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nineveh_ukI am finding the writing of a review of The Attenbury Emeralds rather intimidating. Where does one start beyond “someone is wrong in these pages”? But I shall do it. In the meantime, some brief thoughts on other recent consumption.
Faust, Gounod Someone once wrote of Goethe's Faust, that it is, among other ridiculous things, the story of a pure innocent young woman who is so virtuous that she sleeps with the first man to leave an enormous jewel casket on her doorstep. I can sort of see his point. But hearing it for the first time in English and in a surprisingly non-clunky translation considering the amount of rhyme, it also struck me that it is the story of two people socially conditioned to be polite who are unable to get rid of the person who is hassling them, because that would lead to accusations that they are being rude. Faust sells his soul because it seems less difficult than insisting that Mephistopheles go away, Marguerite goes to bed with Faust because she feels bad about telling him to sod off and come back in the morning. Marguerite’s eventual salvation is a triumph of learning to be rude in self-defence. Oh, and the music is gorgeous.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean Did Dean name herself after the character in Murder Must Advertise? But I digress. I wanted to like this, and I liked aspects of it a lot. The campus novel element is good fun, even if the students are less realistic portraits of students than Lord Peter Wimsey is of the interwar British aristocracy. It was around page 300 that I realised not one of them had had an alcoholic drink in the whole book, not even the Antisocial Pot Smokers, although I did like the depiction of Janet’s casual callousness towards Tina, with its assumption of effortless superiority reflecting that of the Medeous crowd who annoy her in the same way. I didn’t find the supernatural element convincing – it felt bolted-on and the end undercooked. There needed either to be more of it with better integration into the narrative, or it simply be a metaphor. Carleton College (Blackstock) sounds lovely, though.
These Old Shades, Georgette Heyer I am not a big fan of Heyer’s C18 novels, but enjoyed this a lot. I think it was due to the general absence of “Came my lady”, which makes my teeth grind. Leonie and Avon and Fanny were all great fun, though I felt Saint-Vire’s nefarious plotting left something to be desired. If you want an heir to cut your brother out of the inheritance it is probably best to start by picking a wife who has three elder sisters with twelve children between them, not a scrawny girl with cash. The whole thing strikes me as interesting from a queer theory point of view!
Downton Abbey Amiable Sunday evening shiny pudding that will do nicely as we slide into the more blustery parts of Autumn, suffering a bit from slow pacing, and from similar problems to the above, to whit that some of the plot requires people to be idiots. As the above, it could easily be got round by a short sentence showing that the writer had at least thought of the issue:
(i) Heiresses have fathers. Fathers of heiresses have lawyers. Said lawyers say “no-one is signing anything that potentially gives your fortune, Mr Iron-and-Steel, to some random third cousin if the groom proves not to be up to it.”
(ii) Is the Earl of Grantham intended to be shown as a spineless jellyfish incapable of saying to his butler, “I appreciate the situation needs a little management, but I thought you were up to it. If you’re not then I quite understand you will wish to look for a new post. Oh, you think there isn’t a problem now? Glad to hear it.”
(iii) If you’re going to blackmail someone it is a bad idea if the blackmail material incriminates you as much as the target, especially if you’re not the one with friends in high places.
Janie of La Rochelle and Janie Steps in, EBD I enjoy Brent-Dyer on domestic life. She hasn’t a clue about families, but she is entertaining about households. Janie and Julian were surprisingly non-vomitous and even allowed to be physically affectionate, though Julian’s control streak is rather off-putting. No wonder Harriet Vane is cagey if that’s the romantic ideal of marriage! Also I can’t find Janie a saint for allowing her maids a short break at 11:30am when they have been making jam since 6am. I’m glad to finally read the explanation of the Beth Chester situation, even if it is utterly nonsensical. I can cope with the bent solicitor – they were about, and indeed my grandfather’s family lost all their money to one, not that they had this sort of quantity. But this particular bent solicitor doesn’t make sense, as the (apparently permanent) lost income is from rents, not shares, which would have required him to sell the property itself and I’m not sure how he’d actually manage this. Also, they lost the money two years ago, and furniture doesn’t get like that in two years unless you are boosting the family income with weekly orgies and the scrubbing is taking its toll. I love the story of why Beth has a rotten time at school, too: “Well the school is academically excellent but attended only by the children of tradespeople who either talk about sex or want to leave lovely Guernsey as soon as possible – why would anyone want to do that, but then they are lowly people one would never speak to or have anything to do with – so naturally we don’t allow Beth to have anything to do with them to the extent of not allowing her to talk to them anywhere beyond the school gate and not letting her make friends with them, and these disgustingly little toerags have the effrontery to call her a snob!” One can sympathise with Beth, but not the parents.
Faust, Gounod Someone once wrote of Goethe's Faust, that it is, among other ridiculous things, the story of a pure innocent young woman who is so virtuous that she sleeps with the first man to leave an enormous jewel casket on her doorstep. I can sort of see his point. But hearing it for the first time in English and in a surprisingly non-clunky translation considering the amount of rhyme, it also struck me that it is the story of two people socially conditioned to be polite who are unable to get rid of the person who is hassling them, because that would lead to accusations that they are being rude. Faust sells his soul because it seems less difficult than insisting that Mephistopheles go away, Marguerite goes to bed with Faust because she feels bad about telling him to sod off and come back in the morning. Marguerite’s eventual salvation is a triumph of learning to be rude in self-defence. Oh, and the music is gorgeous.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean Did Dean name herself after the character in Murder Must Advertise? But I digress. I wanted to like this, and I liked aspects of it a lot. The campus novel element is good fun, even if the students are less realistic portraits of students than Lord Peter Wimsey is of the interwar British aristocracy. It was around page 300 that I realised not one of them had had an alcoholic drink in the whole book, not even the Antisocial Pot Smokers, although I did like the depiction of Janet’s casual callousness towards Tina, with its assumption of effortless superiority reflecting that of the Medeous crowd who annoy her in the same way. I didn’t find the supernatural element convincing – it felt bolted-on and the end undercooked. There needed either to be more of it with better integration into the narrative, or it simply be a metaphor. Carleton College (Blackstock) sounds lovely, though.
These Old Shades, Georgette Heyer I am not a big fan of Heyer’s C18 novels, but enjoyed this a lot. I think it was due to the general absence of “Came my lady”, which makes my teeth grind. Leonie and Avon and Fanny were all great fun, though I felt Saint-Vire’s nefarious plotting left something to be desired. If you want an heir to cut your brother out of the inheritance it is probably best to start by picking a wife who has three elder sisters with twelve children between them, not a scrawny girl with cash. The whole thing strikes me as interesting from a queer theory point of view!
Downton Abbey Amiable Sunday evening shiny pudding that will do nicely as we slide into the more blustery parts of Autumn, suffering a bit from slow pacing, and from similar problems to the above, to whit that some of the plot requires people to be idiots. As the above, it could easily be got round by a short sentence showing that the writer had at least thought of the issue:
(i) Heiresses have fathers. Fathers of heiresses have lawyers. Said lawyers say “no-one is signing anything that potentially gives your fortune, Mr Iron-and-Steel, to some random third cousin if the groom proves not to be up to it.”
(ii) Is the Earl of Grantham intended to be shown as a spineless jellyfish incapable of saying to his butler, “I appreciate the situation needs a little management, but I thought you were up to it. If you’re not then I quite understand you will wish to look for a new post. Oh, you think there isn’t a problem now? Glad to hear it.”
(iii) If you’re going to blackmail someone it is a bad idea if the blackmail material incriminates you as much as the target, especially if you’re not the one with friends in high places.
Janie of La Rochelle and Janie Steps in, EBD I enjoy Brent-Dyer on domestic life. She hasn’t a clue about families, but she is entertaining about households. Janie and Julian were surprisingly non-vomitous and even allowed to be physically affectionate, though Julian’s control streak is rather off-putting. No wonder Harriet Vane is cagey if that’s the romantic ideal of marriage! Also I can’t find Janie a saint for allowing her maids a short break at 11:30am when they have been making jam since 6am. I’m glad to finally read the explanation of the Beth Chester situation, even if it is utterly nonsensical. I can cope with the bent solicitor – they were about, and indeed my grandfather’s family lost all their money to one, not that they had this sort of quantity. But this particular bent solicitor doesn’t make sense, as the (apparently permanent) lost income is from rents, not shares, which would have required him to sell the property itself and I’m not sure how he’d actually manage this. Also, they lost the money two years ago, and furniture doesn’t get like that in two years unless you are boosting the family income with weekly orgies and the scrubbing is taking its toll. I love the story of why Beth has a rotten time at school, too: “Well the school is academically excellent but attended only by the children of tradespeople who either talk about sex or want to leave lovely Guernsey as soon as possible – why would anyone want to do that, but then they are lowly people one would never speak to or have anything to do with – so naturally we don’t allow Beth to have anything to do with them to the extent of not allowing her to talk to them anywhere beyond the school gate and not letting her make friends with them, and these disgustingly little toerags have the effrontery to call her a snob!” One can sympathise with Beth, but not the parents.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 12:51 pm (UTC)There is, however, an entirely true story about a C19th young woman in Spain who had to wear masculine attire in order to study law - and then married a man she had met during her studies. Enquiring minds wish to know more, and wonder why no-one has written the novel? (possibly because woman in question became distinguished pioneer of Spanish feminism, and respected philanthropist and social activist, with lots of statues and memorials to her).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 02:29 pm (UTC)The story of the Spanish woman sounds fascinating - what was her name?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 07:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 01:09 pm (UTC)Possibly I am in the wrong period, but I was fairly certain that you couldn't do that. Bride's money is bride's money and goes to bride's children, and does not come in under the entail.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 06:51 pm (UTC)I got the impression that the wife's money had been tied up in the entail by the Earl's father but couldn't work out whether they were saying this was normal or something sneaky he had done for the sake of The Estate. What are Dowager Countesses/Duchesses supposed to live on? And why were there no clauses going into the ramifications of everyone's death and remarriage?
I could have done without the thought of Chester family orgies.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 07:56 pm (UTC)It could all have been avoided, too, if they'd made them married for 28 years not 24 and begun their marriage with an ill-advised dash to Gretna. In which case, Cora's fortune would (pre Married Women's Property Act) have fallen into the Earl's hands and nothing her father or all his attorneys could do would have stopped it (this is a minor variant on the plot of The Woman in White)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 08:53 pm (UTC)It could all have been avoided, too
No, no. That would require research, not reading "How We Lived Then" and being married to Mrs Fellowes (though if Cora's father had been alive and the fortune been his, would this still have applied if he hadn't actually given it to her - as opposed to his not realising that it would happen by default if he did?).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 08:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 08:48 pm (UTC)And why were there no clauses going into the ramifications of everyone's death and remarriage?
Good point. If they divorced and then lived in sin, would she get the money back?
I am sure that Chester family orgies merely involve the consumption of vast quantities of gache.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 08:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 07:49 pm (UTC)As for the entail issue, it's surprising how many fortunes were entailed on heirs male, in order to support the peerage dignity, until quite recent times. IIRC, the breaking of the entail on the estate of the sixteenth duke of Norfolk, to allow his daughters to inherit part of the estate, was a knotty business and was still underway when he died in 1975 - the seventeenth duke (a third cousin once removed, though himself a hereditary peer already and a soldier and spy rather than a solicitor) had to defend many of the provisions already as good as overturned in order to keep Arundel Castle out of the hands of the National Trust.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 08:56 pm (UTC)It's not the entail itself that surprises me (though Harriet Vane ought to have said "I quite understand, darling, but all the money from my books will go to the other kids"), but the father of the original dosh not wanting to keep it in _his_ family!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-28 10:06 pm (UTC)If the entail is an older one, then the father of the original dosh has indeed kept it in his family... some dynasties operated a 'Hoovering' policy by which property inherited through the female line was diverted away from the heirs of the heiress, so to speak - this happened in the early eighteenth century to much of the Ogle estate inherited by the Cavendish dukes of Newcastle which then passed to an heiress married to the Holles earl of Clare, subsequently created duke of Newcastle; he then tried to leave most of the estate to his sister's son Thomas Pelham, which infuriated the Harley earls of Oxford whose heir had married Holles/Clare/Newcastle's only daughter.