Tag: 19th century

Review 2596: The Chosen

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

The Chosen, which I read for my Walter Scott project, is about the weeks after the death of Thomas Hardy’s wife, Emma, and also about the writing of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hardy is working in his study when the maid comes to ask him to go to Emma. Although she indicates there is some urgency, Hardy is oblivious and continues working for a while before going up to his wife’s rooms in the attic. When he arrives there, she is dead.

The aging Hardy plunges into guilt that is made worse when, a few days later, he finds her diaries, in which he reads that Emma was deeply unhappy in their marriage. As he reads the diaries, he relives his own memories of the same days, realizing he had no idea of how aloof he seemed to her and how oblivious.

This is not really a novel of plot but more of feelings and realizations. Lowry explains at the end of the novel that Hardy burned the diaries soon after he found them, but she did quote from Hardy’s work and from letters. Emma’s death apparently spurred a collection of poems.

Waiting in the wings is Hardy’s secretary, Florence Dugdale, who seems to expect to take Emma’s place (and eventually did). She cannot understand why, after telling her so many times how unhappy he was, Hardy can now only talk about Emma.

For Hardy fans, especially, this is an insightful and beautifully written novel. It makes me wish I had known more about Hardy’s life before I read Maugham’s Cakes and Ale and this book. Although I read Claire Tomalin’s biography, it was so long ago that I don’t remember what it said about his home life (although I said it was interesting in my review).

Related Posts

Cakes and Ale

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy

Review 2594: Clear

~ whatmeread ~ 16 Comments

I have read some excellent novellas lately, a form I don’t usually choose. That makes me glad I participated in Novellas in November last year. I think I read about this book during that event.

John Ferguson is a 19th century Scottish minister on a difficult mission. Because of the breakup of the Scottish church, in which he participated, he has left his church to join the Free Church and is thus unemployed, no new churches having actually been established. He and his wife are entirely without money, and he doesn’t want to borrow from his brother-in-law, so he takes a job of surveying a small island in the far north of Scotland for clearance. The island only has one inhabitant, who will be forced to leave, and part of John’s job is to tell him.

On the island, Ivar has been alone for many years. The rest of his family left years before, because the island couldn’t support them anymore after foolish decisions by the owner. Ivar thought it could support him, and the factor hasn’t even stopped by to collect rent in years. He lives with a goat, an old horse, a blind cow, and some chickens.

When John arrives, he promptly falls off a cliff and is badly injured. Ivar finds him and takes care of him. They don’t speak a word of each other’s language, but they begin to like each other. John, though, can’t bring himself to try to explain why he’s there.

In the meantime, Mary hears about other clearances being done by John’s employer that disturb her. She decides to go get John.

This is a little gem of a book with a surprising ending. In its few pages, it pulls you totally into the story. It’s a keeper.

Related Posts

Island

The Sea House

The House Between Tides

Review 2586: The White Bear

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

The newly released (today, I think) reprint of The White Bear by NYRB is actually two novellas, The White Bear and The Rearguard. I wasn’t familiar with Pontoppidan but find he was an early 20th century Danish Nobel laureate. Both of these novellas were published in the late 19th century.

In The White Bear, we meet Thorkild Müller, who as a young misfit was directed into the ministry because of a grant that offered a generous university stipend for a theological degree if the recipient was willing to minister in the frozen north for an unspecified period. Thorkild takes the stipend but fritters away his time at university, barely setting foot in the classroom.

But then because of the deaths of two ministers, he receives his summons, which he tries to avoid by flunking his exams. That doesn’t work, and he ends up in Greenland ministering to the Inuit.

There he is miserable until one summer when, instead of returning to a trading post as expected while the Inuit were leading their nomadic summer lives, he goes with them.

Much of the story is about what happens when, as an old man, he decides to return to Denmark.

I really loved this story. I have a fascination for books about cold and desolate climates, but what’s more important is that Thorkild is an unforgettable character—huge and covered with an unkempt white beard, boisterous, simple, yet not as simple as he seems.

The Rearguard is about Jørgen Hallager, in some ways a bit like Thorkild but in others, not. He is also a big boisterous man, a social realist painter who considers that artists who turn away from realism are traitors, who is loud in his condemnation of almost everyone that doesn’t believe what he does.

He has recently become engaged to Ursula Branth, the frail, gently reared daughter of a state counselor. He has become engaged to her in Rome, where they make a lengthy stay and eventually marry. Her father and Hallager dislike each other. He is trying to separate her from her friends and family because of his socialist principles, and her father is worried about her.

I found Hallager to be insufferable—so full of himself and sure of his ideas, belligerent with anyone who disagrees, and verbally abusive to his wife, trying to bring her to a mental place where he wants her. I didn’t understand some of the basis for his rants (not being up on 19th century Danish politics and art).

I liked Thorkild a lot better. Both of the novellas are wonderful character sketches, though.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

Related Posts

Germinal

The Devils

The Return of the Native

Review 2578: Catherine the Ghost

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I took a break from reading A Short HIstory of Nearly Everything to read this novella. After putting it on my list, I had forgotten that it was based on Wuthering Heights. If you’ve read that book, you should be okay, but otherwise Catherine the Ghost may be hard to follow.

Like Wuthering Heights, Catherine the Ghost begins with the arrival to the house of Mr. Lockwood, who is stranded and spends the night in Catherine’s bedroom. The ghost Catherine demands to be let in.

The novella begins there but goes forward with glimpses into the past instead of the other way around. It focuses on Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff and ends at about the same place as the original novel. The ghost is one narrator.

The other narrator is the other Catherine, Catherine the ghost’s daughter, who was tricked into marrying Linton, her cousin, the son of Heathcliff’s enemy, Hindley.

Koja’s style of writing is poetical and unusual, as she frequently uses sentence fragments. However, it is easy to follow. This is a haunting novella. I liked it a lot.

Related Posts

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Solitary House

Murder at Mansfield Park

Review 2565: Classics Club Spin Result! Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

~ whatmeread ~ 19 Comments

I pulled this book for the Classics Club spin, and I’m very happy to have done so. Because of the state of my reading right now, I was hoping for a short one, and this book is only 144 pages (albeit of very small type). It’s one of the few short works left on my Classics Club list.

The autobiography was written in the 1850s about events earlier than that and published in 1861. Although by then Jacobs was free, she wrote it under the pseudonym of Linda Brent, probably to protect others.

Linda had a fairly cheerful childhood, because she was owned by a kind woman who had promised to set her grandmother free. However, on the woman’s death, her slaves were seized as assets because she owed money, and Linda and her brother William ended up in the home of Dr. Flint, a relative. Linda’s grandmother was not freed and was also owed $300 by her mistress but never got it.

Jacobs recounts many instances of brutality on the part of slave owners, but her own troubles began when she reached puberty and Dr. Flint began relentlessly pressing her, trying to get her to have sex. Essentially out of desperation, she succumbed to another white man who she liked better and had two children by him. He, Mr. Sands, tried to buy her and her children several times, but Dr. Flint refused to sell them.

Eventually, Jacobs tried to escape, and the events of her escape, which took years, are the most harrowing in the book. Even after she escaped, she was in danger of being snatched back because of the Fugitive Slave Act, and Dr. Flint didn’t stop trying to find her until he died.

I thought this book was interesting, although at times it had very religious overtones, applied to events that she thought would make her look bad. But, after all, part of her purpose was to educate people against slavery, and she didn’t want her audience to turn against her. Frankly, she does little to deserve that (mostly, she feels she sinned by sleeping with Mr. Sands), but I can see why in that time she would worry about it.

For some reason, although I had sympathy for Linda’s really horrible troubles, I didn’t get as involved with this book as I might have expected. I’m not sure why.

Related Posts

The Underground Railroad

Booth

Beloved

Review 2555: Angle of Repose

~ whatmeread ~ 13 Comments

Again, when I finished reading this book, which was supposed to be for my A Century of Books project, I found the year already occupied. I have been using Goodreads and often Wikipedia to find books for each year, but Goodreads seems particularly inaccurate. I suspect that what happened here was that it listed the novel for, say, 1981, where I still have a hole (as of this writing in February), because of a 10-year anniversary reprint. I often check the dates if they seem suspicious, but this one didn’t. It’s especially bad now because it took eight days to read, and I am way behind on my reading. I only have a few more books to go, but from now on, I’m double-checking the publication date before I start reading.

Lyman Ward, a former academic just in his 50s, has contracted a bone disease that has frozen his neck so that he can’t turn it, confined him to a wheelchair, and resulted in the amputation of one of his legs. He is almost completely helpless, so his son wants to move him into care, but he stubbornly remains in his grandparents’ home in Grass Valley, California, being taken care of by Ada, a local woman.

His wife, Ellen, left him abruptly for his surgeon when he was helpless in the hospital. Although her partner died soon after and she has shown signs of wanting to return, he stubbornly refuses to see her.

Lyman can read, though, and do other sedentary activities. He was raised by his grandparents, and his grandmother was in her time a famous illustrator and writer, Susan Burling Ward. He has come across newspaper clippings and letters she wrote to her best friend, so he decides to write a biography of her, partly to answer questions for himself about events in his family he doesn’t understand.

Angle of Repose combines Lymon’s current experience and thoughts as he does this work with the events in the biography he is writing. The historical arc of the novel predominates, so much so that I occasionally wondered why Lyman’s story was there at all. However, by the end I understood how his grandparents’ history informs his own.

It’s a mismatch. Susan Barling as a young woman is from Upstate New York, a gifted artist just beginning to become known. She yearns for a life of culture. Her best friend, Augusta, comes from a prominent, cultured New York City family, and as young women, Susan and Augusta make a threesome of friends with Thomas Hudson, a poet and editor who goes on to become famous himself. She meets Oliver Ward, a young mining engineer, when she is very young. Unlike her other friends, he is taciturn and maybe too respectful of them all. He goes away on a job in the West for five years.

Thomas, sensitive, intelligent, and delicate, is Susan’s idea of a perfect man. He picks Augusta, though, and Oliver returns around the same time. Despite her friends’ misgivings, Susan decides to marry Oliver. Her idea is that Oliver can get some experience in the West and then move back East to live a more cultured life. She doesn’t seem to realize that to do his work, he must be in the West, and he is suited for that life.

As far as his career is concerned, Oliver seems too prone to consult Susan’s convenience, and she has unrealistic ideas. He turns down some opportunities because they don’t seem suitable to Susan. He takes a short-term job and they live apart. (She is too genteel for these rough mining camps.) She finally joins him near a mining town named New Almaden, southeast of San Jose. He has taken a house away from town, which anyway she removes herself from, as she does everywhere they live, thinking herself too good for the company. As Lyman says, his grandmother is a snob. Here she begins a pattern of not joining into society and their life but enduring it.

The couple doesn’t thrive financially. At this time, there are lots of qualified engineers available and most of them aren’t as fussy about where they’ll go. Susan’s work writing articles about the West and illustrating other writers’ work is helping support them, despite Oliver’s dislike of the situation and Susan’s complaints about it. They move to Leadville, Colorado, which although it is primitive, allows her to open her home to some intelligent visitors and have lively, informed discussions, which she loves. But the Leadville mine eventually grinds to a halt because of a lawsuit brought by would-be claim jumpers.

The couple goes to Mexico, which Susan loves, but the mine doesn’t prove promising. Their projects gain and then lose funding, and so on.

Susan writes to Augusta constantly, but Augusta never acknowledges Oliver as a fit husband. I fear that much of Susan’s growing disappointment has to do with wanting to justify her choice to her friends.

In the novel’s current time (the late 1960s and early 70s), Lyman expresses some irritating views on the times and young people. I wasn’t sure whether they were Stegner’s own views or more delineation of Lyman’s character, but Lyman eventually forms a sort of friendship with a young woman who acts as his secretary for a time.

This is ultimately a fascinating and absorbing story, but this time through (I apparently read it in the mists of time but didn’t remember anything about it) I kept getting distracted from it. I’m not sure why. I think, though, that it deserved more attention from me. Although I was bothered by Lyman seeming to blame all his grandparents’ problems on his grandmother (and after unfortunate events, his grandfather’s intransigence), the novel is considered Stegner’s masterpiece and won him the Pulitzer.

Related Posts

Obscure Destinies

The Town

North Woods

Review 2554: #ReadingAusten25! Pride and Prejudice

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

For years, I read all of Jane Austen’s novels once every year, but I haven’t done that since I started this blog. Now, Reading Austen 25 has given me an excuse to do it again.

The neighborhood is thrilled, because Netherfield Park, a large estate that has been vacant, has been leased. More importantly, the new occupant is Mr. Bingley, a young, single man of fortune. Foolish Mrs. Bennett, with five single daughters, is certain he will marry one of them.

Mr. Bingley has come with friends, and the first time everyone meets them is at a local ball. Although Mr. Bingley seems attracted to Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Bennett’s beautiful older sister, his friend Mr. Darcy stays aloof from the locals and will only dance with members of his own party. (That may seem okay to modern readers but is really very rude for the time.) When Mr. Bingley tries to get him to dance, suggesting Elizabeth as a suitable partner, Darcy slights her.

Later, Lizzy meets Mr. Wickham, a pleasing young man who grew up with Mr. Darcy. He tells her that Mr. Darcy has treated him wrongly, especially that he withheld a living from him that was promised to him by Darcy’s father. Lizzy is shocked.

Things look good for Jane, though, as Bingley is very attentive. Unfortunately, at a ball hosted by Bingley, all of Lizzy’s family except Jane behave in an embarrassing manner—her mother loudly discussing Jane’s chances with Bingley, her foolish younger sisters making exhibitions of themselves, and her father loudly correcting Mary. The next thing they know, the entire Bingley party has left for London with no intention of returning. Lizzy blames Jane’s disappointment in love on Caroline Bingley—Bingley’s sister—and on Mr. Darcy.

This novel is a domestic drama, a romance, and a witty social satire. Austen is gifted at creating characters whose personalities become obvious almost as soon as they open their mouths. I find it hard to choose my favorite Austen novel, but this one is certainly the funniest, with such characters as Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennett, and Lady Catherine De Bourgh.

Harking back to a discussion last month about Austen’s wobble between sense and sensibility, I see more evidence of it here, when Mr. Darcy takes Jane’s calm demeanor for indifference to Mr. Bingley and when, later, he doesn’t speak to Lizzy because he can’t tell if she cares for him.

Anyway, of course, this novel is great.

Related Posts

Sense and Sensibility

Persuasion

Mansfield Park

Review 2546: The Temptations of Big Bear

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I can’t remember whether I found this book when looking for more about native peoples or for filling holes for my A Century of Books project. In any case, it does both.

Readers from the U. S. may not be familiar with the name “Big Bear,” but I’m betting Canadian readers are. He seems to have been their equivalent of Sitting Bull.

In The Temptations of Big Bear, Wiebe tells Big Bear’s story beginning in 1876, when the Cree, of whom Big Bear was a chief, along with other groups of native peoples and the Métis, meet to discuss a treaty with British officials. The treaty calls for the people to “sell” several hundred thousand acres to the government in exchange for small reservations and regular payments as well as assistance when they are hungry. Big Bear does not sign the treaty. He wants to wait to see what happens.

Within a few years, it becomes apparent that the buffalo, upon which the Cree depend, are dying out, so Big Bear signs the treaty. However, he does not select a reservation for his people. Instead, they continue to move among their usual environs.

This novel leads up to events at Frog Lake in 1888, where some of the Cree warriors attack the settlers, kill some, and take others prisoner. These attacks follow years of broken promises and starvation. Although Big Bear tries to stop them, he is disregarded. Of course, he is held responsible by the authorities and tried, despite all the white witnesses but one having testified for him.

This is an eloquently written novel. It is insightful and interesting, and Big Bear’s last speech at his trial made me cry.

Wiebe doesn’t cite sources, and it’s hard to tell whether some of the speeches and writings are verbatim from records or not.

Related Posts

One Thousand White Women

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

The Sentence

Review 2538: The New Life

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

The New Life was a slow read for me. It took me almost a week, which is unusual for me with fiction. I read it for my Walter Scott Prize project.

The novel is loosely based on two men, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, who in the early 1890s wrote a book together. When I looked them up, it didn’t seem as if it was very loosely based—Crewe gives his characters almost identical names. But then I realized it is set after Symonds’ death in order to bring in the trial of Oscar Wilde.

John Addington is a gay man who is married and has three grown daughters. He is known for writing about a vast array of subjects. Henry Ellis is an idealistic, naïve younger man, a doctor. He marries a good friend, Edith, and their intention is to lead the way to the New Life. I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed, but at minimum it seems to be that spouses are equal partners. Unfortunately for Henry, they never discussed the sexual side of marriage. He thought there would be consummation; Edith, a lesbian, did not. So, Henry continues a virgin with a fascination for the subject of sex. They live separately, and soon Edith has a new friend, Angelica.

Henry wishes to make a scientific study of sex and publish the results, and since he knows some gay friends, referred to at that time as “inverts,” he decides to start with them, having a theory that rather than an illness or perversion, inversion is natural. He decides to invite John Addington to join him in his project, not because he thinks he is gay, but because of his reputation as a writer about various topics.

John has been getting more tired of keeping his secret as an invert. He has confessed to his wife and occasionally has brought a man home for sex, an action that I thought was breathtakingly cruel. Now he meets Frank, a much younger, lower-class man who wants to be his friend. When John sees Henry’s proposal, he thinks such a project will change people’s ideas about inversion so that he can be free to do what he wants.

The men write the book and begin looking for a publisher. However, just at that time, Oscar Wilde is found guilty of inversion and is sentenced to jail. The backlash is such that the two fear their work is unpublishable.

If you are not a fan of graphic sex scenes, this won’t be the book for you, especially the first few hundred pages. The novel opens, for example, with a very explicit and detailed wet dream. I am not really a fan of explicit sex scenes in novels, so I found the first half of the novel hard going, despite it being well written and having vivid descriptions of life in Victorian London. (It has a wonderful description of a day that is so smoggy no one can see where they’re going.)

The novel picked up for me after the book, entitled Sexual Inversion, is published and the police go after a bookseller for selling indecent material, their book. Then it becomes about the reactions of the various characters once there is a threat to their own lives.

Related Posts

After Sappho

Murmur

The Children’s Book

Review 2534: #ReadingAusten25! Sense and Sensibility

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

My original intention for ReadingAusten25 was to reread only the books I hadn’t reviewed yet. But I can’t resist Austen, so here I am reviewing Sense and Sensibility. I am not going to repeat my review of 2022, though, so you can find it here. Instead, I thought I’d look at whether the book struck me differently this time and a little at Claire Tomalin’s point of view (the wobble), as cited by Brona.

It did strike me differently. Although Elinor is still my favorite of the two sisters, they both struck me more extremely this time. Marianne seemed like a true modern teenager, not as much for her reactions to Willoughby but more in her sulking (call it what it is), her rudeness to various kind characters whom she thinks ill-bred, and so on. But the thing is, 16 in the early 19th century meant she was supposed to be an adult, or almost. (Of course, she is also under the influence of the Romantic movement in art, literature, and music.)

As for Elinor, sometimes I felt she carried her comments a little too far, into preachiness. I got a little tired of her dissections of other people’s behavior.

I also appreciate the wit of the novel more. Although I always find Austen witty, she has drawn us some priceless characters and written quite a few zingers.

I am not so sure about Tomalin’s “wobble.” I looked for it but didn’t find much evidence for it unless you count Elinor’s dash out of the room after she finds out Edward isn’t married. I’d like to hear if anyone was struck differently. I remember not agreeing with some of Tomalin’s interpretations when I read her biography of Austen.

Related Posts

Jane Austen: A Life

Jane Austen at Home

Persuasion