Recent reading
Feb. 14th, 2023 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeHester by Margaret Oliphant (1883). This has just become one of my favourite Victorian novels ever! It revolves around Vernon's, the principal bank of an English provincial town; some years before the story begins, John Vernon, then owner of the bank, led it to the brink of financial ruin and then fled the country, and his cousin Catherine Vernon stepped in, saved the bank through quick thinking and resourcefulness and thence took over the running of it. Now Catherine is in her sixties, retired from the bank and the somewhat-benevolent ruler of the sprawling Vernon clan; John Vernon's widow returns from abroad to the provincial town, along with her teenage daughter Hester. Hester and Catherine clash: they're both very strong and decided personalities, and Hester objects to Catherine's cynical condescension while Catherine objects to Hester's silly impudence. Meanwhile Catherine has passed on the bank to her young cousins Harry (good-natured, not very bright) and Edward (the brains of the operation, restlessly chafing under the restrictions of Catherine's domineering rule), both of whom fall in love with Hester. And a mysterious newcomer from London arrives and starts talking to Edward about the terribly exciting time to be had and large amounts of money to be made by speculating on the stock market...
From Catherine and Hester's first confrontation onward, and through scenes of rivalry, frustration, love, temptation, mystery and so on, Oliphant writes beautifully detailed, complicated and observant descriptions of the characters' emotions and inner lives. This is one of the best aspects of the book, but it's made even better by the highly interesting and often unusual situations to which she applies the talent: a clash of wills and personalities between an old and a young woman, the two most important characters in the book; the complicated and often heartbreaking emotions of difficult family relationships, particularly Catherine and Edward's surrogate mother-son relationship; the general experience of being very young and passionate and embarrassed about everything by turns. Unsurprisingly the novel raises a lot of questions about women's place in life and society, with interesting effect. It goes without saying that both Hester and Catherine are brilliant characters, and I loved them both. Altogether I was thoroughly enjoying it all the way through, but the ending was what really made it. The plot develops towards an exciting climax which did not go where I thought it would, and where it does end up is very unusual, worthy, complicated and generally good. I mean, how many Victorian novels end up with the main female character neither married nor dead? and it doesn't stop there; yes, there's a suggestion that she'll choose one of the two remaining available options, but my reading was definitely that that's a sop to convention and what Hester really wants, and will probably do, is to take over the bank like Catherine did. Highly recommended, and I must check out some more of Oliphant's stuff; the introduction to the edition I read describes her as 'one of the great neglected women writers of the nineteenth century', and I certainly feel like paying her more attention after this.
Fix Bay'nets: The Regiment in the Hills by George Manville Fenn (1899). Another adventure novel, this one following the travails of a British Army regiment in the mountains of northern India. Fenn pretty much completely supports the imperialist context of this and the book is generally racist about it; while I can stand a certain amount of period-typical attitudes or I wouldn't read so much nineteenth-century fiction, I do have limits, and it was definitely an off-putting feature here. Also the prose is not very good and the characterisation all pretty simplistic; but it does have some better features. The main part of the plot focusses on a young officer, Lieutenant Bracy, and a private soldier newly joined up from East London, Bill Gedge, who are devoted to each other in the very proper, manly, class-appropriate ways suitable to their relationship. They rescue each other from deadly peril; Gedge cares for Bracy when he's recovering from a wound; later they're sent together on a perilous mission to carry a dispatch across the mountains and get into various dramatic adventures. There is a certain amount of subversive slash potential here! And in fact my main reason for reading this book was that there is quite a bit of slash fic for it, which I will get round to reading soon. :D
From Catherine and Hester's first confrontation onward, and through scenes of rivalry, frustration, love, temptation, mystery and so on, Oliphant writes beautifully detailed, complicated and observant descriptions of the characters' emotions and inner lives. This is one of the best aspects of the book, but it's made even better by the highly interesting and often unusual situations to which she applies the talent: a clash of wills and personalities between an old and a young woman, the two most important characters in the book; the complicated and often heartbreaking emotions of difficult family relationships, particularly Catherine and Edward's surrogate mother-son relationship; the general experience of being very young and passionate and embarrassed about everything by turns. Unsurprisingly the novel raises a lot of questions about women's place in life and society, with interesting effect. It goes without saying that both Hester and Catherine are brilliant characters, and I loved them both. Altogether I was thoroughly enjoying it all the way through, but the ending was what really made it. The plot develops towards an exciting climax which did not go where I thought it would, and where it does end up is very unusual, worthy, complicated and generally good. I mean, how many Victorian novels end up with the main female character neither married nor dead? and it doesn't stop there; yes, there's a suggestion that she'll choose one of the two remaining available options, but my reading was definitely that that's a sop to convention and what Hester really wants, and will probably do, is to take over the bank like Catherine did. Highly recommended, and I must check out some more of Oliphant's stuff; the introduction to the edition I read describes her as 'one of the great neglected women writers of the nineteenth century', and I certainly feel like paying her more attention after this.
Fix Bay'nets: The Regiment in the Hills by George Manville Fenn (1899). Another adventure novel, this one following the travails of a British Army regiment in the mountains of northern India. Fenn pretty much completely supports the imperialist context of this and the book is generally racist about it; while I can stand a certain amount of period-typical attitudes or I wouldn't read so much nineteenth-century fiction, I do have limits, and it was definitely an off-putting feature here. Also the prose is not very good and the characterisation all pretty simplistic; but it does have some better features. The main part of the plot focusses on a young officer, Lieutenant Bracy, and a private soldier newly joined up from East London, Bill Gedge, who are devoted to each other in the very proper, manly, class-appropriate ways suitable to their relationship. They rescue each other from deadly peril; Gedge cares for Bracy when he's recovering from a wound; later they're sent together on a perilous mission to carry a dispatch across the mountains and get into various dramatic adventures. There is a certain amount of subversive slash potential here! And in fact my main reason for reading this book was that there is quite a bit of slash fic for it, which I will get round to reading soon. :D
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Date: Feb. 14th, 2023 05:38 pm (UTC)And 'Hester' sounds fascinating, I love the idea of the story centred on a bank (what can I say, I am the daughter of two accountants...)
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Date: Feb. 14th, 2023 06:41 pm (UTC)And 'Hester' sounds fascinating, I love the idea of the story centred on a bank (what can I say, I am the daughter of two accountants...)
It is a very interesting setting! And Oliphant makes the most of it for developing characters and relationships (Catherine working and succeeding in a position very unusual for a nineteenth-century woman; Edward being drawn to the allure of stock market gambling; Hester's views on the bank at the end...).
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Date: Feb. 14th, 2023 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Feb. 14th, 2023 07:19 pm (UTC)Margaret Oliphant was on my radar already, I’d downloaded a few of her books from Gutenberg, but hadn't read any of them yet.
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Date: Feb. 15th, 2023 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Feb. 15th, 2023 07:52 pm (UTC)Yeah, I agree! Well, I'll do some more experimenting and see what it's like...
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