Mrs. Humphry WardBesprekingen

DNF. Trudged through about 2/3's of the book, but just could not finish.

Not now

I enjoyed Mrs. Ward’s 1913 offering, but this anti-suffragette novel was hard to take. The eponymous character is a rich, beautiful, and charismatic young woman whose father has just died. But instead of inheriting her fortune outright, she’s been saddled with a guardian/trustee because her dying father correctly believed that she would devote all her money and all her to life to the cause of woman’s suffrage if she had control. Of course the guardian is a magnificent unmarried middle-aged man who is handsome, noble, etc etc, and sparks fly between him and Delia Blanchflower. Delia is under the sway of an unscrupulous older suffragette. They live together and are devoted to each other. Although it’s explained that the older woman only wants Delia’s money for the cause and doesn’t really care about her, she appears to get jealous of the guardian and basically cuts Delia off. There was a lot of stuff about how their group was blowing up mailboxes, which seemed ridiculous to me, but it turns out that suffragettes really did blow up mailboxes. One woman complains about how her former servant was sick and dying and wrote a letter to her, but it was blown up, so the servant died thinking her mistress didn’t care about her. (I learned from this book that the most important part of noblesse oblige is taking care of your servants when they’re sick.)

There are a number of anti-suffrage women role model characters in the book, and also a woman who believe that women should get the vote, but she doesn’t care if it’s in her lifetime or her daughter’s lifetime or neither, and that it’s wrong for women to do anything except patiently wait for the vote. The stuff that these women say makes absolutely no sense and reminds me of the stuff that people say today that makes absolutely no sense. It’s not about content, it’s about being dignified and an upstanding member of society. People just want everything to be comfy and pleasant. Anyway, there’s a beautiful old historic home that the suffragettes want to blow up (I’m assuming this is based on Lloyd George’s home that really was bombed) and in the end even though Delia and her guardian try to prevent it, the wicked suffragette lady sets it on fire, killing a little disabled girl who has no function in this book other than to be sacrificed—and the suffragette lady dies too. Is this book racist? Of course. Here’s a sample line: “From her face and figure the half savage, or Asiatic note, present in the physiognomy and complexions of her brothers and sisters, was entirely absent.”

FYI, the synopsis provided above is not an actual synopsis, it's just the first paragraph of the novel. The novel is actually about an aristocratic English family divided by politics and their fiery tempers, and the star-crossed romances they enter into. The mother, Lady Coryston, is a bossy domineering Conservative woman who (gasp!) has inherited her husband's estate and (gasp!) intends to interfere with English custom by not leaving it to her oldest son, two things that were outrageously crazy at the time. The oldest son, Lord Coryston aka Cory, is a radical Socialist who wants to inherit the estate so he can split it up into model farms, and he does everything he can to be a thorn in his mother's side. The daughter, can't remember her name, is interested in the Suffrage movement but what she really wants is a strong man to love her and show her what's right and wrong--could her fanatically religious neighbor be the one for her or would she be better off with the poor librarian? The other son, Arthur, a member of the House of Commons, lets his mother write his speeches and tell him what to do, but now he's fallen in love with the daughter of the Liberal opposition and if his mother finds out, she'll cream him. Then there's another son, James, who literally does nothing throughout the entire novel and I'm not sure why he is there. Then there's a couple who may be evicted from their farm because although they are legally married, one of them was previously (gasp!) divorced, meaning that they are living in S-I-N in a major way. When I turned the last page, I felt a little spasm of thankfulness that I am alive today and not 100 years ago. If you like Victorian/Edwardian novels, you will enjoy this one. Downton Abbey is hella boring and weird compared to this.

My brother said that when he was in graduate school studying English, Mrs. Humphry Ward was dismissed as a nobody; they didn’t read any of her books; and she wasn’t sufficiently rehabilitated to be given a first name. (Turns out she was Mary Augusta Ward.) But I liked this book and I’m looking forward to her 1914 offering. My brother was also told she was a Victorian so he could not believe she had a book in 1913. However, all English writers did not conveniently die at the same moment as Queen Victoria, so there was some overlap, and in fact two thirds of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s books were written in the Edwardian period. She did seem to have a kind of Victorian viewpoint, though. There was a strange timeless quality to this novel, and it’s hard to know when it was set. The House of Commons was debating a Land Bill and the aristocrats were very concerned about their “rights” and estates being taken from them, making it feel like 1830. But the main character was a Suffragist, which was accepted as a common viewpoint (although derided as wrong), making it seem more contemporary to 1913. The characters drove about in strange conveyances but I think I remember some cars. I guess it was probably set in 1913 but the ways of the English aristocracy are so peculiar and unchanging that everything was the same as in Victorian times.

The characters had political opinions ranging from Conservative to radical Socialist. I couldn’t figure out which platform the author agreed with, except that she seemed to think women should not vote but instead use their exquisite goodness to make the world a better place without meddling in politics.

FYI, the synopsis provided above is not an actual synopsis, it's just the first paragraph of the novel. The novel is actually about an aristocratic English family divided by politics and their fiery tempers, and the star-crossed romances they enter into. The mother, Lady Coryston, is a bossy domineering Conservative woman who (gasp!) has inherited her husband's estate and (gasp!) intends to interfere with English custom by not leaving it to her oldest son, two things that were outrageously crazy at the time. The oldest son, Lord Coryston aka Cory, is a radical Socialist who wants to inherit the estate so he can split it up into model farms, and he does everything he can to be a thorn in his mother's side. The daughter, can't remember her name, is interested in the Suffrage movement but what she really wants is a strong man to love her and show her what's right and wrong--could her fanatically religious neighbor be the one for her or would she be better off with the poor librarian? The other son, Arthur, a member of the House of Commons, lets his mother write his speeches and tell him what to do, but now he's fallen in love with the daughter of the Liberal opposition and if his mother finds out, she'll cream him. Then there's another son, James, who literally does nothing throughout the entire novel and I'm not sure why he is there. Then there's a couple who may be evicted from their farm because although they are legally married, one of them was previously (gasp!) divorced, meaning that they are living in S-I-N in a major way. When I turned the last page, I felt a little spasm of thankfulness that I am alive today and not 100 years ago. If you like Victorian/Edwardian novels, you will enjoy this one. Downton Abbey is hella boring and weird compared to this.

Bannisdale was an old family home in the Lake District, a part of the world that the author knew well and brought to life with lovely and evocative prose.

“It was an old and weather-beaten house, of a singular character and dignity; yet not large. It was built of grey stone, covered with a rough-cast, so tempered by age to the colour and surface of the stone, that the many patches where it had dropped away produced hardly any disfiguring effect. The rugged “pele” tower, origin and source of all the rest, was now grouped with the gables and projections, the broad casemented windows, and deep doorways of a Tudor manor-house. But the whole structure seemed still to lean upon and draw towards the tower; and it was the tower which gave accent to a general expression of austerity, depending perhaps on the plain simplicity of all the approaches and immediate neighbourhood of the house. For in front of it were neither flowers nor shrubs—only wide stretches of plain turf and gravel; while behind it, beyond some thin intervening trees, rose a grey limestone fell, into which the house seemed to withdraw itself, as into the rock, “whence it was hewn.”

The story begins on a chilly March day, late in the nineteen century. Alan Helbeck has invited his newly-widowed sister, Augustina, and her stepdaughter, Laura, to live with him at Bannisdale. They had been estranged for many years, because he was a devout Catholic and his sister had abandoned her faith to marry an atheist scholar. She was happy that the estrangement was over, that she was home again, but she found that the house and the estate were much changed. The estate was diminished and the house was cold and bare, because her brother has sold land and valuables to support the Catholic orphanages that Jesuit priests had urged him to establish.

Alan was happy with that, and he would have followed his vocation and become a priest had he not been heir to the family fortune and responsibilities; but Laura was horrified. Like her father, she had no faith, but she saw the value of beauty and history, and she couldn’t understand why he didn’t appreciate those things.

Laura found the asceticism of the household oppressive, but she stayed at Bannisdale because she loved her stepmother and she knew that she needed her. She stayed even when Augustina reverted to Catholicism. The contrast between the two women, one who thinks for herself and one who follows the lead of her male protector, is striking.

At first Laura dislikes Alan and finds him very cold, but in time she comes to appreciate his thoughtfulness towards to her and her stepmother, and to appreciate the beauty of his chapel and the value of the good works he does; though her dislike of his faith and the priests who expect so much from him is unwavering. He is captivated by the spirited young woman, loving her openness and honesty, but worrying about her lack of faith.

Over times their feelings strengthen, and events conspire to make them declare their love.

I loved that this book didn’t lead to a marriage at the very end, that a proposal came a little before the story was half over, and that the rest of the book explored the difficulty of marriage between two people whose beliefs were fundamentally different.

It did that with a wonderful empathy towards all of the characters and their different feelings. I knew that the author’s own feelings chimed with Laura’s but she didn’t let that unbalance the story, and she didn’t let the ideas that she was exploring to unbalance the story that she had to tell.

The plot was well constructed and the writing was lovely. It had both academic and emotional intelligence, it evoked the time and the place beautifully, and it always placed the characters, their lives and relationships, at the centre of things.

Laura was a marvellous heroine; she was a ‘new woman’ with wonderful potential, but she was also young and grieving for her beloved father, and terribly torn between the ways he had taught her and the ways of the man she had come to love deeply.

I felt for her as she escaped to visit friends in London, and as she was drawn back to Bannisdale to nurse her dying stepmother ….

It was only at the very end of the story that things went a little awry. It was dramatic, it was emotional, but I wasn’t as convinced by the final act as I had been by the rest of the story.

I think that maybe that was inevitable, because a story has to have a resolution and the problem that the author set out could never be resolved.

That was my only issue, because I loved what the author had to say and I loved the way that she said it.

I decided to read this book because it was mentioned in an article on page 2 of the Goulburn Herald on 22 May 1903. I blogged about the article, which features my home town of Gunning, in October last year. It was the number one novel in the Publishers Weekly bestseller list in the United States for 1903. I understand that Mrs Humphrey Ward, as her use of her husband's name suggests, was an anti-suffragette. That the novel smacks of all things conservative does not take away from the brilliance of her work. I had some concerns over anachronisms in the novel, the plot clearly takes place after 1859, but is still regarded as being in the mid-nineteenth century by the characters, yet electric lights appeared in several scenes. Clearly the railway was a going concern. But after some research, I found that Punch magazine, which gets a number of guernseys in the novel, features the use of electric lights in London houses from as early as 1848 (Punch 1848, Vol. 15, p. 239), not to mention a satirical critique of electric lights (written by "a gas contractor"). Other reviewers have referred to Mrs Ward's "cardboard characters", and that may be true if one views the work as clichéd. However, one must remember that the book was written in 1903, over one hundred years before Downton Abbey, so Mrs Ward may be forgiven for being at the forefront of the re-imagining of Jane Austen in a mid-nineteenth century setting. If I am to take the background of the author into account, the novel is a victory for women who achieve success - when defined as social status and wealth - through their husbands, while at the same time winning a moral victory over the Sins of the Mother (a re-imagining of the proverbial). The pace of the novel was quite brisk, and I was captivated until the final forty or so pages, when the plot unfolds "like a long, slow accident" (Something for Kate's Stunt Show played over and over in my head as I read this part). The conclusion moved me and left me rather perplexed. It made be glad not to be a woman (in the Victorian sense of the word). And Mrs Humphrey Ward, brilliant as I find her work, in my imagination smiles smugly like a Liberal party member passing a lump of coal around parliament as history not only passes her by but would make her look silly if anyone else remembered her. But do read it - it is an excellent novel, even if the entire package serves as a caution for those who suffer from smug assuredness.

An interesting piece of social history, as well as an interesting story in its own right. Mary Augusta Ward wrote this just after the First World War, and just before she died. She makes astute observations on the changing social role of women in England, as they took up war work to replace the absent men and gained financial and political clout. In some ways it seems old-fashioned to modern eyes, the whole conflict being based on the fact that Rachel Henderson is a Woman with a Past. But other themes are timeless: the jealous former lover, the effect on the spirits of stress and the importance of good friends.

'I sometimes think I see more than eccentricity in Kitty'
By sally tarbox TOP 500 REVIEWER on 17 April 2013
Format: Paperback
Published in 1905, this Edwardian melodrama is the story of William Ashe , a charming young politician whose career is in the ascendant, and his love for Kitty Bristol.
From the start we foresee problems: daughter of a dubious society hostess (" For meanness and vileness combined, the things I know of the woman who was Blackwater's wife have no equal in my experience"), Kitty might be expected to have been a failure as a political wife. But in addition there seems to be a determination on her part to act outrageously.
Although William is determined to cope ("She may scandalize half the world", he said to himself, stubbornly - "I shall understand her"), can her relentless misbehaviour be tolerated, especially when she is introduced to writer Geoffrey Cliff, regarding whom she admits frankly "he is bad, false, selfish, but he excites me" ?
As I read this novel, I was unclear as to whether Kitty was nothing but a selfish and outrageous minx or truly had some mental disorder thus meriting the reader's sympathies. For me the latter part of the novel dragged on somewhat, and my irritation with Kitty meant I felt little sorrow at the sad bits.

Acute portrayal of the mixed pride and alienation experienced by members of a minority belief system.

It could have been a good Victorian novel, but was cluttered with too much description and complex religious conflicts that were of no interest.

This book is a Victorian family saga, focused on a family estate, a spurned lover, and a devious villain. Marcella Boyce is young, bright, and taken with socialism. When her parents inherit the family estate in the country Marcella takes up the miserable conditions of the local workforce as her cause. She falls in love with the local favorite son, a Conservative, vying for a seat in Parliament. Socialist Marcella must discover if she can live with a man with different politics, and her feelings on the issue threaten to damage a number of lives.

Marcella shares many of the conventions of the late-Victorian novel. The lead character is intellectually inclined and socially-minded, but her gender ensures that her attention to socio-political issues will either make her look foolish or lead to her demise. The late-Victorian countryside offers no real place for a politically active woman. Ward also gives the reader a strong sense that the best thing for Marcella would be marriage, though Marcella is generally unable to see this for herself. The single woman's folly is readily apparent.

Ward offers a complicated plot and interesting characterizations. That said, I had to pace myself in reading this rather long novel, as Ward is entirely conventional in her treatment of women like Marcella Boyce, and I find Victorian characterizations of women so pat. Oddly enough, I find that to be especially true of books written by Victorian women. It's clear that authors like Mrs. Humphrey Ward were looking for an outlet for intelligent women, but they were still too limited by Victorian gender conventions to be able to revolutionary change in their literature.

"He sought disconsolately through all his pockets for the wherewithal to pay his fly, while the spring rain pattered on his wide-awake." This sentence alone is why i love turn of the century novels. You are always learning something new. While I had an idea what a "fly" was, a "wide-awake" was a complete mystery. Upon further research I learned that a "fly" was indeed what I thought; the 1904 horse and carriage version of our modern day taxi. A "wide-awake" took more looking but it turned out this was a type of hat worn by "religious types" in the late 19th century.

Beyond the language, this was also a morality tale that was wonderfully told because it was not revealed until the very end. The husband has refused to take his wife back because of her infidelity. The "religious type" in the above sentence responds to the husband who has said that his obligation to his wife has been cancelled by the laws of Christian faith. The Deacon replies "I do not so read it!" "Men say so, 'for the hardness of their hearts.' But the divine pity which transformed men's idea of marriage could never have meant to lay it down that in a marriage alone there was to be no forgiveness." I thought it interesting that this book dwells on the subject of separation and divorce and was the #1 bestseller in 1904. I always had the impression that in the beginning of the twentieth century, divorce was rarely discussed.

One last interesting item from this book. Again, researching the book further, I found that the author, Mrs. Humphry Ward, came from a prominent, literary London family and was strongly associated with the anti-suffragette party of the time...Unlike Mrs. Banks from the Disney movie, Mary Poppins, here was an author on the other side of the issue expressing her thoughts in a wonderfully written book.

Just like your favorite television program that is only half way over, you look at how much of the book you have yet to read and you smile. Turn-of-the-century novels are filled with so much description, whether describing the scenery or the latest parlor talk. Stories are contained within stories and each chapter brings a new development in some character of the novel. There also is a morality that is creatively woven throughout the book. It comes as a surprise but it is refreshing to have a voice of reason that doesn't come across as a morality tale or obvious condemnation.