Recent reading
Aug. 18th, 2022 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI'm a bit behind on my reading posts, so this is the beginning of a catch-up! Since my last post I've also re-read The Wounded Name by D. K. Broster and read Villette by Charlotte Brontë, but I think those both want their own posts—and Villette, a very strange and captivating book, could do with a bit more mulling over before I write about it—so I shall leave them for now.
Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1863). I decided to read this one because a) it had been sitting around on my e-reader for ages, after I read and enjoyed Lady Audley's Secret some years ago and b) I kept mixing it up with Aurora Leigh (the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, quoted at some length by D. K. Broster in The Yellow Poppy), and I thought perhaps if I read them both I'd be able to remember the difference. Anyway! This is a sensation novel, and very excitingly sensational it is. Aurora Floyd, our heroine, is the daughter of a rich banker and an actress of humble origins, whom the banker saw on stage, fell head over heels for and married. Apparently this dubious ancestry makes her a good sensation novel character: she's wilful and cheerfully unconventional, bewitchingly beautiful, passionate about horses and racing, and she has a definite flair for making dramatic and dramatically bad choices in life. Aurora's mother dies when she is a baby, and we meet her as a young woman living with her father at his grand house in Kent and being courted by two rival suitors, a proud Cornishman and a jovial Yorkshireman. But there is a mysterious Dark Secret in Aurora's past, which rears its head to ruin one of her love affairs and turns up again after she marries the other suitor; the drama resulting from this forms the plot of the second two volumes, and finally and rather unexpectedly turns into a murder mystery—an early example, five years before The Moonstone, and it was kind of cool getting to see the mystery/detective genre developing out of the sensation genre in real time, as it were. At last Aurora's secret comes out, with dramatic consequences...
I enjoyed the book; Braddon is very good at sensation novel drama, and as omniscient narrator she often goes off into entertaining long, eloquent tangents on literature, morals and society. (My favourite is one that comes just after Aurora's marriage and amounts to 'well, it's customary for novels to end with the happy marriage, but that's silly! People's lives don't stop being full of interesting incident when they marry; why do we ignore the potential of the rest of our characters' existence? I'm not going to!') It is rather spoiled by some silly prejudices; the main villains of the book, set against Aurora's wealth and happiness, are a widowed and economically precarious governess/companion and an intellectually disabled servant dismissed from his lifelong post, and there could have been a good point in there about how marginalised people become embittered by mistreatment and resort to the wrongs society gives them plenty of incentive to commit, but Braddon takes the simplistic 'nope, they're just evil!' angle, even denying the murderer the more interestingly-complicated motive they could have had.
The Governess; Or, The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding (1749). This is apparently the first purposely-written children's novel in English, as well as the first boarding-school story, so I decided to give it a try and see how that excellent genre began. It takes place at a girls' school run by the aptly-named Mrs Teachum, and is almost mathematically precise in structure. Each chapter takes place during one day, and in each our narrator gives us a description of one girl who then tells her life story, retailing how she used to have some moral fault, which she overcame to become a good, well-behaved eighteenth-century child and model pupil. This is interspersed with stories—fairytales and a play—read by the eldest girl to her classmates, and discussions of the moral lessons to be drawn from each story. It is, er, kind of didactic. Much improving, edifying eighteenth-century morality for young girls is inculcated, some of it good (don't get into fights with your schoolfellows over who should get the nicest apple in the basket; don't be silly and vain; tell the truth; take responsibility for your actions) and some of it horrifying (obey your parents in everything; don't ever dream of the wicked evil of thinking for yourself in anything at all—I'm only slightly exaggerating the wording here; remember that fairytales are sources of moral lessons, and you mustn't get all excited about fantasy stuff like giants and magic because they're not real and that's bad; you can be upset if your cat dies, but don't be too upset because you owe your parents the pleasing sight of a happy, carefree child no matter how you actually feel). An interesting window into the eighteenth-century moral mind; in some ways it feels much like a children's version of A Description of Millenium Hall, with the all-female community engaged in rational and improving occupations and discoursing upon duty and morality amongst themselves and to the reader. Genre-wise, it's clearly a much earlier development than Tom Brown's School Days, with very little plot and only a bit in common with later school stories.
Worrals of the W.A.A.F. by W. E. Johns (1941). Yes, I have been convinced to read W. E. Johns! Not Biggles, though, that's too many books, but the idea of exciting adventure novels with female main characters—and only ten of them—was very appealing, so I gave this one a try. It is indeed a very good exciting adventure novel. Our intrepid heroine, Joan 'Worrals' Worralson, is a pilot in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force who starts the book wishing she had some more exciting things to do than ferrying planes back and forth. Pretty soon she does, as she and her best friend Betty 'Frecks' Lovell uncover a dastardly plot by some German spies and get into increasingly dramatic adventures: they investigate and discover more about the plot; Worrals is kidnapped by the spies and Frecks goes to rescue her; there are hidden airfields and secret passages and cunning plans in plenty. It's a very efficient book: not much more than a hundred pages long, it packs in a lot of twisting and turning action, a surprising amount of character detail and some commentary on the sexism Worrals faces and triumphantly refutes. I especially liked the interaction between Worrals—intrepid, clever and fearless—and Frecks—a bit silly, sometimes afraid but finding courage to save the day and/or Worrals. I wouldn't call it very femslashy, but there are definitely possibilities there. The only thing that slightly marred it for me was a feeling that a then-contemporary Second World War setting is both too recent and too serious for me to enjoy a dramatic adventure novel quite as well as e.g. something written in the nineteenth century and set in the eighteenth. However, it's a good, fun book and I intend to continue with the series!
Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1863). I decided to read this one because a) it had been sitting around on my e-reader for ages, after I read and enjoyed Lady Audley's Secret some years ago and b) I kept mixing it up with Aurora Leigh (the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, quoted at some length by D. K. Broster in The Yellow Poppy), and I thought perhaps if I read them both I'd be able to remember the difference. Anyway! This is a sensation novel, and very excitingly sensational it is. Aurora Floyd, our heroine, is the daughter of a rich banker and an actress of humble origins, whom the banker saw on stage, fell head over heels for and married. Apparently this dubious ancestry makes her a good sensation novel character: she's wilful and cheerfully unconventional, bewitchingly beautiful, passionate about horses and racing, and she has a definite flair for making dramatic and dramatically bad choices in life. Aurora's mother dies when she is a baby, and we meet her as a young woman living with her father at his grand house in Kent and being courted by two rival suitors, a proud Cornishman and a jovial Yorkshireman. But there is a mysterious Dark Secret in Aurora's past, which rears its head to ruin one of her love affairs and turns up again after she marries the other suitor; the drama resulting from this forms the plot of the second two volumes, and finally and rather unexpectedly turns into a murder mystery—an early example, five years before The Moonstone, and it was kind of cool getting to see the mystery/detective genre developing out of the sensation genre in real time, as it were. At last Aurora's secret comes out, with dramatic consequences...
I enjoyed the book; Braddon is very good at sensation novel drama, and as omniscient narrator she often goes off into entertaining long, eloquent tangents on literature, morals and society. (My favourite is one that comes just after Aurora's marriage and amounts to 'well, it's customary for novels to end with the happy marriage, but that's silly! People's lives don't stop being full of interesting incident when they marry; why do we ignore the potential of the rest of our characters' existence? I'm not going to!') It is rather spoiled by some silly prejudices; the main villains of the book, set against Aurora's wealth and happiness, are a widowed and economically precarious governess/companion and an intellectually disabled servant dismissed from his lifelong post, and there could have been a good point in there about how marginalised people become embittered by mistreatment and resort to the wrongs society gives them plenty of incentive to commit, but Braddon takes the simplistic 'nope, they're just evil!' angle, even denying the murderer the more interestingly-complicated motive they could have had.
The Governess; Or, The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding (1749). This is apparently the first purposely-written children's novel in English, as well as the first boarding-school story, so I decided to give it a try and see how that excellent genre began. It takes place at a girls' school run by the aptly-named Mrs Teachum, and is almost mathematically precise in structure. Each chapter takes place during one day, and in each our narrator gives us a description of one girl who then tells her life story, retailing how she used to have some moral fault, which she overcame to become a good, well-behaved eighteenth-century child and model pupil. This is interspersed with stories—fairytales and a play—read by the eldest girl to her classmates, and discussions of the moral lessons to be drawn from each story. It is, er, kind of didactic. Much improving, edifying eighteenth-century morality for young girls is inculcated, some of it good (don't get into fights with your schoolfellows over who should get the nicest apple in the basket; don't be silly and vain; tell the truth; take responsibility for your actions) and some of it horrifying (obey your parents in everything; don't ever dream of the wicked evil of thinking for yourself in anything at all—I'm only slightly exaggerating the wording here; remember that fairytales are sources of moral lessons, and you mustn't get all excited about fantasy stuff like giants and magic because they're not real and that's bad; you can be upset if your cat dies, but don't be too upset because you owe your parents the pleasing sight of a happy, carefree child no matter how you actually feel). An interesting window into the eighteenth-century moral mind; in some ways it feels much like a children's version of A Description of Millenium Hall, with the all-female community engaged in rational and improving occupations and discoursing upon duty and morality amongst themselves and to the reader. Genre-wise, it's clearly a much earlier development than Tom Brown's School Days, with very little plot and only a bit in common with later school stories.
Worrals of the W.A.A.F. by W. E. Johns (1941). Yes, I have been convinced to read W. E. Johns! Not Biggles, though, that's too many books, but the idea of exciting adventure novels with female main characters—and only ten of them—was very appealing, so I gave this one a try. It is indeed a very good exciting adventure novel. Our intrepid heroine, Joan 'Worrals' Worralson, is a pilot in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force who starts the book wishing she had some more exciting things to do than ferrying planes back and forth. Pretty soon she does, as she and her best friend Betty 'Frecks' Lovell uncover a dastardly plot by some German spies and get into increasingly dramatic adventures: they investigate and discover more about the plot; Worrals is kidnapped by the spies and Frecks goes to rescue her; there are hidden airfields and secret passages and cunning plans in plenty. It's a very efficient book: not much more than a hundred pages long, it packs in a lot of twisting and turning action, a surprising amount of character detail and some commentary on the sexism Worrals faces and triumphantly refutes. I especially liked the interaction between Worrals—intrepid, clever and fearless—and Frecks—a bit silly, sometimes afraid but finding courage to save the day and/or Worrals. I wouldn't call it very femslashy, but there are definitely possibilities there. The only thing that slightly marred it for me was a feeling that a then-contemporary Second World War setting is both too recent and too serious for me to enjoy a dramatic adventure novel quite as well as e.g. something written in the nineteenth century and set in the eighteenth. However, it's a good, fun book and I intend to continue with the series!
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Date: Aug. 18th, 2022 05:38 pm (UTC)Delighted that you're giving the Worrals books a try! They're not as femslashy as they could be, which is a pity, but I do enjoy the whole Girls Own Adventure thing they've got going on. More books ought to indulge in secret passages.
I will look forward to your post about Villette! A strange and captivating book indeed.
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Date: Aug. 18th, 2022 07:07 pm (UTC)I quite agree about the secret passages :D And, hey, all the more reason to add the potential femslash in by writing fic, right?
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Date: Aug. 18th, 2022 07:56 pm (UTC)And how fascinating about the origins of girls’ school stories and the way the moral content changed over time. The semi-mathematical structure sounds kind of satisfying to read, too.
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Date: Aug. 19th, 2022 04:18 pm (UTC)It is kind of satisfying! The moralising and 'how characters overcame their flaws and became ideal well-behaved children' stuff is in some ways pretty similar to some later books, but it's presented as didactic description rather than through a plot—definitely interesting to see the development.
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Date: Aug. 18th, 2022 08:13 pm (UTC)I also love Villette and look forward to your thoughts on it!
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