Flight of the Heron read-along: Part I chapters 1-2

[regshoe]

Hark! now the drums they beat again for all good soldiers, gentlemen...

Welcome back to the Flight of the Heron read-along! This week we read the first two proper chapters, and meet Keith Windham—and Keith meets Ewen Cameron.

As you'll have noticed, Broster is fond of including both Gaelic and Scots words in dialogue; this online Gaelic-English dictionary and this one for Scots may be of use if you'd like to look anything up.

Next week we will continue with chapters 3 and 4.

Comments

[luzula]

it would have worked far better as foreshadowing in your alternate history AU than it does here :D

Ha ha, well, in my head all of canon up until Fassefern is still relevant for that AU, it's just that I didn't want to retell it!

I absolutely love the tiny bit of Aunt Margaret and Keith interacting that we get in chapter 2.

Me too! "I have that disability", ha.

Here's an excerpt from that book about sexual attitudes in the 18th century that I read a few months ago, comparing Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding:

"From the beginning of his career, Fielding wrote his novels in conscious opposition to those of Richardson, explicitly repudiating his style, tone, and plots. In real life, too, the two authors belonged to markedly different sexual milieux. Richardson, the buttoned-up, barely educated, middle-class tradesman, surrounded himself with adoring, virtuous women, was proud of never even having met an unchaste one, and addressed himself at least as much to a female as a male audience. Fielding, by contrast, was an Etonian gentleman and lawyer, the son of a libertine, the near relation of powerful aristocrats and courtiers. As a young man, he lived the rakish, promiscuous existence of a West End playwright; in middle age, he impregnated (and ended up marrying) his maid; towards the end of his life, as a magistrate, he immersed himself daily in the sordid circumstances of bawdry and sexual trade. His was an upper-class, libertine, masculine world -reflected, his contemporary critics thought, in the character of his writing. Richardson himself, Samuel Johnson, and Charles Burney all deplored Fielding’s ‘loose life, and the profligacy of almost all his male characters. Who would venture to read one of his novels aloud to modest women? His novels are male amusements.’ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the two writers have long been held up as moral opposites. At first sight, Fielding’s ethics do look quite different. On the surface, his work conveyed a worldly acceptance of male sexual freedom that enraged pious readers. It also featured sexually experienced women who were ardent, seductive, and dangerous to men. [...] Yet, for all his levity and bawdy banter, Fielding’s underlying attitudes towards lust and seduction were remarkably close to those of his great rival. He shared their culture’s basic presumptions that, in general, men pursued women; that female innocence was constantly under threat from masculine wiles; and that fallen women were the victims of libertine seducers."

[regshoe]

That book excerpt is very interesting indeed—I was going to say I really must read more eighteenth-century fiction, and I do want to, but actually, thinking of what I'm already reading, Mademoiselle de Richelieu is pretty interesting to consider in that context too. Anyway, thank you for sharing!