Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Third in the Chronicles of Barchester series
Originally published 1858
Category: Classics

You know what’s a downright crime? That Anthony Trollope isn’t a part of the typical English lit degree canon anymore (if he ever was, which honestly I don’t know and don’t feel like looking up). Forget the argument over whether canon is important or not; the point is that making the English degree even remotely universal and relevant from one university to another means having a list of books that you can point to and say “knowing about these texts makes you qualified to ask ‘Would you like fries with that?’” And Anthony Trollope just isn’t on that list. You’ll have to read books by at least two Bronte sisters, you’ll certainly have to read a handful of Dickens, but no general education literature class will put Trollope on the syllabus. Like I said, this is a crime, because Trollope is one of the most genuinely readable authors of the latter half of the 19th century, and for my money a whole lot more interesting than Dickens, who was paid by the word and had a thing for hard allegory. (I may be biased because I was assigned to read Dickens before I was mentally mature enough to appreciate his books. We’ll see what happens when the Rand-O-Matic churns out Hard Times later this year.)  In his own time, Trollope was even more prolific a writer than Dickens *and* had a full-time career with the postal service. He also invented the pillar box (for Americans, the equivalent of the blue public drop boxes we put mail in) and made a pile of money from his writing. Not bad for a guy who was, in his youth, a total slacker.

Trollope was also the first English novelist to write books that were serially related to each other. If you hate the proliferation of 12-volume-mega-novel-series, you can blame Anthony Trollope.  His two most popular series were the Palliser novels, which had a political bent, and the Barchester novels, which are closer to being novels of manners. I’ve enjoyed the first two books in the latter series, The Warden and Barchester Towers. Trollope is good with characterization and description, he understands the issues of the day, and he explains the workings of the Church of England in the mid-19th century well enough for a reader of the early 21st century to keep up with him. It’s not hard to get involved in the lives of his characters.

As good as they were, Doctor Thorne is even better. This is primarily because it’s the first book with a strong female protagonist. In the first two books, Trollope creates a number of strong women, but the protagonists are more retiring and sweet. Mary Thorne, niece of the title character, is intelligent, well-spoken, self-assured and progressive in her opinions about class and individual worth. Her uncle has a similar personality, and despite his being only a country doctor (and one who *gasp* mixes his own doses like a common apothecary!) he’s the close confidant of the local squire Franklin Gresham and far more popular among all the classes than his more arrogant medical peers. At the start of the novel, Mary has shared tutors with the Gresham daughters and feels no artificial inferiority to them or anyone else, including their snooty noble relatives the DeCourcys. In fact, her friendship for Frank Gresham the younger, only son and heir to Greshamville, has started to turn into something warmer. But Mary, despite all her certainties about her personal worth, has to keep Frank at a distance. She knows she is the daughter of Doctor Thorne’s dead brother, but she doesn’t know who her mother was or what her relations are. In that uncertainty, she can’t bring herself to fall in love with Frank—and Frank certainly shouldn’t fall in love with the penniless Mary, because it’s his duty to marry money and restore the family fortunes.

In writing this novel, Trollope reveals that he’s the true heir to Jane Austen in characterization, plot, and style. Trollope’s wit is a little broader, and he uses the technique of addressing the reader directly and commenting on his own words, which I think is fun. But he’s also got the social advantage of writing fifty years after Austen. You see, Mary is a bastard. And everyone knows it, or suspects it. But in the end, she isn’t ostracized by society, and her potential isn’t limited the way, for example, Harriet Smith’s is in Emma. For all the talk another fifty years on about how shocking Thomas Hardy was with Jude the Obscure, I really wonder what the Victorians thought about cheering for a penniless, “nameless” (that’s the polite way of saying “bastard”) heroine?

I’m a fan of Anthony Trollope now. And it’s exciting to know that there are so many more of his novels left for me to discover.

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
First published by Cassell & Company, 1885
Category: Classic

I didn’t put it together that I’d picked two books with heroes from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, not the movie, of course) until I was about halfway through King Solomon’s Mines and reflecting how accurately Alan Moore had depicted Allan Quatermain. Moore is responsible for me picturing Quatermain as Sean Connery despite the fact that he looks nothing like the man; Moore’s said he had Connery in mind for the character long before the movie was cast. For those of you more familiar with the 1985 version starring Richard Chamberlain, that image is even farther from the truth. Never mind Patrick Swayze in the 2004 production. The legendary hunter and adventurer Allan Quatermain is self-described as little, dark, and slender, and either “timid” or “a coward” depending on how positive he’s feeling about himself. It’s the wealthy Sir Henry Curtis who’s the attractive, muscular, courageous warrior-hero. Quite a reversal, considering that Quatermain is the narrator and the main character. King Solomon’s Mines is the earliest African adventure novel and the progenitor of the Lost World subgenre, and still extremely entertaining despite (or, depending on the reader, because of) its sometimes archaic and Anglocentric attitudes.

The novel begins with Allan Quatermain explaining how he came to set down the details of this strange adventure (which somewhat kills the tension of later events, since you know he has to survive). He’s approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to help them make an expedition into the most hostile regions of Africa to try to find Curtis’s estranged brother. This brother was last heard of on his way to discover the legendary diamond mines of King Solomon, which coincidentally Quatermain has a sort of map to. In outfitting the expedition, Quatermain hires an unusual ‘Zulu’ named Umbopo who shows a remarkable lack of respect for his bosses’ white skins, and who is in general much less servile and much more a ‘gentleman’ than the other natives. After traveling for months, losing a number of red-shirted native bearers and nearly dying themselves, the four men find their way to a magnificent land ruled by a cruel usurper named Twala and his hideously ancient bag-of-bones witch doctress advisor Gagool. They make friends with Twala’s half-uncle Infaloos, who tells them how Twala had his brother, the true king, murdered, and drove his brother’s wife and infant son out into the desert. Surprise, surprise, guess who turns out to be the lost son and heir? A short, bloody war doesn’t distract from the main mission, and the trio of adventurers is finally successful in finding both the diamond mines and the lost brother (though by the time I got to the end, I’d almost forgotten about him—that’s how action-packed the book is).

The introduction to my copy says that Haggard wrote this novel on a bet with his brother, who believed he couldn’t write a book as popular and successful as Treasure Island, the big adventure novel of his day. Haggard wrote it in six weeks and then almost didn’t find a publisher, but when it finally sold, it took off like no one expected. The publisher actually had trouble keeping it in print. Haggard’s writing is in stark contrast to his contemporaries, whether literary (Thomas Hardy) or popular (R.L. Stevenson), with a first-person narrator, a lack of flowery language, and some truly bloody scenes. It’s obvious that Haggard knew Africa well and loved the continent, and that Quatermain’s semi-modern attitudes toward the natives reflect his own. Naturally, there’s the sort of reflexive white man’s superiority at times, particularly in portraying the relationship between Quatermain’s companion Captain Good and the beautiful African girl Foulata as impossible because of their skin colors. On the other hand, Quatermain refuses to use the word ‘nigger’ to describe the natives, has tremendous respect for their companion Umbopo and the other warriors of the lost tribe, and even admits his inferiority to these tall, powerful warriors when it comes to battle. I got the sense that Quatermain was about as open-minded as a white man could be in those days, particularly in literature.

The one thing that really threw me was how enthusiastic all three men were about massacring a bunch of elephants for their tusks. I get the thrill of hunting a dangerous animal, I get that the idea of conservation was mostly unheard of back then, but I was still repulsed when I realized that Quatermain’s suggestion that they hunt elephants meant shooting as many of the bulls as they could find, even pursuing the herd after they’d killed the first two. This is definitely not an attitude that’s survived into the modern day.

It really is a thrilling and often bloody adventure. There’s an early scene where one of the servants throws himself in front of a wounded bull elephant to save his master’s life and gets torn in half, very graphically. As with other classics, King Solomon’s Mines may not be as overly gory as contemporary novels, but it’s fun to imagine how grossed-out readers of the late Victorian era would have been by it. I won’t rush out to get any more of Haggard’s novels, but I certainly enjoyed this one.

The Woman in White  by Wilkie Collins
First published 1860
Category: Classic

Wilkie Collins’ novels are considered the forerunners of today’s mystery and detective novels.  What this usually means to the modern reader is a book that seems dull, cliched, with an easy to predict plot–because all the mysteries we’re used to have developed beyond the originals, and what was new and fresh a century and more ago has now been done to death.  This is definitely not the case with The Woman in White.  It’s suspenseful and gripping and had me unable to stop reading until all its secrets were revealed.

This is another one of those semi-epistolary novels of the 19th century–a style I love to see reconceived in the 20th and 21st.  The conceit is actually more of a collection of testimonies that taken as a whole recount a very strange story.  The main narrator, Walter Hartright, mentions occasionally how he managed to get verbatim records from the different people who tell the story, including how one of the first chronologically was the last he took down.  It’s a very effective conceit that allows for different perspectives without stretching belief.

The story itself verges on the Gothic just enough to make it creepy, but not totally unbelievable.  Hartright is engaged as a “drawing-master” for two young women, half-sisters, who live at the Limmeridge estate with their sort-of guardian, Mr. Fairlie.  Marian Halcombe is dark, unattractive in face, and poor; Laura Fairlie is fair, beautiful, and an heiress.  Marian is the clever one, and Laura is sweet and innocent.  Guess who Hartright falls in love with?  That’s right.  Jane Austen had something to say about this–about how an unaccountable bias toward a pretty face often leaves a man married to a very silly woman–but Laura is at least an honorable, decent girl. Unfortunately, she’s engaged to someone else, and Hartright is too poor to marry her anyway, so tragedy ensues.  Complicating matters is the occasional appearance and disappearance of the “woman in white,” the mentally unstable Anne Catherick, whose instability is either more or less than we realize, and who has a remarkable resemblance to Laura Fairlie.

That’s the setup.  I would be doing you a serious disservice (see, Collins’s prose has infected me!) if I said anything else about the plot, because from this point it becomes a true mystery.  Who is Anne Catherick?  What Secret does she know about Laura’s fiancee and later husband, Sir Percival Glyde? What power does his strange Italian friend Count Fosco hold over him?  Collins sets things up so there are obvious answers to these questions, but they’re all the wrong ones; and even when you think you know the real answers, you still don’t know the why of anything.

Collins isn’t any better about gender than any man writing in his time.  The book is full of crap about “women’s gentler natures” and even Marian, that strong-minded heroine, says derogatory things about her own sex and their weaknesses. And, of course, Marian’s mannish face and wits condemn her to a life of being her sister’s companion rather than having a family and life of her own.  I wonder only that any intelligent woman of that era could bear the condescension without hauling off and punching someone.  It’s a stark contrast to Bram Stoker, writing barely forty years later, who idealizes his female characters but also allows them strengths they don’t have to apologize for.  Still, I’ve always had a hard time criticizing writers simply for being a product of their environment; I’d like to think that a writer would be able to see past the fog of societal convention, but they’re just human, after all.  And Collins is a Romantic as well as an early Victorian (middle Victorian?), so the overflowing of emotion everyone has is almost as annoying to me as his editorializing about What Women Are Like.

Go read it.  Read The Moonstone, too, for another great example of early detective fiction.  It is, like Dracula, a kind of prose we modern readers are unfamiliar with, but the payoff is worth the struggle.

Dracula  by Bram Stoker
First published 1897
Category: Classics

I think the reason I never read this book is that I was so very, very bored by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I mean, Frankenstein–Dracula–famous monsters–same era–had to be the same, right?  I never examined that assumption even though I knew full well that Mary Shelley was deliberately trying to Make A Point with her novel, hence the high levels of philosophizing.  And, yeah, I read Frankenstein when I was a teenager and still developing as a reader, so maybe I’d like it better now….

Anyway.  This review is about Dracula,  which is thoroughly enjoyable and cleverly written.  I admire the epistolary (is there a word for novels told through journal extracts?) method Stoker uses, which absolutely would have had his contemporary readers on the edge of their seats.  The story of Dracula is so well-known today that much of the suspense Stoker built through the mystery of the Count’s true nature is simply gone, and yet the book retains a high level of creepiness and horror.  Jonathan Harker trapped in the Count’s castle with the ghastly women, the final death of Lucy Westenra, the creeping transformation of Mina Harker…modern horror writers are free to use shockingly graphic details of violence, but Stoker’s quieter, insidious details still send a chill up your neck.  (There’s also the further engagement of the reader in the many, many times you want to reach into the novel and shake Van Helsing and crew by the neck, screaming "MOVE HER TO A WINDOWLESS ROOM!")

What impresses me is the unique regard Stoker has for his female characters, particularly Mina Murray Harker.  She organizes everyone’s records, puts together clues from different sources, and is basically the core of the entire group–Van Helsing gives her the backhanded compliment of having a brain "like a man’s", thank you Victorian sensibilities, and all the men look to her for direction.  Then comes the point where they all decide to protect her by keeping her in the dark about their hunt for Dracula.  It’s a completely unexpected and sexist turn on their parts, and one that directly leads to Mina becoming Dracula’s next victim.  This is where I have a huge amount of respect for Stoker, who uses this plot twist to subtly speak against that sort of reflexive sexism; the men’s attempt to shield Mina through ignorance actually puts her in danger, and not until they change their position are they all able to finally defeat Dracula.  Mina remains the strongest of the bunch, even partially under Dracula’s sway.  In some feminist circles, this portrayal of the feminine divine is considered a particularly nasty form of sexism, but I see Mina’s character as better representative of a rebuke to the prevailing Victorian attitudes about women’s strengths and (more abundantly) weaknesses.  I can see now why Alan Moore made Mina the leader of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the real one, not the movie version) though the novel makes it unlikely that she would have joined under the circumstances that she did.

Very good book.  Very worth reading.  The prose is, naturally, as alien to modern readers as any 19th century novel, but familiarity with the story should make it easier for most people to get past that little stumbling block.  Though I did not read it for Halloween, I did finish it on St. Patrick’s Day, and since Bram Stoker was working in Dublin when Dracula was written, I call that pretty good symbolism anyway.

Villette  by Charlotte Bronte
First published 1853
Category: Classic

Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre, is one of the most well-known works of English literature. Her later novels, Shirley and Villette, are well known only to a handful of readers.  While I can’t speak to the quality of Shirley, I now have a very good idea of why Villette languishes in obscurity.  It’s not because the plot is boring, or because its characters are unbelievable; the plot is odd but not uninteresting, and in characterization it certainly surpasses its more famous counterpart.  Unfortunately Villette, being semi-autobiographical, is too loosely constructed to be satisfying; the important moments are strung together like pearls on a thread, separated by long episodes of emptiness.  What’s worse is that Bronte’s prose, for reasons unknown, went from being the eloquent and lovely imagery that characterized Jane Eyre to a parody of itself–florid, overwrought, obsessed with meaning, and frequently filled with analogies that Bronte clearly intends to have meaning, but fails to attach to story events.  I liked the book, but I was often frustrated with it, and it’s definitely a book you won’t finish without a great deal of patience and perseverance.

What kept me going was the characterization.  Not of Lucy Snowe, the first-person protagonist.  I don’t know what the heck Bronte thought she was doing with this woman, but for about the first third of the book, Lucy was like an observer in her own story.  Everything that went on happened to other people!  Lucy does have character, but you don’t get to see it for a long while.  On the other hand, Bronte was a master of creating character through just a few lines, a few marks of description, and through interactions with other characters.  She unfortunately wasn’t free of the prejudices of her time–people from different countries either show the traits of their country or are "surprisingly" free of those defects; French girls are silly and prone to laziness, Frenchwomen of any age see nothing wrong with a white lie, you can tell the nationality of a person by his appearance, or someone’s character by the shape of their head–and I think it’s her otherwise outstanding ability to delineate character irrespective of those prejudices that make them so startling when they come up in the text.

In Paul Emanuel, Lucy’s ultimate love interest, Bronte has surpassed herself.  It’s obvious early on that M. Paul (as he’s referred to) is interested in Lucy and jealous of any attachments she might have, but not quite so obvious where that relationship will go.  He is by far the most interesting character in the book, and I think some of what makes Lucy interesting, in the end, is simply the fact that she is connected to him.

But the prose…good heavens.  When you know that the Charlotte Bronte who wrote this book had suffered the loss of her beloved brother Branwell and her two sisters Emily and Anne, you can kind of see how her melancholy affected the story.  Lucy is alone, pitiably alone, and the narrative reflects that misery.  Which is no excuse for rambling on and on about Lucy’s internal dialogues and sorrows.  It feels very much like Bronte was trying too hard to make the reader feel that misery.  What I really hated were the occasional analogies Bronte would go off on that weren’t inspired by anything happening in the story and didn’t actually illuminate what the story meant, which is the point of analogy.  A couple of times I re-read passages twice or more, trying to wring meaning from them, and failing.  Was she trying to emulate the lost Emily, who’s considered the true poet of the three sisters?  Did she think this was the natural extension of what she did in Jane Eyre?  I don’t know.  It just irritated me.

And now we get to the ending.  My friend Julie always says she liked the book except for the ending.  Turns out she meant, like, the actual ending, the last ten paragraphs of the entire book.  If you have any intention of reading Villette someday, you probably want to skip the next paragraph.  No, seriously.

After three years of absence, M. Paul returns to France AND HIS SHIP SINKS AND HE DIES?!?!?!  What the FRACK?!?!  Really, I’m not kidding, WHAT IS UP WITH THAT ENDING?  Are we supposed to take away from this that life sucks and you should never, ever try to be happy, because it will be torn away from you?  And what’s with that passive-aggressive final sentence about how all the bad guys, the ones who made M. Paul leave in the first place, all live to a ripe old age?  This ending has no meaning.  The entire rest of the book, as much as it has a theme in its weirdly twisting plot, is about staying true to yourself despite setbacks and tragedy.  The death of Lucy’s fiance doesn’t do ANYTHING to forward that theme.  Charlotte Bronte, seriously, what is WRONG with you?

When I told my husband about the ending, he teased me about how I should love it because, you know, "you like that tragedy stuff, like Thomas Hardy."  Please.  Thomas Hardy never jerks you around about how everything is going to be all right AND THEN EVERYONE DIES HORRIBLY.  Even in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when Angel and Tess are finally together, you can’t kid yourself that it’s going to end well (believe me, I try every time I read the book).  You know their happiness is terrible because it can’t last.  This was just a dumb ending to an otherwise decent book.  With a little less self-indulgence, a lot of editing to tighten it up, and a different ending, Villette could easily have taken its place beside Jane Eyre–and very possibly might have surpassed it.

("Leave sunny imaginations hope…let them picture union and a happy succeeding life."  Good crap.  Charlotte Bronte, when you and I meet in the afterlife, we will have Words.)