This
is quite a random pairing of books to report on, and my only excuse is that the
extent of my thoughts on each is about half the length of a proper blog post.
How's that for well-considered, thoughtful planning?
I
don't usually say a lot about books I don't like. I know that different readers
feel differently about each book, and I'm always haunted by those reviewers on
Amazon who have the chutzpah to denigrate even the greatest literary works of
all time. If you haven't already, have a look some time at reviews of Hamlet, for example, or Pride and Prejudice, or Bleak House, or Middlemarch, or any other widely-read and highly-regarded book.
There's always one or more dolts ready to weigh in with their carefully considered
opinion that Shakespeare is a terrible writer, Austen is pretentious, or
Dickens is crap.
I
therefore always try to be mindful of the fact that every reader's ability to
appreciate any kind of artistic work is relative and completely limited by his
or her own likes and dislikes, life experiences, education, and previous
reading, not to mention one's mood at the moment one is reading. (How often
have I picked up a book, hated it, and then tried it again and loved it a year
later?) I'd rather, usually, focus on my own limitations, and why a book didn't
work for me at this point in time, rather than make a blanket statement that
it's the book itself, not me, that's the problem.
All
of which is to say that my long-planned, much-delayed reading of a second novel
by March Cost (real name Margaret Morrison) finally happened but wasn't quite
the experience I had anticipated.
When
I first dived into Invitation from
Minerva, I was delighted to find that it was a sequel of sorts to the only
other Cost novel I'd read, The Hour
Awaits, which I briefly wrote about here.
I had only a vague recollection of that novel, but certainly remembered
enjoying it. And Minerva starts off
promisingly enough, just hours after Hour
left off, with the Princess chatting with a friend in London, appreciating
handsome men, whisking about Europe, arranging the sale of a painting in
Florence, and then finally returning home to her impoverished chateau in what
was former the Austrian empire but is now an obscure part of Italy. Clio, a spunky 17-year-old who has been
acclaimed for rescuing a cat from the roof of a villa (though the rescue turns
out to have been a fraud, stemming from her having broken into the villa's
library—a crime I can surely appreciate) joins the cast, coming to stay with
the princess just before a flood of other guests arrive for a dinner
party.
But
then, after such a sophisticated and enjoyable first half of the novel, Cost
inexplicably locks her characters into the chateau, using the device of an
avalanche burying the entire house. The rest of the novel, sadly, reads like a rather
melodramatic play, with far too much gushing and gasping, paling of faces and
narrowing of eyes, as all their various intrigues play out in
a few rooms. From jetsetting across Europe to a rather tedious experimental play, all in
the course of one novel! Clearly, this is quite intentional, and Clio's idea
for a play becomes a central symbol for the novel itself:
With a gasp Clio came to the
surface again, "But this is weird," she said, "—watching you
all! Earlier I told Princess Sophia of a plot I'd got for a play—a gathering of
affinities in a private house, just like this. In the first act, you would be as
you are now. Hidden. In the second act, you would be disclosed. And the third
act—the third act would be the most gorgeous of all ... for we'd all be back
together, facing what we then knew of each other. Why! in some cases it
might be simply frightful—" her inquisitorial glance flashed along the
board—"or very wonderful." She paused to consider the Comte, and lost
vigour.
Sadly,
in the case of the novel, I found the result quite a bit more on the
"simply frightful" side than the "very wonderful" one. But of course, other readers might feel very differently, and I haven't given up on March Cost quite yet! Bree at Another Look Book wrote
about another of Cost's novels, The
Bespoken Mile, fairly
recently, and her review made me want to proceed straight to that novel. It
might take me another year, knowing me, but I'll certainly sample more of
Cost's work.
And
speaking of how long it takes me to get round to reading certain books, it's
embarassing to admit that I acquired a copy of Clare Tomalin's bio of Jane
Austen almost as soon as it came out, and have now, a mere 19 years later,
actually read it. (Well, to clarify, I read a different copy, actually, since
that early copy was lost in the great purge of 2000, before my move from
Washington DC to San Francisco—c'est la vie.) I've flirted with the book on
numerous occasions since then, but it took our upcoming trip to England, and
our impending visits to Winchester, Chawton, and Bath—Austenesque destinations
all—to finally inspire me to make a commitment.
Some
of you, at least, are sure to be Jane Austen fans already, and to be far more
knowledgeable about her than I am, so I'll just mention a couple of things I
was struck by. For instance, I hadn't realized that so much time elapsed
between the writing of her first three novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey—and the later three, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.
In between was a gap of more than a decade. It's hard to resist (and Tomalin
doesn't resist either) imagining what other works Austen might have produced
had circumstances allowed her to be actively writing for all of those years. In
fact, Tomalin notes that the early version of Pride and Prejudice nearly found a publisher soon after its
writing, and speculates what might have happened if a lazy and incompetent
publisher hadn't passed on the book. With the encouragement and financial
resources that might have resulted from a successful publication, who knows how
many other Austen novels we might have?
Being
the obsessive tracker of obscure authors that I am, I also liked hearing about
Austen's own reading material, which, in addition to featuring some
surprisingly scandalous authors like Fielding and Sterne, included women
writers such as Charlotte Lennox,
Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Hannah Cowley. A promising
beginning for an 18th century Overwhelming List!
I
was also surprised by reading about some of her early writings, and this one,
sent to her brother Francis, takes the cake:
All
her early works were given these dedications to friends and members of the
family, whether present or absent, and she inscribed Jack and Alice to
Francis more than a year after his departure. It must
have made him laugh, this story of a quiet country village with a cast of bad
girls, ambitious, affected, 'Envious, Spitefull & Malicious' as well as 'short, fat and disagreeable'. One girl is found
with her leg broken in a steel mantrap; subsequently she is poisoned by a
rival, and the rival is hanged. The ambitious girl captures an old Duke, the
affected one leaves the country and becomes the favourite of a Mogul prince.
Another village family is so 'addicted to the Bottle & the Dice' that a son dies of drink and a
daughter starts a fight with the local widow, the pious Lady Williams, who is
herself carried home 'dead drunk' after a masquerade. Particular interest is
shown in the effect of drink on women; Jane sagely notes that their heads are
said to be 'not strong enough to support intoxication'. This sounds so like an
older brother's piece of worldly wisdom that it is not surprising Jane crossed
it out; perhaps she and Francis had started on the story together before he
went to sea. Two children intensely curious about the adult world, laughing at
drunkenness, cruelty and death, seem plausible originators of Jack and
Alice. Jane had already faced death when she was away at school, Francis
might now face it even further from home; better to die laughing than be
pitiable, was tough Jane's word for tough Francis.
A Jane Austen tale
featuring boozy widows and spiteful bad girls duking it out in a country
village? Count me in!
It was interesting
(and a bit disappointing) to learn that Chawton cottage, which we hope to be
visiting in mid-October, was turned into a tenement after Cassandra's death,
and that it was only in the late 1940s that it was remodelled and restored to
something approximating its look in Austen's day. But I suppose it's too much
to ask that Austen's pen should still be lying exactly where she left it…
And finally, I have
to share the funniest line of Austen's quoted in the bio. It's from a letter to
her sister Cassandra, and has to do with a young man Jane was thrown together
with in 1798, perhaps with an eye toward marriage. He, at least, seemed to have
had marriage in mind—before even meeting her, in fact—but then did not pursue
his goal. Here's Jane's hilarious formulation of the situation:
Jane was at her sourest explaining
to Cassandra that it was 'most probable that our indifference will soon be
mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me
at first, is best supported by never seeing me.'
Clearly,
Jane must go on my short list of people I'd love to have tea with if the
opportunity arose.
