DVD commentary: 'Fragments of Her Mind'

[regshoe]

[DVD commentary meme]

For edwardianspinsteraunt, a DVD commentary of my Howards End fic 'Fragments of Her Mind'.

Fragments of Her Mind

This story was written as a treat for Yuletide 2023, and was a fun piece of reciprocal inspiration: I have long thought that Howards End is really a ghost story and I said so in one of my reviews ages ago, then edwardianspinsteraunt quoted that comment in her Yuletide letter and prompted for actual ghost fic, then I thought, yes, I should write that! So I did.

The title is paraphrased from canon:

“Yes,” repeated Helen, her voice growing more tender, “I do at last understand.”

“Except Mrs. Wilcox, dearest, no one understands our little movements.”

“Because in death—I agree.”

“Not quite. I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness. I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine. She knew about realities....”

She knew about realities: isn't that just it? <3

Margaret was sitting in the shade of the wych-elm, knitting one of a pair of socks for little Ernie

I spent a while considering whether Helen would name him Leonard and decided she wouldn't, from the way she talks about Leonard at the end of the book. So he's Ern(e)st, after the Schlegels' father.

After one of these pauses she happened to glance towards the near side of the house, to the tangle of grasses and weeds and cracked brickwork which two summers had made of the old garage. They kept no motor at Howards End now (Margaret increasingly disliked them, and even Henry had to admit that it was hardly necessary, with the railway so nearby), and the decay of the garage had been allowed to go on largely uninterrupted...

Forster's anti-car stance is genuinely one of his most endearing features as an author. (I love E. W. Hornung, but as a contemporary author this is one area where he is sadly lacking, in contrast.) So of course I had to treat the garage at Howards End, which used to be the paddock for the pony, symbolically here.

As she looked, the figure of a woman in a brown dress appeared by the further corner of the garage and walked slowly round towards the back of the house.

I re-read the book in preparation for writing this, having a vague idea in my head of building up from Margaret's vague sense of Ruth's presence to an actual ghost, and commented in my planning notes: 'Having finished my re-read, I think there's a bit of a difficulty here in that almost everything up to the actual appearance of the ghost is already there in canon!' Opening the fic with the first actual appearance of the ghost was therefore the natural choice.

She supposed that it was Miss Avery, of course. [...] ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen her, have you? I do see her, sometimes....’

I am fascinated by the connection in canon between Ruth and Miss Avery. This story was focussed on Ruth and Margaret, and so Miss Avery is only a side character, but it seemed appropriate, firstly to have her able to see Ruth's ghost and quite comfortable with the fact of her presence, and secondly to introduce the ghost to Margaret via a confusion of identities.

For some time she was content, deeply absorbed in her book; it dealt with the folklore and customs of Tuscany, the author being an intelligent and observant English lady who lived in that country, and its deep shady chestnut woods and warm blue seas banished the cold of this northern winter’s day for a little while.

This is Tuscan Folk-lore and Sketches by Isabella M. Anderton (1905), which I had read as research for a Raffles fic set in Tuscany a couple of years before this. I wanted a book for Margaret to be reading and it occurred to me as something she might enjoy (of course Italian travel is an appropriate subject for any Forster character), and I like making unexpected fandom connections like that.

the great beam across the ceiling (from which the match-board had lately been removed: Helen had kept saying how great a shame it was that it didn’t match the other rooms, and then laughing hilariously at her own accidental pun)

The pun was initially accidental on my part too; I thought that suited Helen.

'Hilarious' has an interesting etymological history, having sort of turned backwards over time: in the nineteenth century it referred to the person finding things funny or being generally merry and laughing, and then flipped over to mean the things being found funny in the twentieth. Making my writing totally period-accurate is a never-ending and impossible task, but I like finding odd little bits of historical language like that to include.

The sense of presence and purpose which Margaret had felt on seeing the house, and had understood better during that first night which she and Helen had spent here together, had not left her in the long months since.

The ghost story really is all there in the book!

Auntie Meg laid down her book and extended her own arms to intercept her nephew in his wobbly career across the room.

Names are like epithets when used meaningfully, in that there's a lot of potential in using different names within a scene for contrast or humour.

She still had her shawl, but her dress was not adequate for weather like this. Margaret flew to the door, opened it and asked whether she wouldn’t come inside?

I always enjoy perfectly sensible logic that deals with deeply weird happenings in very mundane ways.

‘I used to make them, when I was a girl,’ remarked Mrs Wilcox, inspecting the griddle. ‘Of course there was none of that later; Henry didn’t like me to do any cooking myself; it was the servants’ work.’

‘It’s Mrs Coleman’s afternoon off,’ explained Margaret, feeling slightly mad. ‘But I’ve grown rather fond of these little experiments. One does get so domestic... I’m afraid these are a failure, however; they won’t hold their shape.’ She gestured towards an especially collapsed specimen.

The crumpets were inspired by some my mum happened to be making at the time (I've not attempted them myself). The batter is too thin to form the shape of a crumpet on its own, so you have to pour it into a ring-shaped mould placed in the frying pan, then take off the mould in order to flip the crumpets over—timing it right so that they're cooked enough not to collapse but not yet overdone on the bottom. Intricate, but tasty.

edwardianspinsteraunt had listed 'a focus on the domestic and the everyday' among her likes in the Yuletide letter, and I enjoyed imagining Margaret in a more rustic domestic setting than she gets in London. And then, given the context of the house, talking about and sharing small domestic things would be a natural way for her and Ruth to start connecting more clearly.

She felt that the old Wickham Place furniture, and the uncovered beam in the drawing-room, and the cracked brickwork of the garage, and the wych-elm, were truer confidants than any of the people in the house, however much she loved them.

I highlighted two passages in the book while re-reading in preparation for this fic. One was Margaret's explanation of her opinions about supernatural 'fads' of the day in chapter 17, which provided the paragraph before this one; the other was this speech in chapter 15:

“I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.”

—which also made it into the final scene. Curse of London it may be, but I think this ends up being true for her in a better way than that.

Also, that wych-elm does keep coming up.

The place had accepted Henry’s help, had needed him to save it, but it was stronger without him, and showed the fact without false modesty, as it had once acknowledged its need of him without false pride.

I like this piece of phrasing, and I think I did a decent job at summarily killing off Henry to get rid of him in a way that's somewhat in harmony with his role in canon.

‘Oh, now, that looks very curious,’ said Ruth, pointing out a book halfway up one of the stacks that surrounded them where they knelt on the hearthrug. ‘Geographical Etymology: A Dictionary of Place-Names... what is that?’

1) edwardianspinsteraunt is a linguist, and I thought it would be fun to include something related to her interests in the story, 2) I had the good fortune to stumble on a relevant book from roughly the right period by a female academic, which seemed appropriate and 3) it also struck me, to quote again from my notes document, that 'this is a particularly good way to find an intersection between Margaret's intellectual/cultural interests (linguistics as a science, literary detail, etc.) and Ruth's instinctive knowledge of and love for the land (local detail, specific history, one square mile etc.)'. So that worked out really rather neatly!

A few minutes’ further perusal found Heidelberg, which was perhaps named for “the hell of the pagans”, or perhaps only for a myrtle bush.

This sentence is a straightforward summary of what Blackie actually says about the name Heidelberg (which I picked firstly for its alphabetical proximity to Hilton and its canon-relevance), and I was slightly bewildered at how Forsterian it turned out sounding without my having tried.

‘Oh, there are the names of old pagan kings—animals or trees that a place used to be known for—places where the Danes settled in Anglo-Saxon England—all sorts of ancient things, preserved in our sight and hearing, as it were—like—’ She had been about to say, like ghosts.

Whoops! Of course it would be rude to state the themes of the story too explicitly, Margaret.

The night was dark: she saw nothing beyond her own face reflected softly by window-pane and candlelight, and only the sound of the rain, falling on the roof or the last clinging leaves of the wych-elm or the expanse of the meadow or the ruins of the garage, distinguished the variety with which Howards End accepted it.

Another line in which I particularly like the arrangement of ideas. Also, significant slightly-indistinct reflections are one of those motifs I keep coming back to; there was one in the first ever fic I posted, and I think Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is probably responsible for the fascination. Actually, JSMN and HE (and Maurice also) are books that kind of do have things to say to each other, or are interesting to read alongside each other.

She took Ruth’s hand in both her own, feeling her wrinkled skin and the unliving not-quite-warmth of the blood beneath it—still a little strange, but reassuring.

I remember saying of The Warm Hands of Ghosts that one of the things that didn't quite work for me in it was the idea of ghosts having warm hands, and hence feeling just like living people when you touch them—ghosts should be cold and insubstantial and definitely not living people but still present, that's what makes them compelling. And yet making too much of that detachment does make it rather difficult to write happy shipfic about them, and thus perhaps this compromise.

So, slowly, Ruth leaned up towards Margaret, and Margaret stepped closer to her, and their lips met in a kiss as sweet as that of any ghostly lover ever was.

Perhaps I meant this to be slightly ironic; kisses of ghostly lovers are often not at all sweet in the ballads. But happily our heroine is not Fair Margaret, and so I think it works.

Outside, the meadow and the wych-elm and the hedgerow and the paddock went on receiving the rain. The one lighted window—very dimly lighted, around its drawn curtains, but nevertheless visible—watched them in the darkness for a while.

Aha, the paddock has regained its identity! >:D


So there you go! I do really like this story; I've enjoyed revisiting it, and I was reading through it thinking, perhaps I should do more Howards End stuff... and now the schedule for rarefemslashexchange has just gone up. How convenient.

Comments

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

Thank you for making this for me - it’s a really excellent commentary, and is reminding me how much I love this fic! <3

Your reasoning behind the name of Helen’s son makes total sense!

I am fascinated by the connection in canon between Ruth and Miss Avery.
I really love how you explore that here!

'Hilarious' has an interesting etymological history, having sort of turned backwards over time
What a great historical language use detail!

<33 at the discussion of places versus people, and the way Howards End is in its own way a confidant for Margaret. I absolutely agree that the way you killed off Henry was tonally and thematically appropriate, btw.

I also love the insight into your writing process! Do you usually make planning notes when working on a project? :)

And ooh, Rare Femslash Ex! Do you have any idea what Howards End femslash pairings you might nominate for that one?

[regshoe]

Thank you :D

I also love the insight into your writing process! Do you usually make planning notes when working on a project? :)

Yes—I usually do a few paragraphs/lists of sketching out ideas, briefly explaining the plot and sort of talking to myself about the logic, characterisation and themes, so I can get the basic stuff sorted out in my head before starting to write. Sometimes I'll include a few particularly important lines I want to include in later scenes, if I come up with them early on. (And for an exchange fic, I'll copy in relevant parts from the request/letter and talk about what prompt I want to write/how I'll incorporate this or that idea, etc.)

And ooh, Rare Femslash Ex! Do you have any idea what Howards End femslash pairings you might nominate for that one?

All of them? :D I haven't thought about it properly yet, we'll see.