All the books I’ve read by E.F. Benson have been droll/slightly campy comedies, so I felt right at home as the book opens with the spirited daughter of a clergyman whose comical, ultra-religious stepmother won’t let her read salacious literature, play jolly tunes on the organ, or have any other kind of fun. Then I was quite surprised when the book turned out to be a moral tale about the perils of alcoholism and adultery.

It appears that men are the weaker vessel of the title. While the description of the alcoholic husband seemed extremely true to life, it was somewhat painful to read the glorification of wifely codependency. I didn’t get the impression that Benson understood anything about relationships between men and women, he was just spitting out cliches, but the story was interesting and readable the whole way through. I especially liked his shiny portrayal of acting and the theater. At the end there was a very easy way out that would have punished the guilty and allowed the blameless characters to couple off, but he didn’t take that. Instead he presented a very forward-thinking view of disability that even today is rarely embraced in literature, so I thought that was neat.

One of the things I like about reading the novels of 100 years ago is that it’s harder to guess what’s going to happen, because we’re not steeped in the tropes of that day. There was a sticky elevator mentioned several times, and I was positive that someone was going to get trapped in it a la “The Way Up To Heaven” by Roald Dahl. But no, that was all in my mind; I guess people just talked about their elevators a lot back if they had them. ( )