#1book140 Q & A: Stephanie Burt and I Talk Middlemarch

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OxfordThanks to the folks at #1book140 for including me in their 2-month Middlemarch read-along, for setting up a Q&A with me and Stephanie Burt, and then for preparing this Storify of it! We both really enjoyed going back and forth about this great novel, as I hope you can tell.

I am capable of going on at much greater length about Middlemarch: if these 140-character tidbits whet your appetite, you might enjoy this list of my top 10 reasons for liking George Eliot so very much, this essay on the miserable morality of Middlemarch, or my review of Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. You can read the Storify of Rebecca Mead’s#1book140  Q&A here. You can read Stephanie Burt’s review of her book here; and you can watch her wonderful TED talk about why people need poetry here.

Addendum: Here’s the missing first part of my answer to Stephanie’s first question, without which some of what follows may seem a bit garbled!

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[View the story “Live Twitter Q&A with Rohan Maitzen, creator of “Middlemarch for Book Clubs,” facilitated by Stephen Burt, #1book140″ on Storify]

“A Kind of Investigation Into a Life”: Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

stegnerNear the end of Angle of Repose its narrator, retired historian Lyman Ward, is talking with his ex-wife about the book he’s been working on. (Actually, it turns out that he dreamed that he was talking to his ex-wife, but the whole episode, including this conversation, is so unremarkably plausible as a continuation of the story he’s been recounting that even he has to “persuade [himself] that it was all a dream” — an unexpected variation on the novel’s theme of blurred lines between fact and fiction.) Asked its title, he offers up the ones he has been considering — including Angle of Repose, a moment that bounces us deftly into metafiction — and then shrugs off the question:

Forget it. It doesn’t matter. The title’s the least of it. . . It isn’t a book anyway, it’s just a kind of investigation into a life.

 Angle of Repose — that is, the novel that Wallace Stegner has written, not (necessarily) the non-book Lyman Ward contemplates — is exactly that, an investigation into a life. But whose life? Ostensibly, it explores the life of Lyman’s grandmother, illustrator and writer Susan Ward, reconstructing it from sources including her letters and notebooks as well as her published writings and drawings. And a very interesting life it is, too: from an elegant, cultured existence in Brooklyn Heights, surrounded by sophisticated people and domestic luxuries, she moves west with her engineer husband Oliver to places that, in the 1870s, were still works in progress as outposts of American “civilization.” As jobs come and go and hopes rise and fall, they move around, from California to Colorado, from Idaho to Mexico, each time in a new way re-establishing themselves as at home.

In all his guises (as narrator, as Lyman, as Susan), Stegner writes wonderfully about the landscapes of their travels. (So too, perhaps, does Mary Hallock Foote, the real 19th-century woman on whom Susan Ward is based and some of whose letters are incorporated verbatim into the novel — I say “perhaps” because her materials are not identified so I don’t know what words are hers.) The descriptions are never conspicuously stylish or artful. They are just wonderfully specific and tactile:

They came out onto a plateau and passed through aspens still leafless, with drifts deep among the trunks, then through a scattering of alpine firs that grew runty and gnarled and gave way to brown grass that showed the faintest tint of green on the southward slopes and disappeared under deep snowbanks on the northward ones. The whole high upland glittered with light.

Or, from one of Susan’s letters:

I wish I could make you feel a place like Kuna. It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a stage road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. The wind has magic in it, and the air is full of birds and birdsong. Meadowlarks pipe all around us, something else — pipits? true skylarks? — rains down brief sweet showers of notes from the sky. Hawks sail far up in the blue, magpies fly along ahead, coming back now and then like ranging dogs to make sure you are not lost. Not a house, windmill, hill, only that jade-gray plain with lilac mountains on every distant horizon. The mountains companionably move along with you as the dirt road flows behind. The plain, like a great Lazy Susan, turns gravely, and as it turns it brings into view primroses blooming in the sand, and cactus pads with great red and yellow blooms as showy as hibiscus.

I’m not at all a “roughing it in the bush” type, but often reading Angle of Repose I wished I could step outside into the fresh air of a pine forest and dabble my feet in a rushing brook.

The people in the story, Susan and Oliver in particular, are as vivid and three-dimensional as their surroundings, and the story of their marriage — which survives, despite frequent separations, repeated disappointments and disagreements, tragic loss, and personal betrayals, for 60 years — is full of insight and human drama. But ultimately this biographical story is neither the most important nor the most interesting aspect of Angle of Repose. For one thing, it’s embedded in Lyman’s own story: the dream sequence near the end makes even clearer what has been implicitly evident all along, which is that Lyman is investigating his grandmother’s life as a way of trying to understand his own. Crippled by disease, confined to a wheelchair, in near-constant pain,  increasingly dependent on others’ care and fearful of losing what autonomy remains to him, Lyman finds in the activity of his mind both distraction from and consolation for the limitations of his body. Forced to retire from his work as a history professor, he can at least pursue his vocation as a historian, and in a manner that also provides him with a way of reflecting, by proxy, on his failed marriage, his relationship with his son, and the inevitable constrictions of his future. In Lyman’s story too there is much insight and even some drama — though that, for him, often borders uncomfortably on farce, and his wry self-awareness keeps pathos at bay.

What exactly is Lyman’s “vocation,” though? “It isn’t history,” says his assistant Shelly at one point; “you’re making half of it up.” Shelly is specifically concerned about what she considers his reticence about his grandparents’ sex life: “You get close,” she says, “and blip, you turn off the light.” “I may look to you like a novelist,” he responds, “but I’m still a historian under the crust. . . I stick with the actual. That’s what they would have done, turned off the light.” The discussion that follows, about changing mores and whether a historian can or should respect the values of his subject (“There are hints in the letters,” Shelly argues; “You could extrapolate”; “She valued her privacy,” Lyman retorts on his grandmother’s behalf; “she would never in this life have extrapolated. Neither would I.”) is interesting in itself, but the broader question of genre is even more interesting, and one that permeates Angle of Repose — itself a novel based so closely on a particular historical record that the some members of the family involved were apparently deeply offended by Stegner’s deviations from “the truth” but also considered him guilty of plagiarism for the unattributed letters he included.* Stegner created fiction from fact; so does Susan, who publishes both “sketches” and novels based on her Western experiences; and so too does Lyman, though he calls what he’s doing “history.”

The boundaries are difficult to police (as has been discussed explicitly at great and highly theoretical length at least since Hayden White’s Metahistory was published in 1973, and implicitly for at least as long as “historical fiction” has been a recognizable category) because even when the recorded facts are strictly adhered to, they require both interpretation and placement into a coherent narrative. There are always gaps, whether of evidence or of understanding. “I have to make it up, or part of it,” Lyman admits when he arrives at one of the pivotal events in Susan’s family history; “All I know is the what and not all of that; the how and the why are all speculation.” Even when the evidence is abundant, there’s always a process of selection: who decides what is “historical”? on what basis? according to what standard of relevance or significance? “A historian scans a thousand documents,” notes Lyman, “to find one fact he can use”:

If he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence of a woman to boot, he will wade towards his little islands of information through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s diseases, insignificant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday.

Here we see even Lyman rather cavalierly discarding as useless all kinds of material that historians trained in different (later) schools of historiography would readily and eagerly incorporate into their accounts of pioneer life. And in fact Lyman does not disdain this “swamp” of domestic trivia: his account of Susan’s life is fully of it, and the story he (re)constructs is one that eschews many conventional notions of historical significance. As Stegner’s novel opens, Lyman is being harrassed by his cloddish son Rodman, who thinks he should “give up this business of Grandmother’s papers and write a book on ‘somebody interesting.'” Rodman, you see, has looked at some of Susan Ward’s work and seen “nothing in them”:

All full of pious renunciations, he says, everything covered up with Victorian antimacassars. He cited me her own remark that she wrote from the protected point of view, the woman’s point of view, as evidence that she went through her life from inexperience to inexperience.

Rodman has inadvertently stumbled on another issue that has also been written about extensively: the way in which ideas of “historical significance” have traditionally been gendered. Lyman himself is well aware that the “real” history is happening somewhere else while he stays at home with Susan Ward: over and over Oliver and his colleagues ride off to do manly work (“They departed like a Crusade,” observes Susan at one point) but it’s her perspective we share, and Stegner often makes the point that she too, with her home-making and domestic chores, but also with the cultural aspirations she carried with her and the drawings and stories she created to build bridges of understanding between East and West, was engaged in building a nation. It’s just that her experiences could easily be dismissed, as Rodman dismisses them, as “inexperience,” an error Angle of Repose corrects simply by paying attention to them.

Stegner’s exploration of these historiographical themes seems almost prescient: Angle of Repose was published in 1971, so just as both women’s history and historical narrative were emerging as major fields of theoretical and scholarly inquiry. Looking at the conclusion to my book about gender and genre in 19th-century historical writing, I’m reminded that Gerda Lerner’s “New Approaches to the Study of Women in History” appeared in 1969; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s “Placing Women’s History in History” in 1975; Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance” in 1977. Many others followed White in exploring ways historical narrative could be read in literary ways: an essay I drew on a lot in my own earlier work was Louis O. Mink’s “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.”

Angle of Repose in fact made me think often of my research on gender and genre: though his specifics are very different from my own examples, we’re both looking into who gets written about, by whom, and in what form. The writing he (or Lyman, as his proxy) actually does about Susan Ward resonated very much for me with the novel that provides the final example in my book, Daphne Marlatt’s 1988 novel Ana Historic, in which her story of a frontier woman is also framed by a contemporary perspective and motivated by resistance to rules about who matters, about who (or what) counts as historical:

i learned that history is the real story the city fathers tell of the only important events in the world. a tale of their exploits hacked out against a silent backdrop of trees, of wooden masses, so many claims to fame, so many ordinary men turned into heroes. (where are the city mothers?) the city fathers busy building a town out of so many shacks labelled the Western Terminus of the Transcontinental. Gateway to the East — all these capital letters to convince themselves of its, of their, significance.

As I argued in my book, I think Marlatt’s vision in Ana Historic is “ultimately exclusionary: for her, women’s history can achieve authenticity only through isolation from masculinity in both life and representation.” Stegner, in contrast, seems committed to reconciling difference and opposition:

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.

 That “angle of repose” seems to me something that Stegner achieves, not just for his characters, but for the historical and fictional imperatives that underlie Angle of Repose.

*Jackson J. Benson’s introduction to my Penguin edition explains the permutations of Stegner’s negotiations with the Foote family.

June Updates: a New Open Letters Monthly and a Fun Q&A!

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Junecover

First of all, the June issue of Open Letters Monthly is up! I won’t itemize all of its contents, because I hope you’ll come over and have a look for yourself. But I will mention that it is the first issue in a while to include something by every editor. We’re pretty proud about that. My own contribution is this month’s “Title Menu” feature. We’ve always talked a lot about the popularity of the so-called “listicle,” but most of the ones we’d seen around just didn’t seem substantial enough for the lofty aspirations we have for long-form writing at OLM. Then it occurred to us that there’s no reason a list has to be trivial, or that long(er)-form writing can’t be fun. So we’ve been experimenting with our own version of the listicle since January, with all kinds of cool topics from memorable birth scenes to art crime to books that might (or might not) be poetry. Mine lists eight books inspired by George Eliot — there are others, I know, but these are ones I’ve particularly enjoyed.

In other news, I had mentioned not long ago that I would be participating in a Q&A on Twitter organized by the folks who run the Atlantic’s #1book140 club.* For a while I thought maybe it wasn’t going to happen after all, since #1book140 decided not to officially read to the end of Middlemarch (I’m not sure how much participation they usually get in their discussions, but it did seem to me that things weren’t exactly hopping on the hashtag). But it did! They talked Stephen Burt into being the Q to my A, and he and I had a grand old time going back and forth for an hour last night. He had a lot of interesting questions for me. One in particular that I had never thought about before was how the most famous “takeout quotations” from the novel change when you look at them actually in the novels. The Atlantic people are putting together a ‘Storify’ of our conversation, so when it’s ready I’ll be sure to post a link to it so you can find out not just what I said about that but which character in the novel I most identified with at 18, and what quotation I would choose if I ever opted to get a Middlemarch tattoo! I so much enjoyed exchanging ideas and favorite moments from the novel with someone else who’s excited about it: it made me realize that I’ve been thinking about it in the abstract recently more than I’ve actually been reading it. Hooray for having put it on my book list for 19thC Fiction in the fall term and having an excuse to go once more into all the details.

*In case you’re wondering how good this has been for the stats over at Middlemarch for Book Clubs, you’ll be glad to know that it has increased the hits there by literally dozens. 🙂

Liking and Disliking: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Rohan Maitzen17 Comments

mccannLately I can’t seem to stop quoting Henry James’s remark that “nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it: the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.” However much we try as readers and critics to bring something resembling rigor to our analysis of a book, there’s always a fundamental (though not immutable) personal response at the heart of it, isn’t there? No two people ever really read the same book, after all. I often think of criticism as an attempt — more or less fully realized — to show someone the book as you see it, very much in the spirit of Kazuo Ishiguro’s remark that being a novelist is an appeal for companionship in experiencing life: “Perhaps you’ve never looked at it this way but now that I’ve put things this way, don’t you recognize this, too?” Agreement may not follow, but better understanding will, perhaps of the book, perhaps of the reader.*

What makes one reader like a book — love it, even — and another not like it, or even despise it? This question was much on my mind as I read Let the Great World Spin because from the moment I plucked it off the shelf at the Brattle two years ago it was the subject of just such a debate: one trusted reader warmly recommended it, while another (OK, it was Steve) told me emphatically not to bother with it. I ignored Steve’s advice, but clearly his disdainful judgment introduced just enough ambivalence for me to defer actually reading the book for a pretty long time!

And now that I’ve finally read the novel for myself, what did I think? Well, it more than passed “that primitive, that ultimate, test” for me: I really liked Let The Great World Spin. Because I had heard it was a “9/11 novel,” and because it is festooned with blurbs praising its “lyricism” and “heart,” I was worried that I might find it overdone, manipulative, portentous — but I didn’t. Each section is from the perspective of a different character: I was drawn rapidly into each story, and as the relationships between their individual parts emerged I appreciated more and more how delicately it was done. There were moments of recognition as each story took its place, but nothing felt forced: every moment, and every voice, had its own history and its own integrity. All of the stories are about love and loss and longing, and they are held together by small acts of grace or moments of connection: there’s no melodrama, no hyperbole. This kind of polyphonic narrative always risks becoming more about artistic showmanship than about the story or characters (for me, this was the effect of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), but I found McCann’s virtuosity at once impressive and understated. Even the high wire act around which the whole novel is arranged remains, for us, just out of view: our attention is (in McCann’s words) on “the ordinary people on the street, the ones who walked a tightrope just one inch off the ground.”

There’s no arguing with my response to Let the Great World Spin. It turned out to be one of those books that make me seek solitude as the end draws near: I wanted to stay quietly within it until it had completed its work. It didn’t affect me as deeply as, say, The Orphan Master’s Son; it’s not as dazzling as The Last Samurai or as darkly brilliant as Wolf Hall or Bring Up the Bodies; it’s not as important as The Lost. But I am really glad I read it: I liked everything about it.

At the same time, there’s no arguing with Steve’s visceral rejection! So that has me thinking — not so much about what accounts for this particular difference of opinion, or experience, or judgment (though maybe he and I will talk it over when I visit Boston again next month!) as about why we hate books, when we do. I’ve been trying to think of books I really hate. I’ve certainly written here about quite a few books that I didn’t like at all. Usually, though, they aren’t books that I think are outright bad but books that are good in ways I don’t enjoy (Flaubert), or good at things I don’t think are very nice (Ford, St. Aubyn). I disliked a lot of Terry Castle’s The Professor: that’s the closest I’ve come lately, that I can think of, to actively hating a book. Except for maybe The Paris Wife: that was pretty lame. Oh – and there was The Sixteen Pleasures! But I was more disappointed in it than anything. I thought Lord of Scoundrels was laughable, “a parody of my worst imaginings about romance novels” — but that was only the first time I read it, when I really didn’t get what it was doing, and even then I wouldn’t say I hated it. Hate is such a strong word! (It might not even be the right word for what Steve feels for Let the Great World Spin, though it seems a reasonable inference from his calling it “paper-thin idiotic drivel.”) It suggest an absolute negation, an active hostility, that may be incompatible, for me, with actually reading a book all the way to the end. Steve wants back the time he spent reading Let the Great World Spin: I can’t think of a book I’ve read (at least since I started blogging –sometimes it feels as if my prior reading is all one undifferentiated blur) that I truly regret having read because the experience was so unpleasant. I’ve been bored, unconvinced, puzzled, underwhelmed, repelled, occasionally scornful; I’ve more than once thought a book didn’t live up to its hype. That’s all bad enough, but that’s as bad as I can really say it gets.

I wonder if what keeps me from taking that final stop into hatred is my ever-lurking sense of my own fallibility as a reader. I already mentioned Lord of Scoundrels as an example of a book I came to read differently (better), and there are many other examples of books that I came to like more as I got to know them better, as I found contexts for them and ideas about them that reduced the role of my personal taste in my response to them. Many of these are books I have worked with for teaching, though: I am unlikely ever to reread and research most of the books I write about here in the same way — and even those I review more formally for Open Letters, though they certainly get scrupulously reread and reconsidered, are never the focus of my sustained attention over time, meaning I do not have the opportunity to grow into them, or they do not get further opportunities to educate me about themselves! I am morally certain that many of the books I’ve blogged about don’t really deserve, or would not reward, that investment, but nonetheless I know perfectly well that mine is not the final word on them — nobody’s is! So even my most arrogant pronouncement rigorous disquisition on the merits or demerits of a particular book is underwritten (if only implicitly) with a little humility. And yet I am as sure of my own liking or disliking as anyone else.

Have you ever hated a book? When you do — or when you just dislike a book intensely — do you think there’s a particular quality or feature that you’re responding to? Can you think of a time you really regretted having read something? What do you think when you discover that someone really liked or disliked a book that you had the opposite response to? Also, if you have read Let the Great World Spin, did you like it? 🙂

*One of the things I did over the last two weeks was write about 1000 words laboriously explaining this view of criticism — complete with some discussion of “coduction.” But I then decided it did not fit in the larger piece I was writing so I cut it all out. I’ve saved it in another file, just in case, but in the meantime, I’m glad I got to sneak this nice Ishiguro quotation in somewhere else!

A ‘Dark Love Letter to Iceland’: Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

burialritesI’ve gotten pretty cynical about book blurbs, but when I see a cover adorned with high praise from not one but two of the smartest readers I know, how can I resist the temptation to read it for myself? (In fact, it’s probably because I’d seen Steve’s and Sam’s reviews in the fall that the title caught my eye in the first place, though they both write so darned many reviews that I didn’t specifically remember that Burial Rites was among them until I looked closer.) We don’t share all the same reading tastes, so it was still a bit of a gamble; I’m sure they will be relieved to know that I too thought Burial Rites was very good, so they retain their credibility! 🙂

Burial Rites is based on a real incident that took place in Iceland in 1828: a double-murder for which three people — a man and two women — were tried and condemned. One woman, Sigga, was pardoned; the other two, Agnes and Fridrik, were beheaded. Kent has researched the people, events, and locale extensively, but she has the gift of telling the story so that even though the documents from the case punctuate the narrative, it does not feel researched but lived. Agnes is her focus, and the novel begins when Agnes is moved from her primitive confinement to a farm where she is to be held in custody until her execution. The family charged with keeping her greets her with suspicion and hostility at first, but as they live and work together through a long hard winter, they come to see her as a woman with a story of her own, not just as a murderess.

Agnes tells that story herself (the novel alternates between her first-person narrative and the omniscient narrator). It’s a grim story of a lonely, love-starved life:

Oh, my foster-mother is dead and my own mother is gone. And I sit on the floor, my legs buckled with the pure, ripe grief of an orphan, and the wind cries for me because my tongue cannot. It screams and screams and I sit on the packed earth floor, hard with cold, and smell the fish-heads, sickening, lacing the bland scent of winter with their stench of salt and dried bone.

She asks to see a young priest, Tóti, who becomes the “final audience to her life’s lonely narrative.” He is told by the local administrator, Björn Blöndal, who is keen to make an example of Agnes, that “she has nothing that you need to hear unless it is a confession.” But Tóti believes he can serve her best by listening, and in doing so he brings her at least the comfort of having been heard — not just by him but, inevitably in the close quarters of the small farm house, by her custodians. In the end, in fact, it’s the farmer’s wife Margrét who hears her “confession,” or rather her account of what really happened the night of the murders.

It’s predictable that, incrementally, her audience (including us) comes to believe, not just that she’s human and thus deserving of our sympathy, but that she does not deserve the death she is not, in the end, to be spared. Kent strips her of any pathos, though: she may in some sense be innocent, but as Steve says, the revelations unfold with “an utter lack of sentiment.” Agnes herself is both reticent and fierce, with nothing of the damsel in distress about her. Accustomed to live without hope or comfort, she longs for her appointment with death:

I am sick with finality. It is like a punch in the heart, the fact of my sentence alongside the ordinariness of days at the farm. Perhaps it would have been better if they had left me at Stóra-Borg. I might have starved to death. I would be mud-slick, stuffed to the guts with cold and hopelessness, and my body might know it was doomed and give up on its own. That would be better than idly winding wool on a snowy day, waiting for someone to kill me.

But when it comes, it is not better than the waiting, and Agnes’s spiraling panic is wracking:

You will be lost. There is no final home, there is no burial, there is only a constant scattering, a thwarted journey that takes you everywhere without offering you a way home, for there is no home, there is only this cold island and your dark self spread thinly upon it until you take up the wind’s howl and mimic its loneliness you are not going home you are gone silence will claim you, suck your life down into its black waters and churn out stars that might remember you, but if they do not they will not say, they will not say, and if no one will say your name you are forgotten I am forgotten.

The jumps from third- to first-person narration are sometimes awkward, but it’s compelling to watch the gradual convergence of what we know of Agnes, from her own words, and what those living with her discover. As the execution approaches, there’s a different kind of drama as these perspectives grow apart again — having now shared her story, they can only stand by helplessly as she travels towards her fate.

In her acknowledgements, Kent says that she intended Burial Rites as a “dark love letter to Iceland,” and in that ambiguous goal I think she has succeeded: the novel reflects in its subject and its language the harsh, dramatic landscape it depicts. Iceland appears to be having something of a vogue (or maybe it just seems that way to me because I just read The Faraway Nearby), but this is hardly the language of tourist brochures:

Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as if you do not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there, licking the grass flat upon the ground, not caring whether the soil is at a freeze or thaw, for it will freeze and thaw again, and soon your bones, now hot with blood and thick-juicy with marrow, will be dry and brittle and flake and freeze and thaw with the weight of the dirt upon you, and the last moisture of your body will be drawn up to the surface by the grass, and the wind will come and knock it down and push you back against the rocks, or it will scrape you up under its nails and take you out to sea in a wild screaming of snow.

In this particular moment the description is infused with Agnes’s desperation in the face of death, and with the prospect of her own imminent reintegration into that frozen landscape, but there’s a bleakness to the whole novel, and to the whole account it gives of the struggle to live in such a cold, wild, unforgiving place. Agnes may be a prisoner of the law, but all of the characters are hostage to the climate, to the dark and wind and snow that makes the roads impassable and life barely supportable for so much of the year. Kent excels at scene setting so that we feel both the physical and the psychic stress of the characters: the warmth of a hearth seems like the possibility of love, while emotional deprivation brings a chill that the warmest blanket can’t ease.

For all the novel’s strengths, though (and once I got my bearings in it, I read it with rapt attention) I ended up wondering if, beyond its compelling account of who, what, and how, it was driven by much of a thematic why. The setting and characters are well developed, especially Agnes but also Margrét, but as the elements of the plot work themselves out, I couldn’t detect a strong layer of meaning behind them. What do we learn from Agnes’s story — about Icelandic society or history, for instance, or about issues of guilt, innocence, and morality? Burial Rites didn’t seem to me to be about an idea: it’s about a story, about making the most of it. “This novel has been written,” Kent says in her author’s note, “to supply a more ambiguous portrayal of this woman,” who has, she notes, been portrayed by many sources as “an inhumane witch, stirring up murder.” The scope of the novel seems limited, though, to providing that alternative version of an individual character: there are only gestures towards systemic issues about, for instance, class or gender. Agnes believes she is treated less sympathetically than Sigga (her co-accused who is pardoned) because she is older and seems more knowing than Sigga. Inquiring into the case, Tóti hears that “she was always fixed on bettering herself.” But there’s no consistent sense that Agnes is really being punished for transgressing, either as a woman or a servant. The case as she tells it is intensely personal, and limited to the passions and jealousies of the small circle involved. Though its materials are rich, and richly rendered, it’s not a book that does something with them besides dramatize them.

“This extraordinary colloquy”: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

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warnerI picked up Summer Will Show on my trip to Boston a couple of years ago. It caught my eye then because not long before we had run a good essay on Sylvia Townsend Warner in Open Letters. I’ve read most of the books from that trip but until now, not Summer Will Show. I think I put it off because I was expecting (its being historical fiction and all) something both dense and intense, like A Place of Greater Safety, say, or The Children’s Book (though obviously it’s much shorter — which should have been a clue). I was prompted to get to it at long last by notice that Anne Fernald was giving a talk about it at the New York Public Library.

I wanted to attend the talk even before I read Summer Will Show, because I know Anne to be someone well worth listening to (see, for instance, her essays and reviews for Open Letters). Now that I’ve read the novel, I wish even more that I could have been there, because the novel seemed so strange to me that I could tell I needed some tips, some guidance about how it works, how it makes sense on its own terms. I actually enjoy that feeling of interpretive disorientation provided the book causing it feels interestingly confusing, not just blundering or messy. Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide, for example, or anything I’ve read by Margaret Kennedy, would fall into that first category — and I wonder if it’s not coincidental that Summer Will Show is roughly contemporary with these novels and shares with them the property of being (for want of any other literary-historical label) “not modernist.” Not that I’m any kind of expert on reading modernism, but as far as I know there isn’t a handy set of terms or frameworks for making sense of the more miscellaneous fiction from the early decades of the 20th century. I read a number of very interesting books on topics like The Feminine Middlebrow Novel for the Somerville seminar, but Warner isn’t someone who came up — though her absence from my notes doesn’t mean that she isn’t actually mentioned in those sources, just that I wasn’t interested in her in that context. So even there I got no particular help. It may be best read along with other political fiction from the time (Orwell, maybe?), but I don’t know much about that context. All I can really offer, then, are some provisional first impressions.

My strongest initial impression is that Summer Will Show (again like The Dark Tide) is not an especially good novel, but that it’s bad in interesting ways. Duly acknowledging that “but is it any good?” is a fraught question, I’ll point out as weaknesses that neither of the main characters seemed quite three-dimensional to me: both were the literary equivalents of vivid but jerky puppets going through the motions of a story designed to lead to encounters and crises that, in their turn, were designed to bring about a conclusion more intellectual and ideological than human and dramatic. The story itself is at once simple and unexpected: aristocratic Sophia Willoughby travels to Paris in 1848 after the death of her children determined to find her straying husband and get pregnant again to make up for her loss; she finds him, as she intends, but instead of staking her claim, she falls in love with his theatrical Jewish mistress, Minna Lemuel, and as a result of their relationship is drawn into revolutionary fervor and ends up literally fighting on the barricades.

Sophia is a supremely unappealing character — not just at the start (when her haughty prejudices are at their most dominant and unrepentant) but throughout. What Minna ever sees in her was one of my major stumbling blocks, while what she sees in Minna was another: their relationship comes from nothing and is never explained or described in any way that really motivates it. There’s another of the problems I had with the novel: it is jumpy and episodic, skipping over transitions where exposition would have been welcome and then becoming fulsome in contexts where great detail seemed gratuitous and digressive.

And yet the section of the novel that I found most compelling could be seen as a digression: Minna is a storyteller by profession, and our (and Sophia’s) first introduction to her is her gripping account of surviving a pogrom in her childhood:

I was just coming across the yard from the outhouse, where I had gone to carry our goats their feed, when I heard footsteps, a man running and staggering along the frozen path. The running man was my father. He had torn off his mittens as though their weight would encumber him, I saw his red hands flapping against the dusky white of the snow. His mouth was open, he fetched his breath with groaning. He fell down on the icy track, and was up again, and came running on with his face bloodied. He did not see me where I stood motionless in the dusk of the yard, but ran past me and burst open the house door and staggered in. Before he had spoken I heard my mother cry out, a wild despairing cry that yet seemed to have a note of exultation in it, as though it were recognizing and embracing some terror long foreseen. I went in after him, very slowly and quietly, as though in this sweep of terror I must move as noiselessly as possible. He was leaning over the table, his hands clenching it, and trembling. He trembled, his back heaved up and down with his struggles for breath, with every gasp he groaned with the anguish of breathing. Mixed in with his groans were words. Always the same words. “They’re coming!” he said. “They’re coming!”

The breathless rhythm of the sentences, the vivid tactile details, the repetitions, all add to the combination of urgency and predictability that makes the story so chilling: this is a catastrophe that has been long expected, even as its coming is painfully, hopelessly sudden. “No need, at this last door, to cry that the Christians were coming,” Minna says of her own frantic attempts to notify their neighbors.

Summer Will Show earned my interest precisely because the writing is, generally, that good: I was captivated and impressed by Warner’s style even as the structure of the book frustrated me and the characterization disappointed. A book this well written can’t be simply careless, it isn’t inept: the awkwardness and the didacticism both felt purposeful. But what might that purpose be? According to the publicity notice, Anne’s talk focused on the novel as an exploration of “what might make a middle-aged person change her mind and her life–the very problem at the heart of politics. . . .what it might take to transform an imperious aristocratic wife into a communist.”  In that context, I can see that Minna’s storytelling is important, not just because it sets up her individual identity, but because it draws our attention to the importance of the stories we tell about our experiences and those of others: changing your mind means changing your story, perhaps accepting someone else’s or incorporating it to create a more complex, multi-faceted narrative. I thought Sophia’s conversion from conservative to radical was too abrupt, and too idiosyncratically motivated by her passion for Minna, to be much of a model, but maybe it’s not her initial move into Minna’s life that really counts so much as her transformation at the very end of the novel, when her own experience of violent confrontation and its bloody consequences prompts a much deeper change. Certainly her speech before the firing squad is utterly and convincingly unlike anything the Sophia of the first chapters could ever say — and the Sophia who reflects with such pride on her meeting with the Duke of Wellington as the novel begins hardly seems the same person who concludes the novel reading The Communist Manifesto.

But that’s where my dissatisfaction with the novel as a novel makes trouble for me again: the ending is a bit too pat. It felt as if the elements of the novel had been manipulated to ensure we ended up there, with the specter haunting Europe, rather than discovering the need for Marx as we read. Elizabeth Gaskell is a much more politically conservative thinker than Warner, but Mary Barton explains a lot more about socialism as a response to economic conditions than Summer Will Show — and no wonder, of course, since she was observing Manchester in the 1840s just as Engels was when he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Where Blogging Leads: A Bit More About How Things Add Up

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

When I read this post by Eric Grollman at Conditionally Accepted a little while back, it got me thinking about the various opportunities that have arisen for me since I started blogging in 2007. Whether these “extracurricular activities” (Grollman’s term — though he too puts it in scare-quotes) count in some strict professional way is not really the point, or at least not the whole point. Some day I may well make the case that they should count; increasingly the vocabulary seems to be available to explain how and why (outreach, knowledge mobilization or dissemination, public scholarship, whatever). In the meantime, what struck me reading Grollman’s post is that I may have underestimated the impact of blogging on my own activities. Grollman notes that he “received ten speaking/writing requests in 10 months, primarily because I write publicly about my experiences in academia.” That’s a lot, in a hurry! My timeline is a bit slower, and most of the specifics differ (as you’d expect, given our different fields), but one thing we have in common — and I know other bloggers who’ve remarked this too — is that by dint of being among the first and few academics in our circles to venture onto public platforms, that experience itself becomes something people want to hear from us about. (I always feel a bit odd about that, because my own blog is not exactly an “academic” blog — which is something I usually address, if not in the presentation itself, then in the Q&A. But the general issues around blogging for and by academics are things I have thought and written a lot about, nonetheless.)

Here’s my quick tally of things I have done more or less directly because of this blog:

Presentations, workshops, and interviews:

  • In 2007 (when I was just a newbie myself!) I gave a presentation on academic blogging in my department’s colloquium series.
  • In 2008, I was an invited guest speaker in a class on ‘Writing in the Digital Age’; I spoke about academic blogging and online writing more generally.
  • In 2009, I was interviewed about George Eliot by Nigel Beale, for his website The Bibliofile (now The Literary Tourist). (Gah! That picture!)
  • Also in 2009, while at ACCUTE to present a paper on Ahdaf Soueif (one that grew out of some blog posts about her novels), I led an informal workshop on academic blogging.
  • In 2011, I was invited to participate in a panel on “Knowledge Dissemination in Canada” at the British Association of Victorian Studies; that presentation became a paper in the Journal of Victorian Culture.
  • In 2012, I gave a presentation on academic blogging at our Faculty’s research retreat.
  • In 2012-13 and 2013-14 I spoke in our graduate students’ professionalization seminar about blogging (and Twitter). I expect (though I guess I don’t know for sure!) that I’ll be asked back again in 2014-15.
  • In 2013 I was interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail about Richard III. (I don’t think the interview I did about Jane Austen had anything to do with blogging: as I recall, that was an occasion when the reporter just called the department and got handed off to me).
  • Later this month I will participate in a Twitter Q&A about Middlemarch hosted by the Atlantic‘s #1book140— I was invited to do this because of Middlemarch for Book Clubs, but that site is itself the result (you guessed it) of a blog post.

Writing:

  • In 2008, I was invited to become a regular contributor to the group blog The Valve.
  • In 2009, I was invited to contribute to Open Letters Monthly, and in 2010 I moved my blog there and signed my soul over to them became an editor there too.
  • In 2011, I was invited to contribute a short piece to John Williams’s blog The Second Pass (currently on hiatus as he now has a great gig working for the New York Times!)
  • Also in 2011, I was invited to write an essay on the Martin Beck books for the Los Angeles Review of Books (the immediate prompt for this was on Twitter, but the original impetus was – again — a blog post). Encouraged by this experience I have since pitched and published two more essays with them.
  • This year I was invited to contribute to the British Library’s Discovering Literature site, on the basis of my ‘public’ writing more generally — especially at OLM — but since everything that happens there is fruit of the Novel Readings tree, I count that too!

There have been many other more diffuse effects as well, of course, including courses developed from reading interests initially pursued here “only” out of curiosity and course assignments such as student blogs, wikis, and pecha kuchas that I would never have thought of if it weren’t for the time I spend online. And there are all the intangible intellectual benefits I referred to the last time I wrote about what this whole experiment adds up to. This tally overlaps with the list of specific publications on my c.v. (the ones that “don’t add up to anything,” you remember) but it’s a somewhat different angle on the whole question — I think it shows that in some ways my role as an academic has changed along with my work habits and publication platforms.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

solnitI’ve been wanting to read The Faraway Nearby for myself ever since I helped edit the fine review of it that Victoria Olsen wrote for Open Letters. In her review, she describes it as “an experiment in digressive form” and also as a “book constructed as a spiral” — what could that really mean, I wondered when I first read her piece. I’m not usually attracted to books that are either particularly experimental or deliberately digressive, but Victoria’s review (itself written in an evocatively associative way) made The Faraway Nearby sound very appealing by emphasizing Solnit’s interest in the stories we tell and how they help us create or understand connections.

I went back to reread Victoria’s review after I finished The Faraway Nearby, and I have little to add to her analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, so if you want to know more about them, hop on over and read her first! I am perhaps a bit less impressed with Solnit’s actual writing than she is (and not just she but many reviewers — there are three full pages of blurbiage in my edition rhapsodizing about her “gorgeous” “graceful” “dazzling” “lush” “sumptuous” prose) — though this may be because her sentences, like the book itself, are meandering and exploratory rather than polished and purposeful, which, again, isn’t usually my thing. Reading them (and it), I wasn’t always sure where we were going, which is something I tolerate in my reading in direct proportion to my confidence in the writer’s overall control. Is Solnit always in control? I wasn’t convinced. Take this sentence, for instance: “Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them.” Is it just me or is that a mess?

But there were also lots of passages I liked a lot, such as the one about libraries I quoted from last time, and the other pages in its vicinity about reading: “a book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another” (though shouldn’t it be “beats only” instead of “only beats”?). Apricots, Iceland, Frankenstein, Arctic explorers, leprosy: as long as I could relax and just follow her where she went, I was almost always interested, even if I sometimes found myself pausing, perplexed, because I couldn’t remember the path we had traveled to arrive at our current location. In that respect the essayist she reminded me of the most was Woolf, except that in A Room of One’s Own (vivid in my reading memory right now because I just taught it) a specific argument is made emphatically at the beginning of the book and everything else is logically (though not linearly) in pursuit of it. Solnit’s governing ideas are themselves more fluid, and thus her stream-of-consciousness method ultimately diffuses rather than focuses our attention — or, at any rate, my attention. Prompted by her observations, experiences, and descriptions, my own mind often wandered off to my own life, or reading, or family, or travels, and I had to bring myself deliberately back. I don’t think Solnit would be dissatisfied with that, as if she has a thesis, it’s that stories move between us and link us, and shape our understanding, of ourselves and of others, in just that way.

Something I found myself wondering about a lot as I read The Faraway Nearby was where the authority comes from to write in this genre, whatever it is. It’s not exactly a memoir, though it might be right to call it “life writing” (I would actually have liked it if it were a more conventional autobiography, as I got very caught up in the more linear sections about her mother’s dementia and her own cancer). It’s not exactly travel writing, though sections of it are (she writes wonderfully about Iceland). It’s not philosophy, at least not in any way a professional philosopher would recognize, but its parts are woven together with writing I might call “philosophical” in the informal or colloquial use of that word: reflections on what things mean and what is important, not just for Solnit but in general.

Maybe The Faraway Nearby is a modern version of “sage” writing: it purports or aspires to offer us not just observation and personal experience but wisdom. Where does someone find the confidence — it’s really a kind of arrogance, isn’t it? — to offer general insights about life? I don’t mean that as a criticism, honest! It’s a genuine question about writing and voice and, again, authority. Here’s an example of the kind of meditative but also assertive passage that I’m thinking about:

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don’t change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through a new identity and new purpose, whether it’s that of a nation or a single human being.

 The first thing I thought after I read that bit was “Chapter 42!” That’s my favorite chapter of Middlemarch; it includes Mr. Casaubon’s confrontation with the reality of his own mortality. It is “one of those rare moments of experience,” Eliot writes, “when we feel the truth of a commonplace,”

which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace ‘We must all die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die — and soon,’ then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel.

Maybe one of the reasons I did not find Solnit’s version of this idea especially compelling is that, knowing Eliot’s so well, Solnit’s proffered insight struck me as unoriginal. It’s also more abstract: it emerges from her recounting of the story of Che Guevara, but its idea is immediately diffused across other stories, while Eliot uses her appeal to our shared experience as a means of making us feel all the more intensely the mental agonies of Mr. Casaubon (which is, in turn, part of her larger agenda of training us in empathy, which is also one of Solnit’s intermittent interests). Both passages are overtly written, but Eliot’s metaphors are more concrete and surprising.

I don’t think I could necessarily make a convincing case, though, for why I read Eliot’s philosophizing as more profound or authoritative than Solnit’s. (I did have a much easier time with Solnit in this regard than I did with Cheryl Strayed, whose Tiny Beautiful Things annoyed me so much I couldn’t finish it.) Am I underestimating Solnit’s gravitas because of the comparative ease and looseness of her writing, which made it seem (mostly) artful but not truly deep? Or is there a genuine difference of quality, of substance, between her elegant reiteration of fairly commonplace ideas and Eliot’s sustained attempt to dramatize a system of ethics, a theory of history, a human place in nature? (I realize that’s not a particularly neutral way to put the question!) Solnit’s section on leprosy includes many fascinating and thought-provoking observations, but once she turns to using the disease as a metaphor, it becomes banal: “If numbness contracts the boundaries of the self, empathy expands it.” Why do I not feel the same dissatisfaction with the pier glass passage in Chapter 27? Is it just the accumulated deference and admiration of long acquaintance with its author that makes it so much more interesting to me? If I knew Solnit better — if I had been reading her longer — would I hear the same rich authority in her pronouncements?

That the passage I liked best in The Faraway Nearby is this one, not by Solnit herself but a quotation from Woolf, makes me think not:

 It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what. . . . From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.

Compare this, from Solnit’s follow-up commentary: “Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won’t mark you out as special, though your response to it might.” Isn’t that a letdown, even rhythmically? But it’s a lot to ask of a writer, that they withstand comparison to Eliot and Woolf.

Shhh! It’s (Still) A Library!

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

sp-coasterOne of my favorite souvenirs from my trip to Oxford a few years ago is a pair of coasters from the Bodleian Library that say “silence please.” I love these because they speak for me: so often I crave silence so that I can concentrate on my book. Reading, for me — at least serious reading, rapt, transcendent, lost-to-the-real-world reading, which is the best kind of all — takes concentration, and I know no greater threat to that concentration than intrusive noise. Especially since I had children, I feel as if it has been a constant struggle to find the kind of quiet conducive to that kind of reading. The polite Bodleian signage reassures me that I’m not anomalous: that others too value the silence that enables us to merge our consciousness with the words on the page.

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I was thinking about this recently because my husband and I attended a fundraising event for the new Halifax Central Library, currently under construction and expected to open its doors this fall. I am hugely excited about the new library, because I’m a huge believer in libraries as great civic spaces. A public library represents an idea that’s at the heart of democratic society: that the accumulated thinking of centuries is our greatest resource and should be freely available to everyone. A library’s specific commitment to reading as a source of both information and pleasure is a wonderful thing. Like so many families, mine made regular trips to our local library branch while I was growing up; it looks a little different now than it did, but it’s still in the same place, and walking into it on a visit home last summer I vividly recalled the feeling of liberation that came over me whenever I entered its doors as a child — there was a whole world in there, inside the covers of all those books, and my library card was my passport. I had free run of the collection: I don’t recall anyone, either parent or librarian, ever trying to steer me away from anything I was interested in because it was “too hard.” (I have struggled greatly with the emphasis in the schools here on “just right” reading — reading should be aspirational! I was incensed once while volunteering at a school book sale when a mother pulled her crying child away from a book, berating him about wanting something he couldn’t read on his own yet. “But he wants to read!” I wanted to yell at her. “Read it with him until he’s ready!”) I discovered many favorite authors in the stacks; some of my most cherished books today are library discards with the “VPL” stickers still on them. It was built after I’d moved away, but the Vancouver Central Library is a spectacular building that has long inspired me from a distance.

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Flickr photo by Dustin Quasar

I’m reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby right now and while I have some issues with the book overall, I really appreciated what she says about libraries:

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years’ War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children’s books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. All readers are Wu Daozi; all imaginative, engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish.

“Here in quiet rooms”: for her too, quiet is part of reading. The temporary hushing of everything going on around us is what lets us pass through into that other landscape and really see and think about what we find there. So why does it seem to have become such a bad thing to imagine a library governed by a polite request for “silence please”? Over and over at the fundraising presentations, speakers spoke with disdain of the old-fashioned notion of librarians shushing patrons and celebrated the library as a place for what sometimes seemed like every activity besides actually reading to yourself. “It’s not just about books anymore” seemed to be the go-to argument for why we should enthusiastically support the library’s fundraising campaign — even though (interestingly) they also emphasized that they are raising money now “for the collection.”

I should be clear that I think the social and educational functions of libraries — children’s activities, teen hangouts, workshops and meeting groups of all kinds, performances, lecture series — are also wonderful things integral to the library’s mission as a place to nurture and support its community. But after a while I started wondering where, among the atriums and coffee shops and recording studios and play areas, a person is supposed to go who wants the traditional hush of a place suited to actually reading books. I’ve been looking again at the plans and it turns out that the fourth floor does have designated areas for “quiet reading and study.” As far as I can tell, though, they are still very wide open, and I wonder how much ambient noise will travel up from below — and whether anybody will respect or enforce the suggestion that here, at least, shushing might be in order. It’s already such a noisy world everywhere else! I even recently left a local bookstore in a huff because the annoying pop music they were playing distracted me from browsing the shelves: the words to the songs came between me and the words on the page. If I had the kind of money that makes this kind of thing possible, I think that I would have offered to fund a real “reading room” somewhere in the new library building: comfortable chairs, good lighting, no wi-fi, a door that closes (quietly, without slamming!), and a sign on it courtesy of the Bodleian.

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What do you think: am I just a curmudgeon? Do you like quiet when you read? When you use the library, do you resent or appreciate attempts to keep it a place suitable for quiet contemplation and deep concentration? If you’re a librarian, how do you deal with the competing expectations that the library serve both social and silent purposes?

“And neither was content”: George Gissing, The Odd Women

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

gissingI suggested Gissing’s The Odd Women to my book club as our follow-up to The Murderess: though the two novels are drastically dissimilar in style and setting, they are fairly near chronologically and, more to the point for my book club, extremely close in the problem they address: the hazards of being a “redundant” woman in a society that sees unmarried women as either aberrant or burdensome. “But I ask you, do there really have to be so many daughters?” asks Papadiamantis’s anti-heroine Hadoula — and the same question launches The Odd Women, where in the first chapter we meet Dr. Madden and his six daughters: Alice, Virginia, Gertrude, Martha, Isabel, and Monica. Dr. Madden has the best intentions for his girls, but when he dies suddenly and uninsured, they are thrown into a world for which they are woefully unprepared: “it never occured to Dr. Madden that his daughters would do well to study with a professional object.”

By the second chapter, Gissing has — with Hadoula’s ruthlessness — killed off three of the sisters. But there are still too many for the doctor’s small legacy to support, and the work the remaining ones can find is grueling and poorly compensated. Alice and Virginia look to younger, prettier Monica to fulfill what they still believe is a woman’s real destiny: “Thank heaven, she was sure to marry!” Monica, worn out from long hours in a draper’s shop, has much the same ambition for herself, though the men she meets in the ordinary course of things are hardly good economic prospects. When she makes the acquaintance of Mr. Widdowson on one of her afternoons off — “an oldish man, with grizzled whiskers and rather a stern visage,” but well-dressed, with a gold watch and other signs of prosperity — he seems like a solution to her (and her sisters’) problems.

One of Gissing’s central concerns in The Odd Women is precisely the way financial exigencies like the Maddens’ lead to moral compromise because women had so few ways to support themselves. The uncomfortable proximity of a “good marriage” to prostitution is a theme often touched on in Victorian fiction (think of the narrator in Vanity Fair, for instance, reflecting on poor Rose Crawley, who sold her heart “to become Sir Pitt Crawley’s wife”: “Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair”). That a woman would invest her beauty for a good financial return might shock in a novel like Lady Audley’s Secret, but it was easier to gloss over or defend when other “career” options for women (at least for middle-class women, which is where most novels focus their attention) were both rare and not obviously necessary (except for their intrinsic satisfactions, of course, but that’s rarely the point). The context is different in The Odd Women, though, and so too are the arguments. The novel directly confronts a widely-discussed statistical imbalance between men and women addressed in other works such as W. R. Greg’s essay “Why  Women Are Redundant,” and it proposes a more radical solution than Greg’s preference, emigration: independence!

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In counterpoint to the faltering Maddens — raised to fulfill an ideal of womanhood that is repeatedly shown up as both outdated and unnatural — Gissing gives us two feminist activists, Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who run a training program that prepares girls for office work. Both are single, and Rhoda in particular has set herself against marriage: “I maintain that the vast majority of women lead a vain and miserable life just because they do marry,” she replies when Mary proposes that marriage remains a better alternative than some more degrading ones. She disdains “the sexual instinct”: “women imagine themselves noble and glorious when they are most near the animals.” Rhoda prides herself on the stringency of her principles, though Mary cautions her that “the ideal we set up must be human.” Cue Mary’s dashing cousin Everard, who finds himself increasingly fascinated, first by Rhoda’s mind (“His concern with her was purely intellectual; she had no sensual attraction for him”) — but then with everything she represents (“Rhoda might well represent the desire of a mature man, strengthened by modern culture and with his senses fairly subordinate to reason”). As his interest in her grows into passion and a desire to see her “yield herself,” Rhoda also becomes caught up in feelings that greatly confuse her and test her commitment to living up to her surname.

It takes Gissing a while to get all his pieces on the board and into position, but the game that plays out after that is fast-moving, dramatic, and consistently surprising. Hardly anything turns out quite as you expect, from Monica’s disintegrating marriage to Widdowson (another highly suggestive surname!)  to Rhoda and Everard’s “romance” (which, trust me, deserves the scare-quotes). The plot twists that bring about the final crises are precisely those of a farce or comedy of errors, but they are anything but funny. And though there’s not one main character that is easy to like or admire wholeheartedly, even the worst characters are hard to blame for their failings, which arise from expectations ingrained in them from early on — poor Widdowson, for instance, who is driven to Othello-like rage and violence because he really believes Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” is a good guide to women’s roles. Ironies abound: for example, that Monica’s brief exposure to Rhoda and Mary’s ideas (which at the time she disdains in favor of Widdowson’s proposal and her idea that marriage is the easy way to a comfortable life) turns out to have planted seeds that take root and grow into theories of and demands for equality once she experiences the oppressive subordination of actual marriage to him. There are no easy solutions to any of the problems Gissing highlights: though some new standard for relations between the sexes seems urgently needed, one that acknowledges women’s right to “live a life of her own” (as Monica comes to advocate), nobody in the novel seems to know what it could be, or to be ready for it. The most rapturous love scenes leave the partners discontented; desire clouds judgment; new compromises emerge that seem no more satisfactory than the old ones.

I’ve assigned The Odd Women several times, usually in the upper-level seminar I offer on “The Victorian ‘Woman Question.'” It has been a few years since I offered that class, though, and thus since I read it through. I remembered its plot very clearly, along with the ways I’ve come to read its central themes, but I had forgotten how emotionally intense it is and also how strange it feels, because it refuses to sort anything out nicely for us. Even Jude the Obscure at least gives us the cathartic satisfactions of tragedy, but the griefs of The Odd Women are more sordid. It’s possible (we debated this last night) that Rhoda’s story has elements of triumph in it, but at the very least they are equivocal. I don’t consider Gissing much of a prose stylist, but another thing we discussed last night is how specific he is, especially about money, or its lack, and the difference this makes: as one of my friends observed, The Odd Women has a lot in common with Pride and Prejudice, including this economic preoccupation and its focus on the precarity of women’s lives absent good matrimonial prospects — The Odd Women is what Pride and Prejudice would be if Mr. Bennet died before Bingley ever came to Netherfield. Suddenly Mr. Collins doesn’t look so silly, just as Mr. Widdowson looks pretty good when you’ve been standing for 18 hours at a shop counter.

Another aspect of The Odd Women that we discussed was the confusion around men’s roles as well as women’s in it. Our interest in the ways its men were sometimes “womanly” and its women “manly” led us, eventually, to choose Woolf’s Orlando as our next book. The only part of that novel I know well is the wonderful riff on the arrival of the 19th century:

The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus — for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork — sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.

When I read the whole novel, years ago, I think I was not ready for Woolf in general, or for it in particular. I’m looking forward to giving it another go. I’m also looking forward to working through The Odd Women again in the fall, as I’ve assigned it for the Victorian fiction class.