In an era where Mary Cassatt eschewed marriage and a fully adult life to live with her parents in Paris so that she could produce her work, Mary Hiester bounded into an adulthood of painting with a grown-up’s problems of money and sex and logistics . . . Existing with an ambitious man in a socially constricted world for women of which a person today can barely grasp the demeaning dimensions, she lived, by her lights, “cheerfully.” She painted around the obstacles of an artist’s life by employing a woman’s emblem, the rose, and later an emblem of independence, the tree.
Molly Peacock’s Flower Diary weaves together three stories—each of which is also, in its own way, more than one kind of story: there’s the biographical account of artist Mary Hiester Reid, including her marriage to and working relationship with her husband George Agnew Reid; there’s the story of Peacock’s second marriage, which is also the story of her second husband’s illness and death; and there’s the story of Mary Evelyn Wrinch, who married George Reid after the first Mary Reid’s death. “The three of them,” Peacock notes, “are even buried together
in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, section 18, lot 22. Not side by side, but on top of each other; MHR is the foundational layer. Then George on top of her. Last, Mary Evelyn on top of George.
Like Peacock’s earlier, similar work The Paper Garden, the biographical and autobiographical material is interwoven with commentary on art and creativity, especially in this case Mary Hiester Reid’s paintings. For me, these were the best parts of the book. Peacock is a wonderful observer. “A Fireside is rich, warm, and pillowy,” she says of one of Mary’s early paintings:
It’s full of interest for the beholder’s engagement (books, copper tea kettles, a Japanese print brought back from Paris, George’s copy of a huge Velazquez that Mary admired). To the side of the umber beams bloom paperwhite narcissus bulbs in a ceramic bowl. The sparkler flowers hurl out their scent in swift dashes of white that make you know it must be snowing outside. (Canadians plant them to bloom in January or February, life in the dead of winter.) Painted in 1910 when she was fifty-six, it is of a generous room where MHR lit her own art fire, warmed others, and somehow negotiated the complexities of a spiritual, aesthetic, familiar, and perhaps sexual, quasi-ménage à trois.
“Like the continent’s Depression, or perhaps her own,” she says later, of the still-life “Three Roses,”
Mary’s roses languish, looming from the dark background. One of them even drops two tear-shaped petals onto the table below. Another rose—the youngest?—barely out of the bud, has tightly folded petals. Each one is flushed, the pink of the inside of a mouth. The top flower almost pats the back of the one that has let two weeping petals go. It is a highly emotional scene—roses acting out a romance? The still life has a narrative quality.
Now that she’s described it that way, I can see it: does it make her description any less plausible that it never would have occurred to me to read so much drama into these quietly lovely flowers? I remember having similar questions about her interpretations of some of Mary Delaney’s paper flowers—and about some of the commentary in William Kloss’s ‘Great Course’ on Masterpieces of European Art. “You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes famously chides Dr. Watson: it takes a trained eye, a sympathetic eye, perhaps a poetic eye, to see what Peacock sees. Her poet’s words, of course, also make the difference between plain description and illumination.
I found Mary’s paintings really beautiful. (Flower Diary itself is a beautiful object, with heavy, glossy pages and rich, high quality reproductions, a treat for the eyes.) I hadn’t heard of her before. Peacock explains that MHR’s influences were the “tonalists,” painters who “attempt to represent emotions in their paintings through times of day like sunrise, twilight, or sunset, and weather like fog and rain”— a key example is Whistler, whose portrait of Thomas Carlyle was a significant inspiration for MHR’s late composition “A Study in Greys.” MHR, Peacock says, “made [tonalism] her own, with a Realist’s touch”; she had “zero interest in the hard abstraction of modernism.” These labels and abstract explanations mean less to me than Peacock’s insights into the paintings as reminders “that a moment existed, that it flowered fully, that it was fraught and complex, and that a woman in a lace collar holding a palette insisted on its essence.”
Flower Diary follows Mary’s artistic development, integrating it with the story of her personal life—as indeed the two were intricately related in reality. There are lots of parts to both, including the art school Mary and George ran and many trips to Paris and Spain and time spent in an artistic community in Onteora, in the Catskills. Peacock emphasizes Mary’s “persistence” as an artist. Hers was not a bad marriage, or an unsuccessful career: George was a supportive partner, and she was productive and accomplished and recognized. The times were not kind to ambitious women in general, though, or to women artists more particularly. “I don’t know where the assurance and conviction required for Mary’s sort of persistence comes from precisely,” Peacock comments,
but daily circumstances—the vector of a husband’s energy, an active social life, the maintaining of meals, clothes, sleep, friendship, sex, when no one expects you, a weaker vessel, to do what you do—require an internal stamina that must connect to a conviction that something inside of you will perish if you don’t protect your gift. I marvel at the ability to access emotions so thoroughly and to organize an art life, to display rage and to turn toward a canvas with plans. It is consummately adult to hold at once these contradictory responses and urges. “Going cheerfully on with the task” was her method. Eight paintings equaled health, equaled survival, equaled a truly textured life that could have disintegrated if the rage and disappointment she modeled had been enacted.
“Going cheerfully on with the task”: there’s no doubt that this is admirable, and getting on with things rather than enacting one’s rage may indeed by a truly adult—the only possible—adult response to the complexities of life, including married life. There’s ultimately something a bit stolid about the woman we meet in Flower Diary, though, or about Peacock’s characterization of her anyway, and I think that’s why Flower Diary, interesting as it is, and full as it is of beautiful pictures and wonderful bits of writing, was a disappointment to me after the revelation that was The Paper Garden. The story of Mary Delany discovering and fulfilling her own peculiar creative genius late in life was so exhilarating; it seemed to offer so much hope. It is, as I said in my post about it “a subversive, celebratory view of growing older as a woman”: in Peacock’s wonderful phrasing, “Her whole life flowed to the place where she plucked that moment.”
When I wrote about The Paper Garden, it resonated with my rising hope that I too might be finding my moment. Now, almost a decade later, I feel less buoyant, more tired and uncertain. It’s not that I don’t recognize myself in MHR: it’s that I do (except maybe the ability to carry on the endless negotiations between life and work, reality and ambition, as “cheerfully” as she apparently could). Where Mary Delany offered inspiration, Mary Hiester Reid represents something more like sensible resignation: do what you can, keep on doing it as well as you can, be satisfied if the work is good. That’s exactly right, of course, and MHR’s work, as Peacock shows it to me, is good indeed. And yet at the same time it seems uncomfortably apt that the culmination of such a life is a study in greys and not an exuberant flowering.
Did you believe that writing about the experience would help you understand what had happened? You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you’ll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.
I’ve created another false alternative myself, though, in my irritation at this aspect of The Wrong End of the Telescope. I didn’t much like the book as a whole, mostly because of the way it scattered its and thus my attention around, but it is a very empathetic novel; over and over it does put its reader into different stories, inviting them to understand better the fear, horror, desperation, and hope that lead people to crowd into boats and risk everything to cross the sea. Its structure does have some linearity or continuity to it, through the story of Mina’s arrival on Lesbos and her efforts to help the refugees there, especially one woman, Sumaiya, who is dying of cancer. Mina’s narrative is like a tree limb, with other stories branching off it. Cumulatively they don’t make the situation “understandable” or even, narrowly speaking, “legible,” though there are certainly moments in which one character or another offers the elements of an explanation. “I loathe these Westerners who have fucked us over and over for years and then sit back and wonder aloud why we can’t be reasonable and behave like they do,” Mina’s brother Mazen exclaims at one point—this and other pieces of the novel offer historical and political frameworks for the ‘refugee crisis’ along with pointed criticisms of the West’s response. Overall, though, it is a novel built primarily of vignettes.
Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau . . . Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware—were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?
The third-person parts of the novel are quite different. The narrator is observant but conspicuously (and, I’m sure, deliberately) not omniscient: the commentary has a hesitancy, an uncertainty, so that the effect is like watching the characters from across the room, or looking in the window at them—hence the frequent tags like “seems like” or “appears to be.” The descriptions are very precise, but they are mostly external; the characters’ thoughts or feelings have to be inferred from their movements, actions, or speech. This too is artifice, of course, and it can feel a bit stilted. But there are also lots of lovely passages like this one:
This is the first trip in seven years where she is going to be the only one to remember everything she saw, everything she did. There won’t be anyone to remind her of the smell of fish and freshly cut grass in Harbour Grace, the rain that pooled on the plaque with Amelia’s name on it, Pat’s bologna sandwiches, the salmon burgers at Anna’s, the lobster she couldn’t eat. This trip is hers, only hers, and the weight of it feels terrifying.
I didn’t know much about Earhart going in to Letters to Amelia and I found it fascinating learning more about her life. Possibly she is a bit too pat or obvious a choice to represent women’s struggles to be seen in full: not to be reduced to an exception, or a first, to experience but not be defined by relationships. Grace is struggling to figure out who she herself is; it makes sense that she finds courage and inspiration in Earhart’s example. “Amelia is so much more than her relationship with Gene,” she reflects near the end, after a whole novel spent reading the letters that recorded that relationship and sorting through her own broken-off relationship with her boyfriend Jamie: “So much more than her disappearance.” When she thinks this, she is standing next to Earhart’s red Lockheed Vega at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It looks so light and fragile! I have serious fear of flying, so it was a leap of both faith and imagination to participate vicariously in Earhart’s joy in flight and Grace’s pleasure in looking out airplane windows, in her turn, to see the world as Earhart saw it.
I liked a lot about Letters to Amelia, especially Grace’s discoveries about Earhart’s life (including its Canadian connections) and Grace’s trip to Newfoundland, a nearby place where—for reasons partly to do with inertia and partly to do with my dislike of both driving and flying—I have never been. A bit perversely, perhaps, given its title, my least favorite parts of the novel were the letters. The disclaimers at the beginning tell us that the letters in the novel written “by” Earhart are “entirely fictional.” Given that, I wondered why they were mostly so dull. They were realistic—but they didn’t have to be, did they? They had a lot of (what I assume are) actual details about Earhart’s life, but I got very little sense of her personality from them:
That’s what everyone became, small stories, tiny really, to explain their whole lives. Those too-short lives.
Looking back, it seemed to me I’d been trying to escape not just from the camp, but from Achilles’ story; and I’d failed. Because, make no mistake, this was his story—his anger, his grief, his story. I was angry, I was grieving, but somehow that didn’t matter. Here I was, again, waiting for Achilles to decide when it was time for bed, still trapped, still stuck inside his story, and yet with no real part to play in it.
Collapsing the distance between “us” and “them” in that way did sit a bit uncomfortably, I thought, with the less easily domesticated aspects of the story: you can’t really have both modern warfare and parents who are gods and goddesses. Are these ancient people just like us or radically different? Both, I guess is the answer, and maybe it’s the right one, but I found the result uneven. I wonder if my inability to quite believe in Briseis arises from a related problem: she is at once of that world and of ours. She seemed a bit too deliberately conceived as a way to push back, to write back, against her role and treatment in the Iliad. “I shall take the fair-cheeked Briseis, your prize,” says Agamemnon in my Lattimore translation, “I myself going to your shelter, that you may learn well how much greater I am than you.” Barker’s starting point is this dehumanizing treatment of women as “prizes,” but (and again I can only speak as someone who is not at all intimately familiar with the Iliad) she didn’t seem to me to go very far with that pretty obvious point: she doesn’t build Briseis into a character who can dominate the novel (which would mean dominating Achilles, not in act, of course, but in perspective and significance and charisma qua character). We are told Briseis comes to love Patroclus, but we do have to be told: I didn’t think we were every brought to feel it deeply. We feel Achilles’ love for Patroclus much more vividly, and it’s their love that has extraordinary consequences.
What we get instead are comments that seemed both anachronistic and perfunctory, about women as sacrifices and victims of male violence, about men’s inability to see the women they have enslaved as people, about her desire to free herself from his story to tell hers. And the thing is, not only is a lot of The Silence of the Girls itself still largely his story, but his parts in it were by and large the most interesting parts. Why, if what she wanted was to displace Achilles as the protagonist, did Barker give him so much space? Also (and these are just a few more quibbles) who is Briseis supposedly talking to? And why are some parts in the present tense?
I am still finding it challenging to think in what were once my usual ways about what happens “in my classes” every week, because of the diffusion effect of 
So what have my classes actually been about this week, then? Well, in my introduction to literature class, we have moved on from Module 1 (What words?) to Module 2 (Whose words?). The course overall is designed to keep complicating students’ engagement with the readings, so we start with the most basic (diction, connotation, denotation, etc.) and then add layers, this week some issues about voice, point of view, irony, and unreliability. Our readings feature speakers whose positions are worth interrogating: Tom Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?”, Aga Shahid Ali’s “The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood,'” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” (Our reader is the concise edition of Broadview’s Introduction to Literature, so all of our readings are chosen from their admirably varied selections.) Next week we move on to “About What? Subject and Theme.”
In the 19th-century fiction class, which this term is the Austen to Dickens option, we are wrapping up our work on Persuasion, or we will be as more students get to the end of the module and submit their discussion posts. Anne Elliot can be a bit annoying in the first half of the novel, with her tendency to martyrdom and her inability to reach out and claim what she wants. I always find it interesting that so much of the novel’s resolution continues to be cautious, even reticent: this is not a novel celebrating impassioned outbursts, rebellion, or (to a point anyway) self-assertion. That will make Jane Eyre a dramatic contrast when we shift to Brontë’s novel next week, something I have been thinking about a lot because of course I can’t wait until Monday to start working on Jane Eyre but have to have my recorded lectures ready to go—which I do! I have discussed Jane Eyre with so many classes over the past 25 years that it hasn’t been hard to decide what the lectures should address, but it has been extremely hard to figure out how much they (I) should actually say. The model I have in mind is that they should include the equivalent of the opening comments I typically make in class, to set up the discussion to follow; explain any key critical or theoretical or historical contexts that I think are helpful to analyzing the novel well; and then prompt students to think about various elements of the novel in light of what I’ve said, rather than trying to cover what could be said about those elements. I pick some specific examples, but then I try to get out of the way, and then I show up in the online discussions to poke and provoke and steer as seems useful.
Oh dear: I’m back to logistics again! I do miss the simplicity of in-person teaching. In 2019-20, I had actually been working deliberately on weaning myself from more detailed lecture notes (not from lecture plans, just notes) and, trusting to my long experience, letting the discussion in class be more free-flowing. It was going well. I remember especially clearly the last class meeting for the Austen to Dickens class on March 13, 2020. We knew classes were going to be cancelled the next week, but we had a robust discussion of Mary Barton nonetheless and wrapped up not realizing that we would not meet again in person. I know that I could be back in person right now if I’d made that choice, but it would not have been a real return to that kind of ease and energy. I think I chose right, for me, for now, but that doesn’t make everything about this easy. I do still get the same satisfaction from engaging with students’ ideas and especially from being able to be present for them, albeit virtually. And on that note I guess I should go check on what new submissions are waiting for me!
I have to be careful here. What I disliked the most about Lucy Ellmann’s book of “essays,” Things Are Against Us, is that much of it reads like intemperate off-the-cuff ranting about things Lucy Ellmann doesn’t like. (These include electricity, men, travelers, Americans, bras, crime fiction, people who object to her ill-informed criticisms of crime fiction, and teenaged girls who make or watch YouTube videos about their morning routines.) If I start ranting intemperately about the book, I won’t be doing any better myself! But at the same time I honestly don’t think Ellman’s screeds are either stylish or substantial enough to warrant the time it would take to respond thoughtfully and meticulously to each one.
series, seemed the most thoughtful and grounded of the collection; the one on bras was kind of amusing; the five pages generalizing angrily and ignorantly about crime fiction and its readers strongly suggest Ellmann had either no or very weak editors.
I bought Ducks, Newburyport a couple of years ago because my curiosity about it overcame my skepticism. So far I have started and stalled out in it three times. I am determined not to let Lucy Ellmann be the reason I give up on it altogether, even though in every interview with her that I’ve read I have been put off by her posture of superiority and Things Are Against Us more than confirms all my previous bad impressions. Could the person who says and writes these tiresome things actually write a novel that transcends the snarky small-mindedness of the persona they project? I want to believe that’s possible: I have always argued that someone’s writing, someone’s work, can be better than they are. I think there’s hope for all of us in that idea, given how imperfect we all are. So I’ll keep Ducks, Newburyport on my shelf. I need to let my irritation with Things Are Against Us fade before I try it again, though. It might take years.
If only she could have the privilege of believing him entirely. What kind of person, what kind of ungrateful daughter, doesn’t believe her own father? She had never doubted him before. She never thought he was anything but moral and civilized. She wasn’t even sure what those words meant. But if someone puts the possibility of something terrible in your head—and people around you believe it—you can’t go back to thinking it completely inconceivable. The possibility is there whether or not you choose to believe it, and you can’t go back to not knowing that the possibility exists.
The novel focuses on the family of the accused teacher, George Woodbury: his wife, his daughter, and his son. In its attention to the fallout of the accusation, rather than to the details of the case, The Best Kind of People reminded me of the TV series Rectify, which defers answers about its protagonist’s guilt or innocence, so that we have to sit in the same uncertainty as his family. If you love someone, both stories emphasize, you will want to think them incapable of wrongdoing – but, as the excerpt I chose for my epigraph highlights, once the possibility is raised, you don’t really have the option of ignoring it. To do so, also, is to ignore the claims of the victims. Whittall does a good job tracing a range of possible reactions, including how they ebb and flow, from trust to anger, from loyalty to horrified conviction, depending on what is known or said, or just on the mood of the moment. The accusations alone trigger reassessments, from every angle, of an entire family history. The resulting destabilization has ripple effects through the lives of everyone affected.
The other reason The Best Kind of People struck me as well suited to adaptation is that stylistically I would describe it as workmanlike rather than particularly artful. I don’t think much would be lost in the translation into a different medium. This is something I sometimes say about Jane Austen too, though for slightly different reasons (so much of the action of her novels is in dialogue, for one thing, or can be shifted to it)—so again it isn’t meant as a slight. I did feel, though, that the novel read like a plan being well executed more than something being written really well. Given how hard it is to get two people to agree on what “well written” means, maybe that’s a distinction without a difference. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the novel, though it is sad and hard going at times. I think it’s smart about its central scenario, and it created a believable version of how something so unpleasant might play out among those used to thinking of themselves as “the best kind of people.”
Novel Readings 