Picked up one last YA-paranormal read: The Dark Divine, by Bree Despain. Notable mostly for the author's ability to create actual suspense, in that nothing even vaguely supernatural occurs for 100 pages, just offhand details and rumors, and the full picture doesn't come out for many chapters after that. While the revelations themselves weren't brilliant (werewolves!), and I did see the twist coming: still. There was a twist. There was some plotting going on! Good on you, Bree!
Then, the marvelous Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding, which galley I garnered with my mad bookseller skillz on behalf on my little sister, who is tying the knot in March. It's a wonderful, straightforward, sardonic how-to on having a nice wedding with niceness instead of buying into the wedding-industrial complex (my sister's phrase) that turns women into money-grubbing high-maintenance monsters on the grounds of a misguided confusion of femininity with selfishness, solely to enrich their own coffers /end rant/. My favorite quote, on the list of why everyone's miserable at the now-traditional production-number wedding: "The groomsmen [are crying] because they've had too much beer all week. (The bridesmaids have had just as much, but they hold it better.)"
And in celebration of my fast-approaching half-cross-country move, I'm finally reading the 40s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
30 September 2009
20 September 2009
YA weekend!
Good Lord, I love these.
Up til 1:30 last night reading Melissa de la Cruz's Blue Bloods, the first in the series of the same name. It's set in the ranks of old-money Manhattan: the twist, though, is that the spoiled rich kids that populate this glitzy milieu aren't descendants of folks who came over on the Mayflower--no, they came over on the Mayflower, because they're all vampires. The writing's not great--the story relies heavily on info-dumpish "now you can know the truth" conversation--but the re-mythologizing is top-notch. De la Cruz blends in the fall of Lucifer, Caligula, and the lost colony of Roanoke with the vampires' history, and locates their immortality not in their bodies as a whole, but in the blood itself. It's the blood that lives forever, and passes from host to host along with their memories, so that they experience many lives, but not always as the same people. No mere "hey-they-sparkle!" varnish: this is real imagination, and it shines through the slipshod plotting.
Today I've started The Devil's Kiss by Sarwat Chadda, about the youngest and only female member of the Templars, half-Pakistani Billi SanGreal, plunged at fifteen into the Order's never-ending battle against the forces of darkness. The opening scene is straight-up Buffy-style, with the hate-and-black-ichor-filled spirit of a murdered little boy on a creaky swing in the middle of a deserted playground. Awesome sauce!
Why don't they write books for grown-ups like this? Or rather--because they certainly do (Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series springs to mind)--why are such books relegated to the Genre Fiction ghetto, and not allowed to coexist with (often dour, self-righteous, or o'er-consciously-literary) Serious Literature?
Up til 1:30 last night reading Melissa de la Cruz's Blue Bloods, the first in the series of the same name. It's set in the ranks of old-money Manhattan: the twist, though, is that the spoiled rich kids that populate this glitzy milieu aren't descendants of folks who came over on the Mayflower--no, they came over on the Mayflower, because they're all vampires. The writing's not great--the story relies heavily on info-dumpish "now you can know the truth" conversation--but the re-mythologizing is top-notch. De la Cruz blends in the fall of Lucifer, Caligula, and the lost colony of Roanoke with the vampires' history, and locates their immortality not in their bodies as a whole, but in the blood itself. It's the blood that lives forever, and passes from host to host along with their memories, so that they experience many lives, but not always as the same people. No mere "hey-they-sparkle!" varnish: this is real imagination, and it shines through the slipshod plotting.
Today I've started The Devil's Kiss by Sarwat Chadda, about the youngest and only female member of the Templars, half-Pakistani Billi SanGreal, plunged at fifteen into the Order's never-ending battle against the forces of darkness. The opening scene is straight-up Buffy-style, with the hate-and-black-ichor-filled spirit of a murdered little boy on a creaky swing in the middle of a deserted playground. Awesome sauce!
Why don't they write books for grown-ups like this? Or rather--because they certainly do (Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series springs to mind)--why are such books relegated to the Genre Fiction ghetto, and not allowed to coexist with (often dour, self-righteous, or o'er-consciously-literary) Serious Literature?
16 September 2009
Children's books.
Three recent reads that dovetail together nicely:
The Book of Dragons, E. Nesbit: Nesbit wrote some of the greatest children's fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I say this boldly, but I must confess I had only read Five Children & It, long ago, my curiosity piqued by references in Edward Eager's wonderful, wonderful Half Magic (or maybe Seven Day Magic? One of Edward Eager's wonderful, wonderful, mid-century reads, which I wore to shreds as a little one). This collection of dragon-centered tales sums up her style, though: ordinary children matter-of-factedly experiencing the incredible.
The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt: While I was reading this, I didn't want to be doing anything else. Not working, not eating, not sleeping. I just wanted to read my book. It's a family saga, essentially, but also a brief history of England from 1895 to the end of the Great War, with special emphasis on radical politics (Fabians, Russian anarchists, brick-throwing suffragettes) and art. A main character, Olive Wellwood, is clearly a fictionalization of E. Nesbit herself, down to the socialism and the open marriage. It's probably the best book I've read this year, and Byatt makes it look effortless. Towards the end, she even tries her hand at some Great War poetry, and darned if she doesn't have Sassoon and Owens and Graves nailed.
The Magician's Elephant, Kate DiCamillo: I'm reading this now, and it feels like it was recently discovered in an attic in London, in spidery brown ink on yellowing parchment. Like Nesbit, or at least Olive Wellwood, or, definitely, Kate DiCamillo, who understands the rhythms of fairytale like almost no one--except children--does anymore.
The Book of Dragons, E. Nesbit: Nesbit wrote some of the greatest children's fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I say this boldly, but I must confess I had only read Five Children & It, long ago, my curiosity piqued by references in Edward Eager's wonderful, wonderful Half Magic (or maybe Seven Day Magic? One of Edward Eager's wonderful, wonderful, mid-century reads, which I wore to shreds as a little one). This collection of dragon-centered tales sums up her style, though: ordinary children matter-of-factedly experiencing the incredible.
The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt: While I was reading this, I didn't want to be doing anything else. Not working, not eating, not sleeping. I just wanted to read my book. It's a family saga, essentially, but also a brief history of England from 1895 to the end of the Great War, with special emphasis on radical politics (Fabians, Russian anarchists, brick-throwing suffragettes) and art. A main character, Olive Wellwood, is clearly a fictionalization of E. Nesbit herself, down to the socialism and the open marriage. It's probably the best book I've read this year, and Byatt makes it look effortless. Towards the end, she even tries her hand at some Great War poetry, and darned if she doesn't have Sassoon and Owens and Graves nailed.
The Magician's Elephant, Kate DiCamillo: I'm reading this now, and it feels like it was recently discovered in an attic in London, in spidery brown ink on yellowing parchment. Like Nesbit, or at least Olive Wellwood, or, definitely, Kate DiCamillo, who understands the rhythms of fairytale like almost no one--except children--does anymore.
Less-than-magical.
So Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which I read, yeesh, a month ago already, was pitched to me as "Harry Potter goes to college," to which I said, and I quote, "Oooo! Neat!" And it's got a beautiful cover. Don't laugh; the marketers know their shit these days, and similarity in jacket palettes can often reflect similarity in tone and style. But The Magicians let me down on both counts.
It's not a bad book, really--I mean, I read the whole thing--but underwhelming. It's really half Harry Potter, as the hero, Quentin Coldwater, is lifted from his everyday Brooklyn existence to matriculate at the exclusive Brakebills Academy for Magical Pedagogy, and half Narnia: Quentin and his aimless twentysomething fellow graduates discover by chance that Fillory, a fantasy kingdom detailed in a series of English children's books they'd all read and absorbed as children, is real. There are some great scenes in here (I think first of the slightly drunk talking bear they meet in Fillory, who drones on for hours about the relative merits of different bee species), and the central dilemma--what if everything you've ever dreamed of is real, and you're still miserable?--is harrowing, especially to a fellow fantasy-devourer like me. But the writing is sub-par, heavy on exposition and telling-not-showing, especially in the school sections. Instead of, "Wow, what an ambitious adult take on Harry Potter," I kept thinking, "I wish I was reading Harry Potter."
Lesson learned: you can't always judge a book by its cover. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, though? Totally accurate.
It's not a bad book, really--I mean, I read the whole thing--but underwhelming. It's really half Harry Potter, as the hero, Quentin Coldwater, is lifted from his everyday Brooklyn existence to matriculate at the exclusive Brakebills Academy for Magical Pedagogy, and half Narnia: Quentin and his aimless twentysomething fellow graduates discover by chance that Fillory, a fantasy kingdom detailed in a series of English children's books they'd all read and absorbed as children, is real. There are some great scenes in here (I think first of the slightly drunk talking bear they meet in Fillory, who drones on for hours about the relative merits of different bee species), and the central dilemma--what if everything you've ever dreamed of is real, and you're still miserable?--is harrowing, especially to a fellow fantasy-devourer like me. But the writing is sub-par, heavy on exposition and telling-not-showing, especially in the school sections. Instead of, "Wow, what an ambitious adult take on Harry Potter," I kept thinking, "I wish I was reading Harry Potter."
Lesson learned: you can't always judge a book by its cover. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, though? Totally accurate.
Reviews: Stitches, Sense, Sensibility, & Sea Monsters.
Stitches: A Memoir by David SmallMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
In general, I’m not big on unhappy-childhood memoirs. Despite Tolstoy’s dictum, the genre is awfully repetitive, and often of dubious literary merit. Having had alcoholic parents or a drug problem or a Hardscrabble Existence Full of Simple Joys Not Like These Kids Today With Their Texting and Whatnot—it makes you deserving of sympathy, sure, but it doesn’t make you a *writer*. And the market is certainly glutted. It is probably a good thing, then, that I didn’t bother to read the blurbs on the back of David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches (which include the word “redemptive,” ick). Because it’s about an unhappy childhood, and it’s great.
The central trauma of Small’s young life was an operation at fourteen that he thought was simply to remove a cyst on his neck; he awoke missing a vocal cord, with a lurid incision stretching up his throat, “slashed and laced back up like a bloody boot.” He has to relearn speech. He is not supposed to learn, but does, that he had thyroid cancer, brought on by his radiologist father’s overzealous use of X-rays in an attempt to cure his sinus problems. His mother is cold, his father distant and preoccupied, his grandmother actively insane. It’s a harrowing tale, buoyed up by a formidable artistic talent.
Small is best known as a children’s book illustrator (he’s got a couple of lively sketches up in Watermark’s basement autograph gallery, in fact), a Caldecott winner in 2001 for Judith St. George’s So You Want to Be President?. His drawing style reminds me of Jules Feiffer’s illustrations in The Phantom Tollbooth, loose-jointed, often suggestive instead of precise, by turns whimsical and haunting. Stitches is entirely black and white, and here my vocabulary falters: I am not sure what to call the shading technique he uses. It looks like watercolor, but all in greys, a paintbox of ashes and thunderheads, punctuated with inky slashes. Just the two pages where we see his basted wound for the first time are a textbook in murk and exactitude, the variegated non-colors of blood and bruise receding from the bleached sutures, an unnatural imprint of disease and deception.
Graphic works require new skills: how do you read pictures? How long do you look at a page with no text before turning it? Memoir, too, provokes questions: is the story better somehow because true?
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When Quirk Classics’ first literary mash-up, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, came out earlier this year, we Austen-obsessed Watermarkers kept it displayed close at hand, for the sheer delight of watching customers’ reactions to its cover, which features a well-coiffed Regency lass missing several important parts of her face. As one might gather, comments fell into two camps: the “That is the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen!” variety, and, like my own, “That may be the single greatest idea anyone has ever had!” (Take that, penicillin and the wheel!) It seems the general populace leaned towards the latter, because P&P&Z has been hanging out on the New York Times bestseller list for months now. Last I heard, the movie rights were in hot contention. May I suggest, Hollywood, that no one could pull off Mr.-Darcy-as-action-hero better than Clive Owen?
Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters mines the same vein, with gleeful results. You see, some time before the action takes place, a horrible change took place in the oceans of the world; known as the Alteration, this mysterious event turned all the creatures of the sea into vicious monsters, bent on destroying mankind. Needless to say, this left England, being mostly coast, rather susceptible to attack by sea serpents, gargantuan jellyfish, razor-toothed crawfish, and the like. It’s a downright Lovecraftian premise, crossed with a little H. Rider Haggard (in a subplot about young Margaret Dashwood’s glimpses of an alien geyser-worshipping civilization on the secluded island where Barton Cottage stands).
And where is Austen in all this? Well, Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters has, despite appearances, the same basic plot as its more respectable namesake, and in fact, many of the same words. What’s brilliant about these two Austen-horror hybrids is actually their fidelity to the originals—I think most of the humor would be lost on someone who hadn’t read the non-zombified-and-sea-monstered versions. For instance, in the parody, poor Colonel Brandon is not only old (at 35) and less than dashing: he’s been cursed by a sea witch, and the bottom half of his face is covered with tentacles. Thus, in the early conversation between Willoughby and Marianne over their shared dislike of him, Austen’s words get oh-so-subtly spun: “‘Brandon is just the kind of man,’ said Willoughby, ‘whom everybody speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and everybody is sort of mildly afraid to look at him directly.’”
I can, of course, understand why Austen purists object. Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, and its predecessor, are thoroughly silly exercises in subversion. Me, I think they’re hilarious. As for what Quirk Classics should tackle next, I’m torn: Northanger Abbey is begging for a vampire or two, but giant robots would liven up Mansfield Park considerably, wouldn’t they?
03 September 2009
The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend by Jeff LeenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have an image-destroying confession to make: I enjoy watching pro wrestling. Not enough to seek it out while channel-surfing, really, and my TV companions would never let me dwell on it, anyway—but man, is it ever a fascinating, brutal form of theater, telling Homeric and Shakespearean tales of rivalry, revenge, treachery, and heroism! And there is an epic, animal grace to the competition, like a nature documentary where rutting elk lock antlers, bellowing. Also, people get hit with folding chairs.
There were no folding chairs in the mix, however, when Millie Burke, the greatest female wrestler of the Thirties and Forties, was grappling. That’s right, there were female wrestlers in the Thirties and Forties! Enough of them for there to be “a greatest!” It was a surprise to me, too. But unlike the sport she helped invent and made famous, Millie Burke was quite real: a five-foot-two Kansas girl (born in Coffeyville, like my grandmother), who escaped Depression-era waitressing to “rassle,” and, with the P.R. savvy of her otherwise despicable husband, Diamond Billy Wolfe, built a media empire.
Burke’s tawdry, complicated, brawny story is ably handled by Jeff Leen, a managing editor for the Washington Post. He follows her rise from sideshow attraction, wrestling all comers (mostly men—her agility and lower body strength prevailed), to arena bouts before thousands of cheering fans (60% of them women), clad in her signature white costumes, rhinestone-covered capes, and full makeup, to her final championship match, where she and June Byers (one of Wolfe’s many lovers) set aside the playacting and fought for real. The match was called after an hour, because it turns out real wrestling is pretty boring to watch. The Golden Age of women’s wrestling, which Burke presided over, has faded into obscurity; but Millie’s rediscovered glory is the tale of a woman strong before her time.
16 August 2009
Lecture time!
As promised/threatened: my sprawling, messy lecture notes for my Austenland lecture last Wednesday. I talked for an hour, and told the story about my dad crying at the end of the recent BBC version of Persuasion, and got to wear a wireless mike, just like a celebrity on a late-night talk show.
Lady Susan (written around 1794; first published 1871)
The correspondents:
Other characters:
A novel told as a series of documents, usually letters, although diary/journal entries, newspaper or magazine clippings, or (recently) audio, radio, TV or film transcripts, blog entries, emails or even instant messages (Lauren Myracle’s teen novels ttyl & ttfn) have been used.
Early examples (which Austen would likely have read):
The Watsons (1805)
Austen’s Female Literary Influences
Modern audiences more or less consider Jane Austen to be the first woman novelist in English. Nothing could be further than the truth: though the literary form was only two centuries old (arguably—I’m dating from Cervantes’ Don Quixote [1605], but the ink spilled by comparative lit scholars on the subject could float an armada), women had been formidable forces in the genre since its inception. (A great, if academic, study of women’s contributions to the early novel is Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen [1988].)
Here are a few:
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman & His Sister (1684), Oroonoko (1688)
Behn was perhaps the first Englishwoman to earn her living as a professional writer; because of this, and her reputed bisexuality, she’s something of a celebrity to feminist scholars (as she was to Virginia Woolf, who eulogized her in A Room of One’s Own, a work which also applauded Jane Austen). Mostly known at the time as a dramatist, she also served as a spy for Charles II during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Her novel Oroonoko chronicles the romance of an enslaved African in the English sugar colony of Suriname in South America.
Charlotte Lennox (1729-1804)
The Female Quixote (1752)
Poet, actress, and literary scenestress, a friend of Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson. Like many independent women of her time, she was separated from her husband. Though her novels were widely popular when published, she died penniless.
The Female Quixote is a great read (and, at 400 pages, quite short for the 18th century) and a direct progenitress of Northanger Abbey. As the title implies, it’s an inversion of Cervantes’ work; the contemporary heroine, Arabella, has steeped herself so far in the melodrama of chivalric romance that she models her life after their women characters, expecting her suitors to undergo horrific ordeals to win her favor, and perish by their own hand at her rejection. Reality crashes down on her with some force.
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), The Old Manor House (1793)
Miserably married to a unfaithful, violent, and profligate man, Smith turned to writing as a career—the proceeds from her first book of poetry got him out of debtor’s prison in 1783. She later left him and started writing novels instead, as they were more profitable than poetry (hey, even back then!), and she had ten children to suppport. Needless to say, her experiences led to strong feminist themes in her writing, and even radical politics—later novels took stands against slavery and supported the ideals of the French Revolution. Aesthetically, she blended sentimental plot with an artist’s eye for landscape and setting; she is credited as an early influence on Gothic literature and Romanticism.
Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840)
Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796)
Like Austen, she wrote about strong-willed, flawed, middle-class female protagonists negotiating the stressful realm of romance and marriage, and satirized contemporary manners and social hypocrisy. While her first novel was published anonymously (her father, in fact, read several reviews of Evelina before he learned it was written by his daughter), her cover was eventually blown; but instead of causing a scandal, her authorship brought her national fame. Her widespread success under her own name helped legitimize writing as a career for women. She married a French exile, General Alexandre d’Arblay, when she was 42. Her diaries, published after her death, were started at 16 and span 72 years.
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849)
Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801)
The proudly Irish Edgeworth never married, and her writing career was closely shepherded by her overbearing father, who insisted on approving and editing her work. Her first novel, Castle Rackrent, was submitted for publication without his knowledge, and hence escaped his improving pen—it’s the story of four generations of bungling, dissolute Anglo-Irish landlords told through the bemused voice of their steward, Thady Quirk.
Northanger Abbey and the Novel
“Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has be so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.” (Northanger p.22, Bantam Classics edition)
Northanger Abbey is a novel about novels in general, gothic novels in particular, and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho in even more particular. Both the narrator and the sensible Henry Tilney poke fun at the over-the-top conventions of popular fiction, and Catherine’s inability to distinguish between imagination and reality gets her into trouble. But Austen is not anti-novel (or even anti-Radcliffe); rather, she calls them the works “in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” (p.23). Even her hero, Henry, reads and loves novels, though Catherine assumes “‘they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books’” (p.85); then, as now, women read more novels than men, a likely reason for the disparagement of the genre. (A 2007 Gallup poll confirmed that women read more books in every major literary category except for history and biography. One can’t help but wonder what Austen, who through Catherine typifies history as dull—“the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all” [p.87], would think of this.)
Novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey
p. 23: Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, Fanny Burney (1782): The eponymous orphaned heiress will inherit a vast fortune, but only if her future husband adopts her last name. Unable to find a gentleman who’ll do so, she relinquishes her wealth and marries for love. Pride & Prejudice takes its title from this quote from the end of the novel: “[R]emember: if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination.” Also alluded to by Anne Elliot in Persuasion.
p. 23: Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, Fanny Burney (1796): Thorpe describes it as “‘the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin.’ . . . [T]he justness of [this critique] was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine" (p.33).
p. 23: Belinda, Maria Edgeworth (1801): In the first two editions, this novel featured not one but two interracial couples: an English farm-girl marries an African servant, and the titular heroine nearly weds a wealthy West Indian Creole. The third edition, published in 1810, excised both these relationships; Edgeworth’s editor father was likely responsible. Austen would have added this mention in revision, as the novel hadn’t yet been published when Northanger was first written (under the name Susan).
p.24: Isabella’s list of “horrid novels”: For years scholars assumed these titles were the products of Austen’s imagination, but they are all real works of disposable popular fiction already deservedly obscure by the time Northanger saw print. Rife with incest, ghosts, and ruined castles, these novels were indeed shocking reading for well-bred young ladies! Several have been reprinted by Valancourt Books, or can be found in etext form online:
p. 26: Sir Charles Grandison, Samuel Richardson (1754): Austen’s hands-down favorite novel, told (like Lady Susan) in epistolary form. The saintly hero & heroine’s exceedingly drawn-out path to the altar (seven volumes & 80,000 words!) were buoyed along by their far more interesting family and friends. Charlotte, a sister of the title character, seems quite familiar, in fact: “Here was an outspoken young woman, very often wrong in her judgements and behaviour, yet always captivating, brilliantly lively and wholly human, whether speaking for herself or presented through the eyes of others. with her sisterly love and loyalty, her teasing, her articulacy, her repartee, her ‘archness rising to the eye that makes one both love and fear her,’ Charlotte Grandison was surely an early inspiration for Elizabeth Bennet” (Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, p.74).
p. 32: John Thorpe’s “tolerably decent” novels Tom Jones, Henry Fielding (1749) and The Monk, Matthew Lewis (1796): The former is a founding work of realistic fiction (made into an Oscar-winning movie with Albert Finney in 1963. You probably remember the dinner scene.), while the latter is high Gothic, the tale of a corrupted monk who dabbles in black magic, rapes and kills a woman who turns out to be his sister, and eventually sells his soul to the devil. Radically different books, but both scandalous and extremely sexual; together, they don’t speak well of Thorpe’s moral fiber.
Ann Radcliffe and The Mysteries of Udolpho
“Have you gone on with Udolpho?”
“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I have got to the black veil.”
—Northanger Abbey, p.24
[Emily] paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall—perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture, and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor.
—The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 249 (Oxford World’s Classics edition)
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was probably the most celebrated English writer of the 1790s, and a must for anyone with pretensions to being well-read for at least fifty years thereafter. All of her novels were bestsellers; The Mysteries of Udolpho, her 1794 masterpiece, was sold for the astonishing sum of £500 (Pride & Prejudice, in contrast, was sold for £110). Unlike a lot of modern blockbuster authors, however, she was also a critical darling, called “the Shakespeare of romance writers” and “the Great Enchantress”; even those who admitted her characters could be bland and same-y (at least the good guys) praised her scene-setting, her lush description of the natural world, her sense of the sublime, and her intricate plotting and ability to inspire terror in her readers.
Her biography is brief and pedestrian—hers truly was, as Henry Austen said of his sister’s, not “a life of events.” She was middle-class, seems to have been happily married—her husband certainly supported her writing—and never comfortable with her fame. She didn’t mingle in literary society, preferring a private, quiet lifestyle. The only strange incident is the abrupt end of her career: after publishing five novels in eight years (The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 1789; A Sicilian Romance, 1790; The Romance of the Forest, 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho; and The Italian, 1797), she simply stopped writing at the height of her fame. (A sixth novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was published by her husband after her death.)
She didn’t invent the Gothic novel; that distinction is usually attributed to Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) established many conventions of the genre—the exotic-to-the-English location in Italy (France would also be popular); the setting somewhere in a vaguely medieval past; the aristocratic family with a dark and terrible secret; a crumbling, mysterious edifice full of secret passages, unexplained noises, and dark corridors. What Radcliffe did was make the genre respectable. Where Otranto was full of paranormal and magical events—beginning with the castle’s heir being crushed to death on his wedding day by a giant helmet that falls out of the sky—Radcliffe pioneered the “explained supernatural,” in which seemingly ghostly happenings (spectral figures, haunting music) are eventually revealed as ordinary—if backstory-and-coincidence-dependent—human actions.
She also cleverly blended Gothic trappings with the “novel of sensibility,” which featured a sweet, well-behaved, usually orphaned heroine and her ordeals at the hands of cruel, tyrannical father figures, on her way to happily ever after with her similarly proper but persecuted love interest. (In terms of genre shifts, it’s similar, actually, to Stephenie Meyer’s commercialization of the vampire myth, achieved partly by excising the traditional eroticism connected with bloodsucking in favor of a chaste romance that echoes Radcliffe’s wholesome values. Edward and Bella are really not that far from Udolpho’s Emily and Valancourt.)
But while her ostensible protagonists may be one-dimensionally virtuous, her villains are fantastic: bloodthirsty, avaricious, manipulative, ruthless, completely amoral. Her landscapes are gorgeous and painterly, mountains and fields and forests lovingly lingered upon. And her plots are jaw-droppingly complex, fast-moving and packed full of shocking plot twists that would make M. Night Shyamalan hang his head in shame. She’s worth reading, is what I’m saying.
And Jane Austen would agree. Northanger Abbey laughs at the more exaggerated aspects of her Radcliffe’s fiction, especially in contrast to mundane middle-class English life:
“But you must be aware” [said Henry Tilney] “that when a young lady is introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy, the ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before.” (p.128)
And poor Catherine Morland’s Radcliffe-assisted imagination leads her to assume General Tilney (who has “the air and attitude of a Montoni,” Udolpho’s remorseless bad guy) must have hated his wife, and probably either killed her or imprisoned her, of which scandalous notion Henry disabuses her in astonished anger:
“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult you own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?” (p.163)
But it’s Catherine’s suggestible nature that’s mostly to blame. And is she so wrong after all? General Tilney’s not the sort of man to murder his wife, no; but he is the sort who would peremptorily send away his daughter’s good friend and his son’s sweetheart, early in the morning, all alone, with no money, for the sin of not being an heiress. He’s a proud and unyielding man, whose children are scared of him, who sucks all the fun out of the room. He may not be an out-and-out villain, but he’s not a pleasant chap.
And that, I think, is where Austen’s respect and admiration for Ann Radcliffe figures in. Sure, she doesn’t write realistic fiction. But she’s not trying to. She’s trying to entertain, and there she succeeds; further, while the events are overblown, there’s a central truth about emotional experience that is very real. Radcliffe captures intensity of feeling; she truly, as Austen says, conveys “the most thorough knowledge of human nature” (p.23).
As for what’s behind the black veil, I am totally not telling you.
Lady Susan (written around 1794; first published 1871)
The correspondents:
- Lady Susan Vernon (our antiheroine)
- Mr Vernon (Charles): her amiable-if-not-the-sharpest brother-in-law; resides at Churchill
- Mrs Johnson (Alicia): her equally scheming best friend; resides in Edwards St, London
- Mrs Vernon (Catherine, née De Courcy): Charles’ not-taken-in wife
- Lady De Courcy: Catherine’s mother; resides at Parklands
- Mr De Courcy (Reginald): Catherine’s dashing, impressionable younger brother
- Sir Reginald De Courcy: Catherine & Reginald’s sickly father
- Miss Vernon (Frederica): Lady Susan’s timid, ill-educated daughter
Other characters:
- Mr Manwaring: Lady Susan’s married lover; resides at Langford
- Mrs Manwaring: his jealous-with-reason wife, formerly Mr Johnson’s ward
- Miss Manwaring: their (presumably plain) daughter
- Sir James Martin: Miss Manwaring’s erstwhile suitor, waylaid by Lady Susan for Frederica; eventually Lady Susan’s second husband
- Mr Johnson: Alicia’s gouty husband, not a fan of Lady Susan, who refers to him as “just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout—too old to be agreeable, and too young to die.” HA!
A novel told as a series of documents, usually letters, although diary/journal entries, newspaper or magazine clippings, or (recently) audio, radio, TV or film transcripts, blog entries, emails or even instant messages (Lauren Myracle’s teen novels ttyl & ttfn) have been used.
Early examples (which Austen would likely have read):
- Pamela and Clarissa, Samuel Richardson (1740, 1749)
- Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Cholderos de Laclos (1782)
- The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
- Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
- The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1982)
- Griffin & Sabine, Nick Bantock (1991)
- The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008 Man Booker Prize winner)
- The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (2008)
The Watsons (1805)
- Unfinished novel of five chapters (about 18,000 words).
- Emma Watson, having been raised by a wealthy aunt, is forced by her relation’s imprudent second marriage to move back home. She is awkwardly courted by a lord, but prefers his former tutor, Mr. Howard.
- The story bears similarities to Pride & Prejudice (Emma is embarrassed by her family’s vulgarity and her sisters’ husband-hunting) and Mansfield Park (a girl raised by relatives more genteel than her immediate family).
- Worth reading for a charming ball scene: 10-year-old Charles Blake has been promised the first two dances by Miss Osborne, the daughter of the local Great Family. When Miss Osborne cavalierly abandons the boy for a dashing colonel, Emma, without pausing to think, offers herself as a partner to the crestfallen boy. It’s a lovely bit of characterization-by-action, and the delight of the child staying up till all hours to dance like the grown-ups is heartwarming.
- Austen likely abandoned the novel after her father’s death in January 1805; Mr. Watson is seriously ill in the preserved draft, and Jane confided in Cassandra that he was to die in the ensuing chapters.
- Eleven chapters; Austen was working on it during her final illness.
- While there are various marriageable young characters to provide romantic intrigue (the ostensible heroine seems to be Charlotte Parker, daughter of a large and isolated country family who goes to visit the burgeoning beach resort of the title), the most interesting elements of the story come from social satire.
- Unlike Persuasion, probably the most restrained of her novels, Sanditon contains broad caricatures: a trio of hypochondriac siblings, fond of leeches and tonics; a young peer who’s read too many Gothic novels and fancies himself a dangerous seducer—his conversation is peppered with the buzzwords of the time (prefixes like anti- and pseudo- were super-hip); his mother, Lady Denham, who exemplifies the mixture of haughtiness and parsimony that we often find in Austen’s aristocrats.
- Austen’s other novels all take place in established locales, but Sanditon is in the process of developing from a sleepy seaside village to a fashionable resort in the manner of Bath—at least in the mind of Mr. Parker, the town’s most zealous promoter. In reality, few of the lodgings are let, and the library’s subscription list is sadly missing names of rank or fortune.
- Mansfield Park comes down firmly on the side of the staid status quo, but Sanditon is much more uneasy in its appraisal of the progressive consumer culture that was to define 19th-century England. The tone with which Austen details Sanditon’s improvements—blue shoes in the shop windows! fashionable ladies with harps and telescopes and sketchbooks! the library/convenience store, which sells “all the useless things in the world that could not be done without”—is certainly mocking. But the coastal setting is lovely, Mr. Parker’s enthusiasm in his hometown is sweet, and Charlotte, the representative of the “old ways,” is even less likeable than Fanny Price. It’s maddening that Austen’s death prevented the novel’s completion, because one has no idea where it’s going!
Austen’s Female Literary Influences
Modern audiences more or less consider Jane Austen to be the first woman novelist in English. Nothing could be further than the truth: though the literary form was only two centuries old (arguably—I’m dating from Cervantes’ Don Quixote [1605], but the ink spilled by comparative lit scholars on the subject could float an armada), women had been formidable forces in the genre since its inception. (A great, if academic, study of women’s contributions to the early novel is Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen [1988].)
Here are a few:
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman & His Sister (1684), Oroonoko (1688)
Behn was perhaps the first Englishwoman to earn her living as a professional writer; because of this, and her reputed bisexuality, she’s something of a celebrity to feminist scholars (as she was to Virginia Woolf, who eulogized her in A Room of One’s Own, a work which also applauded Jane Austen). Mostly known at the time as a dramatist, she also served as a spy for Charles II during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Her novel Oroonoko chronicles the romance of an enslaved African in the English sugar colony of Suriname in South America.
Charlotte Lennox (1729-1804)
The Female Quixote (1752)
Poet, actress, and literary scenestress, a friend of Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson. Like many independent women of her time, she was separated from her husband. Though her novels were widely popular when published, she died penniless.
The Female Quixote is a great read (and, at 400 pages, quite short for the 18th century) and a direct progenitress of Northanger Abbey. As the title implies, it’s an inversion of Cervantes’ work; the contemporary heroine, Arabella, has steeped herself so far in the melodrama of chivalric romance that she models her life after their women characters, expecting her suitors to undergo horrific ordeals to win her favor, and perish by their own hand at her rejection. Reality crashes down on her with some force.
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), The Old Manor House (1793)
Miserably married to a unfaithful, violent, and profligate man, Smith turned to writing as a career—the proceeds from her first book of poetry got him out of debtor’s prison in 1783. She later left him and started writing novels instead, as they were more profitable than poetry (hey, even back then!), and she had ten children to suppport. Needless to say, her experiences led to strong feminist themes in her writing, and even radical politics—later novels took stands against slavery and supported the ideals of the French Revolution. Aesthetically, she blended sentimental plot with an artist’s eye for landscape and setting; she is credited as an early influence on Gothic literature and Romanticism.
Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840)
Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796)
Like Austen, she wrote about strong-willed, flawed, middle-class female protagonists negotiating the stressful realm of romance and marriage, and satirized contemporary manners and social hypocrisy. While her first novel was published anonymously (her father, in fact, read several reviews of Evelina before he learned it was written by his daughter), her cover was eventually blown; but instead of causing a scandal, her authorship brought her national fame. Her widespread success under her own name helped legitimize writing as a career for women. She married a French exile, General Alexandre d’Arblay, when she was 42. Her diaries, published after her death, were started at 16 and span 72 years.
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849)
Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801)
The proudly Irish Edgeworth never married, and her writing career was closely shepherded by her overbearing father, who insisted on approving and editing her work. Her first novel, Castle Rackrent, was submitted for publication without his knowledge, and hence escaped his improving pen—it’s the story of four generations of bungling, dissolute Anglo-Irish landlords told through the bemused voice of their steward, Thady Quirk.
Northanger Abbey and the Novel
“Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has be so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.” (Northanger p.22, Bantam Classics edition)
Northanger Abbey is a novel about novels in general, gothic novels in particular, and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho in even more particular. Both the narrator and the sensible Henry Tilney poke fun at the over-the-top conventions of popular fiction, and Catherine’s inability to distinguish between imagination and reality gets her into trouble. But Austen is not anti-novel (or even anti-Radcliffe); rather, she calls them the works “in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” (p.23). Even her hero, Henry, reads and loves novels, though Catherine assumes “‘they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books’” (p.85); then, as now, women read more novels than men, a likely reason for the disparagement of the genre. (A 2007 Gallup poll confirmed that women read more books in every major literary category except for history and biography. One can’t help but wonder what Austen, who through Catherine typifies history as dull—“the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all” [p.87], would think of this.)
Novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey
p. 23: Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, Fanny Burney (1782): The eponymous orphaned heiress will inherit a vast fortune, but only if her future husband adopts her last name. Unable to find a gentleman who’ll do so, she relinquishes her wealth and marries for love. Pride & Prejudice takes its title from this quote from the end of the novel: “[R]emember: if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination.” Also alluded to by Anne Elliot in Persuasion.
p. 23: Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, Fanny Burney (1796): Thorpe describes it as “‘the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin.’ . . . [T]he justness of [this critique] was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine" (p.33).
p. 23: Belinda, Maria Edgeworth (1801): In the first two editions, this novel featured not one but two interracial couples: an English farm-girl marries an African servant, and the titular heroine nearly weds a wealthy West Indian Creole. The third edition, published in 1810, excised both these relationships; Edgeworth’s editor father was likely responsible. Austen would have added this mention in revision, as the novel hadn’t yet been published when Northanger was first written (under the name Susan).
p.24: Isabella’s list of “horrid novels”: For years scholars assumed these titles were the products of Austen’s imagination, but they are all real works of disposable popular fiction already deservedly obscure by the time Northanger saw print. Rife with incest, ghosts, and ruined castles, these novels were indeed shocking reading for well-bred young ladies! Several have been reprinted by Valancourt Books, or can be found in etext form online:
- The Castle of Wolfenbach, Eliza Parsons (1793)
- Clermont, Regina Maria Roche (1798)
- Mysterious Warnings, Eliza Parsons (1796)
- Necromancer of the Black Forest, Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1794)
- The Midnight Bell, Francis Lathom (1798)
- The Orphan of the Rhine, Eleanor Sleath (1798)
- Horrid Mysteries, Karl Grosse (1796)
p. 26: Sir Charles Grandison, Samuel Richardson (1754): Austen’s hands-down favorite novel, told (like Lady Susan) in epistolary form. The saintly hero & heroine’s exceedingly drawn-out path to the altar (seven volumes & 80,000 words!) were buoyed along by their far more interesting family and friends. Charlotte, a sister of the title character, seems quite familiar, in fact: “Here was an outspoken young woman, very often wrong in her judgements and behaviour, yet always captivating, brilliantly lively and wholly human, whether speaking for herself or presented through the eyes of others. with her sisterly love and loyalty, her teasing, her articulacy, her repartee, her ‘archness rising to the eye that makes one both love and fear her,’ Charlotte Grandison was surely an early inspiration for Elizabeth Bennet” (Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, p.74).
p. 32: John Thorpe’s “tolerably decent” novels Tom Jones, Henry Fielding (1749) and The Monk, Matthew Lewis (1796): The former is a founding work of realistic fiction (made into an Oscar-winning movie with Albert Finney in 1963. You probably remember the dinner scene.), while the latter is high Gothic, the tale of a corrupted monk who dabbles in black magic, rapes and kills a woman who turns out to be his sister, and eventually sells his soul to the devil. Radically different books, but both scandalous and extremely sexual; together, they don’t speak well of Thorpe’s moral fiber.
Ann Radcliffe and The Mysteries of Udolpho
“Have you gone on with Udolpho?”
“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I have got to the black veil.”
—Northanger Abbey, p.24
[Emily] paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall—perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture, and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor.
—The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 249 (Oxford World’s Classics edition)
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was probably the most celebrated English writer of the 1790s, and a must for anyone with pretensions to being well-read for at least fifty years thereafter. All of her novels were bestsellers; The Mysteries of Udolpho, her 1794 masterpiece, was sold for the astonishing sum of £500 (Pride & Prejudice, in contrast, was sold for £110). Unlike a lot of modern blockbuster authors, however, she was also a critical darling, called “the Shakespeare of romance writers” and “the Great Enchantress”; even those who admitted her characters could be bland and same-y (at least the good guys) praised her scene-setting, her lush description of the natural world, her sense of the sublime, and her intricate plotting and ability to inspire terror in her readers.
Her biography is brief and pedestrian—hers truly was, as Henry Austen said of his sister’s, not “a life of events.” She was middle-class, seems to have been happily married—her husband certainly supported her writing—and never comfortable with her fame. She didn’t mingle in literary society, preferring a private, quiet lifestyle. The only strange incident is the abrupt end of her career: after publishing five novels in eight years (The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 1789; A Sicilian Romance, 1790; The Romance of the Forest, 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho; and The Italian, 1797), she simply stopped writing at the height of her fame. (A sixth novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was published by her husband after her death.)
She didn’t invent the Gothic novel; that distinction is usually attributed to Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) established many conventions of the genre—the exotic-to-the-English location in Italy (France would also be popular); the setting somewhere in a vaguely medieval past; the aristocratic family with a dark and terrible secret; a crumbling, mysterious edifice full of secret passages, unexplained noises, and dark corridors. What Radcliffe did was make the genre respectable. Where Otranto was full of paranormal and magical events—beginning with the castle’s heir being crushed to death on his wedding day by a giant helmet that falls out of the sky—Radcliffe pioneered the “explained supernatural,” in which seemingly ghostly happenings (spectral figures, haunting music) are eventually revealed as ordinary—if backstory-and-coincidence-dependent—human actions.
She also cleverly blended Gothic trappings with the “novel of sensibility,” which featured a sweet, well-behaved, usually orphaned heroine and her ordeals at the hands of cruel, tyrannical father figures, on her way to happily ever after with her similarly proper but persecuted love interest. (In terms of genre shifts, it’s similar, actually, to Stephenie Meyer’s commercialization of the vampire myth, achieved partly by excising the traditional eroticism connected with bloodsucking in favor of a chaste romance that echoes Radcliffe’s wholesome values. Edward and Bella are really not that far from Udolpho’s Emily and Valancourt.)
But while her ostensible protagonists may be one-dimensionally virtuous, her villains are fantastic: bloodthirsty, avaricious, manipulative, ruthless, completely amoral. Her landscapes are gorgeous and painterly, mountains and fields and forests lovingly lingered upon. And her plots are jaw-droppingly complex, fast-moving and packed full of shocking plot twists that would make M. Night Shyamalan hang his head in shame. She’s worth reading, is what I’m saying.
And Jane Austen would agree. Northanger Abbey laughs at the more exaggerated aspects of her Radcliffe’s fiction, especially in contrast to mundane middle-class English life:
“But you must be aware” [said Henry Tilney] “that when a young lady is introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy, the ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before.” (p.128)
And poor Catherine Morland’s Radcliffe-assisted imagination leads her to assume General Tilney (who has “the air and attitude of a Montoni,” Udolpho’s remorseless bad guy) must have hated his wife, and probably either killed her or imprisoned her, of which scandalous notion Henry disabuses her in astonished anger:
“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult you own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?” (p.163)
But it’s Catherine’s suggestible nature that’s mostly to blame. And is she so wrong after all? General Tilney’s not the sort of man to murder his wife, no; but he is the sort who would peremptorily send away his daughter’s good friend and his son’s sweetheart, early in the morning, all alone, with no money, for the sin of not being an heiress. He’s a proud and unyielding man, whose children are scared of him, who sucks all the fun out of the room. He may not be an out-and-out villain, but he’s not a pleasant chap.
And that, I think, is where Austen’s respect and admiration for Ann Radcliffe figures in. Sure, she doesn’t write realistic fiction. But she’s not trying to. She’s trying to entertain, and there she succeeds; further, while the events are overblown, there’s a central truth about emotional experience that is very real. Radcliffe captures intensity of feeling; she truly, as Austen says, conveys “the most thorough knowledge of human nature” (p.23).
As for what’s behind the black veil, I am totally not telling you.
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