London Books

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

In the grand tradition of May’s post on Boston by the Books and last summer’s post on my equally bookish expedition to New York, here’s a recap of my book buying adventures in London. First of all, as I have mentioned here a few times, the London Review Bookshop was my top destination for the trip. It was everything I’d imagined. It proves that, when it comes to bookstores anyway, size really doesn’t matter: it’s far from the largest bookstore I’ve ever been in, but every shelf is packed with interesting titles, with no space wasted on the mass-market blockbusters of the mostly disposable kind that fill huge display racks at so many other stores. I could have spent hours more exploring and learning. I didn’t even really go downstairs, except to grab the one Mr. Gum title missing from our collection from their children’s section–this series, much beloved of both my children, is very hard to get on this side of the pond. I was especially looking for a couple of books I hadn’t found locally, John Williams’s Stoner and Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, and sure enough, they were both in stock. I couldn’t resist Judith Flanders’s The Invention of Murder, which has not been released here yet in paperback, and having just helped edit Michael Adams’s lovely piece on Barbara Pym for this month’s Open Letters Monthly, I leapt on Jane and Prudence when I spotted it. I could easily have bought another dozen titles, but I had to respect not only my budget but also the impracticality of adding too much more weight to my suitcase when I knew I still had to lug it to Birmingham and back. So I made it out of there with only five additions to my library–restrained indeed!

I enjoyed browsing in a number of other bookstores, including Blackwell’s on Charing Cross Road and two Waterstone’s locations, the one on Gower Street (just up from my little hotel) and the giant one at Piccadilly Circus. There, after much dithering deliberation I picked out another couple of books that have proved elusive locally, Susan Hill’s thriller The Woman in Black and Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel. Again, there were many other tempting choices (including Elizabeth von Armin’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I am still rather regretting having put back on the shelf, and Sebastian Faulks’s One Day in December–though deciding against that one, I think, was probably the right call). But I had already added Avrom Fleishman’s George Eliot’s Intellectual Life to my stash from the Cambridge University Press table at BAVS, and while roaming Waterstone’s Piccadilly I was actually carrying with me, in my trusty Lug shoulder bag, the beautiful book on the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries that I treated myself to at the Victoria and Albert Museum Bookshop, so I was keenly aware of the increasing weight of my luggage! My final book purchase in London was a tiny one, the British Museum’s Little Book of Mummies. Then, having arrived virtuously early at Heathrow for my flight home and checked my heavy bag, I felt at liberty to explore WHSmith, where seeing Mary Stewart’s Stormy Petrel  brought to mind a recent chat with a former student and fellow avid reader about her novels and how much I had once enjoyed them. And now here they all are, just waiting for me!

Both the tapestry book and the mummies book are part reading material, part souvenir: they will remind me of and teach me more about some of the museum exhibits that moved and interested me the most on this visit. In the same spirit, here are two related pictures from those exhibits for you to enjoy!




 

 

Back from BAVS

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I got back Monday afternoon from my long-anticipated trip to Birmingham for the British Association of Victorian Studies conference–and, of course, my stop-over in London for sightseeing and book shopping. I’m now in the midst of back-to-school preparations. Though I am feeling very glad that I did so much work for my fall courses before I left, inevitably there are still details to be finalized, and in fact it’s a good thing I didn’t quite finalize things like my syllabi, as for various reasons (such as the last-minute announcement from higher up that we are not renewing our contract with Turnitin.com for this year–ask me how good an idea I think that is…), a number of sections needed to be tweaked. So I ‘m doing that, and making plans for the actual classroom time on Friday and Monday, updating PowerPoint slides and lecture notes, and making sure I have things like sign-up sheets for presentations and attendance lists. It adds to the excitement that the printer in our main office is defunct: as Dalhousie does not provide individual faculty members with printers (or, more significant these days, with ink cartridges, which typically cost more to replace than the whole darned machine), I rely on the office printer for my course materials, reference letters, and so on, so this is pretty inconvenient. The workaround in place is our new copier, which is “networked” so that we can send documents to it straight from our offices–except that the networking is itself a work in progress, to be completed by the end of September, and my computer remains out of the loop. So there are various extra steps involved any time I want a document sharp enough to copy.  I know, you’re all fascinated by this trivia about the glamorous life of the professoriate! Anyway, bit by bit the pieces are falling into place, the handouts into the folders, the notes into order, the graphics into position.

As for BAVS, I feel good about the experience. It was a big conference, with five parallel sessions running in most time slots and thus there was a lot of competition for everyone’s attention. In my own case, I find that my capacity to listen to specialized academic papers is somewhat limited at the best of times, and so I rationed out my attention a bit stingily, not attempting to attend a panel in every time slot but rather taking one break to go into downtown Birmingham to explore the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (which was wonderful, and topical, too, since it houses a terrific collection of Pre-Raphaelite art), and another to go across the street from the main conference site to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (also wonderful, a real gem, as Ann promised when we met for our very pleasant dinner the night before the conference). The genre of the academic conference paper is, in my view, a somewhat problematic one. Typically, papers are highly specialized, and they are also usually very tightly crafted, polished to a high degree of rhetorical sophistication. As a result, I find it isn’t easy to engage with them, to see how to get into a conversation with (or about) them. If your own research isn’t highly proximate, it’s unlikely you know enough to get into the details, and if you’re interested anyway, you may feel kept at a distance by the effect of closure such a paper generates. I guess I wish conference papers were more like blog posts: preliminary or open-ended (or open-minded) enough that you feel invited into a conversation rather than impressed by a performance. That said, I heard some interesting papers, good things of their kind: they told me things I didn’t know or addressed questions I hadn’t thought of. A highlight for me was Colin Cruise’s plenary on ‘Arranging meanings: Pre-Raphaelite compositions and narratives,’ not only because it was intrinsically interesting and well presented, but because I had only just seen, in the BMAG, many of the paintings he focused on.

I think my own presentation went well. Our panel on ‘knowledge dissemination in Canada’ offered snapshots of three quite different projects, one the well-established Disraeli Project based at Queen’s University, presented by its director, Michel Pharand; another the Affect Project, a large-scale interdisciplinary endeavor recently launched at the University of Manitoba under the leadership of my good friend Arlene Young; and the other my adventures as an academic who blogs. We had a reasonable audience, considering the number of alternatives they had (if I’d had the choice, I too might have been at the Carlyle panel!)–around 20 people, maybe? I’m terrible at estimating these things, especially when I’m buzzed from nerves, as I always am when speaking in public. My prezi worked fine, which was a relief, after all that time spent on it, and I was even able to do a little last minute tinkering and get in a snippet from the Guardian piece that went up just that morning in response to my earlier post about Leonard Cassuto’s dismissive attitude towards blogs. There was some pretty lively discussion after. I was not surprised that the first couple of questions were, let’s say, skeptical–one of them was prefaced with a hope that it wouldn’t sound “too adversarial.” I didn’t think so, but I did think it skipped past a number of the quite careful framing statements I had made in order to present a kind of extreme worst-case scenario the logic of which, to be honest, I didn’t completely grasp. The concern seemed to be that somehow if we started doing something besides the conventional, highly structured and hierarchical and gated forms of academic publishing, we were heading down the slippery slope to having all our research funding and graduate programs cut — because (and this part of the question, or response, I do remember quite clearly) “in that case why would we need to do research or train graduate students?” As one of my main points was that the non-academic writing I’d been doing was closely integrated with, or reliant on, expertise acquired through my own specialized research, I don’t think I did, myself, offer evidence that such research was irrelevant or beside the point beyond the gates of the traditional publishing models. In fact, to the contrary, I was trying to make the point that such research has more value outside those gates than we typically believe, or at least than we typically let it. As for training graduate students, well, as readers of my blog know, I have a lot of doubts about whether we should continue to train graduate students in quite the way we have been doing for the last several decades, and it was really in service to those concerns that I emphasized my own belief that we need to make a place for (and make the case for) the value of unconventional scholarly practices including blogging in the overall landscape of recognized academic activities.

It struck me, listening to the more dubious voices in the audience, not just that they gave some signs of the defensiveness people like Alex Reid have written about, but also that they tended to talk about “the system in which we are embedded” as if we have no agency in that system. Has Foucault made cowards of us all? Who makes up the academic system, after all, if not the people who embody it? To be sure, there are all kinds of people in that system, often people with administrative or executive powers, who show no appreciation for the academic humanities. But if we really believe we can change our profession for the better, surely we should advocate for those changes, and seek to explain them in the strongest and clearest and most aggressive ways, rather than condemn ourselves–and, more pressingly, those coming after us–to persisting in a system we believe is dysfunctional. It may also be that breaking open the current rigid paradigms of academic scholarship and publishing will help us make the case for the value of our work to those administrators by showing it to be less insular, to serve a broader public. This is part of the logic behind the support structure for the new Los Angeles Review of Books, as I understand it; Tom Lutz, the founding editor, noted in his powerful essay on the state of book reviewing that academics are able to contribute to “as part of our commitment to the dissemination of knowledge that is integral to that job.” In any case, the questions were not, really, “adversarial,” but curious and eager to consider the further implications of the fairly modest proposals I specifically made, and it seemed worthwhile to have stimulated that kind of discussion. I think it’s telling that quite a number of young scholars, mostly continuing Ph.D. students, came up to me later to express their interest in what I’d said. Maintaining the status quo is not, overall, in their interests, I think, and their eagerness to think about how else things might be done was energizing.

Unusually for me, the conference felt most useful as an opportunity to have these informal exchanges, and also to meet people I knew from blogs or Twitter or the long-standing VICTORIA listserv, or from reading their scholarship, to make the personal contact that moves conversations and relationships forward — networking! It was a real pleasure putting faces to names, especially Rosemary Mitchell, whom I have ‘known’ for many years (since we both wrote essays on 19th-century needlework and historiography and decided we would be not competitors but allies) but never met in person. David Skilton was there! I was able to tell him how useful I have found his book Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries. And I met Regenia Gagnier, whose book Subjectivities was one of the first critical books I bought when I was a student at Cornell, and Lyn Pykett, whose work on sensation fiction I rely on, and I was able to reconnect with one of my very best former students, now completing her Ph.D. in the UK (hi, Emily!).  I could wish there had been a bit more time for simply mingling, as we were either in sessions, standing in the crowded atrium eating the (very good) lunches provided, or seated at tables for dinner. Perhaps if I hadn’t been too tired from traveling to go to the pub …

Next up: some self-indulgent posts about my eagerly awaited visit to the London Review Bookshop and other bookish haunts.

“The Measure of Blogging”: More from Leonard Cassuto

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Leonard Cassuto has published some further thoughts on blogging at the Guardian, with some specific attention to my response to a couple of his earlier comments in the live chat back in July.

I don’t have time to reply in detail right now as (ironically) I am at a conference in Birmingham heading off to give a presentation about blogging as knowledge dissemination. I will quickly say that the “critical error of fact” he points out (that “[his] writing for the Chronicle is in fact a column, not a blog”) doesn’t seem that critical to me, really, but I accept the correction. The difference between the two as he explains it has to do with only two things: where in the Chronicle his writing appears (including that it appears in the print version), and that it is edited by others (including fact-checked). That process, he notes, “almost always” improves the product. It’s true that my blog is not fact-checked except by me, and as it turns out, my attempt to identify just what the process was for his pieces was not thorough enough – I didn’t altogether rely on the statement in the Guardian that identified his pieces as a blog post for the Chronicle, but when I looked around the online version I didn’t see anything that clearly contradicted that description.  I guess the Guardian doesn’t fact-check very thoroughly either. In any case, it seems only fair to retract the suggestion of hypocrisy about that example. Now that he’s posted a declared blog post, he has also softened his general stance on blogging: “I mostly don’t read blogs. I’m reading this one right now, and I’m even posting to it.”

But the point of my previous post is not to determine exactly the right label is for Cassuto’s writing (as Cassuto acknowledges, “the world does not turn” on that question). The Chronicle publishes a lot of articles I think are surprisingly poor (many seem like nothing more than link-bait), despite whatever editing they have received, and by far the most valuable resource it offers, in my opinion, is the Profhacker blog. I don’t decide what to read based on the form or label.

There’s more I’d like to say, including about the model of “authority” Cassuto gives (how does “going viral” confer “authority,” for instance?) and the value of “visibility” (an argument which reproduces existing publishing and prestige hierarchies) as well as the assumption that to succeed, graduate students and junior faculty are best advised to continue in the most conservative way possible in their work. As senior, “established,” faculty, we are the ones in a position to encourage alternative models of productivity and scholarship, and if blogging is valuable to me in the ways I described, there would be real hypocrisy in my case if I didn’t consider it valuable work for people at earlier stages of their careers and work to recognize it as such when they do it.

Finally, I’ll note that I disagree with Cassuto’s conclusion that ‘if Dr Maitzen’s blogging is “unofficial,” then it doesn’t deserve the same kind of attention that her “official” publication does.’ I used “scare quotes” around “official” in my earlier comment for a reason: I don’t like that distinction, and one of the points I’ll be making today in my presentation is that I think we, collectively, as a profession, need to broaden our understanding of what counts as real, official, scholarly work. But more important, I think my blogging deserves as much, if not more, attention than my other publications. It’s more interesting and wide-ranging and intellectually curious, and it’s relevant to a wider audience. In many cases it is better written, too. It does indeed “demand a fair amount of attention” to follow blogs and to participate in the conversations that a post can generate. On that note, I think it’s interesting that Cassuto chose to publish his reply as a blog post in the Guardian but never engaged in the discussion that unfolded in the comments after my post went up last month.

 

Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The blurb page of my edition of Brooklyn is full of praise for Toibin’s style. Words like “simplicity” predominate, along with “spare,” “delicate,” and “elegance.” I can imagine a review of Brooklyn that would describe similar features but with less enthusiasm: instead of “spare,” perhaps “sparse”; instead of “delicate,” “flat” or “colorless.” It’s a book that is strangely without affect, so deliberately underwritten it’s as if Toibin was determined to keep not just himself off the page but his characters and readers too. Is elegance dependent on such effacement, such careful subordination of elaboration or enthusiasm? Can there be no pulse, no poetry, in it? The negative review I imagine is not, quite, the review I would write, but I finished the novel feeling still held at a distance. Eilis Lacey, for instance: who is she? What is she like? She’s barely there, though the novel is, I suppose, told from her point of view. Even accepting what I take to be the premise – that she lives remote, somehow, from her own emotions, almost even from her own experiences – she’s an oddly insubstantial figure, the sum of actions she takes and things she says more than any rich conception of character. Like Eilis, the story too is a sequence, this and then this and then this. The writing precise, each detail placed just so, but the pacing is so steady that if I were writing that negative review, I’d call Toibin’s style “pedestrian.” Maybe even “plodding.” I’m not writing that review, though, because I’m not sure that’s so, only that it struck me as so, that I was expecting something urgent and illuminating to emerge from behind the cool narration and was left disappointed. Something can be perfect of its kind and still not be the kind of thing we love: Brooklyn has a certain minimalist perfection, but if I weigh it against, say, Leaving Brooklyn, also a story about self and place, about growing and seeing, about loving and choosing, Leaving Brooklyn is the book for me. (I realize there’s no intrinsic necessity to that comparison, but it occurred to me throughout my reading of Brooklyn.) I’m surprised at my own reaction because I like my books cerebral. Maybe I was in the wrong “head space” myself to appreciate such an austere approach.

Have you read Brooklyn? What did you think?

Stress!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

You know that house I was getting in order, just a little while back? Well, right now it feels pretty wobbly, not for any one big reason but just from the combination of lots of little things that, cumulatively, are making me feel stressed out and distracted. I leave on Monday for my trip to the UK, for instance. In lots of ways I am really looking forward to this: a chance to meet up with friends and colleagues, to see and learn things, to be in London again and in Birmingham for the first time. But much as I enjoy being other places, I’m a terrible traveler when it comes to getting to other places (particularly by air, though I also abhor car travel). In addition to the flying itself, there’s the fun of airport security, in which you have your option of ways to have your privacy invaded, and a great deal of hurrying up in order to wait. I usually distract myself as best I can from thinking about the unpleasantness to come by keeping busy with planning, and in this case there’s plenty of that to do, along with finishing my conference presentation. But that is the source of its own kind of stress, as after all this time working out what I wanted to include and in what order and what degree of detail, I’m feeling dissatisfied with what I’ve got. I also did a practice run of the current version today and ran almost 10 minutes over what I believe to be my allotted time. I wanted to do a more informal talk, but it’s so hard to make sure you stay on point (and hit every specific point you want to) if you don’t script things pretty carefully!

I’ve been developing my Prezi in tandem with working out my speaking notes, and though I remain enthusiastic about Prezi as a concept and a conceptual tool, there too I am feeling dissatisfied: the current version doesn’t really use the special features of Prezi in a very creative way, and I’ve been wondering if I should have just saved a lot of time and done some straightforward PowerPoint slides — which I might end up preparing anyway as a back-up because I am paranoid that something (what? I don’t know!) will go wrong using Prezi (a firewall keeping me from getting to the site? an incompatibility between the design of my presentation and the projector I use? I don’t know! I enjoy technology but I don’t altogether trust it, at least not when I know people will be watching me use it!). It is not entirely calming to reflect that every conference paper I have presented in the past has been quite sparsely attended and has been the focus of far more concern to me than to anyone in the audience. The disproportion between my anxious preparation and the usual underwhelming but friendly reception in a way adds to my stress, because I feel I must be doing something wrong. I particularly recall two papers I sweated bullets over, both of which I thought dealt with quite controversial material in a somewhat provocative way. Oh, the questions I braced myself for! The micro-edits I put on them trying to anticipate and shape responses from hostile, or just better-informed, listeners! And in both cases there were maybe 9 or 10 people there besides the panelists, and no challenging questions at all. A relief? In a way, but also a let-down. One possible (and comforting) interpretation of this past experience is that I prepared such good papers they were (to quote from the cute new ‘Welcome to Dalhousie‘ song) “hater-proof.” But maybe the opposite was true and nobody wanted to be mean to me. I don’t think a paper about blogging and knowledge dissemination will be controversial, but I do want to have thought about the issues I raise well enough that I can answer questions about them, give appropriate references or clarifications, and address any skepticism I encounter…

So there’s that. And there’s the prospect of being on my own in London, which is at once exhilarating and a bit scary — it’s so big, and there’s so much to do and see, and I have so little time, too. I don’t feel so overwhelmed by New York because I’ve been there so many times (one perk of going to graduate school “up-state”), but I’ve been to London only twice and always with others. It will be nice not having to negotiate plans or meals, or just the pace of things, and I reassure myself that if I get lost, well, at least I (more or less) speak the language.

But I get back only a couple of days before my classes begin, and literally the day before my kids start back at school, so there’s a lot to try to be on top of before I leave. I’ve done one round of shopping for school supplies (I swear, I won’t be surprised if pretty soon they ask us to provide toilet paper for our kids) but am still waiting for a reply from the other school about what is needed. Then Dalhousie just announced some changes to their parking system which will make a difficult system a lot worse (unless I’m one of the lucky ones who “wins” a permit for a lot newly designated for reserved spots only — at more than double what I paid for my permit last year). So that’s stressful, as I contemplate scenarios that involve 45-minute walks with the kids through typical Maritime fall or winter weather (pouring cold rain, sideways wind, ice pellets) carrying all the gear we need for our days, and no easy way to get around if there’s some kind of problem that requires picking them up early — not to mention getting to routine after-school activities and appointments. Oh, and a hurricane is threatening to arrive the day I’m supposed to be flying out, which in a best case scenario means it will be a bumpy trip.

Sorry for venting. I’ll calm down eventually. Tomorrow I have some practical things to see to, and then I’ll do another round of tidying-up revisions on my speaking notes, and then on Friday I’ll have one more go at the Prezi, just to be sure that at least it includes all the illustrative bits I want, and to keep improving the transitions to avoid making my audience sea-sick. (My efforts towards this last point account for the increasing linearity of the prezi: big turns and lateral movement seem to be the most disorienting.) And tonight, I’m meeting two of my favourite former students, just for a coffee and a chat — that is definitely something to look forward to. Maybe I’ll even do some serious reading again soon: I’ve been too distracted for much besides yet more early Spensers.

Update: Better now. I really enjoyed chatting with my students (can I still call them this, even though they have both graduated – twice – from Dal?). Interestingly, we all talked at length and with much animation about the books we’ve been reading lately. This is interesting to me because I have noticed that at social functions with my professorial colleagues, we almost always end up talking about which TV shows we are watching. Maybe to English professors, book talk is too much like shop talk? But it’s also my colleagues who always say they have “no time to read.” I’ve taken another look at the prezi and it at least seems usable, though I do still want to tweak it (and cut the talk down). So I feel better about that, if not entirely satisfied. And now a glass of wine and maybe a dose of Our Mutual Friend, and that should keep the other anxieties at bay until tomorrow.

Vera Brittain, The Dark Tide

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

There are books that are bad in uninteresting ways and books that are bad and yet somehow still interesting. The Dark Tide, Vera Brittain’s first novel, is in the second category. In saying this I am basically repeating what seems to have been the critical consensus about The Dark Tide since its publication in 1923: its flaws seemed conspicuous (though there was not universal agreement about just what they were), but yet it had an energy and intellectual determination that made it something more than a failure, something other than forgettable. To her credit, Brittain herself is both frank and intelligent about the novel’s weaknesses: “the crude violence of its methods and the unmodified black-and-whiteness of its values.”  The Dark Tide, she says in her preface to the 1935 reissue,

still appears a surprisingly melodramatic and immature production for a young woman who had seen four years of War service and three of University training. It stumbled towards a technique which I have since repeated with possibly better results – the relation of an individual story against a larger background of political and social events – but the story was over-emphasized and the background lamentably inaccurate and incomplete. Yet, by the time I began the book, I was well into my twenties; I had passed through a veritable lifetime of annihilating experience; and I was not, I think, exceptionally unintelligent.

She goes on to suggest that the very “annihilating experience” she had been through had impeded her intellectual development even as it artificially accelerated her emotional development. The resulting asymmetry she proposes between head and heart does seem to me a plausible explanation for the extraordinary unevenness of The Dark Tide,  in which crudely-drawn characters careen around the story, knocking into each other like conceptual bumper cars. They deal only in extremes of passion or commitment, or, on the other side, of passivity and submission. What matters most to them all is how they feel about everything — and this, to me, was entirely unexpected, as it reverses the priorities and emphases of Brittain’s autobiographical writing. The Dark Tide doesn’t sound like Brittain at all, and clearly she didn’t think it did either. Though she wrote other novels (one of which, Honourable Estate, sounds like the next one I should read), there seems to be good reason why she is best known for her non-fiction, which she wanted to be “as truthful as history, but as readable as fiction.”

The Dark Tide is organized around two characters based, quite obviously, on Brittain herself and Winifred Holtby. Neither portrait is ultimately flattering, and as Mark Bostridge remarks in his introduction to the Virago edition, the identifications loosen as the novel goes on: he argues that “the two main female characters become increasingly representative of the different sides of Vera’s own personality.” Daphne Lethbridge has Holtby’s energy and outgoing personality, but lacks intellectual subtlety and social refinement; Virginia Dennison has Brittain’s petite elegance, intellectual seriousness, and social conscience. They disdain each other for reasons that make neither of them look good, and like Brittain and Holtby in real life, but under very different circumstances, they outgrow their hostilities and find each other unexpected allies. But the feminist principles and political engagement that make the Brittain-Holtby friendship distinct and inspiring are completely lacking here. Instead, the conflict between Daphne and Virginia is focused on their entanglement with their tutor Raymond Sylvester, who loves Virginia but is loved by Daphne. Full of thwarted desire and smarting from the blow to his ego when Virginia rejects his proposal, Raymond asks Daphne to be his wife, and from that spiteful moment the novel’s catastrophes unfold. Poor Daphne, thrilled at first to think her love is reciprocated, withers away under Raymond’s bitter dissatisfaction with her. Virginia renounces her intellectual ambitions on the grounds that they encourage her to be selfish and self-satisfied; she becomes a nurse. The women meet up again and Virginia (guilt-ridden by her part in Daphne’s unhappiness) offers her friendship which, by that point, Daphne desperately needs.  In the meantime, Raymond, still obsessing about Virginia, fixates on an opera singer who resembles her. His infidelity makes him resent Daphne’s clumsy affection and pathetic attempts to please him more and more (in this, Brittain is at least psychologically astute, though the writing is almost unbearably hyperbolic). Eventually he lashes out at her and leaves, unaware that his blow has sent his pregnant wife crashing into the fireplace and left her unconscious on the floor, where she is discovered an hour later, bloodstained and in premature labor, by (you guessed it) Virginia. The baby lives but is somehow crippled by the accident. Sad as this is, Daphne’s decline seems almost sadder still, as the crude energy that made her attractive in a blundering sort of way at the outset of the novel has evaporated entirely by the end: her only ambition is to make up to little Jack for his misfortune (for which,distressingly, she blames herself as much as her abusive husband). Then, adding ideological insult to literal injury, Raymond’s mistress appears to urge her not to pursue a divorce as Raymond’s political career is finally taking off but he is campaigning primarily against a proposed new divorce act – one which would actually make Daphne’s case against him easier and surer.  A divorce would show him up as a hypocrite and scuttle his chances of eventually becoming Minister of Arbitration. Thus private values and public service come into direct conflict, and Daphne decides that she will sacrifice her right to be rid of him rather than deprive him of the chance to do something good in the world. Daphne sees her decision as a “sordid compromise,” but Virginia applauds it in a long speech about the moral beauty of giving things up for “the weak and the wicked and the undeserving.”

There is material here for a great, if still problematic, novel about competing values: about women’s aspirations at a time of profound social and political change, about marriage and how its demands are affected, in their turn, by new ideas about women’s independence and intellectual and moral integrity, about private life and public morality – or, in a different register, about love and obsession and cruelty and submission. This is part of what I mean when I say that the novel is bad and yet interesting: that despite the clunky prose and plotting, the heavy-handed speechifying, and the cringe-inducing melodrama, the novel gives the sense of a rich (if confused) intelligence trying to get something done, or maybe to get something out. One example will be enough to get across the flavour of the novel. Here’s a bit of the turbulent proposal scene between Raymond and Virginia:

‘Miss Dennison!’ he burst out in a sudden overwhelming flood of passion, ‘you know what I’m going to say – you know what I want, but all this term you’ve been just the little devil that you are – aggravating, alluring, torturing – driving me nearly mad. And never, never would you let me get hold of you alone – till now. That in itself makes me hope – makes me hope just a little bit more. I love you – Virginia – I can’t sleep or work or think for loving you! I want you till I feel mad – mad – mad! . . . I don’t want you to give up any of the things you like doing – I only want to find you work to do – work for your splendid gifts – but with me – with me! Virginia – my dear – my beloved – wonderful, wonderful little girl – say you care for me a little – say you’ll come to me – marry me!’

Virginia waited for the torrent to subside a little. ‘No,’ she said very firmly.

Sylvester, white and trembling, looked at her with blazing eyes.

‘You don’t mean that! You don’t, you don’t! It’s another of your cruel tricks – your maddening wiles – Virginia!’

Finally convinced by her resolute refusals that her ‘no’ actually means ‘no,’ and insulted by her comments about his low moral standards, Sylvester turns on his beloved:

‘So that’s what you think of me, is it!’ Sylvester exclaimed. ‘That’s the sort of reputation I’ve got? Very well then, I’m going to live up to it. I’m going to make you kiss me before you go, you little devil! I’ll have that much satisfaction at any rate.’

He seized both her hands as he spoke, pulled her out of her chair, and began to draw her towards him. With a tremendous effort she managed to get one of her hands free – the one in which she still held her paper. [Oh yes, this is all during what is supposed to be a “coaching” session.] Summoning all her strength she lifted it above her head, and struck him violently with it in the face. He let her go immediately and staggered back, with eyes watering and one cheek crimson from the blow.

Yeesh, right? And yet fending him off with her paper is surely symbolic of the deeper contest between the feminine submission he wants (in the guise of romance) and her determination to achieve things with her life that she believes (as Brittain believed) were likely incompatible with marriage. He’s a sexual bully as well as the incarnation of masculine privilege in a context marked by women’s aspiration to claim their share of the authority that comes with education and the degrees that formally recognize it. If only the novel continued to beat him up; if only he had to pay, not just for his violence against Daphne, but for his regressive attitudes and his sheer, unmitigated meanness — and by that I mean, for things like being angry at Daphne for fainting during an ‘at home’ he insists on her hosting at short notice even though she is heavily pregnant and generally unwell and unhappy. If only Daphne had grabbed the poker during the miserable confrontation and struck him down, instead of being struck down herself … or if only Daphne and Virginia had united against him and formed the kind of genuinely mutual friendship Brittain and Holtby had, settling in together to raise Jack into a different kind of man than his father (in the true Bronte tradition, crippling him at birth would have been a helpful step in that direction).

But The Dark Tide offers neither complex realist analysis of the social conditions (and conditioning) that lead both Raymond and Daphne to act as they do, leaving us productively dissatisfied, nor a feminist revenge fantasy. Instead, it turns into a weird treatise on the value of self-sacrifice, leaving me worried that Brittain has been influnced too much by my least favourite aspect of George Eliot’s moral philosophy: the imperative articulated in The Mill on the Floss that “the responsibility of tolerance lies with those of wider vision.” At the end of the novel Virginia talks for nearly three pages about the greatness of Daphne’s decision not to divorce Raymond, on the grounds that “It’s never for the people who deserve it that we’re called upon to sacrifice ourselves”:

No, it’s for the weak and the wicked and the undeserving that we have to give things up. Look at the lives of people like doctors and nurses; more than half their days are spent on patients whose diseases are due to their own sins and follies.  Look at the teachers of boys and girls in schools; they don’t wear out their gifts and their energy on the brilliant and the ambitious, who’d get along all right without any teachers at all. No; they give their best work to the lazy and the backward and the stupid, who either can’t or won’t learn. Just in the same way the clergyman in a slum parish spends al his time and thought on the people who drink and swear, and beat their wives, or are unfaithful to their husbands. . . . You’re one of them now, Daphne, one of the children of the Kingdom, who because they save others lose the chance to save themselves.

Yeesh again, I’m afraid, first of all because this long speech really comes out of nowhere. I wouldn’t declare absolutely that no character ought to speak for three pages straight, even didactically: there might be a right time and place for it, a right novel, the right novelist. But surely the speech ought to feel organically part of the novel, something that everything else in the novel has prepared us to hear, and if The Dark Tide is about the beauty of self-sacrifice on behalf of the wicked and undeserving, this is the first we’ve seen of it. It seems telling that Daphne’s not convinced, also – but I don’t sense that Brittain is using the gap between Virginia’s conviction and Daphne’s disappointment to do anything in particular except continue distinguishing between them as characters, at Daphne’s expense as usual.

The sudden introduction of what seems a new theme, and the intrusive and inartistic way it is handled are both reasons to object to this part of the novel. An equally good, if not better, reason is that the doctrine is so ethically problematic. If the better are always to serve the needs and interests of the worst, doesn’t that mean that in the end, the wicked win? What’s the long-term good of self-sacrifice that serves only to prop up someone like Raymond? It’s enabling, that’s what it is! It’s exalting within limits, perhaps, and it may even be theoretically necessary, because if you put your own needs first, you blur the line between yourself and the undeserving. But it lets the bad guys win. George Eliot is uneasy about this too: think of Lydgate, whose better nature makes him tend to Rosamond at the cost of his own highest aspirations. What’s sad there is that precisely because he is the better person, he has no real choice. The same is true of Dorothea’s promise to Casaubon: she has to say yes, or she wouldn’t be Dorothea. It’s her best self that leads her to the brink of a sacrifice we all (including her) know he does not deserve. Eliot rescues Dorothea by killing off Casaubon, saving us all from the misery of watching Dorothea live out the consequences of her own moral elevation. The novel in which she does that would be utterly disheartening. If Viriginia is speaking for Brittain in The Dark Tide, she seems quite prepared to inflict such a doctrine on her character, but it’s impossible to believe Brittain would have accepted such terms for Holtby in real life.

Overall, it’s a strange, puzzling, annoying, unsatisfying novel. What it is not, on my reading, is what Bostridge calls it: “an amusing period piece.” It’s far too dark for that. Brittain quotes a contemporary review of it that concludes “Some day she may write a good book.” That seems fair. A Dark Tide is not a good book, but there’s something about it (including quite a powerful section about Daphne’s growing isolation and self-awareness in the early weeks of her marriage) that tells us the writer has a good book in her.

My tremendous writings — not!

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I got a spam comment here today that made me laugh:

Hey, you used to write great, but the last several posts have been kinda boring… I miss your tremendous writings. Past several posts are just a little out of track! come on!

Usually the spammers use honey rather than vinegar in their attempts to get us to click through and buy a little of what they are selling; this crew probably thinks that if they rile us up, we’ll come after them–and then they’ll have us! But it also made me laugh because it’s a little close to the mark: posting has been slow around here, though I do hope that what has gone up is not terribly “out of track.” It’s not that I’m not reading. I finished two Spenser novels over the weekend, for instance, part of my look back at the earlier ones in the series. Mortal Stakes seems to me particularly good, because it sets up and then challenges the moral terms on which Spenser pursues his code (which, as he notes, does not work in this instance). Looking for Rachel Wallace is interesting in different ways: again, it features Spenser coming up against some of his limitations, but in this case they are ideological more than ethical: Rachel Wallace is a “radical” feminist Spenser is hired to, but fails to, protect, an while he has to make up for his initial insistence on overriding her decisions in service of his chivalric standards (which leads her to fire him, leaving her to be kidnapped), she also has to confront her own inability to defend herself. Both are zippy reading and good, stylish examples of their kind. But I chose them to read because they fit well into the interstices of my other weekend projects, and so writing them up in detail was beside the point.

The other books I’m reading will almost certainly get their own proper posts, but I have to finish them first! One is Our Mutual Friend, which I am rereading after a gap of more than 20 years. It’s great. It’s also long! And I’ve been interrupting it with other things, including Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise, which I am puttering along at times when concentrating on Dickens is not realistic. The Rest is Noise is fascinating, but I can’t altogether get past the frustration of its not being a hypertext edition with music samples. (There’s a companion blog, but coordinating reading with being online and listening has not proved practicable.) Reading about music without listening to it is like reading about food without eating any — or substitute your choice of sensory activities that are best experienced directly! Still, it’s making me curious about music I never wanted to listen to before, and it’s lucid, lively, and full of great anecdotes. Finally, Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide just arrived via “document delivery” (in my day, we called it “interlibrary loan”) and the lending library has given me only until September 7th, so I thought I’d best get right to that. No point imagining a seminar for 2012-13 on the Somerville novelists if I haven’t actually tested the charm of the idea against the reality of their novels, after all, and South Riding is not a very big sample.

So. I’ll have more tremendous writings up again soon, I promise.

Monday Miscellany: Getting My House in Order, Course Prep, & LA Review of Books

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

In part, I mean “getting my house in order” quite literally, in the sense that much of my time in the past week has been spent sorting out a household problem of the most unexciting kind. It sounds simple enough: some time ago our dryer began catching items in its edges and scorching them – not a good thing! So I finally set up a “service call” and, after warning me that if he even stepped across the threshold he’d have to charge me at least the minimum for the visit and it might not be worth it for a dryer that is over a decade old, the nice man from Sears diagnosed the problem, “costed” the parts and repairs, and left us convinced that we didn’t want to fix the thing because to do so would cost very nearly as much as a new dryer. And a new dryer, of course, instead of developing yet more expensive problems, would actually be under warranty. And it might (technological advances being what they are) actually dry clothes more efficiently. Thus was launched the great Washer-and-Dryer quest of 2011 — washer too, because our old set was ‘stackers,’ a decision by our home’s previous owner that had seemed odd to us until we started looking for alternatives that would actually fit inside the closet where the laundry hook-ups are. Hours of internet research followed, and then multiple phone calls and then trips to stores (tape measure in hand, eventually, because it turns out you can’t trust the information you find on the internet!). It’s such a boring thing to spend so much time on, and yet it’s just the kind of thing you don’t want to screw up because you need the darned things to work, preferably for years. It’s a boring thing to write about, too! And this is just the kind of thing that gets the snide hashtag #firstworldproblems on Twitter…so I’ll stop, except to say that our new, pretty basic but, we hope, efficient and effective (and non-scorching) set arrives on Saturday. As most of the appliances in our house are at least that old or older, I fear we are living on borrowed time, especially with our cook-top and oven (original, I believe, with the house, which was built in the late 1980s). I promise not to keep you up to date.

I’ve also been getting things in order at work. A couple of weeks ago I laid out the tasks I need to get done to be ready for the start of classes in September: Blackboard sites, course syllabi, and other assorted paperwork and preparation. At this point I am happy to say the syllabi are ready for all three of my fall courses, including details about course requirements and policies, and, most important, full schedules of readings and assignments. I’ll give these one more thorough examination before I make them official, but I don’t expect to change anything major. I’ve also prepared the Blackboard sites for all three courses. I won’t be using these sites for much besides organization and storage of course materials except for in one class, where we will use the discussion boards for questions and responses. Even so, it takes a lot of tedious work to put the various pieces in place, including setting up and testing links to a range of online resources, uploading handouts, and so forth. There are some bits and pieces I still need to draw up, including study questions for novels I haven’t taught before, and I’ll keep puttering away at those, but those can be added easily enough now that the overall system of tools and folders is in place. I do hate Blackboard: every step is so laborious. But it is helpful having course information centralized in this way as well. I know we don’t have the latest version. I can’t say I’ve found the most recent upgrades improvements, but maybe the next level will give us a more intuitive interface and even (dare I dream?) drag-and-drop capabilities. Though I’m not completely finished with class preparation, there are some things it never makes sense to do very far ahead of time (like actual lecture notes, which I find need to be pretty fresh to be useful), and the panic I was feeling at the beginning of the month has more or less abated.

As for my other work, there too I am getting things in order. I’m actually caught up right now on thesis chapters to read. That won’t last – I expect not only another Ph.D. installment this week but an entire M.A. thesis, for which I am serving as 3rd reader. I must make the most of this little lull and … work some more on my conference presentation for Birmingham! I finished a first full draft version of the Prezi I was building for it (if it even makes sense to talk of a “draft” of something as malleable as a Prezi). Looking at it this weekend I felt that I had found pretty much all the pieces I wanted to include (the accompanying commentary, of course, is what will make it all intelligible, or so I hope) but it still seemed kind of linear and unimaginative given what you can actually do with Prezi’s layout options — it looks as if I took PowerPoint slides, shuffled them up a bit, and laid them out on the table in related clusters. I’m going to spend some time working on my speaking notes separately now, and then go back to the Prezi and tighten it up. I’ve been looking at some of the samples on the Prezi site (like this astronomy one: cool!) and getting a sense of how you can use the zooming functions and the multi-directional layout options more creatively to end up with a presentation that lets you step back and display the big picture as well as come in close and explore the details. In the end, of course, what matters most is that your audience understand your points and the relationship between them. What I have been appreciating about Prezi is that it lets me think about those relationships and play with them right there on the ‘canvas,’ muttering to myself as I go. I know that in PowerPoint you can shuffle slides around, but the slides themselves are both harder to set up and fussier to change than the Prezi, where you literally just slide things around. That said, I definitely want to do a trial run in one of our classrooms that has its own ‘desktop’ computer and a data projector, to check how what I see on my own computer translates to that technology. I think I’m also going to prepare a simple PowerPoint version: the conference organizers have told us to bring PPT presentations on memory sticks to use in the conference rooms, and even though I have double-checked that the available computers will have internet access (which should be all I need to run the Prezi right from the Prezi site), I don’t want to be caught short by some factor I haven’t anticipated. The conference program is up and it looks like it will be a very full three days of sessions. With my departure now only two weeks away, I am starting to feel my usual pre-travel jitters, which I will keep in check by focusing on planning. I’ve just started looking more attentively into trains from London to Birmingham, for instance. Both prices and times for the trip seem to vary enormously. Oh dear: something else to fret about!

In other news, I don’t think I ever mentioned here specifically that the piece I wrote on Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series ran on the Los Angeles Review of Books site on August 5th (link). I’m really impressed at what the folks there have accomplished in what seems like a very short time (though I realize a lot of work went on in preparation for the launch even of this temporary site!), and also at their larger ambitions for the review, which reflect a deep commitment to but also a welcome optimism about books and book culture. If you haven’t been paying attention to them, one piece that is well worth reading because of the way it contextualizes their efforts is editor-in-chief Tom Lutz’s “Future Tense.”  Among the many interesting things he says is this, about their editors and contributors: “Many of us are also supported, as I am, by our universities (however much they, too, are shrinking and under siege), and so we can write and edit ‘for free’ as part of our commitment to the dissemination of knowledge that is integral to that job.” As I noted briefly on Twitter, the kind of writing the LA Review of Books represents is not the kind that is usually required or rewarded by universities (I bet most if not all of the academics who are heavily involved in this experiment in knowledge dissemination are tenured), so if they are indeed being encouraged by their institutions to proceed, that’s a promising sign that at least some administrators understand that there are more ways to use academics’ time and expertise than specialized, peer-reviewed publication.

I’ve been taking kind of a mini-sabbatical from Open Letters Monthly, partly to make sure I concentrated on my ‘must-do’ tasks, partly just to regroup and think about my priorities over there, including how best to balance them against the upcoming term, which promises to be one of my busiest in a while. I haven’t forgotten the essay on Richard III, gender, and genre, but my motivation for it rather sagged, especially given how esoteric it is, really — except for my own quirky interest in it, I couldn’t see the point of it, and it’s certainly not time-sensitive, unlike other work I’ve been doing. I’ll take a fresh look at it when my informal leave of absence is over and see if I feel excited about finishing it, and also if, on sober second thought, it seems like something anyone else would want to read! I also need to be ready to steer a couple of incoming pieces from other contributors through for the September issue, so I hope to be re-energized and back in the editing business soon. Watching the LARB take off has prompted some reflections on how we fit into the broader context Lutz describes: as Ed Champion remarks in his response to Lutz’s essay, there is a pretty extensive array of online review publications already, including OLM. (As a side note, following on the issue of how academics might fit into the ‘new’ order, one of the comments at EdRants says “Perhaps the kind of long-form book reviewing that was the rule in the old print world should be gathered into the fold of academia, and it seems like the LA Review of Books model might be the thin end of the wedge here.” The more I think about these issues, the more they seem to deserve a separate post, as they open up all kinds of questions, including about the role of academics in the wider world of books and reviewing – which were, of course, some of the questions that were most on my mind when I first began blogging.)

And now, I must go put some laundry in, as our old set leaves tomorrow and though the four-day interval before the new ones arrive may not seem like much, it’s not negligible with a teenaged boy in the house! Then I’ll settle in to address the next things on my to-do list.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It was very interesting and somewhat disorienting reading The Last September so soon after Farrell’s Troubles. On the one hand, they inevitably have a lot in common. On the other hand, you almost wouldn’t know it, they are so different in tone, with Farrell’s novel so dry and yet violent, and Bowen’s so indirect and yet humming with emotional disquiet. Probably because I was better prepared for it, I didn’t find Bowen’s prose as difficult as I did with The Heat of the Day. The Last September is 20 years earlier, too, so perhaps Bowen was still discovering how she wanted her sentences to work – or what kind of (or how much!) work she wanted them to be for her readers. Still, they have the same tendency to break up or wander away before coming back around to their main parts, and as in the later novel, that sense of interference between our attention and the point prevents us from imagining that the point is, itself, in any way direct or obvious.

The title evokes a moment,  and that’s how the whole novel feels, poised on the edge of something. Lois, whose novel it mostly is, is poised on the edge of adulthood: it’s her last September as a girl, though at the same time she is already not a girl even though she hasn’t defined herself, or claimed her identity, as a woman. Those around her impede her development, offering her no meaningful guidance into what it would mean for her, or could look like for her, to move beyond her current unformed, unsettled self. “What they never see,” she says near the end, “is, that I must do something.” That desire to claim an occupation, even as she cannot see what it might be, puts in her in good company: inevitably, I thought of Dorothea (“What could she do, what ought she to do?”). In some ways Lois’s situation seems even worse than Dorothea’s, despite her being more modern, because Lois has not even an imaginative ideal to motivate her. Though Dorothea’s yearnings and fantasies of a noble life only get her in trouble, at least she has a sense of nobility, an aspiration. I guess that’s part of what marks her, and her novel, as Victorian.

Lois’s world too is poised on the brink: the novel is suffused with the threat of violence, but because it is kept so much more on the periphery than in Troubles, it is more shocking when it finally intrudes unequivocally. The tensions run throughout, and reports of “incidents” trickle through, but Lady Naylor’s attitude explains how the novel will treat them: “From all the talk, you might think almost anything was going to happen, but we never listen. I have made it a rule not to talk, either.” Neither not listening nor not talking is a useful or realistic strategy, of course, and inevitably the margins become the center of the story, though Bowen holds them off until nearly the very end.

I was surprised to find myself chuckling at many points in the novel. I don’t remember finding any humor in The Heat of the Day (though it’s possible I just wasn’t attuned to it). The absurdity of the denial exhibited by some of the characters provides from some wry amusement, but there were also moments that made me think of Wilde. “We must seem ridiculous to you, over here,” Lady Naylor says to young Gerald Lesworth, “the way we are all related”:

“Topping, I think,” said Gerald.

“Oh, I don’t know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at all; that must feel so independent.”

“I have dozens.”

“Indeed? All in Surrey?”

“Scattered about.”

“That sounds to me, of course,” remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her gloves off brightly, “exceedingly restless.”

The prose also, while occasionally convoluted to a point past patience, very frequently gave me a frisson of readerly pleasure – on nearly every page I marked a passage or sentence that I lingered over because I wanted to, not because I had to to make sense of it. A couple of examples:

Recollections of Laura were now wiped for him from the startlingly green valley, leaving the scene dull. Not a turn of the rocks with the river, not a break-down of turf along the brink, not the Norman keep with perishing corners (where they leaned and quarrelled till Laura had wished aloud it would fall on them) gave back to him what they had taken of that eroding companionship. He and she might never have come here; they were disowned. The sharp rocks breaking out from the turf, the impassive speed of the water, were naked and had to be seen as themselves, in some relation excluding him; like country seen from the train, without past or future. And, having given proof of her impotence to be even here, Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus, leaving only – as in some rediscovered diary of a forgotten year – a few cryptic records, walks, some appointments kept, letters received and posted.

Bowen is brilliant here, I think, about the complicated way memory and association, psychology and emotion, affect our relationship to landscape. And here’s a little bit that is more simply poetic:

An escape of sunshine, penetrating the pale sky in the south-west, altered the room like a revelation. Noiselessly, a sweet-pea moulted its petals on to the writing-table, leaving a bare pistil. The pink butterfly flowers, transparently balancing, were shadowed faintly with blue as by an intuition of death.

 

Jane Smiley, Private Life

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Back when I was doing my survey of ‘books about books,’ one of the best I read was Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, which I admired for its balance of elegance and erudition. My relationship with her fiction, however, has been both limited and not so happy. I read A Thousand Acres and remember finding it compelling, but that was in the dark days before blogging, so I have only vague memories and nothing to consult to remind me why, or how far, it worked for me. I picked up Moo at Doull’s more recently (but still not recently enough to have blogged it, it turns out), and though it sounded like something I would enjoy, I ended up putting it aside unfinished. It’s not that it wasn’t well told, but that (as I recall) it turned out to be arch, and that became irritating. I don’t mind funny, or ironic, or wry, but I like my humor underwritten with sincerity, and so arch is not for me. When I came across Private Life while browsing in a bookstore last weekend, I’m not sure what instinct prompted me to take a closer look. I think I read at least one review of it, when it was freshly out, that suggested it was more my kind of book than Moo and that had stuck somewhere in the musty bookshelves of my mind. Anyway, I did examine it, it did look good, and so I bought it, and I finished it this morning very glad I had given it a chance, because it’s excellent.

Private Life is formally unassuming, even old-fashioned: it proceeds by direct,  methodical exposition, without even much extended dialogue. We are just given one sentence after another as we follow our group of characters across a span of history marked with major public, “world-historical” events including the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the First World War, and then, as the book concludes, the Second World War. Our perspective is almost exclusively that of Margaret Mayfield, a bookish girl from Missouri who grows into what looks like certain spinsterhood until she attracts the notice of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, an eccentric astronomer. They marry and move to California, where Andrew tends to a small observatory at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. In their marriage, he is very much the larger force, which only gradually comes to seem not just unnatural but unjust and insupportable to Margaret. It’s not a novel of rebellion and liberation, however, but a patient account of Margaret’s experiences, particularly as her wifely allegiance to Andrew is tested against his mania for scientific theorizing and his incessant demands that she serve as amanuensis, secretary, and chauffeur. Margaret is naturally self-effacing, to the point of often feeling herself a spectator at events in her own life. That and her learned expectation that a wife subordinates her interests and time to her husband’s make her disillusionment a slow process, but also an especially painful one, as despite her eventual realization that she is married to an absurdity, she cannot, or will not, repudiate him, even though one consequence of his near-delusional thinking is that he accuses Japanese friends of hers of spying, leading to their arrest and internment.

At one level the novel is just what the title suggests: a story of private life. But it also artfully evokes the complex interplay between that individual experience and the broader narrative of history. It tells an alternative history of America from 1883 to 1942 that makes everyday life and, more particularly, women’s lives central and thus renders more traditional historical subjects peripheral. Thus Smiley contributes to the history of those who “rest in unvisited tombs,” who get through every day and do nothing spectacular, nothing that gets reported or documented – who do nothing except live as best they can in the circumstances they meet. One theme of the novel is that “just living” is not as easy as it sounds, something we all know, in our own ways. Margaret’s sister-in-law Dora, whose life as a reporter involves her much more directly in the turbulence of the public world, eventually writes a column called “My Life Didn’t Prepare Me For This,” a title that resonates with Margaret: “Dora was writing about the mysteries of the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. Margaret was thinking about everything in the whole world.”

The “private life” of the title also refers more specifically to Margaret’s experience: though we know she develops a circle of superficial friends through her knitting circles and card playing afternoons and charity work, she does not share her intimate life – her thoughts, her dreams, her emotions – with any of them. Even through the agonizing and beautifully told death of her only child, her grief is controlled and internalized; much later, when she finally speaks about it to a friend who becomes, briefly, her lover, she breaks down and weeps, relieving us, too, of some pent-up emotion. The novel’s impact depends on the strength of these reserved feelings, on our awareness that Margaret is capable of much more than she is saying or doing. “There are so many things I should have dared before this,” she says bitterly at the novel’s end.

Smiley sets Margaret’s intensely personal experience of life up against her husband’s preoccupation with the universe in general. One exemplary (and also quietly profound) sequence focuses on Margaret’s discovery of a family of coots on a nearby pond. Margaret returns again and again to the pond to watch the chicks growing under the watchful eyes of their parents. Finding beauty and tranquility in this tiny piece of nature, she brings her friend Mr Kimura to the pond to paint them (the resulting scroll painting becomes an important symbol for her of what she actually loves and values, and also of what she is unable save or achieve in the world). Returning from one of her visits, overwraught with her realization that the chicks are being preyed on, their numbers slowly diminishing, she finds Andrew obsessing as usual over “larger” issues. “It seemed to her that if he said the word ‘universe,’ she really would scream,” she reflects. “The universe, of course, was the very thing that circled around those chicks, vast and senseless.” Margaret feels the largeness of things as oppressive. Andrew, in contrast, believes passionately in the theory that the universe, far from being empty, is filled entirely with “ether.” In fact (as Margaret sees by this point) what fills it, or at least fills his consciousness of it, is his own ego: Andrew’s “life force” is endless, ceaseless, overpowering; it crowds Margaret so that she always happy when he leaves the house. His supreme self-confidence makes him a poor scientist, more determined to prove himself right than to pursue the truth. There is perhaps something too neat in the way Smiley divides up her fictional universe between the hyper-masculine, monomaniacal, ultimately delusional, but also pathetic Andrew and the passive, inward-looking, domesticated Margaret: they are emblems of a gendered division of attention that reflects a historical division of education and labour but also repeats a version of the ‘separate spheres’ myth reflected throughout so many 19th-century texts – and rejected so eloquently in, say, Aurora Leigh. I longed for Margaret to fling off her opressive but also just plain annoying husband with Aurora’s cry, “I too have my vocation, work to do!” But there’s more Dorothea than Aurora in Margaret (and plenty of Mr Casaubon in Andrew, though in a louder, more clanging register), absent the moral yearning that makes Dorothea’s mistakes heroic, but with the same moral paralysis inflicted by an essential generosity that makes it near impossible to admit, to her friends and family much less to Andrew, that she knows perfectly well he is a fool. Smiley’s answer to the problem of such essentializing views of gender and gender roles is not to defy them by creating a modern heroine to satisfy us, but to guide us towards recognizing the heroism in surviving Margaret’s life.

What matters more, public life or private? Private Life builds towards the commonplace but still uneasy idea that the two are never truly distinct. History happens to the people in the novel in the form of cataclysms and catastrophes  – earthquakes, fires, assassinations, bombings. But at the same time the people in the novel are the ones making history. Smiley’s novel works in the tradition of social historians and women’s historians, blurring the boundaries between public and private or around the definition of “event.” What is the San Francisco earthquake, after all, as a historical event, but the accumulation of stories of people who lived through it, suffered during it, or died from it? What is the “event” we call “Japanese-American internment” but the actions of all those who conceived of, contributed to, and carried out this shameful policy, as Andrew contributes to it by writing paranoid letters that lead to the arrest and internment of the Kimuras? Private Life proceeds quietly, but it pulses between these levels of engagement and lets Margaret, so quiet herself that it is an effort for her to speak, be fully herself and yet much more than just a woman in private.