Farewell, Victorian Celebration. Welcome, Lazy August

This is the last day of Allie's two-month Victorian Celebration, so it's time for a wrap-up post. First of all, we would like to thank Allie for organizing this event. We had less time to dedicate to it than we would have liked, but, nonetheless, we are very happy to have participated. To tell you the truth, it kept us blogging. We both had a complicated couple of months in real life and, if not for this commitment we'd made to read a handful of Victorians in June and July, we're not sure we would have had the drive or the energy to continue with the blog. So, thanks, Victorians, for not letting us quit.

Now on to the main attraction of the Victorian Celebration: other people's posts. We enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts and added quite a few books to our TBR piles in the process. And, with the caveat that we didn't have a lot of time to check everything (especially on new-to-us blogs), there were a few series that we absolutely loved and want to highlight:

• Fanda's excursions into Victorian London: Fanda set out to explore Victorian London as depicted in Dickens' Sketches by Boz, covering popular pastimes, occupations, transportation etc. We loved this project for its nice historical glimpses - useful & enjoyable even if one isn't that much into Dickens.
• Allie's Author Focus: Allie profiled some of the most important Victorian writers: Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, Collins and the Brontes. Sometimes it's nice to have this sort of broad overview of an author's life and work, and with every post, we felt like we were slowly mapping out the Victorian period.
• O's reading organized by decade: we are not quite sure when o from Délaissé sleeps, but she read something from every decade of the Victorian period for this event, and wrote eloquently about the books she read. She's an inspiration. Also, check out this post for some very interesting thoughts on one of those decades (the 1870s).
• Becky's reviews of the Jane Eyre movies: this is one of the most helpful things the internet has thrown at us lately. Becky watched ten film adaptations of Jane Eyre, reviewed them individually and then compared their strengths and weaknesses. It's a great project and we're very grateful to Becky for her recommendations.

Okay, so that's how awesome people spent their Victorian Celebration. What did we do? Well..., we started with a list, completely ignored it in June, and then tried to catch up by reading & reviewing the following things in July:

• Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 
• An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
• Daniel Deronda by George Eliot 
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
• What Maisie Knew by Henry James
• Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
• The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton 
• How to Marry An English Lord by Gail McColl and Carol Wallace

As you can see, we're still four books short of the original list:

• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (to be read in August)
  
• Charles Darwin, On the Origins of Species (started but not yet finished)
• A.S. Byatt, Possession (to be read in August in a Goodreads buddy read)
  
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (unappetizing. maybe someday?)

We'll cover these books in the near future (and we're not quite talked out about the already-reviewed titles either). Also, Claudia won Villette in a giveaway organized by Kristi from Kristi Loves Books (thanks, Kristi!) so that will be one of the books discussed in August.

We're not going to lie. This challenge has been much fun and got us through a blogging slump, but we're sort of looking forward to an August of less-scheduled reading too. What about you? What did you read? What posts from the Victorian Celebration did you like? What do you plan to read in August?

Reviews: The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton and To Marry An English Lord by Gail McColl and Carol Wallace

Today I'm wrapping up my reading for A Victorian Celebration with a joint review of two books that complement each other wonderfully, and thus must be reviewed together: The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton and To Marry An English Lord by Gail McColl and Carol Wallace.

As I'm sure you've noticed, astute readers, neither book was written in the Victorian period, although both discuss a most peculiar and fascinating aspect of the late Victorian period: the mad dash of American heiresses across the pond to marry members of the English nobility. Many of these marriages were mercenary at heart on both sides--dollar princesses trading their fortunes for marriage to cash-strapped, but titled, English gentlemen in need of money to support vast estates and other trappings of aristocratic life.

The Buccaneers offers a fictional look at the privileges and pitfalls faced by one of the first bands of American girls to go husband-seeking in England. Edith Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937. It was later published posthumously, with the ending completed by Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring, drawing from Wharton's notes. To Marry An English Lord offers a look at the real-life heiresses that inspired Wharton's fictional tale (she borrowed heavily from the lives of New York society girls in her orbit) and thus offers a delicious counterpart to the novel.

Because we've got twice the territory to cover here, I'm going to keep things short and sweet in my reviews. Here we go!

The Buccaneers: Pros and Cons

The Buccaneers is somewhat of a departure from Wharton's normal writing style. Here she adopts a dizzying multi-narrator style, with the story switching perspectives through a host of characters, including multiple American heiresses and their mothers, several British gentlemen, and one very loyal British governess, just to name the main players. The characters are both the story's biggest strength and its weakness--they aren't as finely drawn as Wharton's memorable figures from earlier works (Annabel St. George, the main heroine, is no Lily Bart). Yet, although the portraits are more superficial, they are nonetheless satisfying and keep the reader engaged through the various plot twists and turns.

It's clear the novel was very much a work in progress at the time of Wharton's death--the writing feels unfinished, the social commentaries (always Wharton's great strength) sketchier. However, the elegance of Wharton's writing remains and some of her passages about English life and the English countryside are just magnificent. And, for her part, Mainwaring does an admirable job finishing out the final quarter of the novel in a very credible imitation of Wharton's writing style.

The Buccaneers: The Bottom Line

Overall I give The Buccaneers 5 out of 5 stars. Now, I am something of an Edith Wharton groupie, so do keep that in mind here. But, quibbles aside, the story is a lovely one and it offers a fascinating portrait of the strange joys and sorrows known to young American girls living in England in the heady days of the Gilded Age. 

To Marry an English Lord: Pros and Cons

Do me a favor. If you're now intrigued by The Buccaneers, do not read it until you've first read To Marry an English Lord--or at the very least, the first few chapters of this great nonfiction book. Why? To Marry offers a fascinating inside look of the many real figures that Wharton borrowed liberally from to create her band of buccaneers. One part-gossip column, one part-historical analysis, To Marry is a treasure in its own right to be sure, but it also makes The Buccaneers a much richer and rewarding book to enjoy. With amusing details about New York and London society, the mores of the British upper-class, and the husband-hunting tactics of American heiresses, To Marry is a fun and informative read--and a real-life primer for The Buccaneers.

To Marry an English Lord: The Bottom Line

I give To Marry an English Lord 4 out of 5 stars. Why does it lose a star after I've raved about it so much? Style points, really. The authors adopt a snarky tone at times that becomes a little grating and detracts from the book. But that's really splitting hairs on an awesome read. It's a perfect one for the last month of summer, hint, hint...

Review: What Maisie Knew by Henry James

I was going to start this review by explaining how reading Henry James is like eating the most delicious, delicate and non-crumby pastry you've ever had: you're enjoying the flavor and at the same time wondering at the skill that made it all possible. Me being me, however, a great lover of pastry and Henry James, it all turned to food porn and I had to delete it. But this is the impression rereading What Maisie Knew left me with. I felt like I was given a dessert. This is a book that's shorter and perhaps lighter than some of James' masterpieces, but no less accomplished.

The Subject

As he explains in the preface*, James drew his idea for the novel from a dinner conversation in which the strange fate of a little girl used as ammunition in the war between her divorced parents was mentioned. In a decision unusual for that period, the child's custody was shared and she was to spend half a year with each of her parents. While at first they were both eager to take revenge on the other by depriving them of the child's company, at some point one of them remarried and the situation changed. The responsibility for the child became a punishment fit to be inflicted on the ex-spouse and the two irresponsible parents outdid each other in trying to get rid of their charge. This is the core on which James built the story of Maisie, a girl whose childhood was spent "rebounding from racquet to racquet like a tennis-ball or a shuttlecock" in the power games between her parents and, later, her stepparents as well.

The subject is surprisingly modern, and James, being James, wraps it in layers upon layers of elegant language and meaning. Maisie, his young heroine, is raised in an environment marked by high-class immorality (meaning selfishness, lies and adultery abound, but outright criminal offenses do not). In a way, she knows the things that go on around her. She is a direct witness to them and she's a very sensitive child. But in a different and very important way, she doesn't know them, because she can't yet grasp their moral value. Her factual knowledge seems to much exceed her moral knowledge, and this raises interesting questions about both knowledge and morality.

What Maisie Knew and Henry Told Us

This discrepancy between the things Maisie sees and her ability to interpret them is the driving force of the novel and the major source of its delicious irony. But the most interesting aspect of James' strategy is that he doesn't entirely limit his narrator to Maisie's perspective. We see the exact portion of the world Maisie sees, but we are allowed to make more of it than Maisie ever could. After all, Maisie can hardly be aware of her own ignorance or signal it to us. So Henry James finds a way for us to have our pastry cake and eat it too. We have a narrator that excels at capturing nuances and playing with various styles  (like the legalese/high-society gossip mix in the first chapter), but then this narrator  seems content to adjust his own perspective to reflect that of Maisie and borrow some of her concepts. It's one of the most charming juxtaposition of sophistication and ingenuity in a narrative voice I have ever seen.

But there is a second reason it's important to have a voice distinct from Maisie's tell the story. There is a certain ambiguity building as the story progresses. Maisie keeps learning more and more things about the world, and at some point one starts to wonder, what does she know? Is there a point at which she becomes aware of the moral implications of the things she's seeing? The evasive impersonal narrator is essential to maintaining this uncertainty to the very end, when we get to see a test of Maisie's moral faculty.

My Favorite Passage

This book contains one of my favorite passages from the whole of literature:

[...] it had taken her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick survey of the objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them was no appurtenance of Sir Claude's. She knew his dressing-bag now—oh with the fondest knowledge!—and there was an instant during which its not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn what it could be to recognise in some lapse of a sequence the proof of an extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang was a foretaste of the experience of death.

The feeling you get when you don't find the familiar signs of someone's presence is a foretaste of the experience of death. This moves me every time I think of it.

The Bottom Line

I feel I can never be eloquent enough in praising Henry James. What Maisie Knew is one of my favorite books, so 5 out of 5 stars and endless squeeing are a given. But, more than that, if you are looking for a good gateway drug to James, this book could be it. It has all the wonderful features of his style, but it's less dense than some of his other books.

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*What Maisie Knew was published in 1897 and is copyright free. You can find it online on Project Gutenberg among other places, but beware, most of the editions floating on the internet lack James' preface discussing the inception of the book and his narrative strategy. I am of the school that thinks the author's intentions are more entertaining trivia than indispensable instruments to reading, but still, there is no reason to deprive oneself of entertaining trivia. Here's a link to the preface.

Eminent Victorians: My Favorite Portrait

What's a footnote?

One of the best aspects of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians is his talent to succinctly and eloquently portray people that play secondary parts in the "plot" of our heroes' lives. Cardinal Newman, Sir Evelyn Baring, Gladstone, Lord Panmure, Lord Hartington, they all have a quality to them that is better than life. Reduced to a handful of traits, they are interesting in the way literary characters are. The elegance and intelligence of Strachey's style makes historical truths almost superfluous. (Might this be an occasion to use that nice proverb, se non è vero, è ben trovato - if it's not true, it still makes for a good story?)

The best example of this is the portrait of Monsignor Talbot, a secretary to Pope Pius IX. I think a lot of writers would be proud to have written this passage. It is perfect, down to the punchline:

Monsignor Talbot was a priest who embodied in a singular manner, if not the highest, at least the most persistent traditions of the Roman Curia. He was master of various arts which the practice of ages has brought to perfection under the friendly shadow of the triple tiara. He could mingle together astuteness and holiness without any difficulty; he could make innuendoes as naturally as an ordinary man makes statements of fact; he could apply flattery with so unsparing a hand that even Princes of the Church found it sufficient; and, on occasion, he could ring the changes of torture on a human soul with a tact which called forth universal approbation. With such accomplishments, it could hardly be expected that Monsignor Talbot should be remarkable either for a delicate sense of conscientiousness or for an extreme refinement of feeling, but then it was not for those qualities that Manning was in search when he went up the winding stair. He was looking for the man who had the ear of Pio Nono; and, on the other side of the low-arched door, he found him. Then he put forth all his efforts; his success was complete; and an alliance began which was destined to have the profoundest effect upon Manning’s career, and was only dissolved when, many years later, Monsignor Talbot was unfortunately obliged to exchange his apartment in the Vatican for a private lunatic asylum at Passy.

If you want to read more, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, is copyright free and available on a good number of sites on the internet. Like here. Or here. Or here. (Okay, okay, I'll stop now.)

Review: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Thus begins the preface to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. The Victorian Age was no more than two decades away when this book was published, and its shadow was still very much in the room. How to depict a period that was too close for historical perspective? How to capture its spirit without getting hopelessly entangled in the web of information available about it? Strachey's answer is to rely on individual lives as on some sort of historical flashlights, to use them to illuminate larger trends of the 19th century. To see what the Victorian Age was really like, one's best bet is to look not at history directly, but at history filtered through biography. In other words, to see what the Victorian Age was really like, one has to find out what some of most eminent Victorians were like, how they lived and under what circumstances their individual lives got entwined with the flow of history.

This might, at a first glance, sound like a pretentious or boring endeavor. It's nothing of the sort. Strachey has that gift of selecting details that make both history and biography come alive. His voice is wry, irreverent and endlessly entertaining. If you've read André Maurois' History of England or Indro Montanelli's History of Rome or History of the Greeks, you might be familiar with the style. (And if you haven't read them, they are highly recommended. They are charming and funny and make reading history a pleasure. Montanelli in particular can make one laugh till they cry. And by "one" I mean "me," and by "can" mean "totally have.")

Here is a sample of Strachey's wit, the target being Florence Nightingale:

Review: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

So who could have predicted that after expressing what bugged me the most about this book I'd lose interest in it and never finish the proper review? But well, after a solid week or two of procrastination, here I am, returned to both Wilkie Collins and this poor neglected blog. And I've come back to tell you that I really didn't like The Woman in White that much. 

Now, I am not a fan of mystery novels in general. When I read mystery, I have one of two reactions to it. The first is boredom. I wish I could say I am one of those astute readers that figure everything out from page two and then spend the rest of the book yelling at the characters to smarten up. I am not. I never figure anything out, but I just don't care. I just wish the mystery plot would go away and the characters would do something interesting for a change. (Which is precisely why four-year-old me was bored to tears by the whole catching-villains part of Scooby-Doo, but got reasonably invested in the idea Fred and Daphne were meant for each other. And by "reasonably invested" I mean I would have written fan fiction of it, had I known fan fiction existed.)  

But sometimes, with some books, I get a totally different reaction and I am afraid that reaction is best described as complete mental unraveling. I am not made for suspense. If I'm really invested in a book, don't know where it is going, but do know that it might end badly, I won't enjoy it. I will just get sick to my stomach. (Which, by the way, is why spoilers are good.) This is usually the case with books that feature some great injustice done to the characters. No amount of happy resolutions can make up for the agony of my reading experience. So you see, between "Meh." and "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, J. McAuthor?",  I really don't have a lot of things to look forward to from mystery novels and I usually avoid them.

Mistaken First Impressions? 

The reason I told you all this was not, contrary to all appearances, because I wanted to confess to shipping Scooby-Doo characters. It was because I wanted my bias to be clear when it came to this book. The Woman in White did not start with the best chances. I am afraid its first section did nothing to improve those chances either. It had some bad, bad writing. Until I got to the second section and realized that the clichéd writing had been a feature, not a bug; that it had reflected the writing skills of the character narrating that part of the story and not Collins' own abilities, I doubted my wisdom in choosing this book. But then things started to look up. 

The multiple narrators are this book's best feature. The fact that Collins can play with Walter's romantic and affected prose, with Marian's direct and compelling style and with the distinct voices of so many secondary characters is, hands down, an achievement. The high point of the entire book for me was Mr. Fairlie's section. His self-absorbed, whiny tone managed to be entertaining, even though I knew that his comical selfishness was actually putting his nieces' lives in danger.

Not only that Collins created an unique voice and background for each character, but, in the first part, he managed to do so without any costs to the plot or the pacing of the story. There were no elements extraneous to the plot and little overlapping between the sections narrated by each character. So it moved briskly along, and I was charmed. I was even briefly sucked into the story and started the dreaded complete mental unraveling spiral. I suffered along with Marian and wished the villains punished. If things had continued this way, I would have loved this book (and probably gotten sick to my stomach from the suspense too). But they didn't.

The Disappointing Second Half

Everything that was good in the first half was undone in the second. The problems all stemmed from the fact that once Walter returned and saved the two sisters, there was basically nothing at stake anymore. We knew what happened. We knew the villains' plan and its outcome. All that was left was to a. figure out all the details of the villains' motivations and b. force society to acknowledge a story that we, as readers, already knew. Neither objective is too fascinating to watch unfold. As a result, there is hardly any tension to the second part, especially once it becomes clear that the story is rapidly moving toward a happy ending.

Unfortunately, this also means that the perfect synchrony between the narrating voices and the plot breaks down. You get characters repeating parts of the story we already heard and it's dragging the pace down. Fosco's confession is close to useless in the story's economy. There is no reason to have it in full, because at this point in the story the readers either knew or guessed most of the things in it. The character himself is on his way out and has been absent for hundreds of pages, so a focus on his characterization is also a little misplaced. The whole thing is just anti-climactic, the way the villains' punishments were anti-climactic too. 

The Bottom Line

I wouldn't call this a bad book, but I can't in all honesty say it was a particularly good book either. Even working past my dislike for the genre, The Woman in White disappointed me. I would normally give it 2 out of 5 stars, but since it provided me with a good chance to rant about gender roles and some things to ponder in the future, I will give it 3 stars.