Waltzing Matildas
May. 16th, 2005 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIs the name Matilda making a comeback?
I don't think I've ever met a Matilda. I associate the name with remote reaches of medieval history - Matilda or Maud, Stephen and Matilda, something out of 1066 and All That - or with the Victorian era: Hilaire Belloc's Matilda (who told lies, and was burned to death), or Tillie who lived with her sisters Elsie and Lacie in a treacle well (in the story the Dormouse told Alice). Now suddenly I've read two recent books whose heroines are both called Tilly.
The Tilda who told lies was the heroine of Jennifer Crusie's Faking It: the book seems to have been published in 2002, and she's in her late 20s. The theme of the book is, as it says on the label, fakery: art forgery, confidence trickery, lying to other people and lying to yourself.
Anne Fine's Raking the Ashes starts from Hazlitt's observation that "Nine times out of ten, good nature is simple idleness of disposition". This isn't something which afflicts the heroine, Tilly; she is clear-sighted and intelligent, and she tells it as she sees it. It's a wonderful portrait of a woman who is a bit of a monster, and yet absolutely right much of the time (I suspect it says nothing good about me, that I like her so much). The book was published earlier this year, and Tilly is a generation older that Crusie's Tilda.
Both books paint a very believable portrait of a family which is nonetheless exaggerated to an almost farcical degree; both books manage to have something quite serious to say about life, but to be extremely funny about it. How much of a coincidence is it that their heroines have the same name?
And then, of course, there's Tilda Swinton...
I don't think I've ever met a Matilda. I associate the name with remote reaches of medieval history - Matilda or Maud, Stephen and Matilda, something out of 1066 and All That - or with the Victorian era: Hilaire Belloc's Matilda (who told lies, and was burned to death), or Tillie who lived with her sisters Elsie and Lacie in a treacle well (in the story the Dormouse told Alice). Now suddenly I've read two recent books whose heroines are both called Tilly.
The Tilda who told lies was the heroine of Jennifer Crusie's Faking It: the book seems to have been published in 2002, and she's in her late 20s. The theme of the book is, as it says on the label, fakery: art forgery, confidence trickery, lying to other people and lying to yourself.
Anne Fine's Raking the Ashes starts from Hazlitt's observation that "Nine times out of ten, good nature is simple idleness of disposition". This isn't something which afflicts the heroine, Tilly; she is clear-sighted and intelligent, and she tells it as she sees it. It's a wonderful portrait of a woman who is a bit of a monster, and yet absolutely right much of the time (I suspect it says nothing good about me, that I like her so much). The book was published earlier this year, and Tilly is a generation older that Crusie's Tilda.
Both books paint a very believable portrait of a family which is nonetheless exaggerated to an almost farcical degree; both books manage to have something quite serious to say about life, but to be extremely funny about it. How much of a coincidence is it that their heroines have the same name?
And then, of course, there's Tilda Swinton...
