mellow. 

The New Year’s Day party at the Squire’s  mirrors the crowd scene in the pub, being a sort of upper class comedy sketch to complement the peasantry version.

Godfrey’s abandoned wife is heading through the snow with their child, intent of confronting him at the party. But she is addicted to opium and, taking a draught, the soporific drug combines with her fatigue to send her to sleep; hypothermia finished her off. Her toddler toddles off and wanders into Silas's cottage (he is in yet another convenient fugue state so he doesn’t notice her coming in) and falls asleep in front of the fire. Silas comes to and thinks the child is his missing gold, returned in human form. Pulling himself together, he retraces  the girl’s steps to find the woman in the snow and then turns up at the Squire's feast with the baby, asking for the doctor. 
Godfrey semi-recognises the child but says he doesn’t; Silas insists the child is his (the gold went, the child came; both being mysterious) and, since the woman is dead, Godfrey, now free to marry Nancy, lets Silas take the child. 

Dolly Winthrop proves invaluable to Silas in instructing him to to bring up the girl, now called Eppie, and giving him baby clothes etc from her last-born Aaron. She insists Silas gets Eppie baptised. As a toddler, Eppie proves a handful, and Silas is too soft to discipline her. But his love for her begins to soften him.

Sixteen years later (this is a little like 'A Winter's Tale' in which a girl is lost and rediscovered after a long gap) the Stone Pits are being drained. Dunstan's body, with the stolen gold, is discovered. Godfrey confesses to (childless) Nancy that Eppie is his child (by the dead woman). 

Godfrey and Nancy go to Silas and claim Eppie as theirs; they propose to take her away (though they will make sure that Silas is cared for in his old age, and permit Eppie to continue to see him) and adopt her. However, Eppie elects to stay with Silas (though she will soon be marrying Aaron) and Godfrey (and Nancy who, though very much the wronged woman, sides with her husband in this game of social one-upmanship) are turned away.

Nancy and Godfrey reflect on what has happened and decide that they must make the best of things. Chastened, they repent.

Silas and Eppie journey to Lantern Yard ... to find that the church has been replaced by a factory and the city is too busy for their simple country ways.

The structure of the plot

One of the joys of SM is the juxtapositions. Immediately after the dramatic theft of Silas's gold comes the comic rustic yokel scene in the pub; this reversal reminded me of the way, in Macbeth, the murder of the King is immediately followed by the only comic interlude, the 'hell porter' scene. Eliot then follows the scene in the pub with another scene of a social gathering: the New Year's Eve party thrown by the squire to which the poor people are invited to entertain the guests (and afterwards to dine off the leftovers). Both social occasions are interrupted by Silas, once to announce that his gold has gone and the second time to announce that Eppie, who symbolises eternal gold (Eliot would have known that in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew chapter 6, (verses 19-20) Jesus is reported to have told his followers "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth. and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal".

Sleeping Beauty or Hero's Adventure?

Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots (pp 202 - 203) cites SM as a classic ‘Rebirth’ story along the lines of Sleeping Beauty. The jealous fairy is William Dane, who frames Silas for theft, so stealing his fiancee and causing Silas to seek self-exile in the semi-mythical rural paradise of Raveloe. But the poison has entered the soul of Silas and he gradually (over fifteen years, about as long as it would take a princess to grow up) withdraws from the world, first into his miserhood, and then, following the loss of his gold, into embittered "Self-pitiful brooding". From this “state of living death” he is awakened by the semi-magical arrival of Eppie and is happy but the 'ever after' bit is undecided until Eppie acknowledges Silas as her father, despite discovering that her natural father is Godfrey. One might also note that the two of the three moments of magic in the Sleeping Beauty tale, the fairy's curse and the prince's kiss are both occasions on which Silas has fallen into his "cataleptic fit", itself an echo of the Sleeping Beauty. (Perhaps the other moment of magic, when Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger, is heralded by the fortuitous mist that shields the theft of Dunstan ... and leads him to fall, with his stolen gold, into the pools.)

An alternative analysis of the story is that it is a 'Hero's Adventure' (an analysis along these lines is supported by the comment of GE herself that SM was a "legendary story"). Silas, the hero, leaves his home country to travel to the mythical land of Raveloe where he meets trials: the first being the offer of becoming the village's 'wise woman', which he fails; the second being the theft of his gold, which he passes, at least in part, by seeking help from the village pub; and the third being his acceptance of the responsibility for the care of the abandoned child. The grail that the hero has been seeking turns out to be Eppie's love and, armed with this, he returns to his own world, only to find that it has changed and that the past no longer has any hold over him. In this analysis the antagonist is Godfrey and he is in many ways the mirror image of Silas: wasteful and indolent rather than hard-working and miserly, and, fundamentally, he ducks responsibility where Silas accepts it.

The author's messages
Although George Eliot believed fiction should have a morally beneficial effect, as a critic, she asserted that “We don’t want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art and tells its own story.” Nevertheless, as an author, she cannot resist the authorial voice commenting upon issues, though it is far less intrusive than in many contemporary novels. But Silas Marner is, first and foremost, a story and the dance of the characters offers the reader enjoyment and delight.

• One of my U3A Central Eastbourne reading group suggested that the book's message is that suffering is rewarded.
• Another suggestion is that the message is that a man can only find fulfilment when he is part of a community in which he both gives help and receives it. 
• Alternatively, a man can find fulfilment only when he acknowledges both the male and the female sides of his character. Silas has his masculinity ripped away from him when he is first falsely accused and doesn't stand up for himself and second has his gold stolen (symbolic of emasculation) and accepts the loss. When he adopts Eppie he accepts that a human can only be complete if he accepts responsibility for and nurtures and cares for others. (One could argiue that the role of protector is a masculine virtue and he has therefore reasserted his masculinity when he says, pivotally, apropos the baby Eppie: "It's come to me - I've a right to keep it."; Ch 13).
• Another message might be that neither miserliness nor wastefulness bring happiness. Marian Evans knew her Dante and in Dante's Inferno one of the circles of hell contains both those who spend too much come against those who spend too little. Dante, like Aristotle, believed in the doctrine of the golden middle: that good lies in moderation. Silas himself is, famously a miser: "as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.” (Ch 2) What is less obvious is the wastefulness of the squirearchy. This is referred to overtly in chapter one: "there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion". In chapter two we are told that the poor people enjoy the leftovers from the feasts of the rich (an early example of trickle-down economics or further confirmation that the rich are wasteful?) One of the symbols of this waste is the undrained and deserted stone-pit next to which Silas lives (though it is Godfrey's decision to drain the stone-pits that leads to the discovery of Dunstan the thief and Godfrey the unacknoledged father). The Lammeters are Eliot's ideal: “for the Lammeters had been brought up in that way, that they never suffered a pinch of salt to be wasted, and yet everybody in their household had of the best, according to his place.” (Ch 3) Silas himself recognises the virtue in moderation near the end of the book when he has achieved wisdom: urged to continue smoking he demurs: “I’ve done enough for to-day. I think, mayhap, a little of it does me more good than so much at once.” (Ch 16) Nancy's sister, a Lammeter, describe: “that way o’ the men—always wanting and wanting, and never easy with what they’ve got: they can’t sit comfortable in their chairs when they’ve neither ache nor pain, but either they must stick a pipe in their mouths, to make ’em better than well, or else they must be swallowing something strong, though they’re forced to make haste before the next meal comes in.” (Ch 17) but she specifically exempts “our father” (is that a deliberate Biblical echo?) from this general foolishness.

Two types of faith

Eliot, who herself as a young woman moved from a devoted Christian to an agnostic position, contrasts two conceptions of faith:

• Eliot explicitly attacks the narrow-mindedness of the Lantern Yard (surely a deliberate name with its implications of the light for the world) version of Christianity: “The little light he [Silas] possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night.” (Ch 2) 
  
• In contrast, the faith of the village is relaxed and easy-going; perhaps one might say that it is less concerned with right and wrong and more with good and bad. The village is almost pre-Christian in its beliefs: “Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.” (Ch 1; second paragraph)
  
• The fundamental faith in the village is ‘neighbourliness’, a word Eliot often uses. This is pretty close to the Christian commandment to ‘Love Thy Neighbour’: “There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.” (Ch 10)
  
• Even going to church is not central to the villagers’ faith, although it is thought more suitable for the higher social orders: “The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely regular in their church-going, and perhaps there was hardly a person in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours—a wish to be better than the “common run”, that would have implied a reflection on those who had had godfathers and godmothers as well as themselves, and had an equal right to the burying-service. At the same time, it was understood to be requisite for all who were not household servants, or young men, to take the sacrament at one of the great festivals: Squire Cass himself took it on Christmas-day; while those who were held to be “good livers” went to church with greater, though still with moderate, frequency.” (Ch 10)
  
• Dolly expresses the fundamental faith of the villagers thus: “there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know—I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so.” (Ch 16)
  
• These two faiths are explicitly contrasted in the rambling story about a marriage which the sexton tells in Chapter 6. In the story, he parson muddles up the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ in a wedding ceremony: “Is’t the meanin’ or the words as makes folks fast i’ wedlock?” (Ch 6) the sexton asks.
  
• Eliot seems to be attacking the narrow-mindedness that accompanies monotheism. “In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth.” (Ch 2) This idea has Biblical roots. There is a lot of evidence that the early Israelites (eg pre Moses) were not monotheistic, but possibly polytheistic, or at best henotheistic (they recognised many gods but worshipped only one. For example, in Exodus 20:3 God tells the Israelistes that “you shall have no other gods to set against me”, implying that there are others. In Psalms 89: 5-7 there is a question: ’Who among the heavenly beings is like Yahweh, a God feared in the council of the holy ones, great and awesome above all that are around him?’ Finally, there are suggestions that other gods are local. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 states “When Elyon [translated in the New English Bible as ‘the Most High’] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods [the NEB has ‘sons of God’]; Yahweh’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.” Lastly, David, exiled by Saul, curses those who have sent him into foreign lands where he will have “to serve other gods” (1 Samuel 26:19)
  

Social commentary

There is a degree of social commentary which might suggest that politically Eliot is to the left of the spectrum; she is on the side of the working man rather than the landowner:

• From early on, it is made clear that there is nothing special about the social hierarchy of the village. The Squire “was only one among several landed parishioners”, the big difference being that he not only owned his land, he even “had a tenant or two”. (Ch 3)
• “It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels.” (Ch 3)
• “the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor.” (Ch 3)
• “The Squire had been used to parish homage all his life, used to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best” (Ch 9)
• “By this advanced hour of the day, the Squire ... felt it quite pleasant to fulfil the hereditary duty of being noisily jovial and patronizing” (Ch 11)
• At the squire’s party, Ben Winthrop (father to Aaron, husband to Dolly, and therefore representative of the kindly, easy-going villagers, defends Godfrey the Squire’s son against sexton Mr Macey: “I should like you to pick me out a finer-limbed young fellow nor Master Godfrey—one as ’ud knock you down easier, or ’s more pleasanter-looksed when he’s piert and merry.” Macey replies: “he isn’t come to his right colour yet: he’s partly like a slack-baked pie. And I doubt he’s got a soft place in his head, else why should he be turned round the finger by that offal Dunsey as nobody’s seen o’ late, and let him kill that fine hunting hoss as was the talk o’ the country? And one while he was allays after Miss Nancy, and then it all went off again, like a smell o’ hot porridge, as I may say. That wasn’t my way when I went a-coorting.” (Ch 11)

But how radical was Eliot? Her idealised village community of Raveloe is set in the past (Eliot had seen many of the early Victorian changes in the countryside and she is aware that Raveloe is special in that it is set away from a coaching route (and pre railway) and so has remained unspoilt); Eliot is a small-c conservative at heart (as is shown by her horror at the industrialisation of Lantern Yard at the end of the novel). 

In her treatment of women, despite Eliot's own scandalous personal life, Eliot is quite conventional: the three main female characters are Dolly, the perfect farmer's wife (perhaps paralleled by Mrs Poyser in Adam Bede), Eppie, the adopted daughter of Silas, who has remained steadily nice despite being spoiled rotten as a child, and Nancy, the only remotely complex female character, who is the wronged but loyal wife of the young squire.

Of course, the peak of the social commentary comes when we ask whether the right of a biological father (and from there the old traditional system of inheritance of land and title) should overturn the right of an adopted father. Eliot's answer in this case is a resounding 'no'. 

• “Godfrey had from the first specified Eppie, then about twelve years old, as a child suitable for them to adopt. It had never occurred to him that Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie. Surely the weaver would wish the best to the child he had taken so much trouble with, and would be glad that such good fortune should happen to her ... Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower?” (Ch 17)
• “But I’ve a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims. It’s my duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her. She is my own child—her mother was my wife. I’ve a natural claim on her that must stand before every other.” (Ch 19)

Influences:

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan: One of our U3A group suggested that Eliot derived the original idea for Silas from seeing a jobbing weaver going across the countryside with a large pack on his back ... and remembered the description of Christian, in the early part of the Pilgrim's Progress, who travelled with a burden on his back until, with sufficient faith, he could cast it off.

Shakespeare: as well as the murder/hell porter juxtaposition in Macbeth described above, the rural pub scene could have been inspired by Nick Bottom and his mates in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the obvious Shakespearean influence is A Winter's Tale, in which Perdita is a child who is lost and then rediscovered after a gap of sixteen years. 

The Bible: As well as the reference from Matthew, above, and from Exodus and Deuteronomy, one could see call some of the villagers in the pub scene Job's comforters, after Silas has his gold stolen. The Christian interpretation is made even stronger when Silas is identified as Christ in only the fourth paragraph when the “Raveloe lasses ... declare that they would never marry a dead man come to life again.” (Ch 1)

Pantomime. We have discussed Sleeping Beauty. In the Introduction to the Penguin edition of this book, Q D Leavis suggests that Silas Marner is an 'anti-Cinderella' story: "Eppie ... renounces her birth-right as the Squire’s heiress to marry a working-man” (p 34)

Selected quotes:

• “Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.” (Ch 1)
• “Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.” (Ch 2)
• “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.” (Ch 5)
• “joy is the best of wine, and Silas’s guineas were a golden wine of that sort.” (Ch 5)
• “there’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himsen, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him.” (Ch 6)
• “there’s reasons in things as nobody knows on—that’s pretty much what I’ve made out; yet some folks are so wise, they’ll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason’s winking at ’em in the corner, and they niver see’t.” (Ch 6)
• “he’d got a bit confused in his head, what wi’ age and wi’ taking a drop o’ summat warm when the service come of a cold morning.” (Ch 6)
• “Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye? That’s what I should like to know. If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places—let ’em come where there’s company and candles.” (Ch 6)
• “Now, don’t you be for overshooting the mark ... That’s what you’re allays at; if I throw a stone and hit, you think there’s summat better than hitting, and you try to throw a stone beyond.” (Ch 8)
• “Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard.” (Ch 8)
• “I wouldn’t speak ill o’ this world, seeing as Them put us in it as knows best—but what wi’ the drink, and the quarrelling, and the bad illnesses, and the hard dying, as I’ve seen times and times, one’s thankful to hear of a better.” (Ch 10)
• “he isn’t come to his right colour yet: he’s partly like a slack-baked pie” (Ch 11)
• “It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.” (Ch 12)
• “uncle Kimble ... shuffled before his adversary’s deal with a glare of suspicion, and turned up a mean trump-card with an air of inexpressible disgust, as if in a world where such things could happen one might as well enter on a course of reckless profligacy.” (Ch 13)
• “We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all” (Ch 14)
• “For if the child ever went anyways wrong, and you hadn’t done your part by it, Master Marner—’noculation, and everything to save it from harm—it ’ud be a thorn i’ your bed for ever o’ this side the grave; and I can’t think as it ’ud be easy lying down for anybody when they’d got to another world, if they hadn’t done their part by the helpless children as come wi’out their own asking.” (Ch 14)
• “Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires” (Ch 14)
• “Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years, having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a practice “good for the fits”; and this advice was sanctioned by Dr. Kimble, on the ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm” (Ch 16)
• “I know the way o’ wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they turn round on one and praise ’em as if they wanted to sell ’em.” (Ch 17)
• “‘A man must have so much on his mind,’ is the belief by which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words” (Ch 17)

July 2022; 244 pages

There is a BBC In Our Time podcast about Silas Marner which can be found here, although it spends more time considering GE than SM. 

A short biography of George Eliot can be found here.

Biographies of George Eliot reviewed on this blog are:

• George Eliot by Jenny Uglow
• George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

Other novels written by George Eliot include:

• Scenes of Clerical Life
• Adam Bede
• The Mill on the Floss
• Middlemarch
• Silas Marner
• Felix Holt
• Romola
• Daniel Deronda

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte

The following review incorporates comments from my Eastbourne Central U3A group.

This story, written in early Victorian times, is about a woman trapped in a marriage to an alcoholic and womaniser and the 'nice boy' who wants to marry her not knowing she is already married: these are the days before easy divorce and before the Married Women's Property Act so that all the wife's property, including her son, are deemed to be the property of the man. The book stirred up controversy in its time for its no-holds-barred (for its time) portrayal of dissolute wickedness. The husband of the heroine indulges in verbal and physical abuse of his wife, he offers her sexual services to his friends, he indulges in coercive control; for her the final straw comes when he encourages their son to sweat and rink alcohol. Unlike the high Gothic extravaganza of Wuthering Heights and the ultra-romantic Jane Eyre of Anne's sisters, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, this book's realism and lack of sensationalism has led to it being overlooked. To modern sensibilities its narrative pretences, its length, and its moralising make it a sometimes difficult read. Nevertheless, there is plenty to enjoy.

Anne Bronte chose a story-within-a-story format for TWH. The frame narrative purports to be a letter written by Gilbert Markham to ‘Halford’, inside the frame are journal entries by Helen Huntingdon. But neither works properly: both letters and diary entries are long and too well conceived; there are neither digressions nor irrelevant details as there would be in genuine letters and journals. And the diary entries are so selective; huge periods being missing (including her marriage and the conception and birth of little Arthur!)

Pre-Victorian novelists commonly used letters and diary entries, though the fashion had been for more straightforward narratives for many years prior to TWH. The big advantage of these formats is that the narrator (and therefore the reader) does not know what is going to happen next. This maintains suspense (theoretically the narrator could even die, which is not possible with a traditional past-tense narrative). But Markham’s letters are clearly written some time after the events in question, so this advantage is thrown away in the case of the frame narrative.

The other advantage to the author in this structure is that she is able to use two different narrators, and to some extent this works although the ‘voices’ of the narrators don’t seem particularly different. AB should be able to show Gilbert learning to become less impetuous ... but he doesn’t; his character at the end of his reckless rush to the wedding at the end of the book is much the same as it has been throughout the book. Helen, on the other hand, does change from a headstrong and impulsive girl (while she is being courted) to a rather censorious and scripture-quoting wife who is so obsessed with conforming to social canons of respectable behaviour that she won’t even unbend enough to propose to Gilbert at the end (she will only drop some rather coded hints).

Despite the story-in-a-story structure, the fundamentals of the pacing conform to the classic four-part plot with major turning points at the quarter-marks:

• The 25% mark just follows Gilbert’s attack on Lawrence and just precedes the start of Helen’s diary.
• The 50% mark is when Helen realises that her marriage is a bad one
• The 75% mark is when Arthur reads Helen’s diary and demands from her the keys, effectively imprisoning her.
• Helen’s diary ends at the 80% mark.

The book seemed overlong to modern eyes. One of my fellow U3A members admitted wishing, during a prolonged death-bed scene, that 'he would just get it over with'. For me, the most artificially protracted part of the story for me was at the end with the narrator throwing endless obstacles into their own way of achieving marital happiness. 

The difference in expectations between women and men in upper class Victorian society is blatant in this novel. Most of the men are portrayed as impetuous, proud, and aggressive, many are also dissolute, hard-drinking and womanising. This has been described as what we would now call 'toxic masculinity'. The proffered ideal of womanhood is puritanical: the maintenance of one’s reputation is all-important. And it is respectability that seems to matter. Helen must have known that her husband was womanising when he was away from home; it was only when the affair was taking place under her nose that she gets upset.

There were times when the Bible quotes meant the ‘novel’ was more like a tract. It was suggested in the group that this reflected Victorian sensibility but it was written in 1848, only 11 years after Victoria's accession, and is mostly set in the 1820s so it is actually late-Georgian. In some ways it therefore reflects the change from the dissolution of Regency bucks to the later Victorian primness. Or is this telling us that the days of moral respectability began earlier than the name 'Victorian' suggests? The rise of Methodism was in the mid-1700s. Our group considered suggestions that the fundamental theology was  post-Calvinistic and this would have been connected with Methodism, furthermore the naming of the villain 'Huntingdon' might be linked to the Countess of Huntingdon, an important Calvinistic Methodist of the mid-1700s. Wesley condemned alcohol abuse in 1743 but the Temperance movement in the UK didn't really get started till 1829. The Band of Hope, which made its members swear to total abstinence and attempted to educate children away from drinking alcohol (what would they have made of Helen putting poison into little Arthur's wine as a form of aversion therapy?) was founded in 1847, so TWH caught the zeitgeist there!

Although Christian doctrine always has to have the last word, AB did include other points of view:

• “You choose rather to leave us miserable, and you coolly tell me it is the will of God that we should remain so. You may call this religion, but I call it wild fanaticism.” (Ch 37) Said by a frustrated Mr Hargrave
• “To regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of Heaven, is as if the grovelling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups of basking on their sunny petals. If those little creatures knew how great a change awaited them, no doubt they would regret it.” (Ch 45) Said by Helen Huntingdon
• “It’s an act of Christian charity, whereby you hope to gain a higher seat in Heaven for yourself, and scoop a deeper pit in Hell for me.” (Ch 47) Spoken by a magnificently bitter Arthur Huntingdon

Was it the first feminist novel? The debate ranged around what was meant by 'feminist'. It was decided that a book narrated by a woman but written by a man couldn't count. It was proposed that if a book with a strong female protagonist was 'feminist' this would include the novels of Jane Austen and these romantic comedies, no matter how well written, didn't seem very 'feminist'. But it was thought probably, given the large numbers of female novelists at work pre- and post-Austen, that there must be earlier feminist novels. 'Mary: A fiction' by Mary Wollstonecraft  was proposed but the only person in the group who had read it couldn't remember the details so we couldn't decide.

This topic was also debated in a BBC In Our Time programme broadcast in 2021 in which  it was agreed that is embodied the feminist concerns of the day but it might not be the first.

Certainly TWH seemed to be pushing a feminist agenda, although in her Preface to the Second Edition, AB states: “I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read.”

Despite atrocious reviews, which criticised the novel's 'coarseness' and said it was unfit to be read by ladies and girls, the first edition was sold out in six weeks.

Selected Quotes:

• “She was barely civil to them, and evidently better pleased to say ‘goodbye’ than ‘how do you do’.” (Ch 1)
• “When a lady does consent to listen to an argument against her own opinions, she is always predetermined to withstand it - to listen only with her bodily ears, keeping the mental organs resolutely closed against the strongest reasoning.” (Ch 3) And not only ladies!
• “If abstinence be an evil ... no one will deny that excess is a greater.” (Ch4) Compare this with the view of Dickens, reported as "The widespread assertion that drunkenness was the cause of many evils rather than a result of already existing ones angered him, as if eradicating a symptom in any way dealt with the disease." in the biography by Fred Kaplan
• “I was wearied to death with small-talk - nothing wears me out like that. I cannot imagine how they can go on as they do.” (Ch 9)
• “I almost wish I were not a painter ... instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them [the effects of nature], I am always troubling my head about how I can produce the same effect upon canvas.” (Ch 9) It's a common trope. But in my experience, dissecting and critiquing a novel, even just reviewing it with more than 'I liked it' or 'I hated it', invariably leads one to a deeper appreciation of the book. Once I had learned a little about how jazz is structured, I enjoyed it more. So I disagree with the sentiment.
• “A light wind swept over the corn; and all nature laughed in the sunshine.” (Ch 15)
• “Beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men, and, therefore, it is liked [sic] to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.” (Ch 16)
• “By the bright azure of the sky, and by the warm and brilliant lights, and deep, long shadows, I had endeavoured to convey the idea of a sunny morning.” (Ch 18)
• “Spring just opening into summer - morning just approaching noon - girlhood just ripening into womanhood - and hope just verging on fruition.” (Ch 18) Lots of pathetic fallacy here!
• “The media-via, ni-jamais-ni-toujours plan - not to kill himself like a fool and not to abstain like a ninny - in a word, to enjoy himself like a rational creature.” (Ch 22)

Something I learned: A ‘clod-hopper’ was originally one who walked across a ploughed field.

May 2022; 383 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne

 I was inspired to re-read this after watching the first episode of the recent BBC adaptation which utterly changed the story. 

When I first read this book, as a kid, I loved it. Fundamentally, it is a race against time. Phileas Fogg, an English gentleman of fixed habits who is almost catatonic in his reserve, bets that he can travel around the world in eighty days and sets off with his newly hired manservant Passepartout, whose role in the novel is to provide comedy and to do stupid things which will cause delays. On the journey Mr Fogg acquires a tail, a detective called Fix (never Mr Fix!) who believes Mr Fogg is a bank-robber and follows him in the hope that he will land in an English territory where an arrest warrant might be served. During the journey, the travellers rescue a lady from the clutches of murderous savages who becomes the love interest. But the excitement is provided mainly when missed connections require the improvisation of unorthodox means of travel. 

There is also quite a lot of 'travel writing', describing the scenery and customs of foreign lands. For example:

• "Mocha, surrounded by its ruined walls whereon date-trees were growing, was sighted, and on the mountains beyond were espied vast coffee-fields. Passepartout was ravished to behold this celebrated place, and thought that, with its circular walls and dismantled fort, it looked like an immense coffee-cup and saucer." (Ch 9)

The fundamental problem to a modern reader (or a BBC scriptwriter) is that the book was written at the height of the British Empire and the indigenous peoples visited are invariably described in blatantly racist terms:

• "They first passed through the “black town,” with its narrow streets, its miserable, dirty huts, and squalid population; then through the “European town,” which presented a relief in its bright brick mansions, shaded by coconut-trees and bristling with masts, where, although it was early morning, elegantly dressed horsemen and handsome equipages were passing back and forth." (Ch 15)
• "the Indians were in the act of plunging themselves into the drunkenness caused by liquid opium mingled with hemp" (Ch 13) Later Passepartout visits an opium den.

 In addition, the only female character is essentially passive. 

When you add the fact that a large part of the excitement requires that the reader/ viewer realises that in Victorian days steamships and locomotives were cutting edge travel, it makes me wonder why they bothered to adapt this book; why not simply take the premise of a race around the world and write your own tale?

But the first episode added a shoot-out in which Passepartout's brother was trying to assassinate the French president. I suppose the BBC believe that the average viewer is unable to be gripped by the fundamentally simple tensions set up by Jules Verne. They must think that we have degenerated to now be in need of such dumbed-down entertainment.

Selected quotes:

• "Passports are only good for annoying honest folks, and aiding in the flight of rogues." (Ch 7)
• "the days were shorter by four minutes for each degree gone over, Passepartout obstinately refused to alter his watch, which he kept at London time. It was an innocent delusion which could harm no one." (Ch 11) Brilliant foreshadowing; of course the 'inaccuracy' of Passepartout's watch is the key to the twist at the end.

Unusually for Jules Verne, this isn't scifi. It was a classic in its time and it is still a good read but it reveals racist and sexist attitudes that were typical of its time but make uncomfortable reading today.

December 2021

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family" by Sheridan Le Fanu

 This delightful piece of Gothic horror was written in 1839 by a master of the genre. It includes a number of elements of the plot for Jane Eyre which was published in 1847; Milbank (2002, 151; The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories. In: J. Hogle, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, pp. 145-166) recognised the "imprisoned foreign first wife, as well as the veil and the mirror.”

It is written as a frame fiction in order to increase verisimilitude; the author who allegedly writes down the dictated story of the narrator and protagonist ("I find that I have taken the story down as she told it, in the first person, and, perhaps, this is as it should be.") even includes a couple of footnotes, a technique also used by Byron. The first section of the tale seems disjointed from the rest: it describes how the narrator's sister goes away to be married and the apparent arrival of a supernatural coach as a harbinger of the sister's death. Then we move to the marriage of the protagonist and the story proper begins. The newly married wife is allowed to roam her husband's castle anywhere except for the back part (he even refers to Bluebeard as he says this): "You must promise me, upon your sacred honour, that you will visit only that part of the castle which can be reached from the front entrance, leaving the back entrance and the part of the building commanded immediately by it, to the menials, as also the small garden whose high wall you see yonder; and never at any time seek to pry or peep into them, nor to open the door which communicates from the front part of the house through the corridor with the back". She sees mysteriously disappearing swathes of black cloth which, on old family servant tells her, are a portent of bad things a-coming: "Whenever something—something bad is going to happen to the Glenfallen family, some one that belongs to them sees a black handkerchief or curtain just waved or falling before their faces". Then she is accosted by a blind Dutchwoman who claims to be the first (and only true) wife of the husband. One night the narrator is lying in bed when the Dutchwoman comes into the room. "The mirror, as if acting of its own impulse moved slowly aside, and disclosed a dark aperture in the wall, nearly as large as an ordinary door; a figure evidently stood in this; but the light was too dim to define it accurately." The narrator is paralysed with fear as the Dutchwoman takes a cut-throat razor and goes across to the husband before returning to the narrator and attempt to cut her throat. In the ensuing scandal the Dutchwoman is tried and convicted and hanged. Subsequently the husband begins behaving strangely, claiming to have conversations with the Dutchwoman in the next room. 

Some of the more gorgeously Gothic bits:

• "nothing was to be seen but the tall trees with their long spectral shadows, now wet with the dews of midnight."
• "What has he done to alarm you? he is neither old nor ugly." I was silent, though I might have said, "He is neither young nor handsome."
• "Once, nearly twenty years ago, a friend of mine consulted me how he should deal with a daughter who had made what they call a love match, beggared herself, and disgraced her family; and I said, without hesitation, take no care of her, but cast her off;"
• "I cannot conceive anything more unreasonable or intolerable than that the fortune and the character of a family should be marred by the idle caprices of a girl."
• "Indeed I do not recollect that I was even so romantic as to overcome my aversion to rats and rheumatism, those faithful attendants upon your noble relics of feudalism; and I much prefer a snug, modern, unmysterious bed-room, with well-aired sheets, to the waving tapestry, mildewed cushions, and all the other interesting appliances of romance; however, though I cannot promise you all the discomfort generally pertaining to an old castle, you will find legends and ghostly lore enough to claim your respect"
• "The gay, kind, open-hearted nobleman who had for months followed and flattered me, was rapidly assuming the form of a gloomy, morose, and singularly selfish man."
• "I was wakened, after having slept uneasily for some hours, by some person shaking me rudely by the shoulder; a small lamp burned in my room, and by its light, to my horror and amazement, I discovered that my visitant was the self-same blind, old lady who had so terrified me a few weeks before."
• "He had a wife living, which wife I am."
• "There was something in her face, though her features had evidently been handsome, and were not, at first sight, unpleasing, which, upon a nearer inspection, seemed to indicate the habitual prevalence and indulgence of evil passions, and a power of expressing mere animal anger, with an intenseness that I have seldom seen equalled, and to which an almost unearthly effect was given by the convulsive quivering of the sightless eyes."
• "I was within the reach of this violent, and, for aught I knew, insane woman."
• "The horror and dismay, which, in the olden time, overwhelmed the woman of Endor, when her spells unexpectedly conjured the dead into her presence, were but types of what I felt."
• "As I have never taken the opinion of madmen touching your character or morals, I think it but fair to require that you will evince a like tenderness for me."
• "I heard a voice close to my face exclaim as before, "There is blood upon your ladyship's throat." The words were instantly followed by a loud burst of laughter."
• "Quaking with horror, I awakened, and heard my husband enter the room. Even this was a relief."
• "Whenever my eyes wandered to the sleeping figure of my husband, his features appeared to undergo the strangest and most demoniacal contortions."

December 2020

Le Fanu later reworked this story as The Wyvern Mystery. Written in 1869 after the best-selling success of Jane Eyre it included more Eyre-like features, such as an orphaned heroine, thus becoming an unusual example of a story which is influenced by the story that was influenced by it.

Sheridan Le Fanu was a massively popular novelist in his time and helped develop the prototype for much of the horror genre. in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers the narrator Harriet Vane considers writing a dissertation on Le Fanu but decides it will be thought too mainstream.

Le Fanu's works include

• Uncle Silas, a locked-room mystery
• Carmilla, featuring a lesbian vampire
• Spalatro, whose Italian bandit hero seems to be a dead ringer for Anne Radcliffe's The Italian except that he has a necrophiliac passion for an undead blood-drinking heroine.
• The House by the Churchyard (1863), a historical novel referenced by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God