"A Life I Had Never Dreamed Of": Jane Robinson's 'Bluestockings'

I bought Bluestockings, a study of the opening of university education to women, in perhaps the ideal location: Heffers bookshop in Cambridge. As I walked back to my car, I passed three or four Cambridge colleges, most of which had been male-only at their founding. Magdalene College, in fact, did not admit women until 1988 -- the last of any Oxbridge college; and even then, the decision resulted in the wearing of black armbands by its male undergraduates, and the college flag being flown at half-mast.

The University of Cambridge has perhaps the worst history in the UK when it comes to equal access. It did not allow women to be full members of the university until 1948 (the equivalent date was 1920 in Oxford, although there were other problems there). And there remain several single-sex Cambridge colleges: Newnham, Murray Edwards and Lucy Cavendish. Arguably, this now privileges women above men in terms of admission; and in Oxford, by contrast, all of the colleges are now mixed (St. Hilda's began to admit men in 2008).

Sexism and sex difference persist in other ways, too. I remember vividly while I was at Oxford the discussion of what was causing the 'finals gap' -- the fact that men tended to do better in final exams than women -- and what might be done to remedy it. I now work in a Cambridge college, in an office populated almost entirely by Oxbridge graduates, and entirely by highly intelligent women. The other day, one of my colleagues described how she was asked by an elderly-ish man what she'd got out of Cambridge: was it a first-class degree, a blue (playing for one of the university sports teams), or a husband? The first two items on the list are clearly worthwhile achievements for someone of either sex; but I just couldn't imagine anyone asking a man whether he'd managed to find a wife at university.

So I was coming to Bluestockings as a Cambridge resident, an Oxford graduate, a woman, and a feminist. This is, admittedly, possibly the best combination Jane Robinson could have asked for. I am her target audience, and I wasn't disappointed. The book is a vivid work of social history, covering the mid-1800s to 1939, and a testament to Robinson's method, which involved -- alongside traditional archival research -- meeting and corresponding with a huge number former 'undergraduettes' (or their relatives). Robinson peppers her historical narrative with scores of quotations from letters and interviews, all of which are fascinating and some of which are extremely entertaining or moving. I had tears in my eyes by page 4.

There are tales of extraordinary kindness: schoolteachers secretly funding their cleverest pupils through university when all other options failed; a stepladder specially bought for a diminutive natural sciences student to use in the labs in the 1880s (and consecrated to her memory by her supervisor after she left); the near-destitute, visionary mother who believed so strongly in her daughter's Oxford education that she nearly starved the rest of the family, investing in a future she could have hardly dared to hope would materialise -- and, in recognition of this sacrifice, being given a special seat next to the officials at her daughter's graduation. "'This ceremony means more to Mrs Pearson,' explained the Dean, 'than to anyone else here today. Of course she must have a good view.'" (Cue me sobbing into my sandwiches.)

'Dr. Syntax with a Blue Stocking Beauty' (1821)
by T. Rowlandson

These heartwarming anecdotes are balanced nicely with the darker side of the women's experiences: the rampant sexism (hardly surprising, but still appalling), the very real lack of prospects for female graduates for either employment or marriage, and the anxiety associated with being away from home and under pressure to do well. Robinson deals frankly with the fact that many undergraduettes did not enjoy university, and that amongst those who left early, the rate of suicide was disturbingly high. There is a particularly upsetting description (familiar, I am sure, to many freshers), of a young woman who "nearly died, she sa[id], of homesickness, and sat for hours at a time in her room anxiously wondering what she should be doing."

One particularly engaging thing about the book is the sense of recognition, the feeling that university education has in some ways hardly changed at all. Undergraduates still live in a 'bubble' during termtime. (There is a harrowing account of a girl who refused to let her father come and see her, being preoccupied with the forthcoming college dance, only for him to commit suicide a few days later.) They still develop intense friendships and crushes that are fuelled by the physical intimacy of a college or halls of residence. They still have essay crises and wacky tutors.

I was interested, of course, in the things that have changed for the better (access to courses, student freedoms, the food -- the latter possibly being a contentious point!), but equally struck by what hasn't changed, and perhaps should have, such as the use of college 'scouts' or 'bedders' in Oxbridge, employed to clean students' rooms, empty their bins, and even sometimes make their beds. It was understandable for young ladies from wealthy families to be unprepared for life on their own -- but surely it's not acceptable nowadays. It made me wonder about whether university can be infantilising to young people, both men and women, who ought to be moving up a level of responsibility, not cosseted and provided for in most of the things that independent adults have to do themselves. (Though I do wish I'd gone to more late-night cocoa parties when I was a student.)

The book itself does have some faults. Robinson appears to have had problems with structuring her material, resorting to a set of abstractly thematic chapter titles around which to group her anecdotes ('Working in Hope', 'Women's Sphere', 'Shadows', 'Breeding White Elephants' and so on). This doesn't always succeed. For instance, stories about sexual relationships between female students (and/or female tutors) appear in several different chapters before you get to a section explicitly focusing on it -- which is itself problematic, since it appears in the 'Shadows' chapter dealing with unpleasant experiences, yet includes several accounts of very loving, positive relationships between women as well as more abusive ones. The whole book jumps around frequently, which sometimes feels breathless and lively, but which does get rather frustrating after a while.

On the whole, though, the 218 pages of Bluestockings cover a lot of ground and is consistently amusing, moving and intelligent. It's well-indexed, and comes with thorough references, a bibliography and a timeline. Robinson ends her study in 1939, at the beginning of "the golden age of the bluestocking", so there is plenty of room for a sequel. And it would be welcome, at least to me: I tend to think almost all books written after about 1950 are too long, but I found myself wishing there were another 200 pages of this one. Perhaps I shall have to scratch that particular itch with my own creative efforts -- and if I do, Bluestockings will be one of the first places I look for ideas.

The Master, Kermode and Mayo, and "cults"

As a follow-up to the last post, which dealt with a novel about a "cult" (not my words), we went last night to see The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film. This is not a review of the film, but it was a slight vindication of a point I made in my previous post, that religion deserves to be treated with intelligent consideration. The "Master" of the title, a character called Lancaster Dodd, is substantially based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology -- arguably a far more damaging cult than that represented in The Revelations -- and yet, in an interview on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's show, Paul Thomas Anderson was quite adamant that the character, and the cult (named "The Cause"), do not have a wholly negative impact.

It's also interesting to consider that Kermode and Mayo, who review films on 5Live on a Friday afternoon, also have a "cult" following: people who write to the show with their own reviews usually try to show off by referencing the in-jokes and personal foibles of the two presenters (which the podcast amplifies even further). Kermode, who has a PhD in film studies (he's a massive horror fan), is affectionately referred to as "the good doctor". And, in a serendipitous cycle of themes, it turns out that both Kermode and Mayo are regular churchgoers.

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip
Seymour Hoffman in The Master

This is not to dispute the fact that, if the John Sweeney Panorama programme is anything to go by, Scientology does sound like it's fucking crazy. And of course there are different degrees of "cult"-ishness, Kermode and Mayo being at the harmless end of the spectrum. But it is ignorant and unhelpful to ignore the numbers of people who become involved in these movements, without exploring why they might want to do so. The Master is a beautiful, superbly-acted movie (though "low on plot", as Anderson admits), which reserves judgment in an admirable show of reflectiveness and restraint.

One last thing. I am currently reading (Samuel-Johnson prize shortlisted) The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane, about which I shall no doubt be posting soon. It is brilliant. It's about how rational and non-rational views of landscapes -- specifically ancient paths and roads -- might interact and complement each other,  and MacFarlane is so wide-eyed and open-minded, as well as being a beautiful writer, that it is a joy to read.

Book-jacket publicity, and doing mental illness a disservice: Alex Preston's 'The Revelations'

One of my first thoughts after finishing The Revelations was that it has not been particularly well-served by the various taglines, blurb and quotations adorning its book-jacket, many of which make it out to be far less subtle and ambiguous than it really is.

For a start, there's the phrase "one weekend", which you can see in the image on the right. The book is essentially marketed as a psychological thriller (see dramatic lighting and mysteriously back-turned figures on the cover), and it tends towards this in the later stages, but it spends a chunky amount of time doing some quite admirable exposition, exploring who the "four friends" are and narrating some scenes in a lot of detail, before we get to the "weekend". In the thriller mode, it does end up being the weekend --  a spiritual retreat to a country house -- that is important, but in terms of the wider questions this book poses, I think the early stages are just as important.

The other thing that annoyed me is the use of the word "cult", which appears twice on the back of the book, both in the blurb and in a quotation from the Daily Mirror. I therefore expected to read a book about something like Scientology, or a live-in commune -- and, more importantly, I expected Preston's portrayal of it to be very much an exposé of its evils and the way it ruins people's lives. In fact, the "cult", which is called The Course, is an evangelical strain of Christianity seeking to convert people who are struggling to find meaning in life, and there are several instances in the book where it seems to do great good.

Exeter College Chapel, Oxford

I think this book is more intelligent than its packaging suggests because it acknowledges many truths that a more militant author wouldn't have done. There are many highly-educated, young, evangelical Christians who gain great strength from their religion. There are also many non-religious young people who do struggle to find meaning in their lives. And there are many people who are touched by experiences that they can only describe as spiritual, often when they would least expect it. Preston goes into some detail about one character's conversion being helped along by the beauty of a college chapel in the early evening, candlelit, filled with sacred choral music. Having experienced this particular sensation myself, my feeling is that Preston knows what he's talking about and understands that religion is more than about accepting or rejecting a set of values -- there is also "the mystery of faith", as the Christian liturgy expresses it, something beyond the purely rational and ethical that helps you accept that life is inherently complicated, imperfect and difficult.

I still haven't worked out what the author's personal position on this is, and obviously there's a debate to be had on whether it matters. In the acknowledgements, Preston refers to Karen Armstrong's The Case for God as "remarkably sane", and references some "bizarre spiritual excursions". It is tempting to view this as a closed-minded approach to something which has brought a lot of benefits for a lot of people, both intellectually and emotionally, but luckily the novel does make an attempt to explore these benefits properly.

My biggest problem with the book is the character of Lee, a (female) PhD student researching female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. There is a colloquial lit-crit term, a "Mary Sue", which is relevant here: a female character who is so perfect as to be two-dimensional, usually a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the (female) author. The term emerged from fan-fiction, but I have found several instances of where it is applicable to mainstream fiction, and this is sort of one of those cases.

Lee is not a Mary Sue in the traditional sense, but she certainly seems a fantasy to me compared to the other three characters. Mouse, Lee's closest friend, describes her thus:

Everyone who met her thought she was this wonderful, lively girl. Those eyes ... I'd see people look into her eyes and be transported. But behind it all she was struggling with terrible demons, unable to face the world.

This quotation exemplifies another problem with the book -- unrealistic, over-angsty dialogue -- but it was the characterisation of Lee that really irritated me. She is very skinny, highly intelligent, super-promiscuous, and above all deeply troubled. One (male) character is in love with her, another is hopelessly sexually fascinated by her.

Now, if I met Lee and she behaved the way she behaved in the book, I'd find her really bloody difficult. She is clearly very depressed, but no one seems to want to help her (unless sleeping with her/ going down on her/ secretly masturbating while she swims naked counts), and almost no one expects her to take responsibility for her actions (except, interestingly, David, the leader of the Course, and one other fairly minor character). The implication is that she can't be expected to behave properly or discuss her actions or seek help, because she's just got all these problems, you know, and, like, we just can't ever understand them, and one day she might kill herself, but hey, that's just who she is. It's deeply infantilising, and it romanticises mental illness in a way I find really distasteful.

'Universally Speaking' is the second
track on the album By the Way.

 Lee is an example of what could be described as an anti-Mary-Sue -- deeply flawed, but in a highly idealised way. Severely depressed people are not, and ought not to be, objects of sexual fascination, no matter how promiscuous they themselves are. They should be treated with respect and given support -- and that includes, to my mind, not simply ignoring selfish and destructive behaviour because it happens to cater to one's sexual desires. She reminds me of the girl described in the song 'Universally Speaking' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- damaged, yes, but desperately romantic and beautiful.

In short, whilst this is an intelligent book in many ways, I felt short-changed as a reader by being forced to regard this character in such a misty-eyed way. Lee represents the intellectual approach to religion in the novel, and I hoped to see a serious consideration of the fact that many, many highly intelligent people (including many academic professors) are religious. Instead we get a rather lazy association between visionaries and mental illness, and a view of the latter that sits uncomfortably and unconvincingly between science and sentimentality. Recommended if you're interested in the issue of modern religion -- but otherwise, probably not.

Henry James -- a masterclass in plot recycling

When I last updated this blog, I was very slowly progressing through The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Since then, I have found a job, passed the 80,000-word mark on my novel, and seen a woodcock for the first time -- I'm undecided on which of those is the most exciting -- and I've also finished reading Wings, about which you can read below.

WARNING: This post includes spoilers for both The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady.

Although James published Wings (1902) twenty years or so after Portrait (1881), the two plots are extraordinarily similar. A greedy woman and her lover/fiancé conspire for him to get close to, and eventually marry, a rich American heiress, in order that they might both have access to the money. In Portrait, the 'Lady' of the title, Isabel Archer, is the victim of this scheme, only realising exactly how cruelly she has been treated towards the end. Similarly, Milly Theale, the young American in Wings, upon realising that Merton Densher's attentions are motivated by money, not affection, experiences intense despair, "turn[s] her face to the wall," and succumbs to the illness which has threatened her life throughout the book.

James's preoccupation with the figure of a genial, intelligent, rich young woman suffering at the hands of others can be explained in biographical terms, especially as regards Wings. The character of Milly Theale is based on his young cousin, Minny Temple, who died of tuberculosis in her mid-twenties, in 1870. James was open about his interest in the immense potential that had been lost, and the strange fact that his affection for her increased after her death (as Merton Densher's does in the novel). The qualities of Isabel Archer and Milly Theale -- both are good-humoured and almost universally liked -- reflect the author's very personal feelings towards the young woman who inspired them.

It's interesting to reflect that, despite the similarities in the two characters and plotlines, it is only Isabel Archer, not Milly Theale as well, who has become the most famous and beloved of James's protagonists. And, despite my using the word 'recycling' in the title of this post, the two novels don't feel at all similar to read. This is partly because James's prose is extremely dense, though rich and expert, in Wings and comparatively light and fluid in Portrait -- but it is also because of a couple of key structural differences in the novel:

Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich 

in  The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

1. Point of view. The Portrait of a Lady is very substantially from Isabel's point of view. We see her handling Caspar Goodwood, her suitor who keeps popping up from America, her increasing regard for Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, her unhappiness and disillusionment after her marriage, and, finally, the moment of anagnorisis (shocking recognition) when she realises that Osmond and Madame Merle are lovers. (She realises this, by the way, through the simple fact that Osmond is sitting whilst Madame Merle is standing -- a level of familiarity completely inappropriate to mere friends, and only possible with a truly intimate relationship. A stunning use of gesture.)

By contrast, Wings is mostly from the points of view of the couple, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, with only a few chapters entirely from Milly's. Towards the end of the novel, we follow Densher almost exclusively, which means we become more interested in his moral crisis than in Milly's cruel situation. Gilbert Osmond in Portrait has no such obvious crisis, and so the moral dynamics of Wings are far subtler.

Alison Elliott and Helen Bonham-

Carter in The Wings 

of the Dove (1997)

2. Proximity (or rather, the lack of it). Not only do we rarely see Milly Theale's point of view -- we are not even in the same city with her when she dies. Merton Densher, after Milly finds out about the plot to get her money -- which we don't see -- has one last, painful meeting with her in Venice -- which we don't see -- and returns to London, leaving Milly to die -- which we don't see. Her death is reported to Densher by other characters who have themselves merely received a telegram. James adds remove after remove to make Densher, and the reader, as detached from her death as possible. He challenges us to fill in the gaps, to imagine her despair.

For an author to kill off a main character is commonplace, sometimes even necessary, to turn up the emotional volume, to raise the stakes. (The deaths of increasingly important characters in the Harry Potter series is a particularly apt example.) But to keep the reader at such a frustrating distance from it, as James does, is phenomenally brave. James is choosing not to cash in on the tear-jerking moments, and implicitly argues that Densher's experiences are more interesting at this point. The difficulties he had in getting the book serialised, ironically, helped him here, enabling him to revise the book and structure it more freely. He chastises himself in the Preface for making Milly's background so scanty -- we know next to nothing about her life in America, for instance -- but the fact that we don't get to be in the room with her at her most crucial, devastating moments is surely deliberate.

3. Milly's illness. At the start of Portrait, Isabel Archer is healthy and happy and determined to have an interesting, full life. Milly takes a similar attitude, but it is given an edge of desperation by the fact that, as is slowly revealed, she knows that she is ill, and suspects that it might be very serious. The fact that the illness is never named, and that she only shows her weakness by her absence at various social engagements -- when she is present, she is vivacious and charming -- intensifies our sense of this threat through James's, and Milly's, teasing. The reader develops a creeping awareness that Milly will not find the happiness she deserves.

Isabel Archer, on the other hand, has no such doom hanging over her head. You feel that she could make a good decision, with enough perspicacity, and find a mode of living that would really suit her. But she doesn't. She marries Gilbert Osmond, and then stubbornly refuses to take any steps to lessen her own misery (until the ambiguous ending). She is complicit in her own downfall, whereas Milly makes no obvious false steps, and is simply the victim of others' schemes.

That this should lead to Isabel becoming such a cherished protagonist is surely natural, considering that she takes her place amongst Dorothea Brooke, Tess Durbeyfield, Elizabeth Bennet and so on, heroines who suffer long and hard (with or without a happy ending) because of a simple error of judgment. We like characters who make mistakes. Milly Theale is likeable, and her situation is tragic, but she is perhaps just too nice for us to get a handle on her -- compared to Merton Densher, who feels the weight of his own guilty profoundly by the end.



The Wings of the Dove takes a while to decide on its protagonist, but the sense of satisfaction I found at the end, when Densher rejects the money Milly has left him and dismisses the success of their scheme, proved to me that Henry James's choice to go back to the plot of Portrait, rearrange things a bit, and thus find a whole new area of fictive potential, is yet more evidence of a bold, masterful writer.

Reading Diary: Trollope, O'Connor, O'Brien, O'Connor again, Henry James

Since bombing my way through Death Comes to Pemberley I've been reading a rather electrifying cluster of other things ... which I will now proceed to summarise in blog-style, semi-bitesize fashion.


1. Anthony Trollope, The Warden

I had a few friends at university, and one boyfriend, who were big Trollope fans, but our tutor didn't get us to read any during the eight short weeks we 'did' Victorian literature, and, already lumbered with the bricks that were Bleak House and Middlemarch and Our Mutual Friend and so on, I left him well alone. I think it is a combination of having moved to the country and a dip back into Thomas Hardy that raised the idea of reading some Trollope in my mind, so I bought The Warden in a spanking new, very elegant Penguin edition with lovely stripes on the spine and the back. This is the first of the Barchester novels, and is also very short, so I thought it might be a good place to start.

The Warden follows the moral crisis of a quiet, cello-playing clergyman who, through generations of complacency and inflation, receives a huge income as the warden of a lodging house for poor, retired men of the parish. The sum was originally meant to give the warden a comfortable living and provide for the men's board, but whilst the warden's portion has increased, the men's daily allowance has remained the same. A young doctor, burning with the flames of righteousness, decides to stoke up the residents into signing a petition asking for their fair share, which throws the poor warden, Septimus Harding, into shock and disorientation.

Like Tolstoy and indeed Hardy, Trollope has such enormous compassion for nearly all his characters -- perhaps with the exception of Dr Grantly, the archdeacon -- that you can't help becoming rather passionate about what could be described as a dated Anglican quibble. Mr Harding tends to mime cello-playing behind his back during uncomfortable conversations, and, if things get too troubling, on his lapels -- much to the bewilderment of his interlocutors. This is a brilliant touch which encapsulates his preferment of music and emotional fulfilment rather than intellectual or public triumph. From this one gesture, you can see in an instant how the rest of the book will pan out.

Choosing an argument about the wealth of the Church, however, has larger echoes that it is important to remember when reading The Warden today. Henry VIII justified the dissolution of the monasteries partly by pointing to the vast and questionable incomes enjoyed by many abbots, and the privileges enjoyed by bishops, such as seats in the Lords, could form a modern parallel if someone were to take up the issue today. Which is not to say that Trollope is 'taking up' the issue as such. He is certainly exploring it, and also shining a light on the border between being in the right and appearing to be so -- Jeremy Hunt, take note -- but my lasting impression was not of the greed and self-satisfaction of the church; it was of the quiet anguish of the warden himself. The fact that the book is entitled The Warden, rather than, say, Those Avaricious Archdeacons, seems to indicate Trollope's intention here.


2. Short stories -- Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor.

Yes, the sudden cluster of 'O'...' in the author's names does signify a move towards Irish writing. I finally got around to reading Ulysses. A guy I was at university with was surprised I hadn't read it before -- and, frankly, so was I. But I finally did it. And it's BRILLIANT. (See the poll on your right -- if you can take a couple of seconds to vote before the end of October that would be fab!) And the gentleness, the recognisable 'Irishness' of it, pushed me to explore Irish writing a little more.

I bought a great book called The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story -- which I mentioned in my post about Colm Toibin -- which contains thirty-one stories, along with a great introduction by Anne Enright. 'The Mad Lomasneys' by Frank O'Connor and 'Sister Imelda' by Edna O'Brien are particularly brilliant, and I've since gone out and bought a collection of Frank O'Connor stories. They're gentle, uncomplicated, and then, suddenly, more heartbreaking than you might think it reasonable to expect from such a short form.

Edna O'Brien is the next on my list to explore. She has just published an autobiography, Country Girl, and thus has been in the press and on Open Book and so on. Her story 'Sister Imelda' seems to be one of her most famous, and captures exquisitely the desperation pupils have to please their teachers, and what happens if the teacher finds herself a little too keen to be pleased. "I looked into her eyes, which seemed fathomless, and saw that she was willing me to be calm and obliging me to be master of my fears, and I little knew that one day she would have to do the same as regards the swoop of my feelings for her." Without the word "swoop," this sentence would be unremarkable -- with it, it's stunning.

Flannery O'Connor -- as you might have been muttering indignantly to yourself -- was not Irish, but was born in Georgia, USA, in 1925, and died there of lupus at the age of 39. The introduction to her Complete Stories, by her publisher Robert Giroux, paints her as an extraordinarily humble, painstaking writer, but one who knew exactly what she was trying to do -- a conviction strengthened by her Christian faith. Her stories are extremely sharp and tough, and Evelyn Waugh is reported to have said, when sent the proofs of her first story collection, "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable." Whether or not you'd expect this level gaze, frequently directed at men and their pretensions and prejudices, from a female writer (if you need to be angry today, go here), I think it's fair to say you might not expect it from a writer in her early twenties, as O'Connor was when she wrote, say, 'The Geranium'. Her precocity was really exceptional.


3. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

My experience of Henry James so far had only really encompassed The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. But I reread the latter earlier this year, and was struck with how lucidly and civilly and minutely he dissects the relationships between his characters, even two acquaintances striking up a conversation in a drawing room, tracing who seizes tiny advantages and triumphs over the other.

I chose The Wings of the Dove for a couple of very banal reasons. The first is that I've somehow ended up with two copies of it, so it kept thrusting itself into my field of vision -- a bit like a painting whose eyes follow you around the room. Secondly, one edition of it is a lovely Penguin classics copy -- the expensive black ones, not the cheap beige/green ones, which has a very nice font in a good size. I'm happy to admit to being susceptible to print size as a consideration given how much reading I do.

And I'm glad I gave myself a break on that score, because Wings is really quite dense and tough-going in many places. It was published nearly 20 years after The Portrait of a Lady, and James has become even more unremittingly abstract in his descriptions of relationships. Check out this passage, from the very first chapter, on the subject of Kate Croy's relationship with her father:

Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognized his younger daughter's happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great wonder was that they hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to its eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.

It's the kind of writing that rewards slow, thoughtful reading. Once you've got your head round what the hell he's talking about, it's brilliant. But slow really does mean slow -- no eyeslip, no skimming, none of the normal approaches I take with easier stuff. This is not, I admit, a speed I like very much, because I like to feel the thickness of the pages increase in my left hand and decrease in my right hand as I get further into a book. (This is one reason why ebooks don't do it for me.) But it makes more and more sense to me these days to slow down, to commit to writers who have clearly pumped so much time and brainpower into their work that to read it at pretty much any speed feels ungenerous. Sitting and staring at the neat ranks of books I intend to read very soon doesn't help me remember that the main thing is the actual reading of the books -- but Henry James does.



Running my eye back up the pictures of books, this does look like an advert for Penguin -- but they are on a seemingly eternal roll with their book designs, and their fonts have always been gorgeous, so if I've got the choice, it's Penguin almost every time. Other publishers are available. (But sometimes they might as well not be.)

PD James vs. Amateur Fanfiction: Place Your Bets Now!

Who would win in a literary contest between a renowned, nonagenarian crime novelist and a bunch of (mostly) female, unpublished, scribbling fantasists? Or so I characterised in my head the comparison between PD James's Death Comes to Pemberley (DCTP) and the immense amount of online fanfiction I've read over the years.

Like many (should I perhaps say 'many women'?), I've read Pride and Prejudice a good four or five times, and have seen the two modern adaptations frequently enough to have a pretty thorough knowledge of the plot and characters. So when I heard about James's genre-shifting homage to Austen, I was intrigued. I had never read any of James's work, but I knew her name through contacts I've had with Faber and Faber, her publishers. It also made me think of EL James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which started out as a Twilight-based fanfiction, but had to be rewritten for publication for copyright reasons. PD James, of course, didn't have this problem, what with Austen having been dead for nearly 200 years.

PD did, however, have a different difficulty, one which, to my mind, stuck out a mile. Amateur fanfiction writers -- whether they're basing their stories on Harry Potter, Twilight, or, slightly amusingly, Fifty Shades -- can pretty safely assume that their readers know the 'canon', the original texts they're writing from. Thus a Harry Potter fanfiction beginning with Severus Snape storming into his classroom will probably not follow with "Snape was the Potions Master at Hogwarts, but was rumoured to desperately want the Defence Against the Dark Arts post." Readers will almost always know all this. They've come to this category because they've already read, and liked, the canon, and they want to understand or imagine more about this world, these characters.


PD James can't make this assumption. There may be readers who are huge fan of crime writing in general and PD James in particular who have never read or seen Pride and Prejudice. They might have a general idea of the plot in a 'common knowledge' way, have read Bridget Jones' Diary, or even found the clip of Colin Firth in his wet shirt on YouTube. But PD James needs more from her readers than this. She needs them to have a detailed understanding of the plot, characters, and even back story to be able to follow what happens.

She therefore begins the novel with a rather long synopsis of the events of Pride and Prejudice, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Sample sentence: "It was hardly unexpected; Mr Bingley's admiration for Jane had been apparent from their first meeting at an assembly ball." Put it in the present tense and it practically becomes a paragraph from SparkNotes, albeit rather better written. If James's editor/publisher had been slightly conversant with the conventions of fanfiction, s/he might have been sensible enough to suggest that this synopsis be included as a prologue explicitly aimed at people who hadn't read Pride and Prejudice. As prologues, especially of crime novels, I was emphatically not hooked.

Whilst we're mentioning the genre again, it would be unfair of me to ignore it as a work of crime fiction. But even here, I wasn't satisfied. I'd worked out much of the solution quite early on, and then when the big 'reveal' did happen, it was too soon, leaving a lot of explanation to fill the last fifty or so pages, which was not only obvious but frequently repetitious. There were no really 'thrilling' moments, and too much imparting of information was done through quite clunky dialogue.

I also, unexpectedly, found the characters very two-dimensional. I wondered whether this was because they were not PD James's own characters, and thus she had not thought to develop them: Bingley, Jane, Darcy and Elizabeth all seem to rest on the characterisation Austen herself did in P&P, and little is added. (In fairness, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Wickham are more interesting, though they are not the protagonists.) Even the new characters seem to be little more than mouthpieces with one or two broad adjectives. Whether this is typical of PD James I don't know, but for someone who claims that "the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters" (in the afterword to the book, no less), she doesn't exactly back up that claim here.

The book ends with a sickening epilogue in which Darcy suddenly decides to explain his motives for doing a bunch of things back in the old days when Austen was deciding who did what. This is implausible (they've been married SIX years now), unnecessary and, frankly, poorly written. Sample sentence: "How could I have been so unfeeling, so presumptuous, as to seek to separate Bingley from Jane?" This is meant to be Darcy speaking. He drones on, repeating stretches of plot just in case we'd forgotten AGAIN about how much Elizabeth used to hate him, and how justified she was -- and it just doesn't sound like the way Darcy, or indeed anyone, would really speak. The epilogue to the last Harry Potter book was better, and those who've read it will know that's saying a lot.

A P&P-based 'fangirl' creation ...

The last scene, and indeed quite a few chunks of the book, read like 'fangirl' fanfiction: aiming mainly to flag up the writer's love and knowledge of the canon text. I actually found this sentence which apparently runs through Elizabeth's thoughts towards the beginning: "If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?" YAWN-VOMIT-YAWN. We get it, PD. You think Jane Austen's a brilliant novelist. Why don't you just write "Elizabeth thought again about how complex a character she used to be, and how comparatively uninteresting she was now"?

There is a lot of fanfiction out there on the internet -- I've written a few pieces myself -- and the best of it aims to go far beyond the canon texts, bringing a couple of minor characters together, unpicking strange moments or gaps in the plot, and often dispensing with original time-frames altogether. I've read stories where a relatively two-dimensional character (for instance, Professor McGonagall) suddenly gains secrets desires, a dark past, a building tension with another character. This then enriches the original texts by forcing you to ask certain questions, to consider how much deeper the world can go, when you reread them. Why would the Death Eaters, who apparently love torturing people, only have one torture spell? Wouldn't this get boring for everyone? Wouldn't they employ some sadistic spell-writer to create a specialist repertoire for them? You can end up so far from the canon that it becomes merely a speck in the distance, the place you've travelled from. This should be the joy of writing and reading fanfiction.

There are one or two moments when PD James does this in DCTP -- she gives us a plausible and wryly-described marriage for Mary Bennet, for example -- but most of her time is spent hammering through the plot, rather than exploring quirks and idioms of characters. I rarely say this, but it could have done with being a hundred or so pages longer, with the extra wordage spent on giving texture to the characters, making them actually seem real. The book made me long to go and read Pride and Prejudice, for the detail, the minute dramas of the conversations, the vivid sense that these are concrete lives being lived. I can forgive PD James -- she has a long and distinguished career, and is over 90 -- but I find it hard to forgive the reviewers who gush praise on the book jacket. They should go and have a good long look on fanfiction.net and marvel at the ingenuity and resourcefulness of some of its members. As should you, my dear readers.

Edinburgh Book Festival Round-Up (2): Colm Tóibín

This blog post is about an event on 13 August 2012. 

I had planned to write more about the Edinburgh Book Festival in later posts, but it now seems so long ago that it would feel a bit out-of-date. However, I did want to write about the Colm Tóibín event for a number of reasons:

1. His name is one I can never say without feeling awkward. I think the correct pronunciation of it -- at least the one Tessa Hadley used at the event -- is COL-um tuh-BEAN, but it sounds a bit pretentious to say it that way (like referring to 'Paree' or 'Firenze' without a hint of irony), yet ignorant to say it any differently. I wonder if Tessa Hadley checked with him about how to pronounce it at the event. I'm glad it wasn't me. I'd have probably stood there in an agonising dilemma, because on the one hand he probably gets asked that all the time and finds it annoying, but on the other hand saying it wrong in front of 570 people (a sell-out audience at the RBS Main Theatre) would be pretty embarrassing too. It was already warm enough in there without having a hot flush of mortification to deal with.

2. Tóibín is an author I have admired for a while now. I once listened to a podcast in which he was discussing his novel Brooklyn, which won the Costa Award in 2009, and I was so enthralled by his gentle, slightly nasal, Irish-New-York voice that I immediately went and bought and read the book.

It's about an Irish girl, Eilis, in the 1950s, who moves to Brooklyn to seek her fortune. It's all very understated -- no AS Byatt-type encyclopaedic detail, no Madeline Miller-type syrupy-pseudo-poetry, to name a couple of recent prize-winning authors -- and it's very hard to put your finger on what makes it so good. It is precise, it is compassionate as Tolstoy and Hardy and Henry James are (James being a particular love of Tóibín's), and it is balanced; Eilis is non-judgmental and non-aggressive, but both of these qualities appear more as absences than anything else, because she is also incredibly passive. There is tragedy, but Tóibín writes about it as something essentially low-key, banal, and to be expected.

He has the same clear sight and light touch in The Master, and I noticed it again in a story called 'A Priest in the Family', which comes from his collection Mothers and Sons and which I found in the anthology The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. It concerns an old woman, Molly, who discovers that her son, a Catholic priest, is about to go on trial for child abuse. The passages of dialogue almost reach a Hemingway-like level of minimalism because of the lack of interiority -- she only reflects when alone, and not even very deeply then -- which, along with the ingenious decision to focus on the mother, makes the story really quite chilling.

3. His approach to talking about books is one I find extremely sympathetic, and one that was reinforced by his conversation with Tessa Hadley (see previous post). They were trying to search for a word that described the variations in tone and colour that make up a work of literature. They went through 'aesthetic' and 'pattern' before eventually hitting on 'texture'. This word quite rightly brought out the curious sensation that reading feels physical -- it has a rhythm which is not quite the same thing as the speed at which you are reading it. It is to do with the interaction between the words, the eye, the brain, and the white space around the paragraphs. Ending a paragraph with the sentence "It was over" is quite different to beginning a paragraph in the same way. I think it was this sensation they were trying to pin down.

Tóibín teaches a class at Columbia University, where he is Mellon Professor, and explained to an amused audience that he tells all students, even the ones with "massive PhDs", to leave all literary theory at the door. To students who drawl that they can only read in a Lacanian way, he responds like an Irish fishwife: "Not in here, you won't." Saying this, his rather geometric approach to texts, looking for patterns and so on, sounds quite narratological in its method. He explained that in The Portrait of a Lady and Mansfield Park, amongst other novels, the fact that the heroine does not have parents both allows and forces her to come into her own, and thus the story is born. (This is particularly true of the silly or dead mothers in Jane Austen, where aunts and sisters tend to be more important.)

Pressing his Russian Formalist-style musings further, he proposed that it was irrelevant for readers to say they 'liked' or 'disliked' characters in novels: the character serves a function in the novel and is not there to excite that kind of emotion. This sounds a very ascetic approach to reading, and one that a great many readers will surely disagree with, but I see his point. A character is necessary to the novel; there's no point complaining to a novelist that the character isn't this or that. Assuming some competence on the part of the novelist, changing the character would take it away from the novel that the novelist wanted to write.

Focusing on only the text is very out of fashion nowadays, but I admire Tóibín's approach because it encourages extended and careful reflection on the craft with which a text has been put together, and I don't think extended and careful reflection on anything can be a bad thing. Nor is he blinkered: his new book, New Ways To Kill Your Mother, is a series of essays on the relationships between writers and their parents (Yeats and his father, J.M. Synge and his mother, and so on). Clearly, he appreciates the value of biography, and probably more than many.

Tóibín has a long-term interest in parental-filial relationships, judging by the title of Mothers and Sons (2006), which some might slyly suggest is typical of a gay, solitary man. However true this may be, he is a superb writer, who displays a wonderful slow generosity when being interviewed, and makes you feel that he really does understand the slow, minute pains associated with being alive. Perhaps he gives a faint impression that he feels more pain than most, for whatever reason; but he's clearly doing what he loves best of all, and he does it with a modest virtuosity that continues to inspire and excite me.



(The next few posts will focus on a different theme, which is as yet undecided. Never say I'm not helpful.)

Edinburgh Book Festival Round-Up (1): Tessa Hadley and Sarah Hall

I'm doing a couple more posts about authors I saw at the Edinburgh Book Festival. This blog post is about a talk given at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Monday 13th August 2012. A later will be about Colm Tóibín.

This event was in the Guardian Spiegeltent at the Festival, at 10.15; I thought it was at 10.30 and was about a minute late, much to my embarrassment. They had to play some music for a couple of minutes whilst I and a couple of other latecomers scurried in and blushed all over the place. But, once in, I enjoyed this event very much. Both writers have short story collections out: Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference (which I've read) and Tessa Hadley's Married Love (which I haven't). The talk was therefore about the particular nature of short stories, what they are like to write and to read. I've never actually read anything by Tessa Hadley, but as her particular interests include Austen, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Colm Tóibín (more of whom another time), I'm already quite a fan of her. Here is her 'author statement' on the British Council website, which I think is rather nice:

I love the irresponsibility of short stories. Writing short, you create with a free hand. Each new development you imagine can be drawn in to the story without consequences, with all the lightning-bolt effect of a first thought, no requirement to elaborate a hinterland. A quickly scribbled indication of background can stand in for a whole city, a whole past. And yet I can’t stop wanting to write novels too.  Novels see things through. The reader is in for the long term; the writer is in for a sizeable stretch of her life. In a novel there’s not only the dazzle of the moment, but also the slow blooming of the moment’s aftermath in time, its transformation over and over into new forms. I love to write about the present, and the past that’s recent enough for me to remember. The fiction writer’s ambition is modest and overweening: to take the imprint of the passing moment, capture it in the right words, keep it for the future to read.

Both writers read extracts from their work, and the subsequent discussion focused substantially, like the passage above, on the difference between novels and short stories. It was chaired by Sue MacGregor, who was just what a chair ought to be: directing the writers in places where you would expect them to be modest (insisting on reading out parts she thought were particularly brilliant), but not conspicuous or interrupting the flow of discussion.

There was a lot of talk of the impact of a short story, the fact that it is like a punch or an explosion, it has to be engineered very strictly and must have a sense of being "tightly-strung". Sarah Hall mused that it was a bit like throwing a pot: you have to get it right on the first "throw", and can't save it by reworking if the first go isn't right. I'm not sure how much I agree with this -- I think a patient craftsmanship can improve things a lot more than writers (including myself) would like to admit -- but I do agree that short stories tend to come from a particular 'feeling' rather than the kind of scope you need for a novel. Hall also talked about the judgment you have to make about a short story, deciding whether it could "go the distance" into a novel, or should stay in the short form. This is something I've often wondered about things I've written -- whether they should and could be teased out and extended, or whether this would lead to 'padding' and dampen the whole effect -- so it was good to hear. Not to mention the apparently 'banality' of this idea, the admission that writing is often as much to do with logistics and practicalities as inspiration and vision.

Tessa Hadley was the one who really impressed me, though I'm not sure why. She was lively and quick and extremely eloquent, and self-effacing. I almost wondered whether she had erased the sense that younger writers have of writing being bound up with your own attractiveness. I don't think this is a stupid or judgmental thing to say. I have this feeling myself more frequently than I'd like to admit, and been conscious of it in things I've given people to read. I have also on occasion sensed it in things friends have given me to read (and not always that young, either!).

Sarah Hall, in my impression (which is of course pure speculation), hasn't quite got rid of this sense yet, and it shows in the collection: many of the protagonists of the stories are women obsessing in one way or another about a relationship with a man; the book cover itself shows a naked woman with her back to us, on several different cover designs. I wondered how much these women were fictional versions of herself -- more than in the usual way for a writer! Perhaps this is an unfair way to belittle her writing -- after all, female sexuality is a perfectly valid and important subject -- but it was a feeling I had as I read the stories on the way up to Edinburgh, and seeing her in person gave me the same feeling again, so I'm standing by it. I should, however, say that I liked some of her stories very much, in particular 'She Murdered Mortal He' (the title, according to Google, taken from a Bob Dylan lyric). She can create a sense of oppressiveness and draw out a tense moment in a way that makes for good reading.

But going back to Tessa Hadley: she read Elizabeth Bowen's story 'The Jungle' for the series of short stories podcasts released by the Guardian in 2010, and I was very struck by the way she captured tension and tone and mood with a very calm, restrained rendering (see previous post on authors reading their own work!). Though I have never read any of her fiction, she has mysteriously installed herself in my list of favourite literary figures. And, later the same day, she chaired the event with Colm Tóibín. More of which in a later post!

Alice Oswald at the Edinburgh Book Festival

I frankly think that some poets, reading their own work, have a tendency to spoil it (a poet whose name rhymes with 'fluffy' springs to mind.). They over-express, they over-dramatise, they leave massive pauses, they try to become an actor -- which they conspicuously aren't -- and to make their work into a monologue or verse drama -- which it conspicuously isn't. Poetry, especially lyric poetry, is a voice in a space: either a physical space like a hall, or a white paper-space in a book. It does not actually address anyone. It requires intense attention on the rhythm and focus of the words, and I believe that this should largely replace the need for any 'acting'. (Except perhaps in the dramatic monologue, the deliberate 'cross-over' form, done so beautifully by Robert Browning and Tennyson and co.)

However, sometimes readers of poetry, even actors, manage to get a slow, low, calm intensity that directs the listener's attention straight onto the words, not the reader's voice. Ralph Fiennes' reading of Four Quartets is the perfect example.* And, thankfully, Alice Oswald's renditions of her own work are another.**

Oswald is a poet I've admired for many years now. She writes largely about nature and humans' relationship to it, and is often associated with Ted Hughes. There certainly are clear links, but she doesn't emulate his quasi-shamanistic approach. She has said in past interviews that her writing tends to revolve around water and its movement, because it is one thing that constantly changes in all landscapes, even in ways that are not immediately noticeable, such as the rising and falling of groundwater levels. This interest is particularly obvious in Dart, her second collection, which focuses on the River Dart in Devon and its presence in the lives of people around it (and which won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2002).

Oswald's other most obvious defining feature is her use of imagery which is almost geometric or mathematical, focusing on shapes and colours and literal movements: "sections of distance tilted through the trees", or "the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines". She combines this with a rich texture of sounds and rhythm - for example, "Green shines rain / Like a looked at thing being turned in all directions". For me, in the second line of that quotation (from 'Ideogram for Green' in Woods etc.), the movement from the thick K/L sounds to the ING sounds and finally to the harder consonants of D/N/S towards the end suggests the "looked at thing" being turned, creating a kaleidoscopic mix of phonetics. And there are examples like this everywhere.

Her familiarity with the natural world is evident everywhere: she is a trained gardener; she produced a book of botanical poems with etchings by Jessica Greenman, Weeds and Wild Flowers; her play-poem Sleepwalk on the Severn captures the night-time wildlife and movement of the Severn estuary; and so on.

However, she is a classicist by degree, and has returned to this interest in her most recent collection Memorial, a re-imagining of the Iliad, which she describes in the introduction as a kind of "oral cemetery". She is aiming to imitate the ancient Greek tradition of lament, where a professional poet would work with women of the community to orally build a picture of the dead person. By paraphrasing from the Iliad mini-biographies of soldiers killed in the Trojan war, and mixing in directly translated Homeric similes, she creates a tapestry of mourning and death in amongst the constantly shifting, and mostly destructive, natural world.

But the poem is clearly meant for oral delivery, as the Iliad and poems like it would originally have been experienced by an ancient 'readership'. And, at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 14th August, an oral delivery is exactly what Alice Oswald gave us. She chose to recite the poem from memory, which she did fluently and powerfully (notwithstanding one slightly long pause when I assumed she had temporarily forgotten what came next). The recitation lasted for about 75 minutes, which, as she observed at the start, is a challenge for modern audiences. However, the crowd sat largely motionless throughout, a challenge in a stuffy festival tent - and made even more challenging by the gory nature of parts of the text:

... a spear / Thrown by Diomedes pushed hard in by Athene / Hit him between the eyes it split-second / Splintered his teeth cut through his tongue broke off his jaw / And came out clean through the chin

(For some reason Blogspot won't let me put a block quote on multiple lines without messing up the formatting. Apologies for this.)



That the poem is most suited for oral recitation is most obvious in the fact that each of Oswald's translated Homeric similes is printed twice in a row on the page, tempting a silent reader to skip the second iteration. The performance was enough to suggest why: an attentive listener, familiar with the words from the first time around, could use the second time to focus on the intonation and rhythm and penetration of the words. For me it helped with understanding the function of each simile on both levels: the literal image, sometimes with its own internal metaphors (a hawk chasing a dove "snares her with a thin cry / In praise of her softness"); and its relationship to the endless deaths of the men.

Of course, you could also see the first iteration as applying to the death described before it, and the second one as applying to the death described after it: the physical deaths often do not link so closely to the similes which follow them as to make them a clear 'unit' within the poem. The effect, therefore, is of a catalogue of specific deaths combined with a series of meditations on the nature of death itself -- it is like mules, exhausted by toil, or poppies being flattened by heavy rain, or a woman who stops spinning, or a fish jumping out of the water onto the sand, or fleeing fawns suddenly giving up and standing still. And this helps the poem to gain its "enargeia", its "bright unbearable reality", by the reduction of a narrative drive to something like Death is this, and also this, and also here, and also like this.

Oswald's reading certainly enhanced the enargeia she invokes. Her face, with its heavy fringe and angular jaw, is strong and makes you hope you never have to disagree with her. During the reading, she moved her head, and very little else. Her poetry-reading voice was low and only moderately expressive, as it was on the other two occasions I've seen her read. She slightly emphasised alliterations and rhythms. The impression was of an intense power and focus: she was telling us, not reading to us, but she was telling us as a poet, or a poet-prophet, rather than as a mourner or an actor. (Maybe there is something faintly shamanistic about this.)

The title Memorial suggests the timeless status that many classical texts enjoy, because the poem specifically sets out to remember the 'common men' who are sacrificed in epic conflicts -- including modern global conflicts, where casualties are barely a name who passes over the radio waves one day and into obscurity. There is of course an irony in the fact that these men get a short stanza each, if that, and no more -- nowhere near a whole book like Achilles or Odysseus -- but Oswald did not set out to construct them as individuals; rather she illuminates their value, briefly, before slaughtering them. The mixture of significance and insignificance perhaps encapsulates the essence of an army: no army exists without individuals, but both individuality and individuals are disposable in the name of a greater cause.

How different the problem of individuality in armed forces is from the problem of individuality in the civilian world, I don't know. Probably not very. And so Oswald's work does what all good poetry should do: it spins out and out and out and forces us to take cover from our own nature until the slaughter can be ended -- or, depending on how you look at it, completed.


* No, I'm not being paid by Faber and Faber.
** Really, I'm not. They just happen to publish really good poetry.

Sense and Sensibility: Notes on Rereading

A quick preface to the first article of this blog. I had an old blog but it has been several years since I posted with any regularity on it, and I think the direction of my blog-style writings has changed since then. So, I've started a new blog - not that there will necessarily be any more coherence in the themes, but hopefully it will reflect my modern, twenty-five-year-old self with more accuracy.

I've just finished reading Sense and Sensibility, which I hadn't read in full for a good few years - possibly since my second year of university, if not before then. Like many, I'm a big fan of the Ang Lee film (1995), which won an Oscar for Emma Thompson's adaptation from the novel and started some fantastic actors: Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Thompson of course, Gemma Jones, Harriet Walter, Imogen Stubbs, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton - so many, in fact, that it seems like a 'best-of-British-acting' reunion (perhaps foreshadowingthe Harry Potter films, which star at least six of the same actors ...?). The film is charming and funny, and includes some lovely original music.

Rereading the novel, the first that Austen published (in 1811), served to remind me of several things that the film leaves out through the need for economy:

A. Pairs of sisters
There are three pairs of sisters in the novel, and only one in the film. Marianne and Elinor of course are in both. But the film leaves out Lucy Steele's elder sister Nancy. Nancy, by the way, is rather important in the novel, since it's her that reveals Lucy's secret engagement to Edward to her prospective in-laws and sets in motion the chain of events which eventually leads to the happy ending. In the film, it's Lucy who does this herself, which is not inconsistent with her general character, but robs the film of the interesting contrast between one pair of sisters who, although very different in some ways, are both artless and behave with integrity (the Dashwoods), and the other pair who are irritating, greedy and false (the Steeles).

There are also Mrs Jennings's two daughters, one of whom was cut from the film, along with her four children, leaving her husband, Sir John, Mrs Jennings's son-in-law, a widower. This does raise a question of characterisation: what happened to his wife/Mrs Jennings's daughter, and why are they both so cheerful about it? The dead woman is never once mentioned in the film, which does start to stretch the bounds of credibility a little. I can understand why they'd cut her in the film, as she's pretty dull and doesn't add to the plot particularly, but her absence does make both Sir John and Mrs Jennings seem rather callous.

B. Willoughby's appeal
I had completely forgotten that Willoughby comes to see Elinor when Marianne is seriously ill at the end of the novel, begs Elinor to forgive him, and pours out his love for Marianne. It's a typically morally dubious decision on Willoughby's part, since he's already married to a rich young lady and is rather rude about her during his conversation with Elinor, but it serves to underline his very real love for Marianne and encourages us to see his downfall as tragic, the result of fundamental flaws in his character, rather than deliberate manipulation or evil.

In the film, this is cut, and we simply see Willoughby perched on a hill, looking down with a mournful expression at the double wedding taking place below him. On the whole, I think this was a sensible decision. The drama of Marianne's illness would have been interrupted, and the film unnecessarily lengthened, by its inclusion, and the symbolic exclusion of Willoughby from the celebrations makes him the rather lonely, regretful figure that Austen presents, but in a more efficient, visually-striking way.

C. Mrs Jennings
Mrs Jennings is a widow in both novel and film (where she's played by Elizabeth Spriggs). Along with her son-in-law and daughters (daughter singular in the film), she is continually both helpful and irritating to the Dashwoods through her lack of tact and perpetual cheerfulness. She is introduced as "a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar". She teases Elinor and Marianne and practically everyone else about romantic entanglements, real and imagined, and Marianne is often quite rude to her because she fails to see that most of Mrs Jennings's comments are well-meant.

What is developed much more in the novel, and gave me a lot of joy to read, was the fact that Mrs Jennings rises in the estimation of Elinor and Marianne throughout the book because of her loyalty and good sense. Four quotations are enough to illustrate this:

1. When Mrs Jennings is defending Edward for keeping to his engagement with Lucy:

'Then,' cried Mrs Jennings, with blunt sincerity, no longer able to be silent, 'he has acted like an honest man. I beg your pardon, Mr Dashwood, but if he had done otherwise, I should have thought him a rascal.'

Here, Austen cleverly has Mrs Jennings act as the ventriloquist's dummy for the reader. She says what we're all thinking: that Edward's actions prove him to be so honourable as to give up his own chance of happiness and fortune - what a hero.

2. When Marianne is ill at Cleveland, the residence of Mrs Jennings's daughter Charlotte and her husband Mr Palmer:

Mrs Jennings, however, with a kindness of heart which made Elinor really love her, declared her resolution of not stirring from Cleveland as long as Marianne remained ill, and of endeavouring, by her own attentive care, to supply to her the place of the mother she had taken her from; and Elinor found her on every occasion a most willing and active helpmate, desirous to share in all her fatigues, and often, by her better experienced in nursing, of material use. 

Again, Austen has been clever enough here to make Mrs Jennings not only kind, but actually useful and skilful. We begin to see her true worth lies beyond all her hilarity and cheerfulness, in true loyalty and generosity.

3.  When Marianne leaves Cleveland, having recovered, --

... after taking so particular and lengthened a leave of Mrs Jennings -- one so earnestly grateful, so full of respect and kind wishes as seemed due to her own heart from a secret acknowledgement of past inattention ...

The reader wholeheartedly supports Marianne's other conversions, to see that Willoughby is a scoundrel and Colonel Brandon a gentle and passionate lover - and therefore we are inclined to agree with this one, which seems to suggest that Mrs Jennings's good qualities should take precedence in our overall judgement of her character.

4. In the penultimate paragraph of the novel:

... and fortunately for Sir John and Mrs Jennings, when Marianne was taken from them, Margaret had reached an age highly suitable for dancing, and not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover.

Mrs Jennings, still desperate for romantic gossip, is unrepentant. One possible interpretation is that she has no need to repent: her gossip has done no real harm, so she doesn't need to change. Another way of reading this is to admire Jane Austen for not making Mrs Jennings a completely likeable character, even at the end, when the characters have been properly sorted into the good, the bad, and the just-about-pitiable (i.e. Willoughby). We are much more sympathetic towards her than earlier in the novel, but we are made to remember what her essential character is like, and this possibly introduces a bittersweet note into the conclusion, as well as an amusing one.

In between reading Austen novels, I sometimes start to wonder whether her importance has been overblown. But every time I reread another, I remember: she is subtle and brilliant and deserves to be praised in the highest terms.