Tag: sensation fiction

Review 2468: The New Magdalen

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In The New Magdalen, Wilkie Collins has written a sensation novel that is by definition quite melodramatic. The subject, as you might guess from the title, is the reformed prostitute.

That’s what Mercy Merrick is, although she first appears as a nurse on the battlefield of the French/German war. An Englishwoman, Grace Roseberry, is stranded there on the way to England to live with her father’s friend, Lady Janet Roy, after her father’s death. Unfortunately, she was robbed on the way and has only her letter of introduction.

Grace confides in Mercy and then pressures her to confide in her, but she is not at all sympathetic to Mercy’s story of being forced by starvation into prostitution. Mercy reformed after hearing a sermon by Julian Gray, but every time she took a respectable position with the full knowledge of her past by her employers, she lost it once the servants or neighbors found out.

Mercy has loaned Grace some clothing. When after an attack, Grace is pronounced dead by the French doctor, Mercy takes her clothes and letters of introduction and assumes her identity, trying to get a better future.

Several months later, Mercy (now called Grace, confusingly) is Lady Janet’s adopted daughter and is betrothed to Horace Holmcroft. However, she can’t find it within herself to set a date without telling Horace the truth.

Then Julian Gray arrives. It turns out he is Lady Janet’s nephew. He has taken an interest in the case of a woman who has been hospitalized in Germany and claims to have been on her way to live with Lady Janet. Of course, this is the real Grace.

In Mercy’s absense, Grace appears and accuses her of stealing her identity. But Lady Janet doesn’t believe her and finds her offensive. And in fact, Collins depicts her as a horrible person.

That’s the message, really—the despicable virtuous woman versus the saintly ex-prostitute—for Mercy eventually decides to make things right.

Some of the Victorian values in this one are hard to stomach, but Collins knows how to keep readers interested in his story.

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Review 2101: A House in Bloomsbury

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Dora Mannering is a little brat when we first meet her at 16. She and her father are tenants of a house in Bloomsbury. They are not wealthy—he is a scientist who works at a museum—and they occupy three rooms although the rooms are well-appointed. Dora has no understanding of what it means to be very poor and disdains thoughts of money.

Dora doesn’t remember her mother, and her father never speaks of her. Someone sends her a box of gifts once a year, anonymously, and he is not happy when it arrives.

Dora’s father becomes very ill, which throws Dora more into the company of others in the household. Miss Bethune is one, a wealthy Scottish spinster who lives with her maid. Dr. Roland, who believes he could treat Mr. Mannering’s illness better than the expensive society doctor called in, is another.

Then a strange lady appears, or rather, her envoy, a young man, who approaches Miss Bethune with a request that she receive the lady and invite Dora over at the same time. It’s not too hard to guess who the lady is, but the circumstances of the original separation also come out.

Miss Bethune also has a secret.

I’m not sure if this novel would have been considered a sensation novel in its time, because the secrets don’t turn out to be that shocking, but there are a few emotional scenes and two different women who are hysterical at times. However, the novel features likable characters and has a satisfying ending. The heroine grows up, and people are kind to each other.

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Review 1846: Classics Club Spin Book! The Dead Secret

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The latest Classics Club Spin ended up with The Dead Secret as the book I should read. It is Wilkie Collins’ first full-length novel but unfortunately not his best.

Mrs. Treverton is on her deathbed at Porthgenna Tower, but she has a secret. She wants to disclose it to her husband but can’t bring herself to do it. So, she forces her maid, Sarah Leeson, to write it down. She makes Sarah promise not to destroy the confession or remove it from the house, but she dies before she can make her promise to give it to her husband. So, Sarah hides it in a ruined wing of the house and then flees.

Fifteen or sixteen years later, Mrs. Treverton’s daughter Rosamond is a young wife. She and her blind husband, Leonard Frankland, are on their way to Cornwall to take up residence at Porthgenna Tower, where Rosamond has not lived since she was five. They intend to renovate the house, including the ruined north wing, but they have had to stop their journey because Rosamond has gone into premature labor.

The local doctor, in seeking a nurse for the new mother and son, consults a householder only to have her housekeeper, Mrs. Jazeph, unexpectedly volunteer to do it herself. However, Mrs. Jazeph’s odd behavior that evening causes her to be dismissed. Before leaving, she tells Rosamond to stay out of the Myrtle Room.

With a ruined old mansion on the coast of Cornwall that is possibly haunted and a secret too awful to tell, this novel promises to be all that a sensation novel should be. However, Collins is clearly learning here, for this novel is dripping with sentimentality and soppiness. Moreover, the behavior of the maid (it’s not hard to guess who she is) is so exaggerated that I could hardly stand to read about her at times. Collins took Dickens for his model, and Rosamond is a typical type for Dickens—sweet, a little foolish at times, loving, needing the guidance of her morally correct husband. Without having spent enough time with Sarah for us to care much for her—in fact, at times her behavior is extremely irritating—he spends too long a time with a supposedly heart-rending scene.

The secret isn’t very hard to guess, nor are the events of the plot difficult to predict. This isn’t a terrible novel, but Collins has written better ones.

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Review 1584: Milly Darrell

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When Mary Crofton attends a charmless school to learn to be a governess, she is befriended by an heiress, Milly Darrell. Milly is a beautiful and good-natured girl whose life becomes complicated when her widowed father remarries.

Augusta Darrell doesn’t like Milly, but the situation changes for the worse with the reappearance in the area of a neighbor, Angus Egerton. Before he returns, the girls hear the story of his falling out with his mother after he fell in love with a girl of low birth. When his mother prevented the marriage, he swore never to return while his mother was alive and was said to have lived dissolutely. His mother dead, he returns to try to repair his dilapidated estate.

It is easy to guess that Mrs. Darrell has something to do with this story but not so easy to see how that will affect the plot. This thickens when Milly and Angus fall in love with each other.

This novella is a typical sensation work of its time. It is short and fun to read. For some reason, though, the publisher has chosen to add an alternate ending which, while not materially different from the original, is a travesty of purple prose—an indication of a lack of discrimination on their part.

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Review 1388: Aurora Floyd

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The heiress Aurora Floyd is the apple of her elderly father’s eye. At 19, she is dark and high-spirited, with a flashing eye and an air of pride. She has just returned from finishing school in Paris when Captain Talbot Bulstrode notices her.

From a family that prides itself on its blemishless past, Bulstrode is looking for a pure and wholesome wife. He is disdainful of Aurora’s interest in horses and racing. Altogether, he feels he would like his wife to be more like her cousin, Lucy Floyd. Nevertheless, he can’t take his eyes off Aurora even though there seems to be a shadow over her.

Aurora has another admirer, John Mellish, a large, bluff Yorkshireman who worships her at first sight. In the beginning, Aurora pays little attention to either man. Then she seems to favor Captain Bulstrode.

Aurora has a secret, however, that will threaten her happy future. It is not a difficult secret for the reader to guess, but when a murder is committed, she finds that it must come out.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a writer of popular Victorian sensation novels, combining melodrama, intense emotion, and crime. Her best-known work is Lady Audley’s Secret, so if you are familiar with that, you know what to expect. The story evokes some true suspense, and the main characters are either likable or despicable, as intended. Occasionally, Braddon departs into little lectures, some of them loaded with literary allusions. They reminded me of some of Dickens’s writing, only I found them a little cumbersome and overbearing. Still, this novel is readable and generally moves forward at a good pace. I enjoyed it.

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Day 1276: The Haunted Hotel

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Cover for The Haunted HotelWilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel was the spooky book I read for the Classics Club Dare that will also do for the R.I.P. Challenge.

* * *

His family is shocked when Lord Montbarry jilts his gentle cousin, Agnes, and marries the infamous Countess Narona. Agnes herself cannot explain the behavior of the Countess when she meets her in London. The Countess seems horror struck by Agnes and says she will be her undoing.

Lord Montbarry and his new wife go off with her brother, Baron Rivar, to live in Venice. It is not long before the family hears, first, of the disappearance of Ferrari, Lord Montbarry’s courier and the husband of Agnes’s former ladies maid, and then of Lord Montbarry’s death from bronchitis. Lord Montbarry’s fortune is entailed, but he leaves a large life insurance award to his widow. Although the insurance company conducts an investigation into the death, they can find nothing wrong.

Lord Montbarry’s younger brother, Henry Westwick, has been trying to court Agnes, but she is still in love with her former fiancé. In the meantime, he occupies himself with investments, including in the hotel that used to be the villa where his brother died. After the hotel opens, one family member after another stays there, in room 14, all having bad experiences. What happened in that hotel?

Frankly, this short novel has neither the entertaining narratives of The Moonstone nor the intriguing plot of The Woman in White. It is a potboiler, not one of Collins’s best. The hero and heroine aren’t much more than cardboard figures. The only character of interest is Countess Narona herself. The plot is predictable, the novel not scary, and the truth, although creepy, is not told to maximize the effect. On the scary scale, it gets a low mark.

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Day 1212: Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund

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Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund is the second of two novellas by Mrs. Oliphant contained in my Persephone Press edition of The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow. Although I was disappointed in the first novella, I found this one much more sensational and touching. Both are about the consequences of middle-aged passion.

Those who are more aware of their British legends could probably guess where this story was going right from the beginning. It took me a bit longer.

Mrs. Lycett-Landon lives a contented existence on the banks of the Mersey outside Liverpool. She has married a successful businessman and has two cheerful children. Her son Horace is just old enough to join his father’s firm and is day-dreaming about the success he’ll make of it. Her husband Robert is an affectionate father and spouse.

Robert has been speaking of sending Horace to the London office to train with young Mr. Fareham, the nephew of Robert’s partner. However, after a business trip, Robert tells Mrs. Lycett-Landon that the London office is in disarray because of Fareham’s undisciplined work habits. He will have to travel more to London and stay longer to sort out the trouble.

Robert is home less often after that and is irritable when he is home. He looks eager to leave when he returns to London and seldom writes home. If you can’t guess what is going on, I’m surprised, but his family has no notion of it.

It is actually even worse than you’re probably guessing. The question is not so much what Mrs. Lycett-Landon discovers as what she decides to do about it.

Although it’s hard to imagine a woman dealing with this problem in the way she does, I was touched by Mrs. Lycett-Landon’s solution. I found this a much more involving story than the other. In both, the person involved holds back information, but in this one, it’s to more effect.

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Day 1202: The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow

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Cover for The Mystery of Mrs. BlencarrowFlighty Kitty Bircham has flown to Gretna Green to elope with her swain when she discovers in the marriage record a juicy bit of gossip. The respectable and dignified widow from her village, Mrs. Joan Blencarrow, has married someone secretly. Indeed, she has been married for three years!

Kitty is so excited about her discovery that she fails to notice the name of Mrs. Blencarrow’s husband. Instead of running off with her own new husband to London as planned, Kitty goes straight home, figuring this juicy bit of news will win her forgiveness from her mother.

Soon the neighborhood is agog. Is the rumor true or not? Mrs. Blencarrow even has a visit from her own uncles trying to find out, but she only tells the vicar the truth.

I was somewhat dissatisfied with this Victorian era sensation novella, which is a character study rather than a mystery. Part of the truth comes out fairly quickly, but it isn’t hard to guess the other part. And we get a very unfinished story. Why did the couple marry? That’s not at all clear. Are we to believe it was from passion? That’s hard to believe considering her later reaction. What is clear is that Mrs. Blencarrow thinks she will be in disgrace if the truth comes out. But that doesn’t answer the question of why they married in the first place.

Mrs. Blencarrow is an interesting person, and this is a very short work, so a qualified approval.

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Day 1163: The Shuttle

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Cover for The ShuttleAt first, I wasn’t sure I would like The Shuttle, despite my enjoyment of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s other novels. That is because it begins with an extended metaphor, rather cumbersome, about the shuttle of fate weaving together east and west. I wasn’t altogether sure which east and west she was talking about and had wild thoughts about China. But we weren’t leaving the Occident. By west she meant America, more precisely the United States. By east, England. But this introduction lasts only a couple of pages, and then we get into the action.

The novel begins with Rosalie Vanderpoel, the gentle, naive daughter of a New York millionaire. It is the early days of the migration of young, titled Englishmen to New York looking to marry money, and the relatively innocent New Yorkers don’t understand that most of these men are fortune hunters. Rosalie becomes engaged to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Although Reuben Vanderpoel, Rosalie’s father, does not like Nigel, only nine-year-old Bettina sees him for the vicious bully that he is.

But Nigel hasn’t done his homework. He doesn’t realize that American girls don’t come with dowries nor that Rosalie won’t expect to hand her money over to her husband for handling, as an Englishwoman might. Once he realizes his mistake, he blames it on Rosalie.

Rosalie goes to live in dilapidated Stornham Court, where she is mistreated and bullied by her husband and his mother. Thinking that no man would take money from a woman, Rosalie doesn’t offer any, and it takes a while before she realizes that’s what he wants. But he doesn’t want money for the estate, just to support his vicious habits. He cuts her off from her family to make her miserable and keep control.

Rosalie isn’t the heroine of the novel, however. That honor belongs to Bettina, or Betty, who vows at the age of nine to go sometime and rescue Rosalie. And so she does, 15 years later.

This novel isn’t one of great surprises. When Betty finds Rosalie and her son alone and works to buck them up and get them ready to leave, the tension builds from the expectation of a showdown with Nigel. When Nigel finally arrives, he uses all his cleverness to foil Betty. We know who will win—we just don’t know how.

I don’t think Burnett’s adult novels were considered sensation fiction, but this one certainly deals with those kinds of topics and is very melodramatic. Still, it was a fun book to read. Betty is clever and determined. You know she will win at love and defeat Sir Nigel.

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Day 1141: The Moonstone

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Cover for The MoonstoneBest Book of Five!
Although the first mystery stories are credited to Edgar Allen Poe, The Moonstone is widely regarded as the first ever mystery novel. It is not a murder mystery (although it includes a murder), but is instead about the mysterious disappearance of a valuable diamond.

Rachel Verinder inherits the moonstone from her uncle on her 19th birthday. Since the diamond was ruthlessly stolen by her uncle in India and is rumored to be cursed, this gift is meant maliciously, because Rachel’s mother wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

Rachel’s cousin Franklin Blake acts as courier of the diamond, and only his decision to travel early, we learn later, may have saved his life while the stone is in his possession. The Verinder’s house is visited twice by three mysterious Indians.

The night of Rachel’s birthday dinner, the moonstone disappears from a cabinet in her sitting room. Rachel’s subsequent behavior is inexplicable. She declines to be interviewed by investigators trying to find the diamond and is uncommonly offended by Franklin’s attempts to help solve the mystery.

A house maid named Rosanne seems to be involved in some way in the crime. But perhaps she is being unfairly judged, as she has a criminal past and is trying to reform.

The Woman in White is certainly Wilkie Collins’s most famous novel, but The Moonstone has always been my favorite. An epistomological novel, it is made vibrant by the distinctive and sometimes amusing voices of the various characters, who are requested to submit their testimonies of events. I especially enjoy the sections written by Gabriel Betteridge, the house steward with a fascination for Robinson Crusoe.

logo for RIPThis reread for my Classics Club list has not changed my opinion. The Moonstone has a complicated, but not absurdly so, plot and an exotic element. Although it occasionally contains comments, especially about women and Indians, that are no longer politically correct, they reflect the novel’s time and the attitudes of the narrators.

P. S., I am also reading this for the R.I.P. challenge.

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