Category Archives: Books

I’ve read Wuthering Heights before, although I can’t remember exactly when — at least 10 and maybe as many as 15 years ago. I have vague memories of a dark, disturbing, confusing book, and that’s about all I remember. This time around what I’m noticing is the novel’s complicated structure. I find the love story, well, not much of a love story. It’s a story less about love than about deranged, violent compulsion. These characters don’t love; they go crazy with obsession.

But the structure is worth looking at closely, both in terms of narrative form and in the pairing and repetition of characters, places, and action. Much like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights has multiple narrators; it starts off with Lockwood, a complete outsider to Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the two major settings, and then moves to Nelly Dean, a servant who has worked at both houses. Nelly tells most of the story to Lockwood in conversation as they sit up late at the Grange. Lockwood somehow — we’re not told how — records or remembers the long tale and is repeating it to us, although at one point he says he has “condensed” her tale a little bit.

So we get two narrators, each telling the story from what could be an unreliable memory, neither of whom we have any particular reason to trust. Lockwood, in what I now realize is a mildly humorous opening chapter, sees Heathcliff and thinks he is a sympathetic soul, which he most definitely is not, a fact Lockwood must soon learn the hard way. He also thinks he may develop a romantic attachment to Cathy and prides himself at least once on what a good catch he would be for her. Nelly’s status as unreliable narrator is harder to sort out. Her loyalties shift as she tells her tale; at several points, for example, she feels attachment to Heathcliff but at other times is disgusted and frightened by him. She becomes involved in the plot, hiding or revealing information at important points, but she never acknowledges just how much she influences events. She pretends to be an outsider who is merely telling a tale, when she really is one of the most important characters in the novel.

These two narrators provide a frame for the story of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, but in doing so, they call into question any possibility of an unbiased, objective point of view. All we have is gossip and hearsay. I must say I do like this sort of novel, the sort that foregrounds issues of interpretation. Lockwood becomes a little like the reader, trying and failing to make sense of the characters he meets; as he gets his bearings in the world of Wuthering Heights, so do we as readers begin to figure out what is going on, although we may, perhaps, be a bit smarter about it. Just as he is both tempted to flea the place and strangely drawn to it, so we as readers are likely to be ambivalent about these larger-than-life characters who don’t behave like anybody we know.

Equally as satisfying as all the ambiguity introduced by the unreliable narrators is the way Brontë structures the story itself. It’s made up of pairs — Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, which come to be associated with civilization and wildness respectively; the Earnshaws and the Lintons; Lockwood and Nelly; Catherine and Heathcliff; older Catherine and younger Catherine; Heathcliff and Edgar; Catherine and Isabella; younger Catherine and Linton; Hareton and Linton, and on and on. Each character has at least one other alter ego or double or love interest or foil, and possibly several. There’s also the first half of the novel, with its love story between Catherine and Heathcliff, and the second half, with its love story between Catherine and Hareton; there’s the way the first half shows the breakdown of order and the way the second attempts, at least, to restore that order.

But although the novel sets up all these pairings and oppositions, it also emphasizes how no pairing or opposition, no boundary, wall, or exclusion can last. Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights begin as separate entities, each with their own metaphorical significance, but as the novel goes on, the boundaries between the two begin to fall apart as the two families meet and then marry and produce offspring that combine traits from both places. Heathcliff tries to control the movements of the other characters, ordering them around and locking them in or out, marrying them to one another or keeping them apart, and yet ultimately they escape his grasp. There is no end of breaking in or out, of jumping over walls, of invading enemy space, or of creating new alliances.

So although the novel is structured by pairings of various kinds, it really is about how these pairings dissolve. It’s about how nothing is permanent or reliable or certain.

Wuthering Heights describes such a murky world, one where wild emotion flies out all over the place and violence continuously erupts, but it’s also murky in the sense that nothing settles down into neat patterns or into clear meaning. I have to say that as I was reading, I referred to the genealogical table at the front of the novel constantly; I clung to it for some clarity and relief from the confusion of a novel where the same names get used multiple times and the story isn’t told in chronological order.  The genealogical table isn’t part of the novel itself, though; Brontë seems to want us to be confused.  She forces us to live without solid ground beneath us, at least for the length of time we choose to spend with her.

At the library the other day I couldn’t resist picking up Alan Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader, and I devoured it over the course of an afternoon. It tells the story of how the Queen learns to love reading, opening with a funny scene where she asks the president of France about Jean Genet only to get a rather blank look in response, and from there moving back in time to the point where she stumbles across a mobile library near Buckingham Palace. She had always read, of course, “as one did,” but was not a book-lover: “liking books was something she left to other people.” Out of politeness, however, she picks out a book to borrow, an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. She doesn’t like it particularly, but she borrows another one, this time Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. She’s optimistic because, as the narrator says, “novels seldom come as well-connected as this.”

She loves the book, and from there goes on to become a voracious reader, picking up books indiscriminately at first and more knowledgeably later on. She finds a mentor in Norman a palace page and learns the joy of talking about books with fellow book lovers. She soon begins to find it hard to do the things she used to do without complaint; receptions and parades and parliament openings now become merely distractions from her reading and she begins to run late, having trouble tearing herself away from her book. She learns to read and wave to the crowd at the same time while she is driven by in her car.

One of the things I found charming about the book is the way it describes what it’s like to love reading. The fact that the main character is the Queen makes the story especially amusing, but the story in its basics could describe many people. Reading is something that can take over one’s life; it changes the way one thinks and acts, and one’s relationship to it changes over time:

To begin with … she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. The next stage had been when she started to make notes, after which she always read with a pencil in hand, not summarizing what she read but simply transcribing passages that struck her. It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own. “I think of literature,” she wrote, “as a vast country to the far corners of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.”

She begins to develop her own taste in books, wondering:

Am I alone … in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?

and:

I can see why Dr. Johnson is well thought of, but surely, much of it is opinionated rubbish?

While she shares many characteristics with other, more ordinary readers, she is an uncommon reader, after all, and some of her insights come from her unique position. She’s particularly drawn to the democratic nature of reading:

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included.

She loves the way she is anonymous when she is reading; the book doesn’t know who she is and doesn’t care.

Her reading gets her into a little bit of trouble, though; no one in the palace likes the fact that she reads, and her private secretary and her aides are suspicious of the new development. One day her private secretary, Sir Kevin, tries unsuccessfully to explain why:

“I feel, ma’am, that while not exactly elitist it sends the wrong message. It tends to exclude.”

“Exclude? Surely most people can read.”

“They can read, ma’am, but I’m not sure that they do.”

“Then, Sir Kevin, I am setting them a good example.”

Although her servants hide her books and her secretary tries to separate her from Norman, her reading friend, they can’t make her lose her passion for reading. She’s hooked and that’s all there is to it.

I loved the way the Queen comes across as innocent and inexperienced, in spite of her years on the throne; she’s also shrewd, though, and open-minded, ready to experience with pleasure whatever comes her way. She’s a sad figure, too, one who only late in life discovers a pleasure she now realizes she could have enjoyed for many years past. She’s not one to dwell on lost time, though, and she simply relishes the pleasure of reading all the more while she can.

The book is witty and its sense of humor is dry. In my opinion, Bennett gets the tone exactly right — it’s light and fun and charming, but it’s also got some interesting ideas about the way reading can enhance and disrupt any person’s life, common or not.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I struggled with Anne Enright’s The Gathering; the best I can come up with is that I started off badly with the book, and that bad start was too much to overcome. I did begin to like the book more as I went on, and now that I’ve finished it I have come to admire it, but the experience of reading it wasn’t pleasurable.

The first chapter irritated me with its elusiveness, its refusal to make complete sense, its jumping around from character to character and time period to time period. And the first chapter is not even two pages.

I don’t particularly like saying that in another mood, at another time, I might have liked the book — it feels like a cop-out to me: if I didn’t like the book I should just say I didn’t like it — but in this case it’s probably true. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with this particular narrator and her troubled and troubling voice.

The story is told by Veronica Hegarty, one of twelve children in an Irish family; her older brother Liam has just been found dead and throughout the novel she’s preparing for his funeral — the gathering of the title. Much of the novel, though, is taken up with what appear to be memories and flashbacks to Veronica’s youth and adolescence — her memories of her distant and mentally ailing mother, of sibling fights and violence, and especially of her grandmother Ada, her grandfather Charlie, and their mysterious but ever-present friend Lamb Nugent.

I say these “appear” to be memories and flashbacks because we learn early on that Veronica doesn’t really know much about her family and especially her grandparents, so instead she imagines a history for them, conjuring up, for example, the way her grandparents may have met and how Lamb may have ingratiated himself into their lives. There’s very little, when it comes down to it, that we as readers can say for sure about what the novel presents to us; what we know is what Veronica tells us of her attempts to make sense of her past, but these attempts are so tenuous, we are never on solid footing.

Veronica’s voice is a dark, troubling one; she’s grappling with some shocking memories of witnessing a sexual molestation, although even here she’s uncertain about how and whether it actually happened. She’s going through some marriage troubles herself, spending her days sleeping and her nights writing and driving around the city, feeling in complete isolation from her husband. She’s trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with her and with her recently-dead brother, to think through who is at fault, and even whether such a question is answerable at all. Her rage at the world comes through in almost every page, and I came in time to admire her attempts, floundering though they may be, to understand what has happened to her.

I kind of wish I hadn’t reacted badly to the novel at the beginning, as I came to like the book more as I thought about it further. It’s so direct and unsparing, and beautifully written too. But sometimes I’m not in the mood for beautiful writing, strange as that may sound. Or perhaps I should say that it struck me as self-consciously beautiful writing, and that’s what irritated me, the way the language drew attention to itself. That kind of writing I’m not always in the mood for.

At any rate, our book group discussion is tomorrow, and I’m curious to see how the conversation will go. Certainly don’t let my doubts scare you away from the book if you are at all interested in reading it — you may come to love it. Hobgoblin liked it quite a bit, in fact.

I’ll close with a quotation from an interview Enright gave; I thought it was a very astute way of thinking about James Joyce and his influence on contemporary writers:

Q. Almost every review of an Irish writer’s work makes comparisons to James Joyce. Is it hard to get away from him?

A. I don’t want to get away from him. It’s male writers who have a problem with Joyce; they’re all “in the long shadow of Joyce, and who can step into his shoes?” I don’t want any shoes, thank you very much. Joyce made everything possible; he opened all the doors and windows. Also, I have a very strong theory that he was actually a woman. He wrote endlessly introspective and domestic things, which is the accusation made about women writers – there’s no action and nothing happens. Then you look at “Ulysses” and say, well, he was a girl, that was his secret.

I enjoyed Benjamin Black’s The Silver Swan (my copy sent to me by the publisher), although I also thought it was a bit strange, most particularly so in its ending, which I won’t describe here. I’ll just say the ending struck me as unconventional. I find it hard to talk about conventions in crime novels, as I’m not that familiar with the genre, but the ending — while perfectly satisfying — seemed unusual.

I do rather wish I had read Christine Falls first, the book that opens the series; while The Silver Swan stands on its own, it does spend a lot of time reviewing and referring to what happened in the first novel, and I felt I would have been able to follow along better with that context a little clearer in my mind. I’ve read series books out of order before and felt a little less disoriented in those instances. Still, it’s a fine read no matter what.

The main character is Quirke (a delightful name, isn’t it?), an appealing protagonist, a man who (along with many other crime novel heroes I’m finding) has been thwarted in love, struggles with drinking, and is driven by a sense of curiosity that rarely does him any good. His wife Delia died quite some time ago, but the woman he truly loved, Delia’s sister, is recently lost, and Quirke is haunted by the failure of both these relationships. He also has a daughter, Phoebe, who only recently learned Quirke is her father, and she hasn’t yet forgiven him for keeping the secret. Quirke’s life and the lives of those around him are filled anger, resentment, and regret, and Quirke himself is surrounded by an air of melancholy. He’s a former alcoholic, haunted just as much by his longing for a drink as he is by his sense of his mistakes.

The mystery itself concerns an old school friend of Quirke’s who unexpectedly appears and asks Quirke, who works as a pathologist, to ensure that his recently dead wife, Dierdre Hunt, otherwise known as Laura Swan, does not receive an autopsy. Naturally, this sparks Quirke’s curiosity, and it comes as no surprise when we learn that Dierdre died under mysterious circumstances.

The novel’s point of view switches back and forth among the characters, moving from Quirke’s story back in time to tell Deirdre’s story and later moving into the point of view of other characters as well. We learn that Deirdre, in her Laura Swan guise, ran a beauty salon with the mysterious and slightly sinister Leslie White and that both of them visited the equally mysterious and slightly sinister Dr. Kreutz, who is a “spiritual healer,” an occupation that provokes suspicion in a number of the characters, and rightly so, as it turns out.

As Quirke investigates Deirdre’s life and her connections to Leslie White and Dr. Kreutz, he notices that his own daughter Phoebe has connections among these people as well, and then the plot begins to get interesting.

I enjoyed the book for its plot, but even more so for the relationships the novel describes; as happens in some of the other crime novels I’ve read, the crime seems almost like an excuse to throw some characters together in difficult circumstances to see how they behave themselves. I would like to go back and read Christine Falls now to see how Quirke began his life as a crime novel hero, and I would also like to read future installments, whenever they might appear, especially in light of The Silver Swan’s strange ending.

I’m relatively new to the mystery/detective/crime novel genre, but Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key struck me as different from other examples in a number of ways, most particularly in the way we find out so little about the main character, Ned Beaumont. I just finished Benjamin Black’s The Silver Swan for a point of comparison, and although Black doesn’t give us reams of information about his hero’s thoughts and feelings, we do get a little insight into how his mind works. But Ned Beaumont remains a mystery; perhaps he’s the central mystery of the book rather than the murder he’s trying to get to the bottom of.

I don’t say he’s investigating this murder because that might be overstating the case, as Beaumont is not a real detective. He has a man working for him who is a real detective, but he himself is a political henchman, working for a corrupt man who backs a corrupt senator. When the senator’s son is murdered, he wants to find out who did it, not to bring the murderer to justice but to clear his friend from suspicion.

So what do we know about Ned Beaumont? (The narrator always calls him by his full name, never just “Ned” or “Beaumont.”) He appeared on the scene (some unnamed city, possibly Baltimore) only a couple years ago from no one knows where. He has a history in New York City, but no one knows what the connection is. He appears to be a handsome man, although we only know this because of the way other characters react to him; the narrator never describes his looks. People like him, although it’s not entirely clear why. He’s got a powerful attachment to Paul Madvig, the man suspected of committing the murder, but we’re not entirely sure what the basis of this attachment is. He seems like a drifter, a man who will float into a city, stay a while, get in some trouble or get bored, and float away somewhere else. Women fall in love with him, but there’s no indication he has any feelings for them at all.

The world Ned Beaumont lives in is thoroughly corrupt, and there’s no hint that things could possibly be otherwise. No one works to clean things up. Instead, we’re given a world full of violence and betrayal. The novel contains a shocking scene where Ned Beaumont ventures into the lair of a competing political operative believing he can trick this man, but instead finds himself brutally beaten up. He tries to escape again and again and each time he is beaten up once again, but he keeps trying and trying until he comes to embody brute determination itself. Even the man chiefly responsible for these beatings comes to admire his tenacity. It’s as though the novel is saying there is nothing to do in a world like this but to keep fighting until you can fight no more.

This description doesn’t sound like the sort of book I’m generally attracted to, and yet I did enjoy it. At least, I enjoyed it once I figured out what was going on. The first 50 pages or so were confusing, with lots of new characters and lots of intrigue. Since the narrator gives so few explanations of what is going on, the reader must do a lot of work to piece the plot together. It’s not always immediately clear which side Ned Beaumont is on, for example, or what he’s setting out to do. But the world Hammett creates is so chillingly well-drawn, so shockingly consistent in its corruption, so ruthless and heartless, that you can’t help but admire it, even as it horrifies you.

I can’t say I’ll be picking up another Hammett novel soon (although if my book club were to choose another one, I would happily read it), but I’m pleased to have gotten a taste of his work and to have a glimpse into the world of hard-boiled crime fiction.

Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel is the latest choice of the Slaves of Golconda; check out other posts on the novel here and the discussion here.

I enjoyed this novel immensely, although it’s a difficult read at times — not difficult to understand, but difficult to deal with the emotional content. It tells the story of Hagar Shipley, who has reached her nineties and, understandably, is declining in health. She lives with her son and daughter-in-law who are now threatening to place her in a nursing home. Passages set in the present alternate with flashbacks to significant moments in Hagar’s life, her small-town upbringing; her (rather inexplicable) marriage to Bram Shipley, a rough, isolated, uncouth farmer; the birth of her two sons; her decision to leave her husband; and, most dramatically, the fate of her younger son John.

Mirroring the flight she took from her husband in her earlier years is Hagar’s second dramatic exit: when she feels as though she is being forced to enter the nursing home, she takes off to some abandoned buildings along the sea and holes up there as long as she can. She is in no shape to be out walking around on her own, but her fear of losing her home is stronger than her fear of physical danger.

Hagar is a stubborn, strong-willed woman, with an antagonistic attitude toward the world; it does not do to cross her, as her father discovered when he tried to keep her from marrying Bram, and as her son discovers when he tries to move her into the nursing home. The novel is narrated in the first person from Hagar’s point of view, which means that we get Hagar’s explanations and self-justifications. She’s not an unreliable narrator, exactly, but we are left to infer what effect her harshness has on others rather than seeing it directly. And she has inflicted her share of psychic damage on those around her; she is harsh and unloving to her sons and is unable to express even the small amount of affection she feels for her husband. Now that she is in her nineties and is losing her grip on reality, she has an unfortunate habit of speaking whatever is on her mind without censoring it, sometimes without knowing that she is saying anything at all. The effects of these unintentional outbursts can be devastating.

Hagar is a difficult person, but the novel leads us to feel sympathy towards her, and, in fact, the interest of the novel lies in the tension between our sympathy for her and our horror at the damage she causes. This tension plays out particularly well in the story of John; throughout the early parts of the novel it is clear that some mystery surrounds his life, but the characters don’t want to talk about him, as even his name causes them pain. It is no secret that Hagar has always preferred John, and it’s obvious how much pain this causes the older son Marvin — his “flaw” is that he reminds Hagar too much of Bram, the mostly unloved husband. Obviously this is not his fault, and it illustrates just how cruel Hagar can be. But we’re also made aware of how much Hagar has suffered because of what happened to John, the son on whom she has pinned her hopes for a better life. When we find out his fate, the news is devastating.

Equally devastating is the way the novel depicts old age and the nightmare of approaching senility. The novel moves back and forth between the present moment and flashbacks, and often when a flashback ends, Hagar finds herself in the middle of some situation she cannot understand — she has been speaking out loud unknowingly or has ignored those who are trying to get her attention or has simply spaced out, and she is disoriented and confused. The first person narration captures this confusion painfully well.

Hagar suffers and inflicts suffering; in my more depressed moments I might say that’s everyone’s story. But the beauty of the prose and the liveliness with which Hagar tells her story keeps this novel from descending into unbearably dark depths. The stubbornness and spirit that has caused her suffering in the past is now what keeps her going, and as much as we might judge her, we also can’t help but admire her strength.

One of the things I like most about Frankenstein is its complicated structure — the way there are narratives nestled in other narratives and every part of it is either a letter or a story told by one character to another. We start off with Robert Walton writing a letter to his sister Margaret Saville. Then Walton meets Frankenstein, who tells him his story, which Walton records in his letters to his sister. Then Frankenstein tells Walton the story of how he re-encounters the creature after losing touch with him for several years (I try not to call him the monster, although it’s the word that comes most easily to mind — “monster” reflects Frankenstein’s loathing of him, but “creature” is a little less hateful and recognizes that he had the potential for goodness). During this meeting, the creature recounts his life up to that point in a long narrative that Frankenstein reports to Walton word-for-word — a little implausibly — and that Walton records word-for-word in his letters to his sister — also implausibly.

After the creature’s narrative, Frankenstein returns as storyteller, and then the novel closes with Walton again, so the structure of listeners/readers and writers/speakers goes like this: Margaret, Walton, Frankenstein, Creature, Frankenstein, Walton, Margaret. Or Walton to Margaret; Frankenstein to Walton to Margaret; Creature to Frankenstein to Walton to Margaret; Frankenstein to Walton to Margaret; Walton to Margaret. It’s interesting that Margaret is the receiver of all these stories but we never find out much about her and she never speaks herself.

In addition to all this, there are letters embedded in the narratives, so we hear other voices as well, most importantly the voices of Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s love interesting, and Frankenstein’s father, who both write to Frankenstein expressing their worry about his secretiveness.

And, making this already very textual novel even more so, there are literary allusions and quotations all over the place, including lines from Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Paradise Lost. Shelley finds ways to show off all the learning I wrote about the other day. This is a very inclusive novel, really, bringing in as much literature and as many voices and as much complexity as it possibly can.

All of this only emphasizes the loneliness of the creature; I just finished reading the creature’s narrative, and, in spite of the fact that he’s a murderer and that he sets out to make Frankenstein miserable, he’s really quite sympathetic. The story of how he lives in a hovel adjoining a small family’s home, how he watches them and learns from them and begins to care for them, how he shows the goodness of his heart by secretly chopping firewood for them, and how he is cruelly rejected by them when they first lay eyes on him is heartbreaking. Shelley makes clear that if only someone, even one person, had shown kindness to the creature, he would not have become the wretch that he is.

The creature’s narrative is nestled in the middle of this novel, passed on from character to character and finally to the reader, to me, but he himself is kept out of this web of communication. Every person who lays eyes on him is revolted, reacting with uncontrollable horror. The only people who will listen to the creature are a blind man who cannot perceive his horrifying body and Frankenstein who is threatened by the creature’s potential for violence and who therefore feels compelled to listen. It seems like the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that I, too, would react with horror if I saw the creature, in spite of my sympathetic feelings after reading his story. There’s something saving, then, in the ability to write to people from a distance, to write without the body being present, for it’s only this way that the creature’s message gets heard.

If only he could use words all by themselves with no traces of the physical, he could make people understand him, but the creature never actively enters this world of writing, or storytelling from a distance; his story gets passed along because Frankenstein chooses to recount it to Walton and Walton chooses to tell the story to his sister. Although his story is at the center of the novel, literally and metaphorically, he ultimately has no control over it and, left powerless to make people understand him, he lashes out in violence in response. The power that Frankenstein wields when he creates life is impressive, but the power that a writer wields is even more so; being left out of web of communication created by writing is another of the creature’s undeserved punishments.

I’ve been enjoying re-reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; this is at least the sixth time I’ve read it, as I was assigned the book once in college, was assigned it at least three times in grad school, and taught the book once a few years ago, which would make this the sixth time around. I’m not in the least bored by it, though. There is so much richness in the book, and I’m continually amazed that Mary Shelley was only 18 when she began writing it. She was 20 when it was published in 1818. The introduction to my edition discusses critical reaction to her youth, including the argument, made by Muriel Spark, that

… perhaps the wonder of it exists, not despite Mary’s youth, but because of it. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s best novel, because at that early age she was not well acquainted with her own mind.

I don’t particularly like this argument; it sounds condescending to me, as though Shelley wrote a work of genius in spite of herself. But it does seem that, genius though she was, Shelley was lucky in the way she stumbled upon an idea that would resonate so powerfully for so long, in ways she surely had no conscious idea of. Could she have known how acutely aware of the dangers of science and technology people would become in future years? Sometimes authors are particularly in tune with the spirit of their time, or even of future times, and it’s mysterious what allows them that insight.

My introduction is good, though, at showing all the literary and philosophical influences on Shelley, and all the ideas about science and the nature of life and death that were floating around the group Shelley was living with when she got the idea for the novel, a group that includes not only Percy Shelley, but Lord Byron and John Polidori as well. This is how Byron describes the mood of the time:

I was half mad … between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unalterable and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.

Wouldn’t you love to have been able to observe this group and listen in on all their talk?

The story of how Shelley got the inspiration to write the novel is famous; during a stretch of rainy weather, Byron proposed that everyone tell a ghost story and Mary Shelley was unable to think of one until one night she had a vision:

I saw — with shut eyes but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

Soon she realized that this vision could be the basis of the ghost story she had been seeking, and the rest is history.

I’m struck at everything she had absorbed while she was still in her teens. According to my introduction, in the years leading up to the writing of the novel, Shelley had been reading Byron, Samuel Richardson’s novels including Clarissa (whose influence we see in the epistolary structure of Frankenstein), the French writer Madame de Genlis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, books on chemistry by Humphrey Davy, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (both of these at least twice), Rousseau’s Confessions, Emile, and Nouvelle Heloise (the latter two twice), Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, her father William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland, or The Transformation, and various Gothic novels including those by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Maturin, and William Beckford.

And those are only the book the editor mentioned; there may have been plenty more. That’s quite a list, isn’t it? In this case the recipe for a masterpiece seems to have called for genius, avid reading, the right group of friends, and a little luck.

I have now finished Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, and have mixed but mostly positive feelings about it. As I expected, it doesn’t live up to her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, and, as I didn’t expect, it has some odd moments and some tedious ones, but overall it’s an enjoyable, interesting novel.

The novel tells the story of five young people who fall in and out of love with each other. There’s Katherine Hilbery and her fiancé William Rodney, first of all; Katherine is the granddaughter of a famous poet and she and her mother are working (not very successfully) on his biography. They spend their days surrounded by his papers and their memories; in spite of her family history, however, Katherine is not terribly literary and prefers to work on mathematics problems in secret. William is a rather surprising choice for Katherine — while she’s fairly free-thinking and open-minded, he’s conventional to a fault, particularly so in his views about proper womanly behavior. His ideal woman is not likely to spend her free time working at math.

And then there are Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham, both of whom come from decidedly less comfortable circumstances than the other characters. Mary lives on her own and spends her days working for women’s suffrage; Katherine envies her independence, although Mary worries where it is taking her — she doesn’t want to end up like the eccentrics she works with, so devoted to a cause that they can’t see beyond it and begin to lose their common sense. Mary and Ralph are good friends; Ralph lives with his family and works as a lawyer, although he dreams of owning a cottage in the country where he can work on his writing.

These four meet early on in the novel and later are joined by a fifth, Cassandra, Katherine’s cousin, who steps in to make this already-complicated love quadrangle even more complicated. I won’t tell you all the twists and turns of who falls in love with whom; I’ll just say that much of the novel involves these young people agonizing over what it means to be in love, whether love is even possible for them, what kind of marriage they want, and when and if they should confess their feelings to each other.

The novel is fairly traditional in its structure — it’s about romance after all — and yet it doesn’t quite feel like a Victorian novel; there’s so much focus on introspection and shifting states of consciousness that it seemed to me clearly a 20C work (published in 1919). In fact, it reminded me a little of D.H. Lawrence’s work (although it’s been a while since I’ve read him) and also of Elizabeth Bowen’s in the way that the characters didn’t act like any people I know and didn’t talk like them either; they do things like suddenly appearing at each other’s houses, making strange pronouncements, and then just as suddenly leaving. But a novelist doesn’t have to create characters who are like people I know, after all, and Woolf seems to have another purpose in mind: capturing the ins and outs of consciousness in all its shifts and ambiguities. What is familiar to me is the back and forth movement of the characters, the way they struggle to know themselves when the “selves” they are exploring never stay the same.

Familiar as it is, this back and forth could get a bit tedious at times, especially towards the end — in fact, the book starts off more traditionally than it ends, I think — and I wished now and then that the characters would just make up their minds. I was flummoxed by one bizarre moment when in the midst of a heated discussion between Katherine and William all the sudden Cassandra appears from behind the curtains, having apparently been hiding there, although Woolf doesn’t prepare us for this and never offers any explanation. It was just a clumsy way of advancing the plot, I suppose. But the plot seems less important than character development, and a device like this one serves to put the characters in an interesting new situation.

In spite of some flaws, though, I enjoyed the way Woolf captures the fleeting moods and emotions of her characters, and particularly the way she portrays the dynamics among men and women in a time when women were close to gaining the vote. It’s painful to watch William casually dismiss women’s intelligence as unnecessary, but even Ralph, a much more sympathetic character, can be dismissive at times, and Katherine remains uncertain about whether she believes in women’s right to vote or not. Mary is the most modern character among them in this respect, but she is also the character who suffers the most, a fact that speaks, perhaps, to the difficulty of taking the political stand that she does.

I plan to read the chapter on this novel from Julia Briggs’s book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life; I’ll let you know if I find new insights on the novel there.