1910s

Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson

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Mrs Ames (1912) by E.F. Benson has been on my shelves since 2010 – indeed, it is the final book from the two batches of Bloomsbury Group reprints that I had to read. These reprints are renowned round these parts for including Miss Hargreaves (and me quoted on the back!) and they were the best thing to happen in publishing for ages. But I guess they didn’t sell as well as had been hoped, so we only got two batches and ten books in total. All of ’em wonderful!

And I’m happy to add Mrs Ames to that number now. I’ve read quite a few Benson novels including, of course, the Mapp and Lucia series, and the setting will come as no surprise to those who like him. Yep, it’s upper-middle-class people squabbling in a small community. Doubtless said community (Riseborough) has various people who aren’t upper crust, but we don’t care about them. We care about Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans, and (to a lesser extent) their male relatives. And we are introduced to the community through Mr and Mrs Altham, who are keen gossips, though they wouldn’t use the word. I did enjoy that this married couple seem to delight equally in observing and talking about their neighbours – even if they have to cover it with a veneer of pretending they discover things by accident.

Mrs Ames is the accepted leader of the village. She sets the trends for the community, whether that be her outfits, her dinner parties, or her printed menu cards (little do the others know that she found them ready printed, and has been ordering food to match). She has an earnest son at Oxford who is keen to tell everyone that he’s an atheist, and a husband who is ten years her junior. The husband and the son have something in common – they’re both attracted to Mrs Evans. She is a recent addition to the village, with a charming husband and a willingness to accept the flirtations of others. She is also casually angling to be top dog of Riseborough… can Mrs Ames defend her position and her marriage?

Benson is in usual witty form as he documents the rivalries in the village, and we spend much of the novel not taking these would-be adulterers particularly seriously. Or, rather, there are other things that are more important – like new age treatments, how to one-up each other at dinner, and which Shakespearean character they can appropriately dress as for a costume ball. Here’s a fun bit on Mrs Ames addressing her advancing years:

Mrs Ames might or might not have been run down when she left Riseborough the following week, but nothing can be more certain than that she was considerably braced up seven days. The delicious freshness of winds off the North Sea, tempering the heat of brilliant summer suns, may have had something to do with it, and she certainly had more colour in her face than was usual with her, which was the legitimate effect of the felicitous weather. There was more colour in her hair also, and though that, no doubt, was a perfectly legitimate effect too, being produced by purely natural means, as the label on the bottle stated, the sun and wind were not accountable for this embellishment.

In early-to-mid Benson, he often throws in the serious among the trivial. Rather late in the day, the novel becomes (albeit briefly) about women’s suffrage, and there are sections of impassioned writing about women’s rights that are entirely straight-faced. (And, of course, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be – but it’s tonally a bit jarring.) He also aims for some emotional heights that he hasn’t quite earned, given the enjoyable triviality of the rest of the novel. I always think Benson found his firmest ground when he stopped trying to have emotionally climactic moments. Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans are good rivals, but they are only a foretaste of what he would achieve with Mapp and Lucia.

I have yet to read a Benson that was a dud, nor one that was a particular outlier in terms of the society, style, and content. Mrs Ames is every bit as enjoyable as the bulk of the others and, if it isn’t quite Benson at his absolute peak, it’s very good. Vale, Bloomsbury Group reprints!

 

The Silence of Colonel Bramble by Andre Maurois (25 Books in 25 Days #3)

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I read and enjoyed The Thought Reading Machine by Andre Maurois during my DPhil, and when I came across The Silence of Colonel Bramble last year, that fact and the title were enough for me to pick it up. It was published in French in 1918, and in English the following year – translated by Thurfrida Wake (great name), with the occasional verses translated by Wilfred Jackson. My appendix has the original French poetry, and my bad French is good enough to know that his translations were very approximate.

Published just after the First World War, this novella is based on Maurois’s experiences of spending the war with a British contingent of the army. Bramble was a composite character he created, and the silence of the title refers to the archetypal British colonel’s reticence – that Maurois believes contains eloquent multitudes.

This was an enjoyable and interesting view of a certain subsection of soldiers at a very significant period of time, though it doesn’t really qualify as a novel or even a novella. While there is a plot of sorts, it’s pretty much a series of vignettes and aphorisms, tied to characters.

“We are a curious nation,” said Major Parker. “To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match you must tell him that his national honour is at stake. To interest an Englishman in a war you need only suggest that it is a kind of a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian, we agree politely, but tell us that he is a bad sportsman and you rouse the British Empire.”

(The poetry is incidental and rather pointless.) It’s always fun to see one’s nation’s stereotypes held up to the light by somebody from another country, though in the case of Bramble et al, I hope they’re antiquated by now. All the nonsense about honour and sportsmanship has hopefully died out, though I wouldn’t be so sure. And I do wonder what the differences are about reading this as a Frenchman in French as opposed to an Englishman in English. But it is very good-natured and affectionate, filled with the comradeship of having just ‘won’ a war together – and enough amusing and down-to-eath in amongst the jingoism to still make for good reading.

The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki

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I recently read The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) by Saki for Shiny New Books, recently reprinted by Michael Walmer – you can read the whole review over there, but here’s the beginning of it to tempt you in:

Saki is one of those writers a lot of people have heard of but haven’t read – and, as A.A. Milne’s introduction in this reprint (itself a reprint from a much earlier edition) notes, his fans are cautious of sharing so wonderful a gem with those who might not be appreciative. Well, I shall take that risk – I whole-heartedly recommend that the uninitiated try out some Saki.

The Oakleyites by E.F. Benson

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I’m not doing well for A Century of Books choices at the moment, because I keep deciding that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read something written at the wrong time. Recently I was convinced that nothing would suit except for an E.F. Benson, and all the remaining slots of my ACOB list come after he died – so, sorry ACOB, but I turned to 1915’s The Oakleyites. For context, this falls roughly in the middle of Benson’s extraordinarily prolific output, and a few years before he started what would become the Mapp and Lucia series.

There are definitely marks of Lucia et al all over this, particularly in the first half of the novel. Oakley-on-Sea has the same sort of community – dimly aware that the rest of the world exists, but also certain that the only part of the world worth considering is Oakley. People vie for dominant position in society, and a newcomer is treated like the epoch-altering event that it is – especially when the newcomer is a noted (albeit not necessarily respected) novelist, Wilfred Easton.

There are even events in The Oakleyites that are directly repeated in the Mapp and Lucia series – such as an exhibition of paintings in the village hall that are judged by the community. A brief mention of a guru shows that Benson had such things on his mind. I don’t recall a replica of the three daughters squabbling over what they’ll receive as inheritance when their father dies (even while one of them, a Christian Scientist, maintains that he is not ill and could not be) – but it’s all of a piece. And it’s all great. Benson has such an eye for politely feuding communities. And that seeps in the narrative, as well as the dialogue – as a vegetarian, I self-deprecatingly laughed at the following:

Mrs Andrews had a sharp nippy way of movement and speech, and the brightness of eye which is noticeable in vegetarians and is attributed by them to their perfect health and entire absence of toxic ferments in the blood, might apart from that be supposed to have a sort of hungry look about it, which no amount of cauliflowers wholly dimmed.

Our focal point is Dorothy, who is nobler and less ambitious than other Oakleyites. No Lucia she. She is a bit subtle in her interest at Easton’s arrival, but not deceptive – and furiously embarrassed that she once read a paper about how unworthy his novels were to be feted. If Oakley has a moral compass, it is Dorothy.

It is also Dorothy who takes us into a different world within Benson’s oeuvre. For she is a spinster (of all of 35) and wishes that her life had not turned out quite as it has – and starts to wonder if Easton might make her a suitable husband. In Dorothy’s storyline, Benson gets rather more serious and earnest than one might expect. Increasingly so, as Dorothy’s sister Daisy arrives – selfish and dramatic, and not necessarily in an amusing way.

Benson was not a novice novelist at this point, but I did find that The Oakleyites wasn’t a universal success. It’s a curate’s egg. But too many scenes – whether comic or not – lingered too long, so it felt a bit odd to move between them. And the mix of sombre and comic tones didn’t quite work, for me. They remained too separate, as though they belonged in different novels.

I still enjoyed reading it, and it’s always interesting to see a novelist do something a bit different – but I wouldn’t recommend you seek it out over Benson’s zillions of other novels, and I doubt I’ll re-read. But, still – a mediocre Benson is better than no Benson at all.

The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat by Rudyard Kipling

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The nice people at Ampersand Publishing got in touch recently, and asked if I’d like to review any of the Ampersand Classics series. Well, you know I can’t resist reprinted classics – so I took a look through their catalogue, and decided upon Rudyard Kipling’s The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat, first published in 1917.

Before I talk about it – do go and see the sort of things Ampersand do. They’re really beautifully produced – square paperbacks, affordable, and would make great little gifts alongside a birthday card. And the selection is really interesting. It’s a bit disheartening when yet another publisher reprints the Dickens, Austen, Hardy etc that we all know are classics, but don’t need new editions of. Ampersand have dug around in the archives, and come up with lesser-known works by famous writers (Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, F Scott Fitzgerald etc) as well as international authors I hadn’t heard of (Henri Barbusse, Pu Songling). They’re ‘short works’ – straddling the line between short story and novella, I think. The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat is about 100 small pages.

And, going through the catalogue, how could I resist a title like that? The story is a side to Kipling that I haven’t seen before (I’ve read The Jungle Book, The Just So Stories, Kim, and one short story, ‘They’, but that’s it) – it’s extremely funny.

It’s actually a revenge tale. A group of friends are caught speeding by a mercenary local MP, who has set up a speed trap on the long, straight road into his village, Huckley. He glories in their misfortune – and is anti-Semitic to one of the group. They vow that he won’t get away with it. What they have to hand is ingenuity, and a handful of newspapers under their control… subtly, step by step, they manage to turn Huckley into a national laughing stock…

I shan’t say much more, because it’s fun to see how Kipling progresses the story – but it’s done with excellent logic and structure, and we manage to stay on the side of the revengers. It’s all rather silly, but in the best possible way. And there is something very 21st century about trying to avenge speeding tickets (of which, I hasten to add, I have never had any). It certainly makes me want to see what else Kipling has written in this line…

The disturbing popularity of The Sheik

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My latest audiobook from Librivox was The Sheik (1919) by E.M. Hull, and it was a fascinating experience – and not only because I discovered that some people say ‘sheek’ rather than ‘shake’. (The recording was done by a group of people, taking different chapters, and an especial hat nod must go to M.J. Franck who is a brilliant reader.)

If you’ve done any reading about popular fiction in the early decades of the 20th century, you’ll have read about The Sheik. It was an enormous bestseller (selling over a million copies even before the silent film with Rudolph Valentino was released – which, incidentally, you can watch on YouTube). It kicked off a whole new lease of life for desert noir, or whatever they were calling it. And I’m pretty sure that almost nobody reads it nowadays.

I listened to it entirely out of my interest in literary history – not for the novel itself. You’ll understand why the more I explain, if you don’t already know about the novel. And this blog post will have spoilers, because I’m not expecting anybody to read The Sheik. Indeed, I urge you not to read it.

The novel tells of Diana Mayo, an independently-minded young woman who doesn’t want to kowtow to society’s restrictions. She’s not interested in romance or marriage, but instead wants to go exploring on her own – to the concern of her decadent brother. Indeed, she is rather an admirable and refreshing character. Against her brother’s advice, she sets out into the desert with some locals to guide her… and is ambushed. Some of the men are shot. And she is kidnapped by ‘the sheik’. There is rather a lot about how strong he is, and about how his strong arm pushes her strongly against his strong chest. He’s strong, in case that was too subtle.

The sheik is Ahmed Ben Hassan. And he has not intention of letting her go now that he has her. Indeed, between the second and third chapters he rapes her. He continues to rape her every day for several weeks – this is 1919; we don’t see those scenes, but we do get lots of scenes of him looking cruelly at her, laughing cruelly, smiling cruelly etc. Hull goes in for iterated statements.

And throughout all of this, Hull is crazy racist. Lots of sweeping statements are made about “the Arabs” and their supposed disregard for mercy. A lot of her horror seems to come as much from having had sex with “an Arab” as from being raped – though the word ‘rape’ is never used. It’s all pretty unpleasant.

It gets worse.

One day, out riding, she manages to escape. Long story short, she doesn’t get super far until Ahmed Ben Hassan catches up with her and makes her come back to his camp. And… she realises that she is in love with him. I knew this was coming, but I still shouted at the car radio when it happened. I think this brief excerpt sums up everything I hated about the plot of the novel:

Her heart was given for all time to the fierce desert man who was so different from all other men whom she had met, a lawless savage who had taken her to satisfy a passing fancy and who had treated her with merciless cruelty. He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality and superb animal strength. And he was an Arab!

I had thought it might be more like Pamela, where the power of her virtue forces him to repent – but, no, she is the one who changes to be his object. And – skipping forward a few chapters – phew, it turns out he’s actually European after all, so all’s well that ends well.

Hull writes surprisingly well and engagingly, and I’d enjoy reading her in an entirely different sphere – it doesn’t make much of a difference what a writing style is like when it’s about this. My main surprise – as with when Fifty Shades of Grey became so popular – is that so many people had this… taste? fetish? fantasy? Apparently in 1919 this passed for acceptable reading – unless all the millions of copies were read in secret, of course. It’s telling that, in the film, the sheik only thinks about raping her, but doesn’t actually do it.

I’ve no idea what E.M. Hull’s other novels are like (though I don’t hold out hopes for The Son of the Sheik), and I don’t think I’ll explore any further. This dip back a century has confirmed my worst fears from reading about the novel – and painted rather a disturbing picture of what was de rigueur in 1919.

The Osbornes by E.F. Benson

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I’ve been off for a week in a beautiful chateau in the Loire Valley – this one, to be precise, in case you want to follow suit – though I left a couple of scheduled posts to tide me over. There were 17 of us, most of whom I’d only met a few times or not at all – but it was such a wonderful week. Beautiful surroundings, wonderful people, lots of fun, and lots of reading. I read four books in the five days we were there (because the first and last days were basically all driving) and one of those was The Osbornes (1910) by E.F. Benson.

The Osbournes

This is only the third book I’ve read by E.F. Benson that falls outside the excellent Mapp and Lucia series (which I’ve read twice). My shelves have plenty of his books on them, though, and I’d decided to stop buying them until I’d sampled some more – and loved Daisy’s Aunt around this time last year. Unintentionally, I picked a novel from the same year – yes, he had three novels published in 1910; check out his Wikipedia page to see how astonishingly prolific he was. Even more astonishing, both novels are really rather good.

The Osbornes considers a question that has echoed throughout English literary history almost from when it began: what happens when you love outside your own class? From Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and onwards, this topic has (in its different forms) been a peculiarly English preoccupation. And it is at the forefront of The Osbornes, where Dora falls in love with the Adonis-like Claude. Claude’s family is the Osbornes of the title – nouveau riche, and not ‘quite quite’.

Nobody disputes that he and his family are kind and good, but their money has not brought them a sense of what is right to say and what is not. Not that they have come from the gutter; Claude went to Eton and Cambridge, and the list of things that Dora’s family object to make for rather mysterious reading, over a century since the novel was written. Here is Dora’s (selfish, grabbing) brother on the topic of Claude:

“I think Claude has masses of good points: he simply bristles with them, but he gives one such shocks. He goes on swimmingly for a time, and then suddenly says that somebody is ‘noble-looking’, or that the carpet is ‘tasteful’ or ‘superior’.”

It’s not exactly spitting on the floor, is it? But it is enough to irritate Dora once they are married, and once the gleam of lust has worn off. She is very fond of his parents, but cannot help seeing the same things in them – Mr and Mrs Osborne (senior) come with them on a trip to Venice, but are more impressed by the metalwork they see than by the architecture. The size of the paintings in a gallery astonishes them, rather than the artists’ genius. It prickles Dora over and over.

You could draw a gallon of pure fresh kindness from that well-spring which also was inexhaustible, but even before you had time to put your lips to it, and drink of it, some drop – quite a little drop – would trickle in from the source of his vulgarity and taint it all. It was even worse than that; there was a permanent leak from the one into the other; the kindness was tainted at the source.

More on the kindness in a minute. But this did make me think – obviously we laugh at this sort of snobbery now, particularly when it’s so hard to see the nuances that bothered them so much. But I wonder if it has been replaced with other sorts of things – codes that we are used to in our families, and can’t imagine making new relations outside of that perimeter. This struck me when the topic of humour came up – I certainly wouldn’t say I looked down on people who had a completely different sense of humour from me, but it would make forming close bonds very difficult. We may feel angry with Dora and Jim from our 21st-century vantage (agreeing with the character who says “how God must laugh at our divisions of classes. We must look like children arranging books by the colour of their covers instead of their contents”) but that is to miss the point of the contemporary setting, perhaps? Any seismic class shift in England was still around forty years away.

The strength of this novel doesn’t lie, though, in this moral maze. It’s in the Osbornes – not Dora and Claude by Claude’s parents. I loved hearing all your suggestions for happy marriages the other day (and keep meaning to reply, not least because some of them certainly don’t meet my mental criteria!) and here is certainly one. Eddie and Mrs O (as they call each other) have one of the most beautiful marriages I’ve ever read about – and Benson treads just on the right side of saccharine for the reader to swallow it. They have been together since they had little, but in their riches want no more than each other’s company, laughing at the same weak family jokes that have occupied them for decades. There is a little wisdom in them, but only really a little – mostly, Benson paints strengths of character and, yes, kindness.

His wickedly funny cynical side doesn’t emerge in this novel, and an unkind reader might think there are moments in here that are too sentimental – but either I was beguiled by the beautiful French countryside, or Benson manages to get away with it. He remains funny throughout, and dodges a tricky societal quandary by having a bit of an easy out in the end, but somehow the ingredients all add up to another delightful offering from a pen that doesn’t seem able to do anything but delight.

Note: I accidentally wrote ‘Osbournes’ every time in my initial version of this post – thanks for noticing, Tony!

The Pelicans by E.M. Delafield

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The Pelicans (1918) by E.M. Delafield was a wonderful find in a real life bookshop – one I visited with Rachel and Jenny – and one of my Project 24 books. Delafield is one of my very favourite authors, and this is about the 23rd book I’ve read by her – nothing beats finding one of them in the wild. Early warning, it might well be the worst book of hers that I’ve read, but it’s testament to her talents that I still liked it.

The Pelicans

The Pelicans starts with kindly, scatterbrained Lady Argent and her artistic son Ludovic discussing the recently orphaned young sisters Rosamund and Frances. They live near the River Wye and have had an idyllic childhood in many ways – but now they are to be taken away by a distant relative of their mother, who wishes to be called Cousin Bertha. Lady Argent thinks she is a paragon of kindness, and this is clearly the reputation that Bertha wishes to promote – and quite possibly believes herself. But Ludovic is not convinced, and the sisters are also rather daunted by the move. Her friendly approaches towards them leave them rather wary and confused – but off they go, to join Bertha’s daughter, a simpering and devoted companion, and a grumpy but affectionate husband (affectionate to the girls; he clearly loathes his wife but has determined to stay out of the way).

Delafield wrote about unpleasant women time and again, and they are very often the sort who project an appearance of capability and being the supposed centre of adoring crowds. This can sometimes be done comically, as in The Provincial Lady in Wartime, or with a rather darker overtone – Faster! Faster! or Humbug. In The Pelicans it rather falls between two stools. Even her darkest novels have amusing moments, and there are many in The Pelicans that I will come onto, but she hasn’t quite decided how to treat the character of Bertha. Ironically, by making her quite nuanced (because how many people are actually ogres in disguise?), she is less satisfying as a character – do we require more consistency in a fictional construct than we would encounter in real people?

My favourite sections came when Bertha talks to her neighbour and frenemy – no word describes it better, I’m afraid – Nina, who has a son about Rosamund’s age (there is a brief romance) and is a widow. They exchange spiky conversations where each tries to outdo the other, and subtly insult each other. It’s all so delicious, and I longed for those pages – particularly whenever Nina would use the Biblical analogy of Mary and Martha to compare them, which she does often, and which displeases Bertha immensely. Another of Nina’s traits is to remind her friend about her (Nina’s) status as a widow:

“It somehow gave me a little pang – it seemed to bring back that concert, years ago when Geoffrey and I were together.”

Bertha was too familiar with the singular power that the most unlikely incidents possessed of recalling Nina’s happier hours to accord more than a passing acknowledgement towards this tender tribute to the past.

The companion-cum-housekeeper (Miss Blandflower) was also a delight to read, with her verbal tics done beautifully:

“Here I am, last but not least,” agitatedly murmured the late-comer, while her hostess cordially embraced her, and presented Rosamund and Frances.

Miss Blandflower belonged to that numerous and mistaken class of person which supposes the art of witty conversation to lie in the frequent quotation of well-known tags and the humorously-intended mispronunciation of the more ordinary words in the English language.

These examples show you the way Delafield has with a sardonic sentence, familiar to anybody who has read any of her novels, and I could read it for hours. But this novel gives us rather more of a different sort of novel – one which sneaks into so many of her early novels: it’s about a nunnery. Frances becomes very involved in the Catholic church (Bertha is not Catholic, but has a deep interest) and this takes over – Frances goes on a retreat, and eventually decides to live there, and many of the scenes are in this new cast of characters. It doesn’t follow the well-worn path of bashing the church, thankfully, but it’s a new set of people when we haven’t really got full potential out of the original set, and they were not as interesting to read about. It got a little slow, though there were definitely highlights in the dialogue of a booming woman who lived at the nunnery (though not a nun) and considered herself rather more at home than those around her might suggest.

The main issue with The Pelicans is probably structure. It covers so much of the girls’ lives that we never quite linger at any one stage long enough – and the periods Delafield picks seem a little disjointed and unexpected, as though she’d plunged into their timeline at random. It was only her third novel; she got much better at this.

So – her humour and the way she balanced comic sentences was already there. The melodrama that popped its head up throughout her career was a little unbridled. She hadn’t quite worked out how to manipulate characters into the forms that would work best for her. But it’s always fascinating to see the development of an author, and – if this is perhaps at the bottom of my list of EMD reads – it’s pretty impressive that it’s still really rather good. Hurrah for Delafield!

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

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Burning SecretBurning Secret (1913) by Stefan Zweig – translated by Anthea Bell and published in a lovely edition by Pushkin Press – was one of the books my friend Malie gave me for my birthday last year. Being honest, she gave me a voucher and I picked it – but I filled her in on my choices! It matches the Confusion edition I reviewed last year and now, of course, I want all of Pushkin’s Zweig series…

It’s another short and powerful novel – this one takes place in a hotel where the Baron is on holiday. He is bored and, for want of a better word, horny. I think that’s the first time I’ve used that word on this blog, but it’s the most apt.

He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn’t really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that, if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.

He casts his eye around the hotel for the most desirable woman to have a brief affair with, and lands upon a woman staying there with her young son, Edgar. He is 12, but this is the 1910s – so he seems very young and innocent to modern readers. The Baron decides that the best way to approach the woman is via her son – so he sets up a jovial friendship with Edgar – ‘Edi’ – in order to get closer to his mother; without this ‘in’, he couldn’t be introduced.

His ploy works. Edgar is flattered and entranced by this friendship with an adult – having been lonely through the stay so far – and his mother is quickly beguiled into an adulterous affair with the Baron. Once his goal is achieved, the Baron no longer puts any effort into charming the child – and Edgar is hurt, abandoned, angry. He knows something is going on between his mother and the Baron – but no idea what; only that they have a ‘burning secret’.

As I say, Edgar’s innocent naivety doesn’t quite translate to 2017 – but age him down a few years and it would. We don’t quite get prose from his perspective, it remains in the third person, but Zweig does enough to put us in the Baron’s mind and in Edgar’s mind in turn. Zweig is expert at bringing strong, painful, awkward emotions to the fore – and he masterfully interweaves Edgar’s fierce and confused anger through the narrative.

The story is simple, and short – 117 pages – but it is such a brilliant depiction of how unthinking unkindness can affect somebody, and how emotions that aren’t quite understood by the child experiencing them can reverberate and have their impact. Like Confusion, this is an excellent novella about the power of recognisable conflicts in recognisable places. I can see I’m going to have to buy more Zweigs…

The Three Sisters by May Sinclair

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The Three SistersI want to have a stern word with Virago Modern Classics – or, at least, whoever was in charge of cover design back in the 1980s. Normally pretty great, the choice of cover image for their reprint of May Sinclair’s 1914 novel The Three Sisters is pretty unforgivable. I’m going to give you a top tip, right from the start: this is not a novel about the Brontes.

It seems, to me, completely bizarre to put this famous painting on the front of a novel which is only very, very loosely inspired by the Bronte sisters – an ‘imaginative starting point’, as the blurb acknowledges. But we’ll forgive that and put it to one side. The similarities are that there are three sisters in a remote Yorkshire vicarage – that’s about it. They don’t have a brother or two deceased sisters; they aren’t writers; their personalities aren’t even that similar. And the vicar has lost three wives – variously to death and abandonment – and has settled into an angry, unwilling celibacy.

The sisters are Mary, Gwenda, and Alice Carteret. Gwenda is passionate and artistic, striding over the moors and wanting much more than the small community can offer her. Alice is considered weak by all, but has an iron core of determination – and not a little spitefulness. Mary is rather less easy to grasp on the page – starting off staid and dependable, and gradually getting rather less pleasant.

Into this world comes the one eligible man in the district – Dr Steven Rowcliffe. In turn – or, indeed, somewhat all at once – the sisters fall in love with him. He finds these attentions annoying and beguiling, depending which sister is under consideration: it is clearly Gwenda that has caught his eye, but he must cope with all three of them eyeing him as a prospective husband material.

Their father is firmly against any of them marrying anybody, though. He is fired by selfishness, cloaked in supposed holiness. Like most vicars in fiction, he sadly doesn’t come across very well. (Septimus Harding might be the only sympathetic clergyman I can remember, and also by far the closest to the real vicars I have known. Do better, novelists.) His faith and morality seems mostly to emerge in unkindness – such as making the maid Essy leave when she is discovered to be pregnant. It does, at least, lead to an amusingly handled scene where Essy tells her mother – who pretends astonishment, whereas she really ‘only wondered that she had not come four months ago’.

Despite a slightly stereotypical set up, The Three Sisters is really engaging. Sinclair was ahead of the curve, in terms of the psychology of romantic relationships, but – more importantly – she knows how to make the reader find the relationships between all the characters interesting, whether sister/sister, father/daughter, or maid/employer. The dialogues between Gwenda and her father remind me of Austen’s battle-of-wits exchanges, and the prose treads the line between beautifully descriptive and pulling-the-plot-forward extremely well. Sinclair was a very good writer.

But…

Oh, but…

WHY the dialect and transcribed accent? This accounts for probably no more than one in eight pages, but it’s pretty unbearable when it comes. Only the working-class characters speak this way, in what I suppose is meant to be Yorkshire voices, but could equally be anything from Cornwall upwards. I can’t face typing out any of it, but here’s a photo of some of the dialogue…

The Three Sisters accent

Unsurprisingly, I skimmed most of this. Why not just write ‘she spoke with a heavy Yorkshire accent’, and leave it at that? But the rural/dialectical novel was running unchecked around 1900-1920, so Sinclair was only falling into the trap of her time. Suffice to say, if this had accounted for much more of the novel, I definitely wouldn’t have finished it.

But, if you can face with skimming over these pages, there is a lot to like in The Three Sisters – particularly in the second half, where the wheels start to fall off a bit. It’s a sensitive, often fairly wryly amusing, and very well crafted novel. Just don’t expect it to be about the Brontes.

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore: “this book is a strange hybrid of Edwardian values and Victorian conventionality”.

Fleur Fisher (Beyond Eden Rock): “May Sinclair spins a compelling story, full of rich descriptions of people and places, and with a wonderful understanding of her characters and their relationships.”