Mr Harrison’s Confessions by Elizabeth Gaskell

August 28, 2014August 28, 201416 Comments

Mr Harrison’s Confessions is a novella often described as a prequel to Gaskell’s longer novel, Cranford. Published in 1851, it’s the story of a young doctor and his adventures in the provincial town of Duncombe – and at just over 100 pages it can easily be read in an afternoon.

In the first chapter, Mr Harrison agrees to entertain his friend, Charles, with the story of how he and his wife met. While his wife goes upstairs to put the baby to bed, Mr Harrison begins his tale, starting with his arrival in Duncombe as a newly qualified surgeon. After becoming a partner in Mr Morgan’s medical practice, Mr Harrison gets to know his patients, many of whom are unmarried women. Needless to say, the appearance of a handsome young man in a small, rural community causes a lot of excitement and it’s not long before Mr Harrison has attracted the attentions of several of Duncombe’s female residents. Unfortunately, though, none of them is Sophy, the vicar’s pretty daughter and the only girl Mr Harrison himself is interested in…

Mr Harrison’s Confessions is a lovely, witty story and although it is not actually set in Cranford, but in a similar small town, it has all the humour and charm I remember enjoying when I read Cranford. There’s not a lot of plot, but what you’ll find instead is a mixture of domestic scenes, funny anecdotes and moments of poignancy and sadness: the same combination that makes Cranford such a success.

For such a short book, Gaskell also manages to incorporate a good variety of interesting characters into the story, from Mr Morgan, the traditional country doctor with a suspicion of modern medicine, to Mr Harrison’s friend, Jack, who is fond of practical jokes, and the widowed housekeeper, Mrs Rose, obsessed by the memory of her late husband. The only disappointment is that Sophy, the woman Mr Harrison loves, is kept in the shadows and we don’t have an opportunity to really see romance blossoming between them.

While this is the same type of book as Cranford, the characters are different and it’s certainly not necessary to read one before the other. For those readers who enjoyed Cranford and want to return to that world, Mr Harrison’s Confessions should satisfy your craving, but I also think it might be a good introduction to Gaskell’s work for newcomers who don’t want to commit to a longer novel.

Thanks to Hesperus Press for my copy of Mr Harrison’s Confessions.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

July 24, 2014July 24, 201418 Comments

“In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.”

Cranford is the fourth Elizabeth Gaskell book I’ve read, following North and South, The Moorland Cottage and Sylvia’s Lovers. I had been hesitant to read this one, despite it being highly recommended by other bloggers, because I wasn’t sure it sounded like the sort of book I would enjoy. A few weeks ago, though, Hesperus Press sent me a review copy of Gaskell’s novella, Mr Harrison’s Confessions, which is described as a prequel to Cranford, so I thought it would make sense to actually read Cranford first.

Originally serialised in Charles Dickens’ journal Household Words in 1851, Cranford is set in a small English town populated mainly by women, most of whom have either never married or are widows. Our narrator is a young woman called Mary Smith who lives in nearby Drumble but who spends a lot of time staying with her friends in Cranford. Through Mary we meet the ladies of Cranford, listen to their gossip, join them at their tea parties, and watch as they go about their everyday lives. The book has a very episodic feel and feels almost like a collection of short stories, particularly throughout the first half of the book. Later in the novel, we focus more on one storyline – the collapse of the Town and County Bank and its impact on the people of Cranford – as well as returning to some of the earlier storylines and developing them further.

At first it seems that the narrator doesn’t have an active role in the novel and that her main purpose is to act as an observer, reporting on the daily lives and routines of her Cranford friends. Unless I missed something we don’t even learn that her name is Mary Smith until the fourteenth chapter, yet she is obviously an integral part of Cranford society, a loyal friend to several of the ladies and regularly invited to their parties and gatherings. Towards the end of the book we finally get to know a little bit more about Mary and she does eventually play an important part in resolving some of the novel’s storylines.

If the novel has a main character, though, it is not Mary but her friend, Miss Matty Jenkyns. Matty’s story is quite sad: her brother Peter left for India years ago and has never been heard from again, and now that her parents and older sister are dead, Matty is the only member of her family left in Cranford. She’d also been romantically linked with a Mr Holbrook decades earlier but their relationship ended as Matty’s sister, Deborah, disapproved. As the narrator observes: “She had probably met with so little sympathy in her early love, that she had shut it up close in her heart; and it was only by a sort of watching…that I saw how faithful her poor heart had been in its sorrow and its silence.” Despite her troubles, Matty remains a loving, kind-hearted person, liked and respected by everyone in the town and also by the reader – this reader at least!

The story of Matty and Mr Holbrook is an indication that although many of the Cranford women are happy with the absence of men in their lives, not all of them are single by choice. I also thought it was interesting that it’s mainly the more genteel ladies who are unmarried, while their servants do have ‘followers’, as they call them. Matty’s early heartbreak makes her more sympathetic to her twenty-two-year-old maid, Martha, and she allows her to have a follower and consider marrying him, whereas some of the other women would never have agreed to such a thing.

Cranford is also a very witty book filled with lots of funny little anecdotes about the women of Cranford. I won’t go into too many details here, but I particularly enjoyed the stories of Miss Betty Barker’s cow who fell into a lime-pit, Miss Matty’s habit of rolling a ball under her bed to check that there’s nobody hiding under it, and the time Mrs Forrester’s cat swallowed her favourite piece of lace. But while there’s a lot of humour in Cranford, there’s also a good balance between funny scenes and moments of sadness and even tragedy.

It seems I was wrong about Cranford not being my sort of book, because I did enjoy it much more than I thought I would. If I’d known it was such a short book (only about 200 pages) I’m sure I would have read it before now. When I reached the end I was sorry to have to leave the world of Cranford behind, but at least I can still look forward to reading Mr Harrison’s Confessions!

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

May 28, 2014May 28, 201417 Comments

This book was chosen for me in the recent Classics Club Spin. My strategy with spin books is to pick it up and start reading as soon as possible after the number is announced – that way I don’t put it off until the last minute and end up not wanting to read it. This worked well with my last two spin books, A Tale of Two Cities and Can You Forgive Her? and it worked again with this one – once I started reading The Mayor of Casterbridge I didn’t want to put it down, though that wasn’t entirely surprising as I’ve loved everything else I’ve read by Thomas Hardy and fully expected to love this one too.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is the story of Michael Henchard, whom we first meet as a young man, out of work and walking from town to town in search of employment as a hay-trusser. On arriving in a small village near the town of Casterbridge and discovering that a country fair is taking place, Michael proceeds to get drunk and sells his wife, Susan, and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor for five guineas. In the morning he regrets what he has done, but Susan, Elizabeth-Jane and their new owner have already disappeared without trace. After swearing not to touch another drop of alcohol for twenty-one years – the length of time he has been alive – Henchard begins to rebuild his life.

Almost twenty years later, we rejoin Susan and her daughter as they return to Casterbridge. The sailor, Mr Newson, has been lost at sea and having only recently learned that her second ‘marriage’ was not legally binding, Susan is hoping that she and Elizabeth-Jane can find and be reconciled with Michael Henchard. Things have changed in the intervening years and Henchard has transformed himself into the sober and respectable Mayor of Casterbridge. How will he react to having his wife and daughter back in his life? With the arrival of two more newcomers – Lucetta, a pretty young woman from Jersey, and Donald Farfrae, a Scottish traveller – Henchard’s fortunes begin to change yet again and in typical Thomas Hardy fashion a series of mistakes and misunderstandings follow, sometimes with tragic consequences.

I loved this book as much as I expected to and enjoyed being back in Hardy’s Wessex (now that I’ve read quite a few of his books it’s fun to be able to notice the occasional references to characters and places from previous novels). There are some lovely descriptions of Casterbridge with its Roman ruins, and the beautiful countryside surrounding it. However, this is a less pastoral book than most of the others I’ve read – the action takes place in and around the market town of Casterbridge itself, which gives this book a slightly different feel to the more rural, farm-based ones such as Far From the Madding Crowd.

The plot is a great one, with lots of twists and turns and plenty of drama; I was never bored once. There are lots of scenes and images that I’m sure will stay with me from this novel – the ‘furmity tent’ at the fair, the goldfinch in its cage, the noise of the ‘skimmington ride’ – but the main focus of the story is on Michael Henchard and his rise and downfall. There is no doubt that what Henchard does in the first chapter of this book is cruel and shocking, but he’s not just a two-dimensional villain; he is much more complex than that and his character is not written completely without any sympathy. It’s up to the reader to decide whether they can find any forgiveness for him or whether they think he deserves everything he gets. Personally, although I thought the way he behaved was terrible at times, I still found his story very sad, particularly as so much of his misery was self-inflicted and a result of his own flaws and impulsive decisions. And of course, as with many of Hardy’s novels, there is a sense of impending tragedy that hangs over everything and you know from the beginning that there is unlikely to be a happy ending.

I’m now looking forward to reading the other Thomas Hardy novels on my Classics Club list. I think The Return of the Native will probably be the next one I read.

The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin

April 29, 20146 Comments

Set in 1875, this is the story of two women and their love for the same man, Captain Bay Middleton, a cavalry officer and renowned horseman. One of these women is Charlotte Baird, heiress to a fortune, whose brother is a friend of Bay’s from the army. Bay asks Charlotte to elope with him but she convinces him that it will be best to wait nine months until she comes into her inheritance. However, this could be a mistake because in the meantime the Empress Elizabeth of Austria and her retinue arrive at nearby Easton Neston for the hunting season.

Elizabeth – or Sisi, as she is known to her friends – is the wife of Franz Joseph of Austria. Bored with her marriage and with constantly being in the public eye, Sisi is looking forward to spending some time in the English countryside riding and hunting. Sisi is an excellent horsewoman herself, and when Bay Middleton is given the job of acting as her ‘pilot’ (or guide), she and Bay find that their shared passion for horses leads to passion of a different sort. They are unable to keep their affair secret and when people begin to gossip about the Empress and her relationship with her pilot, Bay must decide whether his fascination with Sisi is more important than his love for Charlotte and his dream of winning the Grand National.

This novel is based on a true story – Sisi, Bay and Charlotte are all people who really existed – but it’s probably not one that many people will be familiar with. I certainly wasn’t. However, having read the author’s note and also the small amount of information I could find online, it seems that The Fortune Hunter is largely fictional and only loosely based on the real life story. There are some significant differences, such as the fact that the events of the novel take place over just a few months while in reality, Bay was Sisi’s pilot for five years. But whether or not the characters and their actions were completely true to life, it didn’t matter to me because the author made them feel so real and made me care about them so much that I found myself thinking about them even when I wasn’t reading the book.

The Empress Sisi, who I admit I knew nothing about before starting this book, must have been a fascinating woman. She was also known as a woman of great beauty and I was interested to read about how she would have her floor-length hair tied to the ceiling at night to relieve the pressure of its weight on her head and how she would cover her face in strips of raw meat to freshen her complexion. I particularly enjoyed a scene in the novel where Sisi meets and makes conversation with Queen Victoria, a very different type of monarch with very different views!

Although I was unable to find out anything about the real Charlotte Baird beyond her name, the fictional Charlotte is another character I loved. I enjoyed reading about her experiments with photography, a hobby that in Victorian England was not considered entirely appropriate for a young woman. But the character I was drawn to the most was Bay Middleton. I never doubted that he loved Charlotte but it was easy to see how he became captivated by the Empress and why he was ashamed of his behaviour while at the same time being unable to stop himself. It was not clear to me what the outcome of the story would be for Bay, for Charlotte or for Sisi and I was kept in suspense until the final chapter.

There are also some great secondary characters including Caspar Hewes, a flamboyant American photographer; Augusta Crewe, who is engaged to Charlotte’s brother; and Chicken Hartopp, a disappointed suitor of Charlotte’s. Another favourite was Bay’s grey mare, Tipsy – I thought the relationship between Bay and his horse was well written and very touching. There’s a lot of period detail too and the setting feels believably Victorian, with no irritating anachronisms or language that feels inappropriately modern.

This is a long novel (there were more than 600 pages in the version I read) but I was so engrossed in the story that I didn’t really notice the length. I loved this book and now I need to find a copy of Daisy Goodwin’s first novel, My Last Duchess.

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

March 13, 201422 Comments

This was the book chosen for me by the recent Classics Club Spin and yet again the Spin has been very good to me by selecting a book that I loved. Can You Forgive Her? is the first in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series and based on this one I can’t wait to read the other five. Before starting this book, the only Trollopes I had read were his six Barsetshire novels and I felt so comfortable in that world that I was slightly worried about venturing away into the unknown world of the Pallisers. I needn’t have worried, of course, because as usual with a Trollope novel, I was completely drawn into the lives of the characters and enjoyed all 690 pages!

Like the other Trollope novels I’ve read, this one has several different storylines running alongside each other, meeting and intersecting occasionally. First we have the story of Alice Vavasor, the woman whom Trollope is asking whether we can forgive. Alice is twenty-four years old and at the beginning of the novel she is engaged to be married to John Grey, a country gentleman from Cambridgeshire. But there is also another man in Alice’s life – her cousin, George Vavasor, with whom she was romantically involved several years earlier. John is a good, honourable, dependable man, though slightly bland and boring, but he truly loves Alice, whereas the selfish, untrustworthy George only seems to be interested in using her money to further his political career. Throughout the book Alice wavers between John and George and even after it becomes obvious to the reader which of them she should choose, her own nature makes the decision much more complicated than it should have been.

We also meet Alice’s cousin and best friend, Kate Vavasor (George’s sister), who would love to see Alice marry her brother and decides to do everything she can to influence Alice’s decision. Kate herself has no plans to marry and spends a lot of time with her Aunt Greenow, a rich widow who has two rival suitors of her own, Captain Bellfield and Mr Cheeseacre. Cheeseacre, a farmer, is in the better financial position of the two and believes he has more to offer a wife, but Mrs Greenow makes no secret of the fact that she prefers the poorer but more attractive Bellfield and it seems that Cheesacre is the one who is going to be disappointed.

The third storyline involves the Pallisers themselves. Plantagenet Palliser is a politician who is devoted to his work and is considered to have a good chance of becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. His young wife, Lady Glencora, is another cousin of Alice Vavasor’s. Before their marriage, Glencora was in love with the handsome but irresponsible Burgo Fitzgerald, and as she struggles to understand her new husband, she realises she may have made a big mistake. She and Burgo are still part of the same social circle and when he tells her that he still loves her, Glencora must decide whether to run away with him or whether to stay with her husband and try to make their relationship work.

Whereas the Barsetshire novels revolve around the church and the lives of clergymen and their families, the focus in this series is on the lives of politicians. This hadn’t initially sounded very appealing to me, but luckily I found that the level of political detail in this book was easy enough to follow and understand. I don’t know a lot about the way parliament worked in the 19th century but the thing that does come across very clearly is how corrupt the system was, where a man like George Vavasor, for example, could simply try to buy his way into parliament whether he was actually a good candidate or not.

One of the things I really love about Trollope is the way he makes me care so much about each of his characters, even the ones who seem uninteresting or unsympathetic earlier in the book. As he moves from one character’s perspective to another, he changes my perceptions of each one. In the case of Plantagenet Palliser, for example, I was inclined to agree with Glencora that he was dull and boring and indifferent to his wife’s feelings – until Trollope allows us to get inside Palliser’s head for a while and we see that he does care about his wife after all and is prepared to make huge sacrifices on her behalf.

I think Trollope shows a good understanding in this book of the choices and difficulties facing women, though he offers no real alternatives other than marriage and after a certain point in the book, the outcome of each storyline becomes quite predictable. Each one features a woman forced to choose between two men – one who is respectable but not very exciting and the other who is less respectable but more exciting. However, the way in which each woman deals with the situation she is in varies depending on her personality and her experience of life.

So, to go back to the question the title poses: could I forgive Alice? Well, I could forgive her for vacillating and having doubts and struggling to make up her mind. I understood that although she loved John Grey she was frustrated by what she saw as a lack of passion and ambition and that she wanted to feel she was doing something worthwhile with her life. I found it harder to forgive her for some of the ridiculous decisions she made regarding her money and who to give it to. But really, I don’t think she was in any more need of forgiveness than most of the other characters in the book as they all made mistakes and all had their flaws.

This post is starting to get very long and I haven’t even mentioned the fox hunt, Aunt Greenow’s picnic, the disputed will or the two trips to Switzerland! This is definitely one of my favourite Trollope novels so far and I’m now looking forward to reading the rest of the Pallisers, starting with the second in the series, Phineas Finn.

Classics Club March Meme: Literary Periods

March 8, 201412 Comments

It’s been a while since I last answered one of the Classics Club’s monthly memes, but this one appealed to me and I thought I’d join in. The question this month is:

What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why?

This is a very easy question for me to answer. My favourite literary period is, and always has been, the Victorian period (1837-1901). I love the style of Victorian writing and while I do also enjoy reading books from other periods, I usually feel much more comfortable with a Victorian classic than with a classic from the 20th century. The reasons people sometimes give for disliking Victorian novels – the length, the wordiness, the long descriptive passages, the habit of directly addressing the reader – have never really been a problem for me. And some of the greatest characters and most memorable plots in literature can be found in Victorian fiction too.

One of the first Victorian novels I remember reading was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which I was given as a Christmas present as a child. It was a lovely illustrated hardback edition which I still have and sometimes re-read at Christmas. This was followed several years later by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, both of which I read as a young teenager and loved. It took me a lot longer to get to Anne Bronte’s novels but when I eventually did I enjoyed those as well, particularly The Tenant of Wildfall Hall.

Despite enjoying A Christmas Carol when I first read it all those years ago, it’s only more recently that I’ve come to appreciate Charles Dickens’ other work. Our Mutual Friend found its way onto my books of the year list in 2011 and A Tale of Two Cities did the same in 2013.

Dickens and the Brontes are probably the first names that come to mind for most people when they think of Victorian novelists, but there are so many others that I love too. As the Victorian period covers several decades, it obviously encompasses a wide range of different types of books and authors from Gothic novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas to the wonderful Victorian sensation novels of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood (The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne are some of my favourites) and the comedy of Jerome K. Jerome who wrote the hilarious Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel.

Anthony Trollope is another of my favourite Victorians (I have now read all six of his Chronicles of Barsetshire and am currently in the middle of his first Palliser novel, Can You Forgive Her?) and so is Thomas Hardy – I’ve loved all of his books that I’ve read so far, especially Tess of the d’Urbervilles and A Pair of Blue Eyes.

As I come to the end of this post I realise I haven’t even mentioned George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell – or any of the non-British authors who I’m never quite sure whether to class as ‘Victorian’ or not but who wrote during the same period. And there were some classic children’s novels published during the Victorian era too. I think Black Beauty may actually have been the very first Victorian novel I ever read!

Do you enjoy reading Victorian literature or is there another period that you prefer?

If you do like the Victorians, do you have any favourite authors or books that I haven’t mentioned here?

The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins

January 3, 2014January 3, 201418 Comments

I love Victorian literature and if I had to choose a favourite Victorian author it would probably be Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White was the first book of his that I read, in 2006, and within a year I had also read The Moonstone, Armadale and No Name. Since then I’ve read several of his lesser-known books, most of which I’ve reviewed on this blog, and while they weren’t as good as his ‘big four’ novels, I still found something to enjoy in all of them. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, though, and it’s now been a few years since I’ve felt like reading any of Wilkie’s books. But when the Estella Society announced their Wilkie in Winter event I decided to join in and read one of the titles I hadn’t already read, The Frozen Deep.

The Frozen Deep is a novella which Collins based on a play he had written, with the help of Charles Dickens, in 1856. The story was inspired by reports of a voyage to the Arctic led by Sir John Franklin in 1845 during which the members of the expedition disappeared without trace.

At the beginning of the book we meet Clara Burnham who is saying goodbye to the man she loves, Frank Aldersley, whose ship is leaving the next day in search of the Northwest Passage. However, another man is also in love with Clara. His name is Richard Wardour, and when he discovers that she has become engaged to somebody else, he vows to take his revenge on the man he believes has stolen her from him. Clara, who is gifted with the Second Sight, is convinced that Richard will succeed in finding and destroying Frank – and when she learns that Richard has also joined the same Arctic voyage she becomes even more afraid.

I really enjoyed reading The Frozen Deep. It’s not one of Collins’ best books, but I hadn’t expected it to be so I wasn’t disappointed and with less than one hundred pages it was perfect for those busy days just before Christmas when I was looking for something quick and entertaining to read. But while I was impressed that Collins could tell such a compelling story in so few pages, I do think there was the potential for it to have been expanded into a full-length novel. I would have liked more details of the Arctic expedition itself and the experiences of the men left stranded by the ice-bound ships. And I thought Richard Wardour could have been a fascinating character, if only there had been time to explore his thoughts and emotions in more depth.

Although this book wasn’t without some flaws, I thought it was very enjoyable and I’m hoping to find time soon to read (or re-read) another of Collins’ books.