“The Peace When It Settled”: Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I was so tired, but the mess on my bed—the same congestion into which I had nightly crawled without noticing—was suddenly intolerable to me. I yanked at the sheet and the motion sent everything to the carpet. I lifted the sheet with two hands and it billowed slowly back down, and as it did I felt some otherworldly possibility open up inside myself. I picked up one of the pillows from the floor and placed it back on the bed, smoothed the sheet down to make a flat, empty expanse. I stood looking at the bed and breathing. It isn’t something I ever told anyone—how could you say this?—but the lift and descent of that sheet, the air inside it, the peace when it settled, showed me what I wanted. I knew it in that moment, but it took years to find it.

The first time the narrator of Stone Yard Devotional visits the nuns in their remote community, she just wants to get away for a while. She isn’t religious herself, and the nuns’ routines interest but do not really engage her. “What is the meaning of this ancient Hebrew bombast about enemies and borders and persecution,” she wonders; “what’s the point of their singing about it day after day after day?” How do they get anything done, she frets, with the constant interruptions,

having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.

As she settles into the strangeness of it, she feels “a great restfulness” come over her:

Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow a participant? Or perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.

She goes home after this visit, but she comes back again, and this time she stays.

Stone Yard Devotional both was and was not what I expected. It is a call to radical stillness, or at least an invocation of the possibilities that a deliberate retreat from the noisy chaos (literal, emotional) of modern life might offer: clarity, insight, simplicity. But it does not idealize or romanticize its alternative, or press us towards prayer or faith or even a vague spirituality. It isn’t uplifting; it doesn’t aspire to or encourage transcendence. Its nuns are still very much people, for one thing. People have histories, relationships, idiosyncrasies, disagreements, responsibilities. Work has to get done: people need to eat, animals need to be cared for, or killed and eaten—or just killed, as many of them as possible, if they are the mice who overrun the nuns’ buildings, destroying food, appliances, musical instruments, cars, sleep. I did not expect there to be so many mice—or for them to be so literally mice. For a book that in some ways is “otherworldly,” Stone Yard Devotional seemed to me very much about this world, its characters very much earthbound. I thought about whether the mice were metaphors: the best I can do is that they could represent just that worldliness, the persistent recurrence of the things we try hardest to shut out. But mostly I feel like they were just mice, there to show us that you can’t really retreat—you still have to deal with things.

The things the narrator is dealing with certainly follow her, and she brings them to us through her memories and reflections. Then the nuns have a visitor, Helen Parry, who belongs to the narrator’s previous life. She had not treated Helen well then, and their new proximity becomes an opportunity for her to try to make amends and then to be a support and a witness as Helen moves towards a reckoning with her own sorrows. Helen initially comes to the nuns’ community in attendance on the remains of one of their number who went away to do some missionary work and was murdered. The return of her body for burial brings a kind of closure to the nuns who knew her before.

It wasn’t always clear to me as I read the novel why it had the specific pieces in it that it did (and of course I have not itemized them all here, though it is not a plot-heavy book). Sometimes when I’m reading a novel, even for the first time, I feel a gathering sense of its unity as I go along, of what holds it together for me. Other times if I work at it for a bit patterns emerge—sometimes, this happens while I am writing about it here! It’s likely that if I reread Stone Yard Devotional the ideas that connect its various elements would become clearer: I expect they would, because the novel feels so deliberate, so thoughtful. What did hold it together for me was its tone, or voice. I liked the way the narrator thought and talked. Often she leads herself, and thus us, along an unassuming narrative thread until she arrives somewhere quietly meaningful. Here’s an example:

At first I was struck—a little irritated, honestly, by how slowly the women spoke here, by the long pauses they gave before responding to any question or remark. It seemed affected. But then I recalled a long trip across the country when I was a young woman, driving with my friends from the east coast to the west and back again, twice across the Nullarbor, camping each night along the way. It took a month, and during that month we became slower and slower in our movements. At first we would drive long distances, set up camp in the dusk, rise very early the next day to pack up and move on. But by the end of the trip we would drive only three or four hours a day, and we took longer to do everything. Packed up later and later in the mornings. When at last we drove back into the inner city we were frightened by the speed of everything, by how loudly people spoke. Waiters seemed to be shouting when they came to take your order for dinner.

“I don’t think,” she says, “I have ever again felt as free as I did on that drive across the desert. Except here. Once or twice here I have felt it.”

There is loss and grief and trauma in the novel, because there is in people’s lives, and I liked the way she talked about that too. She recalls visiting her doctor after her parents’ deaths and appreciating her “deep, practical kindness”:

On my second visit, I remarked (embarrassed again by my tears) that it seemed my friends were deserting me, just when I needed them the most. She was unsurprised. Your life has been stripped down to bedrock, she said. It’s not their fault; their lives are protected by many layers of cushioning, and they can’t understand or acknowledge this difference between you. It probably frightens them. They’re not trying to hurt you.

Later, thinking about another tragedy, she comments,

I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, its still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.

It’s not revelatory writing, or even particularly writerly writing, but its directness and lack of complication is both calm and calming.

I’m really just wandering back through the novel looking at the passages I marked rather than going anywhere in particular with these comments about it. It has not been a particularly quiet few days since I read the novel; it has been hard to think at all, really, much less in the way I probably need to to do a better, or at least a different, job of this post. After I finished it on Saturday I commented on Bluesky that I was going to have to sit with it for a while, and that I expected it would stick with me. I still feel that way about my reading experience—that it remains a bit unfinished. I really liked the novel. I read it all at once, in a couple of hours (it’s not a very dense or difficult read); I never wanted to put it down, or to pick up my phone instead, which is a rarity nowadays. Somehow, for all that it is full of mundane activity and also tensions and sorrows, it created a kind of retreat for me in the moment. That is a kind of unity, I suppose, between its form and its content, a congruence between style and substance. And although I said it is not a novel that doesn’t aim at transcendence, it does have some moments of grace:

Just when the misery of the mice, the drudgery and boredom of the days here feels intolerable, there is Dolores’s pure, clear voice carrying across the courtyard as she practises alone in the church. I return to the peeling and coring of apples and find my work has become new, and beautiful.

“Intimate Memorials”: Roland Allen, The Notebook

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Stackhouse was no poet, no artist, and his literary tastes were unsophisticated. But he wrote for himself, not posterity, and he valued the notebook enough to fill more than three hundred pages, and to invite friends and family to make their notes in it too. His observations might be of consequence to no-one but himself, but isn’t it a happy thought that such documents can survive for centuries, intimate memorials to their owners’ preoccupations—unremarkable, hardly read, yet every one unique?

I finished Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper yesterday and decided it deserved more attention than I gave it in my round-up of my reading week reading. It just contains so much that’s interesting, even inspiring! I will be honest and say that I was not equally enthralled by every section, but that’s more a reflection of their variety, as they cover many of very wide-ranging uses to which the humble notebook has been put over the years, than of any fault in Allen’s account. I couldn’t possibly go through the whole array, so I will just offer some samples.

Allen begins with a survey of how people kept track of things before notebooks, including wax tablets and scrolls, and then explains the surprisingly fascinating relationship between the earliest paper notebooks and the needs and practices of accountants in medieval Florence:

Bookkeeping’s arrival had unexpected consequences. The new science of accountancy demanded notebooks in such a variety of sizes and shapes—giornale, memoriale, quaderni, squartofogli—and in such quantities, that as production boomed, they spilled out into every other sphere of Florentine life, sparking imaginations and inspiring new uses.

He devotes a chapter to The Book of Michael of Rhodes, Venice 1434, a voluminous notebook kept by an otherwise obscure sailor in the Venetian fleet who eventually rises through the ranks: it contains records of his voyages, abundant evidence of his fascination with mathematics, information about fitting out ships, all kinds of sketches and drawings, and much more. A more famous notebook keeper was Leonardo da Vinci, who “filled his notebooks at the rate of about a thousand pages a year, all obsessively covered with drawings, diagrams and idiosyncratic mirror handwriting”—but Allen makes the case that the notebooks of Leonardo’s friend Pacioli had more impact, as it was Pacioli who introduced the concept of double-entry bookkeeping, which “would dominate first Europe and then the world.”

My epigraph for this post comes from the chapter on common-place books; there is also one on seafaring logs and one on the remarkable Visboek, or Fishbook, created by the Dutchman Adriaen Coenen in the 1570s. A chapter on travelers’ notebooks highlights Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin; one on mathematics of course focuses on Newton. The most famous naturalist to keep notebooks was Charles Darwin, and Allen’s remarks about his process exemplify the connections he makes throughout the book between writing and thinking:

The transmutation notebooks are some of the most famous in the history of science, and there can’t be a clearer example of the notebook’s intellectual potential than Darwin’s story. Scratching quick, incoherent notes onto their tiny pages, he had used his field notebooks to prompt observation, interrogation and judgment of what he saw. Back on board the Beagle, Darwin turned these raw materials—just one hundred thousand telegraphic words—into nearly two thousand pages of systematic scientific notes, and an evocatively detailed diary. Then, in the ‘Red Notebook’ and its successors, he processed the arguments and ideas which would, in the six books he published in the decade after his voyage, make him one of the era’s most respected scientists—and then, in On the Origin of Species, change the way we think of life. All germinating from a pile of field notebooks that fit comfortably into a shoebox.

What’s distinctive here, of course, is focusing on notebooks themselves as enabling devices for Darwin’s achievements—Allen draws our attention over and over, as he makes his way through his many topics (including, besides the ones already mentioned, authors’ notebooks, recipe collections, police notebooks, patient diaries, and more) to the importance of the flexibility and portability of notebooks, the opportunities they create for in the moment as well as reflective writing, data collection as well as analysis and synthesis. The simple point that they can be carried with us and require so little else to do this work for us, or to support our work, is what matters: this is what was initially transformative and continues to be endlessly appealing, even in this electronic era. In the chapter on “journaling as self-care” Allen discusses the strong evidence for the value of “expressive writing” for helping to heal trauma (he also touches on the reasons that note-taking by hand seems to be more effective for learning during lectures).

The only place where Allen’s enthusiasm for the many uses people have made of notebooks since their first appearance seems to flag is in his chapter on bullet journaling. He begins with an account of Ryder Carroll, who developed what is now a widely known and used system for organizing his time and tasks: “Like the Florentine accountants, Renaissance artists and early modern scientists before him,” Allen says, “he’d come to understand his notebook as a crucial tool for the mind, a way to turn intangible thoughts into more concrete written ideas that could more easily be manipulated.” So far so good, but once Carroll’s system becomes popular and highly commercial, and “bullet journaling was everywhere,” Allen starts to get a bit sniffy about it—especially about the “huge online community of bullet journalists who took to social media to celebrate and share their own journals.” “Looking at their lists and journal spreads,” he observes, “one senses less intentionality than a straightforward interest in prettification.” He doesn’t seem to approve of the way bullet journaling “fits neatly into the perennially irritating self-help genre,” and “yes,” he says, “if you follow bullet journalists online, you see many doodled sunflowers next to their things-to-do lists.” But, he concedes, “there is something substantial” there nonetheless. Given that he goes on to once more affirm that Carroll’s systematic use of notebooks belongs in the story he’s telling and even, as he notes, has a unique place, as Carroll is rare in himself thinking of the notebook “as a tool, wonder[ing] how it actually works,” I didn’t see why he got so grudging about it there for a while. Michael of Rhodes was interested in “prettification” too, as was the fishbook guy, after all!

Allen’s overall conclusion is both convincing and eloquent. “I see the story of Europe’s adventure with the notebook,” he says, “as one of enlargements—intellectual, economic, creative, emotional—as curious minds expanded to interact with, and fill, the blank pages that notebooks represented.” The “material simplicity” of the form is its value:

It challenges us to create, to explore, to record, to analyse, to think. It lets us draw, compose, organize and remember—even to care for the sick. With it, we can come to know ourselves better, appreciate the good, put the bad in perspective, and live fuller lives.

I expect most of us have used notebooks in various ways over our lives, for taking notes in class, as diaries, as repositories of ideas or quotations or recipes or sketches. Reading Allen’s book invites reflection on our own engagement with the history he tells. Reading his chapter on the first Florentine notebooks, I realized that the watercolor sketchpad I had recently bought was made by Fabriano, which he discusses as “the world’s oldest continually operating paper-making company”—it was established (as my sketchbook advertises on its cover) in 1264. I loved that moment of connection. Allen’s main point is that this everyday item, which we now take for granted in its multiplicity of forms and uses, really was revolutionary, changing not just the way we make notes but the way we think. If by any chance you were looking for an excuse to buy a new one—one of these beautiful ‘made in Canada’ ones, say—there it is!

Reading (Last) Week

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Last week in my classes it was Reading Week, a.k.a. the February “study break.” Although overall this term has not been nearly as hectic as last term, I was still grateful for the chance to ease up. Work is tiring. Winter is tiring. Grieving is tiring (yes, still). It doesn’t help that I continue to wake up a lot at night with shoulder pain, something I have been trying to fix for years now. (I am getting closer, I think! I am working with an orthopedist who seems pretty confident about what needs doing, although we are waiting for an ultrasound to confirm that the issue is my rotator cuff.)

Unfortunately being tired is not especially conducive to reading. Overall, February has been a slow month for me, although I remind myself that I have done quite a bit of reading for work, including Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte and Bronte’s Villette, as well as all of the books to date for the mystery fiction course. My book club met early in the month to discuss Wuthering Heights, which I reread and still did not like, but besides that I’d only read For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain before the break – and it’s so short it hardly counts!

Things started out well enough with Connie Willis’s Blackout, which is the first of her two time-travel novels set during the Blitz. It’s good in the same ways or for the same reasons that Doomsday Book is good: Willis has a real knack for historical scene setting, for conjuring up the immediacy of the moment while keeping us engaged a bit more analytically through her device of visiting ‘historians’ from the future who are always assessing and contextualizing. But as I neared the end of Blackout I was finally getting a bit tired of her fixation on people not being able to find each other, either literally (wandering the streets) or chronologically, or just by telephone, and I wasn’t feeling a lot of momentum, which was worrisome given the size of the second book, All Clear. Still, I felt enough trust in Willis to move on to All Clear when I’d finished Blackout— and then that lack of momentum became a problem, because I didn’t really feel like reading more of All Clear most nights, but I am usually a “finish one book before starting the next” kind of reader.

I compromised by beginning, not another novel at the same time, but Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was my Valentine’s Day present to myself. (See also: I can buy myself flowers!) This had been on my radar since I first saw mention of it at the Biblioasis site, and then Shawn discussed it with the author himself on his channel and that really sold me on it. It was a good choice: it is a nice balance of a niche topic and a wide-ranging survey, covering the history of different kinds of notetaking, the invention of paper notebooks, and lots of different uses over the centuries, with attention to both famous and (to me anyway) completely obscure names. It’s a good book for reading a chapter or two at a time, so I could go back and forth between it and All Clear without too much stress. I’m still happily puttering through it, and trying not to let its contagious enthusiasm for its subject lead to too many extraneous stationery purchases.

But. I still found myself struggling to stay engaged with All Clear so I finally decided I should put it aside for another time. I really do expect I will finish it one day, and hopefully the gap between now and then won’t mean I forget who everybody is.

The one other book I got all the way through last week was actually an audiobook: my hold on Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain came in, and it proved truly gripping, surprisingly so given that I knew a fair amount about the whole story from various other sources (including the harrowing series Dopesick). I was so caught up in it that I spent longer hours than usual working on my current jigsaw puzzle—which I think contributed to my shoulder pain somehow, so that was a weird confluence as it had me thinking a lot about how tempting the promise of relief would be even for chronic pain as relatively mild as mine. Of course the whole story is also infuriating and outrageous and horrific, and perhaps it would have been more calming to stick to my usual, more benign, program of literary podcasts!

I have a couple of books in my TBR pile now that I’m pretty keen about: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is one, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is another. But I was listening to some of my friends bonding over their enthusiasm for the Cazalet Chronicles the other night and that reminded me that I have wondered if my own relative indifference to The Light Years was a “me” problem rather than the book’s, so I plucked it off the shelf on the weekend and began rereading it. I am a bit shocked how vague my recollection is of it, given that it was not that long ago that I read it for the first time. But it was also not that long after Owen’s death, and there’s a lot I don’t really remember about those months—and that timing may well have been the real reason for my middling reaction to it. So far I am enjoying it just fine; we’ll see if when I get to the end this time I feel like reading on in the series.

And now Reading Week is over and it’s just another week—with lots of reading in it! For Victorian Women Writers we have begun working through North & South, and when we’re done with that in a week or so it’s Middlemarch until the end of term: that’s something to look forward to. In Mystery & Detective Fiction we’re on The Maltese Falcon and then next week we start Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man, which is one I have not taught before, so I am rereading it now on top of our current books as I begin to sketch out how I will approach it in class.

This Week In My Classes: Uncertainty

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It’s not that the topic of my classes this week is uncertainty, exactly, or that there is anything particularly uncertain about this week—although I suppose that depends on where you’re looking, as nationally and globally there is plenty of unease to go around, while on campus, as the university shapes and shares its plans for coping with a massive budget shortfall (created in large part by heavy-handed federal decisions about international students, on whom universities have unfortunately come to depend because of decades of inadequate provincial funding) we are all wondering just how bad it will get. These are the external contexts for my classes, but by and large I try not to focus on them when I’m actually in the classroom, where persisting with what we find interesting and worthwhile to talk about seems like one way to make sure we uphold our values in the face of all of this.

So why bring up uncertainty? Because in Victorian Women Writers this week we are finishing up our work on Villette, and more than once in class I have acknowledged my own uncertainty about what exactly is going on in this strange, brooding, gripping novel. As I said yesterday, I have pretty clear interpretive ideas about most of the novels I assign, which is not to say (I hope) that my teaching is all about coercing students into seeing things my way. What it means is that I have a sense of how things add up, of how form contributes to or reflects content, of how details are parts of wholes. This still leaves plenty to be discussed, but overall we usually arrive at a sense of what the open questions are, or of what some alternative (but still basically unifying) readings are.

With Villette, though, I find that kind of clarity or unity really elusive. Lucy herself is such a slippery narrator, for one thing, but typically with an unreliable narrator we end up with a reasonably clear sense of the two stories they are telling, the one they mean to tell and the other one they reveal as they show us who they are. With Lucy, it is never really clear why she is so coy with us about some things while being almost excessively forthcoming about others. If it’s a novel primarily about the effects of repression, then why does she freely recount all the times when she really lets loose? If it’s a novel about a struggle for female agency, why does she make such a point about being by nature inert, and why does she seem to respond so well to being pushed around, including by her eventual love interest? If it’s a novel about asserting Protestantism or Englishness, then why does Lucy love (if she does) a Catholic and settle abroad? If these oppositions are reconciled over the course of the novel, why does it not have a happy ending? Etc. There are many complex and sophisticated critical analyses of Villette, some of which we are reading for the graduate seminar version of the course, and they say lots of things I find smart and convincing but they rarely leave me thinking “OK, that makes sense of it all.” (The ones we’ve read this term focus on national identity, religion, theatricality, and queerness—one highlighting Lucy’s resistance to ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and arguing that she is trying to find an alternative relationship between men and women, such as being a “female brother,” another arguing, counterintuitively, for the ending of the novel as a rare instance of “queer joy.”)

The main thing I’m thinking about, however, is not so much “what is the meaning of Villette?” (though if you have a favorite essay or theory about it, I’d love to know!) as “what is the role of uncertainty in pedagogy?” I don’t think of myself as a particularly authoritarian teacher, but in general I think it makes sense to acknowledge that I am a teacher because of my expertise; shouldn’t I act and talk as if I know what I am talking about? On the other hand, I don’t think any interpretation is definitive; if it were, our whole discipline would operate completely differently! I’m always so amused by Thurber’s story “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” which concludes, tongue in cheek, with its wry narrator promising to “solve” Hamlet. Literature can’t be “solved”! Books worth paying attention to are layered or multifaceted; they look different or mean differently depending on how we approach them. I often explain literary interpretation to my first-year students with an analogy to the transparencies used to teach anatomy: each question or approach draws our attention to specific features. Just as all the parts and systems of the body cohere, interpretations have to be compatible to the extent that they can’t ignore or contradict facts about the text, but they do not replace each other or rule each other out. This means, of course, that it is fine that the articles I’ve mentioned illuminate issues in Villette without satisfying every question I have about the novel.

I like the uncertainty I feel about Villette. Some novels feel uncertain to me in a different, less interesting way. Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, I think is genuinely undecided about whether Lady Audley is a villain or a victim. I have come to consider this a genuine weakness in the novel, evidence of inadequate care or thought on Braddon’s part, although another way to put it is she is just not that kind of a novelist, or Lady Audley’s Secret is just not that kind of a novel—it entertains, it provokes, it surprises, but it is not underwritten by a consistent concept or idea. It is incoherent about its themes . . . but maybe that only matters to someone trained and committed, as I am, to interpret fiction with that as a priority.

Villette, on the other hand, feels uncertain by design. It is destabilizing. Our confusion feels like part of the point. Maybe that is the underlying unity of the novel! Maybe there is no ‘right’ way for Lucy to be, to act, to love, to live, and so the novel, by immersing ourselves in her struggles, is just replicating them formally. “Who are you, Miss Snowe?” demands Ginevra Fanshawe at one point, with exasperation: aren’t we asking the same question, right to the very end? Why should unity be the end point, even for a novel that seems to be some kind of a Bildungsroman? I do wonder, though, why I am willing to give Brontë so much more credit than Braddon for the artfulness of her uncertainty. One factor is probably that there is so much evidence of design in Villette, if if I’m not sure what the patterns mean: all the buried (or not!) nuns, for example, and their tendency to show up when Lucy is most emotional; the recurrent imagery of storms and shipwrecks; the emphasis on surveillance, discipline, and self-control; the proliferation, almost to excess, of foil characters for Lucy, from little Polly to Vashti. At every moment of the novel I feel sure there is something meaningful going on.

Anyway, I hope admitting my own uncertainty made my students feel that there was room for their own ideas, not that I was not up to my job! We start North and South next, a novel that includes many thought-provoking elements but which is also patterned in a pretty clear way—and after a couple of weeks on that, we will spend the rest of the course on Middlemarch, about which, for better or for worse, I am much more confident and opinionated, although it is such a complex and capacious novel that there too there is plenty of room for discussion. It is such a good group of students: what a treat for me, and I hope for them too, that we can tune out the madness for a few hours a week and explore what these novels have to offer us.

In All Things: Victoria MacKenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I remembered being a wife and mother, rinsing the herring for dinner, using a sharp knife to scrape away the scales before hanging the fish above the fire. Days later I’d find scales between the stone flags of the floor, stuck to the wall, caught in my woollen shawl. Now, when I remembered how they were everywhere, I saw that it was just the same with God’s love. God is not a being on high, to whom we must raise our eyes. God is everywhere, in all things, including us.

Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is perhaps an odd reading choice for an atheist, or at any rate, this atheist found it odd to read. It’s not that because I am not religious myself I take no interest in religion, or that I find no beauty in religious art or music or thought because I do not share the underlying belief or inspiration. I am often deeply moved by representations of faith, though I am more moved by doubt and by expressions of humanity, and more interested in skepticism. I am stirred by the religious ecstasy of Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” and by the blending of romantic and spiritual love in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?”—but the world I personally live in is more like that of “Dover Beach,” though not always or necessarily so bleak. In fact, a guiding principle of my own life is that a world without God is plenty inspiring and that accepting our own responsibility for “the growing good of the world” is uplifting as well as chastening. (I’ve written quite a bit about these topics over the years, from posts about Christmas to essays about Middlemarch.)

So what was different about For Thy Great Pain? Why did I find it hard to enter into the lives and minds, or more accurately, the experiences and feelings, of its two protagonists, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich? Why did their eventual meeting have no electricity for me, though it was clearly devised as the climax of this immaculate little novel? Or was the absence of that quality—the meticulously prosaic quality of both voices—deliberate?

There are some moments of transcendence in the novel, as you would hope or expect from an account of two lives transformed by visions. After the birth of her first child, for example, Margery is “frenzied,” believing she will die and struggling to tell her sins to her impatient confessor. “It was after this,” she tells us,

that Jesus Christ appeared, sitting on the edge of my bed, very handsome and clad in a mantle of purple silk. He looked at me with so blessed a countenance that I felt my spirit strengthen. He said, ‘Daughter, why have you forsaken me, when I never forsook you?’

As soon as he said this, the air in my chamber became bright as if lit by lightning and he ascended to heaven, not rushing, but beautifully and slowly, until the air closed up again and I was restored to myself.

As she becomes accustomed to the small scale of life in her anchoress’s cell, Julian becomes “a great watcher of light and dark”:

Once the golden light of the sun sinks away, the colour is taken out of things, and the world fades one object at a time . . . In the morning, I watch the world coming into being, leaf by leaf, brick by brick, cloud by cloud, as if every day God says Let there be light and creates the world afresh.

That’s lovely, isn’t it?

But a lot more of the novel is just the two women recounting what happened to them, what it was like to have these “shewings” and then to figure out what to do about them in a world where women’s speech of any kind is not encouraged and women’s religious attestations are not just unwelcome but offensive to almost everyone. When Margery asks to speak with her priest about her visions, “He raised his hands and said, ‘Bless us! What could a woman have to say about the Lord that could take so long?'” Before she becomes an Anchoress, Julian (which was not yet her name) knows “not to confide” in her priest, “no matter that I was sure my shewings had come from God.”

MacKenzie does a good job evoking the character of the times with the kind of glancing precision that we get in other self-consciously literary historical fiction these days—I’m thinking, for example, of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet or Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First. The plague scenes inevitably provoked comparison with Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, as that is still quite fresh in my mind, but MacKenzie gives us only a sentence or two, only a few quick (if still heartbreaking) losses. That grief is an essential element of Julian’s turn to God does seem evident: “Grief marks a person,” as she says,

changing them for ever, like a tree struck by lightning. The tree may keep growing, but never in the same way.

Yes, that seems true: I have often made similar analogies in my own mind, about my own grief, to the hurricane-damaged trees in Point Pleasant Park, where I walked (and walked and walked and walked) after Owen’s death. But for Julian grief is not an explanation, or at least not the explanation, for her turning more and more away from the world towards God.

I wonder if what MacKenzie wanted to do is depict faith itself as a fact, which is not the same as granting factual status to the beliefs, or taking the womens’ “shewings” as actual divine visitations. What might it have really been like to believe in that way? I remember studying The Heart of Midlothian years ago and my professor saying, with the kind of earnestness I too bring to class when I trying to really make a point, that what’s amazing about Jeanie Deans that is too easily lost on us moderns is that she really believes she is going out to meet the devil. The devil! The real, actual devil! Thus her courage, her heroism, is on a scale we can hardly fathom. Margery and Julian feel and see with great intensity things I do not believe in but that they believe in; they frame their experiences accordingly and risk everything as a result, as we are frequently reminded by their anxiety about being considered heretics and burned alive. And yet MacKenzie presents them with no melodrama; they speak, by and large, flatly, or that is how their voices mostly sounded to me as I read—especially (and this was disappointing) in the dialogue between them when they finally meet, which I found almost comically stilted. (It didn’t help that it is presented as dialogue, line by individual line.) This is not a particularly eloquent book, though it does, as noted above, have moments of grace and beauty.

You’d think I would prefer that, as a non-believer—that I would appreciate that For Thy Great Pain trades more in historical specificity than in the meaning or power of faith itself. That’s why I find my muted response to it odd. It turned out that I wanted it to be more ecstatic. Where is its “ah, bright wings!” moment? But why is that what I like, in my religious art, or my art about religion? Do I prefer faith to be aestheticized, because as fact it is, to me, so implausible and thus ultimately meaningless? Give it beauty or give it up? I was interested in the stories of both Margery and Julian, as I know next to nothing about them both otherwise, but interest seems a low bar, and my interest would also have been greatly enhanced for me by context and exposition, maybe not quite as much as we get in Romola, but more like that. That would be a very different kind of book, though, not just a much longer one: to want these women, their voices, their stories, embedded in a narrative about faith in the 15th century the way George Eliot’s account of Savonarola is would change the terms of our encounter with them completely. 

“Something in Penelope”: Norah Lofts, Lady Living Alone

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

And now, in this low and critical moment, something in Penelope, something which had understood courage and resource and action, though she herself had never been brave or resourceful or active, stirred and shook itself. The pirate woman, Jane Moore, the Aztec girl, Xhalama, the misunderstood Tudor stateswoman and others of their blood, stood by her bed, urging her to save herself . . . and to justify them.

In his excellent ‘Afterword’ to the British Library Women Writers edition of Lady Living Alone, Simon Thomas (known to many of us from his excellent blog Stuck in a Book) highlights the genre trickery that makes this little novel so slyly surprising. Initially it conforms to the tropes, tone, and expectations of “comic, domestic fiction.” It centers on Penelope Shadow, an awkward, unobtrusive, and largely ineffectual woman with an overpowering fear of being alone in the house. One day Penelope buys a typewriter, shuts herself in her room, and rattles away at it day and night until she produces what becomes the first in series of historical novels. “Miss Shadow,” we’re told, “had at last found the job for which she was suited, a job which did not demand regular hours, spurious politeness nor the soul-jarring contact with people; so, through good years and bad, she persevered with it” until one of her books, Mexican Flower, is a big success and makes her enough money to move out of her half-sister’s house into one of her very own.

Hooray! you might well think: she has written her way to independence. But this is where her difficulty with being alone becomes not just a quirky character trait but an obstacle to her contentment. Driving home one night in a snowstorm, Penelope realizes that because the latest in her series of housekeepers is gone, she would have to be alone, so instead she pulls up at the Plantation Guest House. There, during the course of a generally uncomfortable stay, she meets “the boy,” a handsome young man named Terry Munce, who looks after her so readily and ably that she ends up offering him  the job as housekeeper.

Terry is a great addition to Penelope’s household and her life: he takes excellent care of her, even giving her massages when she is stiff and tired from typing. Once again things seem to be going well for Penelope, but Terry’s presence kindles gossip. When he confronts her about it, he shocks her by adding “I happen to be terribly in love with you.” He kisses her, “and Penelope was lost.” She agrees that they should marry. Hooray! you might think: our mousy heroine has found love. But before the chapter closes, the novel shifts gears, giving us a glimpse of the real Terry in his “expression of calculating triumph”: “After all, one likes six months of hard labour to bear some result.”

Lady Living Alone does not shift immediately from domestic comedy to domestic suspense: the next phase of the novel traces the rifts that emerge in Terry and Penelope’s relationship. He behaves badly, but he is not overtly sinister, and for some time Penelope’s position seems more pathetic than perilous. But then things take a turn, and Penelope has to wonder if it is possible that this young man she has befriended, trusted, and loved might in fact be trying to do away with her . . . 

I don’t want to spoil the fun of your finding out for yourself how things turn out. Something I found particularly interesting about the novel’s conclusion that doesn’t bear directly on plot revelations is its connection to Penelope’s writing. It is generally seen as eccentricity by those around her—”If she think you can keep a husband by hitting a typewriter all day and all night,” she overhears one of her servants muttering at one point, “let her find out different for herself”—and no particular merits are ever ascribed to her novels. Her subjects are strong women, though, including Queen Elizabeth. “I know why she never married,” she scribbles in her notebook when she turns back to writing after her marriage: 

Oh, she was as certain as though she had been there, that Elizabeth Tudor had never taken Leicester or Essex to her bed. Because if she had done she too, being human, would then have owned a master.

How does that happen, she wonders; “the balance swung so gently that it was not until one scale bumped heavily that you realised that there had been a disturbance.” She too is mastered in her marriage, not so much (at first) through overbearing conduct on Terry’s part but through her own love of him and her desire to be loved herself, to believe in what she thinks they have. When she finally realizes that he is a threat, that she is going to have to defend herself or die, her situation seems hopeless:

A poor little ageing creature, sick, doubting her own sanity, and broken in spirit. A pitiable little object to any observer, had there been one who could see and understand.

But there is more to Penelope Shadow than that: she has “made and known and understood some remarkable, courageous, fiery, indomitable women,” and from them she takes courage—and gets ideas. “If we are part of all we have been,” comments the narrator, “how much more are we part of all we have made?” I loved this moment, which picks up on an idea that has been central to a lot of my own work on women’s writing. “Lives do not serve as models,” Carolyn Heilbrun wrote in Writing A Woman’s Life; “only stories do that.” For Penelope, the stories she has written quite literally empower her—and then it is “over and done with, and Penelope was no more a clever, cunning, ruthless creature, but a gentle little woman with a conscience.” 

I read some of Norah Lofts’s own historical novels long ago: the one I particularly remember is The Concubine, about Anne Boleyn, though I am sure there were more in our nearby public library, where I used to sign out stacks of Tudor (and Ricardian) fiction every week. It is hard not to read some justification of her own work and heroines in the strength Penelope Shadow gets from hers. Lofts published Lady Living Alone under a pseudonym, Peter Curtis; perhaps she thought the message, that women’s ‘romantic fiction’ was more subversive than it seemed, would be more memorable coming from a ‘man.’

Uncategorized

This Week In My Classes: Gaskell & Holmes

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It has been a long time since I worked through Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë with a class. In fact, the last time I did so was the first year I began this blog series, in the fall term of 2007! In the intervening years, when I have put in to teach a graduate seminar (which is what Victorian Women Writers used to exclusively be) it has been one focused just on George Eliot—which is the course I will be revising next year for this new undergraduate / graduate format.

It is interesting reading through that old post: in its broad outlines, it describes pretty much exactly the same topics we’ve been covering. It is quite broad, and that class is so long ago that I really don’t recall how closely our specific discussions matched what we have been talking about this year. It seems as if we have ranged more widely—but we probably touched on a lot of things then too that aren’t captured in that summary. My sense is that this time around we are paying more attention to the variety of genres and layers in Gaskell’s text, to things like her reliance on extensive quotations from Brontë’s letters, for example, which, as we talked about today, don’t always self-evidently support the characterization of Brontë that Gaskell sets up. For one thing, the Brontë of the letters is bolder, friendlier, and funnier than the timid, shy, sickly little person Gaskell usually shows us in her own narrative. Today we talked about (among other things) what nature means, to Brontë and in Gaskell’s story of her and her family, as in moments like this, in one of Brontë’s letters to a friend:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leave, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon.

Copying out that passage, I am struck by its power just as a bit of prose: how delicately infused it is with both the beauty of the moors and the pathos of Charlotte’s grief.

Read right after Oliphant’s Autobiography, with its heartbroken lamentations for her lost children, Brontë’s life story feels like an extension of those lessons in loss, though Oliphant’s narrative itself is fragmented, broken into pieces by each new blow, while Gaskell carries us through the relentless sequence of deaths at Haworth with her own storyteller’s skill. And after they are all gone, each with an ending portrayed as intensely, almost unbelievably, characteristic—Emily fiercely resisting death to the very last, Anne leaving “calmly and without a sigh”—Charlotte (like Oliphant) is left alone with her writing:

She went on with her work steadily. But it was dreary to write without anyone to listen to the progress of her tale,—to find fault or to sympathize,—while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more. Three sisters had done this,—then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk,—and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound.

“No one on earth,” Gaskell observes, “can even imagine what those hours were to her.” Maybe, but also, maybe not, as there is much that will be sadly familiar about that desolation to anyone who also grieves “the days that are no more.” Honestly, I think it will be a relief, not just to me but to the class, to move on to Villette next week. Not that Villette is a joyful romp! But at least it puts us back in the more familiar analytical territory of fiction, and if we like we can choose to believe that it has a happy ending: as Brontë says, “let sunny imaginations hope”!

We started with Sherlock Holmes in Mystery & Detective Fiction this week. I’m not the world’s biggest Holmes enthusiast, but as I have documented here often enough over the years, I greatly appreciate The Hound of the Baskervilles, which we will get to on Wednesday. Today was “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” with its famous “interpret everything about a man from his hat” set piece, and “A Scandal in Bohemia,” with Irene Adler (“To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman”). These are good ones: I enjoy them. I think the class is going fine so far: it ought to be, considering how often I’ve taught it now! One thing I’m noticing is spotty attendance. It isn’t making me rethink my long-ago decision not to give grades for attendance, but it gives me food for thought in other ways, as this seems to be a trend in this class in recent years. Perhaps it’s because the course is an elective for pretty much everyone taking it, so they give it lower priority than their other obligations? Is it that students who don’t take a lot of English classes assume the pertinent course content is exclusively in the “textbooks” (what we call the “readings”!) and don’t expect our class time to offer much “value added”? I know that in some subjects lectures often do simply reiterate content in that way, but of course I’m not standing there rehearsing the plot of The Moonstone. Anyway, I try not to take it personally but it rather baffles me: what is the point in signing up to “take” a class but then not really “taking” it? Sure, you can read on your own (or, sigh, just search online summaries and call that “keeping up”), but unless all you are after is the course credit, aren’t you skipping the good part, not to mention the part you are actually paying for?

Speaking of taking classes, there’s one more class in my weekly schedule now: it’s the online one I am taking myself, Introductory Watercolour Painting. We met (via Zoom) for the first time last week and I have been diligently practicing colour gradients and one- and two-stroke leaves for my homework. Also (keener that I am!) I looked ahead a bit in our Brightspace site (yes, I have to use Brightspace now as a student as well as an instructor) and saw some examples of “loose floral wreaths,” which are on our lesson plan for this week, and I couldn’t resist giving it a try. This will be my “before” example, for comparison with the one(s) I make after I learn more about how to make the flowers and leaves fuller and looser, and also more layered and translucent, like the models.

Always Saying Goodbye: Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o’clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is at once one of the most absurd and one of the most devastating novels I’ve ever read. It is absurd in the way any story about zombies (or vampires) surely has to be: the minute you stop to ponder how this is all supposed to actually work (the head is cut off but the legs are still walking how exactly? vampires have no breath but can still talk?) it falls apart and so if you forget to suspend your disbelief, even for a moment, you might start laughing and not be able to return to it. It is devastating because it is a novel about loss and grief—personal, but also planetary, existential—and the cavernous hunger that comes from wanting and mourning and finding (and expecting) no consolation. “I find I have stopped,” our narrator says at one point on her strange post-apocalyptic road trip;

I am standing in the road. The sky is light in the east. The moon is in the west. It is perfectly round. I am not really thinking anything. I am just looking at the moon. It is silver and flat and serious. A wind comes up to me in the empty morning like someone I’ve met before or seen before but don’t know, and a feeling comes over me. It is sadness. Not a sadness, but sadness. All of it. The whole history of sadness. Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it. The cracked pavement, the moon, the abandoned cars, the gravity that holds them to the road. It is total. I am taken, or taken down. I drop to my knees.

How much can you lose of yourself before you lose yourself? How much can you bear to part with, of yourself, of your world? How long (and why) would you persist in a world without whatever it means to be alive? de Marcken’s novel (novella? at 122 pages it is in a grey area, I think) is clearly using her zombie apocalypse as a device to literalize these questions. “I lost my left arm today,” is its arresting opening line; “It came off clean at the shoulder.” This, and all of it, is metaphorical, allegorical.

It seems fair to wonder: do we need a story like this told in this way? Does the zombie premise help? or is it a distraction? Probably this is the wrong kind of question, a category mistake, as at its heart it is a question about genre. There are other stories about grief and other stories about the end of the world that are not, or not quite, so figurative. As I read It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over I imagined pitching it as “Grief is the Thing With Feathers meets The Road.” (There’s a crow in it, and the narrator is, eventually, walking to the ocean. Has someone already commented on this unlikely pairing as its literary genealogy?) I did sometimes find the zombie aspect off-putting, and slightly comical. “We take my head out of the sack,” the narrator reports,

and prop it upside down at a good angle. I hold it steady and on the count of three the old woman plunges the stake into it with a single unflinching grunt. The point goes true through the soft triangle of my throat and into the firm mud of my brain . . .

I tilt the stake upright and stand with it in my grip. The length is perfect, my head just above shoulder height. I pivot it one way, the other. Realize I can spin it all the way around to see behind me.

And yet. There are scenes in this little book of such unbearable desolation that I sometimes had to put it down and collect myself before I could read on. It also made me think, a lot, especially about whatever it is that we consider the essential thing, or the essence of things, or of people. “When you have arrived at the thing itself,” our narrator reflects, reduced by that point to what is surely the barest minimum of herself,

then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. A rock. A crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.

Loved. Already lost.

This Week in My Classes: Mourning& The Moonstone

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I want to get back in the habit of low-fuss but (potentially, for me) high yield posting about my teaching this term. So without further ado, here’s what’s up this week.

In my Victorian Women Writers seminar, we are discussing Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography. When I was drawing up the syllabus for this version of the course, I included this book without much reflection, as it has always been a staple of the reading list. Preparing for class over the past few days has been a bit rough, though, as the last time I had actually read it was soon after Owen’s death, and Oliphant’s outpourings of grief about the loss of her “dear bright child” Maggie and then her sons Tiddy and Cecco remain unhappily resonant. Students have already commented in class that these are the most compelling sections of the autobiography, sometimes picking out exactly the passages that I quoted in my post about it. I am pretty good at compartmentalizing, and of course it would not be appropriate for me to say in class “yes, that’s exactly how I felt and thought after losing my own beloved child,” so I have managed to keep my own personal feelings in check in that context, but it is definitely a harder job doing that than it was when my relationship to her grief was purely theoretical or vicarious.

It’s such an odd and interesting memoir in so many ways. I’ve always been particularly struck by the conspicuous tension in it between two kinds of stories, one a fairly conventional account of Oliphant’s life and her experiences as a highly prolific writer, the other an intensely personal outpouring of her most private feelings. Her comments about her writing life themselves often signal a further tension between her identity as an “ordinary” woman (a point she makes repeatedly, and perhaps strategically) and her identity as a woman writer and thus a kind of anomaly. They are also interesting for her frequent comparisons of herself with other, more famous or highly praised, writers, especially George Eliot: she often tries to shrug off her sense of inferiority, or to excuse or justify her “lesser” standing on the grounds that she only ever wrote because she liked to and because she needed the money, disavowing ambition or serious literary aspirations—”I am afraid I can’t take the books au grand sérieux,” she says at one point, calling them “my perfectly artless art”—but it’s also clear that she feels both defensive and envious of the writers with higher reputations, making her self-deprecation seem disingenuous.

Critics have often analyzed the fragments and contradictions of the Autobiography as meaningful aspects of its literary form, reflecting the paradoxes and contradictions of Oliphant’s life and, more broadly, of the situation of every Victorian woman writer. That seems reasonable in a way, but Oliphant left her text unfinished, so the fragments are not themselves deliberate formal choices—we are actually reading the raw material of what for all we know might have been a very different, more integrated or unified memoir. This is not to say that this unity would not have come at a cost, particularly of authenticity. I found myself thinking as I was rereading our current installment this morning about the genre of the “grief memoir,” which seems from what I know of it to lean pretty hard into “a journey of discovery / recovery” as its narrative arc, ending with some version of acceptance. Of course that may be true to the authors’ experiences, but it’s hard not to suspect it is also more marketable than the devastating non-ending Oliphant’s memoir offers: “And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.” Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, also stops rather than concluding: “And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.”

In Mystery & Detective Fiction, we have begun our work on The Moonstone. I usually really enjoy teaching this novel as I know it well enough now and am confident enough in my own ideas about it that, while I do always reread it and update my notes, I can lead a fairly fluid discussion without worrying that we won’t get where I want us to go. Tomorrow is mostly “talk about Betteredge” day: I’ll start by just gathering up observations about what kind of fellow he is, considering both the things he explicitly says and how he says them—which is at least as important, given the novel’s emphasis on first-person testimony and the way eye-witnesses see according to their assumptions and prejudices. We can build out from there into a sense of the novel’s setting: what kind of world does Betteredge serve, what are the threats to or problems with that world, who in the novel begins to counter his point of view, and so on, which should lead us into Sergeant Cuff and what he brings to the investigation—and then the sources of his failures to solve the crime.

As my teaching posts over the year repeatedly remark, the first part of term is always a bit chaotic as we adjust and class lists are in flux and so on. By the end of this, our second week of classes, we should all have settled into more of a routine, although this is also the point at which the workload picks up as assignments and deadlines begin to arrive. The biggest change I’m noticing this term so far is the physical toll class meetings take on me, something that was already becoming apparent to me last term. I’m just more tired than I used to be when the session is done. It takes a lot of energy to keep the attention of a room full of people and, especially, to give them my full attention so that our back-and-forth is always clear and meaningful. You never know what someone who puts their hand up is going to say, and you are constantly figuring out how best to reply to it, which is precisely what I enjoy about teaching, because it means it is never truly repetitive, but it is also what makes it hard work. (Yes, mental effort is real work too!) And in lecture classes I pace around a fair amount once we get into discussion. When I get back to my office after class I’m not good for much else for a while—this in spite of my increased diligence about going to the gym. It’s a different kind of exertion, I guess.

The broader context of my teaching term is not very encouraging: budget cuts, a hiring freeze, ongoing pressure to do more with less, and over it all the worry that if we can’t somehow get in its way, generative AI is going to be allowed, even encouraged, to overwhelm us (meaning both professors and students). I find I don’t think or care much about any of this when I’m actually in the classroom. Plenty of students still seem pretty engaged, eager to read and ready to talk. As long as they keep on showing up in that spirit, I’m going to keep doing my best for them.

Frightened and Brave: Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn’t have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog did not really prepare me for Doomsday Book, even though they are in the same series and are structurally very similar: both belong to her “Oxford time Travel” series and involve “historians” sent back in time as part of current-day (actually futuristic) research. In both of them, the novel’s present is marked by bureaucratic stuffiness, mostly well-meaning incompetence, and crises more or less of the “stuff that goes on at work” variety—dealing with annoying colleagues, for example. But in To Say Nothing of the Dog it all stays essentially comic, and the trip to the Victorian period is an affectionate pastiche, full of clichés and peppered with literary allusions, many of them to the Golden Age crime fiction to which the intricate puzzle plot is overtly paying homage.

To say that Doomsday Book is darker is an understatement. In this one, both historical layers deal with unfolding pandemics (linked, we eventually learn, through an archeological dig). While the present-day storyline retains some comic aspects, the humor recedes as the crisis mounts; the bureaucratic rigidity that prevents a more nimble and effective response also felt less funny because it was a bit too real. As the infection spreads and characters become ill and even die, well, that’s not funny at all, of course. I’m going to avoid making a lot of COVID connections, but I do feel as if it would be salutary for some segments of our society to remember how virulent and scary our virus was—and how prevalent it still is.

Along those lines, the atmosphere of mounting dread in Doomsday Book felt pretty familiar to me—and though in the novel’s present the characters have all kinds of highly effective responses, it still takes them a while to figure out what exactly they are dealing with and actually enact the right measures. Even so, things are much worse in the other timeline, where the modern researcher, Kivrin, has been erroneously transported, not to the relative benignity of 1320, as intended, but to 1348 just as the bubonic plague is beginning its deadly spread across England.

The 14th-century part of Doomsday Book would have been a completely gripping historical novel all on its own. Willis gives us a detailed picture of the setting, from the pristine forests and the astonishingly starry skies of the pre-modern landscape to the cold, grime, and stench of medieval peasants’ huts—and, for that matter, of a manor house of the same period. Before the plague arrives (and before Kivrin realizes the mistake made in her “drop”) she is ill herself, so her first impressions combine the disorientation of temporal relocation with her feverish confusions. Eventually her ‘translator’ begins working and bit by bit she gets to know the people whose lives she has landed in the midst of, with their aspirations and jealousies and forbidden loves. She becomes especially close to Agnes, the younger daughter of the house.  These personal connections make the onset of the plague something Kivrin bears witness to in a way that is in one sense entirely out of keeping with her role as a historian, but in another sense fundamental to it. In other contexts I have often quoted what Carlyle said about Scott’s fiction: that his historical novels

 taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems; but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive of great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought of it.

This is very much Kivrin’s experience, and thus ours, as we read both Willis’s conventional narration of Kivrin’s time in 1348 and the more fragmentary bulletins Kivrin records for those back home in her own time, which gradually take on more and more the character of the few remaining testaments of those who actually lived through the plague years, documents which had once seemed to Kivrin melodramatic and implausible. Where the archive is scant, as it must be in such dire circumstances, we rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks and to fully humanize it. I don’t think anyone could read Doomsday Book and not be overcome with horror and pity for those who faced what they understandably believed was the end of the world.

But Doomsday Book is not just a historical novel, and though at times I wondered about the value of the time-travel framing, by the end I appreciated the layers Willis had added through it. The most obvious one was just the point that, for all our advances in science and medicine, we are not immune from catastrophes, including ones caused by mutating viruses. A more subtle and thought-provoking one was the interplay between the science fiction aspects of time travel and the religious beliefs of the 14th-century people Kivrin encounters, especially the priest, Father Roche, who tends Kivrin in her initial illness and then labours beside her as one by one the others around them fall victim to the plague—until his turn comes as well. It turns out that Father Roche sees Kivrin’s arrival as literally miraculous, her presence among them a kind of gift or grace from God, whose love and mercy he never doubts, in spite of everything he sees and experiences. For Kivrin, fighting against a malicious, invisible enemy, and always thinking of those who care for her and especially of her tutor, Mr. Dunworthy, whom she believes to the very end will come to her rescue, the line between science and religion starts to blur. Who is Mr. Dunworthy to Kivrin, after all, but an unseen presence—the thought of whom gives her hope and strength in her darkest hours—and an audience for her testimony, which is spoken into a recording device which it had seemed so clever to place in her wrist, so that she would appear to be praying? “It’s strange,” she says in one of her final such messages to someone who may or may not ever receive it;

When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.