Return to the Abbey
Apr. 9th, 2013 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustPrevious posts on Elsie J. Oxenham's Abbey books: On not having read Elsie J. Oxenham's "Abbey School" series and The school with no abbey.
Now read on: as I did, starting gently with a re-reading of The Abbey Girls in Town, but this time in the original edition rather than the abridged version. This - and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gillpolack's comments - made me curious about Biddy's Secret and I ordered a copy, but while I was waiting for it to arrive I read Stowaways at the Abbey, one of the 'retrospective' titles published later but dealing with the earlier life of the characters. By now my copy of Biddy's Secret had arrived, so I read that, and followed it with Maid of the Abbey. This stuff is addictive.
As I said at the time, I hadn't been aware that my Children's Press edition of The Abbey Girls in Town had been extensively abridged. To that extent, the editing has been deftly done, a paragraph here and a couple of lines of dialogue there, but in removing material that doesn't move the story forward, it removes much of the description of the folk revival which is for me one of the great attractions of the series (and of this book in particular). More to the point, these are details which the author deploys to guide the reader's interpretation of events. For example, very early in the book Ruth muses, as the train carries her towards London and the cousins she has yet to meet, on Mary's letter, which had described her new interest in dancing. The Children's Press edition does not use the more specific terms: the country dances which make Ruth's mother and aunts wistfully recall dances they had danced in their childhood1, and "something she called 'morris'" and the dancing with swords which Ruth thinks could surely only be for men "and yet Mary seemed to imply that she had watched girls learning a sword-dance?" This is interesting in itself, but it also sets out a distinction between country dance and morris which illuminates the scene at the dramatic heart of the book. In another redacted passage, Ruth returns to the unsuitability of women's morris:
Given the patchiness of my knowledge of the Abbey books, I found plenty of interest in Stowaways at the Abbey. Fourteen year-old Jen is stranded at the Hall while Joy and Joan have measles, and has various adventures, one of which is of the type I associate with my memories of these books: she finds out more about the history of a treasured possession, and this makes a link betwen the Abbey and the Hall2. Jen's 'husband' Jack comes to share her quarantine3. I don't know what to make of that 'husband': the two are great friends, but their relationship is sensible, practical - it is around Joy that the emotional temperature rises4.
Which brings me back to the Devine family. Almost the first thing we learn about Biddy and Mary is that they are not well off, and must work for a living: Mary "had to go to work in an office every day, while Biddy went to college to prepare herself for a similar post." We don't learn much about Mary's job, although it was her introduction to the Abbey girls (Jen came into the office to have some typing done): it doesn't satisfy her and it doesn't interest her. But it is never suggested that Biddy might aim higher, might have a vocation for teaching or nursing. In the course of The Abbey Girls in Town Mary writes her first book, and has it accepted by a publisher, but this is not the route by which she escapes from the office: in the later books she has become Joy's secretary, resident, presumably salaried, with allowances made when she needs time for her writing, almost but not quite part of the family. If Biddy is to follow in her footsteps, how should she set about it?
The Abbey Girls in Town is told throughout from Ruth's point of view: she is a cool and perceptive observer, though it is Mary's book. Biddy's Secret likewise starts with Ruth, but soon shifts its focus to Maidlin5, though whom Biddy's secret is discovered. In the six years since her first appearance, Biddy has been following the career path planned for her. There is an understanding that when Maid comes into her inheritance, Biddy will return to be her private secretary (as Mary is Joy's, presumably). In the interim she is working in France, and Joy speaks approvingly of her progress: "She went out as a junior English clerk; she's now private secretary to the head of the firm. She has done splendidly." But Joy doesn't know Biddy's secret, which is that she has married into the firm - married not the son-and-heir, but the scapegrace nephew, who has abandoned her and decamped to South America. Maidlin sees Biddy's position as tragic, and the tragedy is that Biddy realises too late that she has chosen the wrong man, and might have had the right one. "And there was that fatal desire to succeed at any price which was the flaw in Biddy's character."
gillpolack takes this as a feminist issue. She says: "This morning I finished reading the latest Abbey girls reprint. It's wrong for a woman to be ambitious for herself and if one is so inclined then errors of judgement get made and the results are dire. Perfect selfishness and petulance is always fine, as long as one is senior in the pecking order. And these are the lessons I learned from Biddy's Secret. The whole folkthing was empowering in so many ways and Oxenham documents that beautifully, but she also documents the terrible sadness of being a woman in a restrictive society. She documents it and promulgates it and celebrates it."
But Joy's behaviour is not treated as "fine". Indeed, three of these four novels might well have been titled 'Joy Gets It Wrong Again'. I embarked on this re-reading of books I had read as a child with the Chalet School stories very much in my mind as a point of reference, which may be why I assumed that the much-loved character who presides over each successive new arrival must be in the right. On the contrary: Joy Shirley is not Joey Bettany6, and her kindness and generosity are balanced by repeated acts of thoughtlessness and unkindness. Is there a suggestion that these are two sides of the same coin, that Joy gives unstintingly so long as she feels things are within her gift? She cannot stand back and allow Mary to take centre stage or, later, accept that Maidlin has grown up, and it would be kinder to accept her offers of help. Already in The Abbey Girls in Town she is the lady of the manor (though not yet of the Manor); from the Hall she has established a variety of artisan industries and charitable establishments, holiday homes for East End children and "overworked city girls", country-dance classes and a weaving school (with pottery to follow as soon as she can find a teacher)7. Joy is generous and means well, but her sins are the sins of entitlement. Even in Stowaways at the Abbey, when the (retrospectively) much younger Joy makes herself dangerously ill by catching a chill while feverish, she reasons "if Joan can talk through the window, why shouldn't I?" Her thoughtlessness, her temper, her blindness to the feelings of others are always forgiven, but are shown as requiring forgiveness, though not always as explicitly as Biddy's 'flawed character'.
What I think Oxenham does document and promulgate and celebrate is wealth and all its works: the narrative nowhere concedes that Biddy, who has grown up in a small flat on her sisters very limited earnings, and whose only hope of material comfort is to be able to pay her own way, might have some grounds for her "desire to succeed at any price"8. Compare this to Ruth's reaction to Joy's good works in her village: "...seeing it all and all Joy's varied interests [she] could not wonder that she shrank from the thought of leaving it; but wondered rather at the downright honesty which had prevented Joy from grasping at the chance of securing it to herself by a marriage so very suitable." Joy gets full credit for every scruple - and then in the end the narrative allows her to make that suitable marriage. Ruth herself, likewise, at the start of Biddy's Secret, runs away from a proposal which is seen as "suitable" - and is rewarded by another, more welcome, proposal.
How restricted are EJO's heroines in their career choices? It's probably worth underlining that although marriage - and the motherhood which invariably follows soon after! - trumps any other career (Ruth knows without having to be told that Joy's attempts to construct a village idyll would have to be abandoned if she married - as her cousin Joan has done - a man who took her away from the Hall), it is often preceded by work. Even Joy, with her second marriage - to a musician who seems content to make the Hall the base from which he travels extensively - discovers new work, writing songs. Creative work is widespread, and available to both rich and poor: Mary writes books; Maid sings - primarily in oratorio - as does Lindy Bellanne, who will be an operatic soprano. These artistic successes should perhaps be classified as ambitions rather than career plans: they are not presented as realistic ways to make a living. Weaving is a suitable and practical occupation for women - Joy sets up a weaving school in the village, the Pixie has her workshop with its beautiful fabrics and handmade dresses - and Rosamund also weaves.
Dressmaking is a skill which can be expected of every competent housewife, or can be exercised professionally. The same is true of cookery: it is a traditional feminine occupation, and characters prepare breakfast and tea, buttered crumpets and midnight feasts for each other; but the bulk of the cooking in these books is done by professionals. Maid of the Abbey has an interesting ambivalence towards women who cook for a living. The narrative opens with Anne Bellane, a trained cook who has been working in a cakeshop in which she has a small share, but the shop has now failed. There's a world of nuance in that training, in that (small) part-ownership. Received as a guest at the Hall, a beneficiary of the Abbey girls' largesse, she is socially superior to the resident cook, Susan Spindle, who has committed the appalling crime of visiting her small son in the village and bringing measles back with her: "I could wring Susan Spindle's neck" says the gentle Maidlin. (Later - much later - she is forgiven, and Maid concedes that Joy, who has a baby boy herself, will know how much Susan wanted to see her baby. Joy has left her baby boy in New York with his nurse, to rush home to the twins.) Anne takes charge as cook in this emergency, and ultimately agrees to become Maidlin's cook. The book also features visits to the Rose and Squirrel "the tea-shop kept by Rosamund's young Aunt Elspeth". Keeping a tea-shop is a respectable occupation, but - as Biddy's Secret makes clear - waitressing is not entirely proper.
I have so far encountered only one 'Abbey girl' who plans a professional career: in Stowaways at the Abbey Jack says that she intends to follow her father into medecine. Is this evidence that her character is seen as somehow boyish? Or is is rather that this 'retrospective' volume was not published until 1940, later than its place in the narrative would suggest? In Maid of the Abbey (1943) Lindy's transformation into Miss Belinda the nursery governess suggests that music's gain is teaching's loss - but the less glamourous profession is never mentioned. This is all suggestive, but the sample is too small to be significant - there are many more books in the series.
1. The Abbey Girls in Town was published in 1925, Girls of the Hamlet Club in 1914; the English Folk Dance Society was formed by Cecil Sharp in 1911. Are Ruth's mother and aunts remembering some pre-revival dancing? Who knows...
2. Does this story, inserted retrospectively into the overall narrative, deliberately anticipate Jen's marriage to one of the brothers from the Hall? Or is the cast of characters just so entangled that such echoes are inevitable?
3. Quarantine plays a part in the plot of Biddy's Secret, too - and it is central to Maid of the Abbey. There is probably a paper to be written on 'Measles in the work of EJO', though the explanation is probably no more exciting than that it provides an excuse to group her characters as each narrative requires, bringing them together or keeping them apart.
4. Jack's - Jacqueline's - nickname Jacky-boy is surely a song reference (as the Abbey girls' use of Mary Dorothy Devine's full name refers to the name of a dance).
5. And Maid of the Abbey is as much about the Bellanne sisters as it is about Maidlin's love story. The titles are repeatedly subverted by the narrative: though the reason may be no more than the commercial advantage in promoting the new title through its link with the established favourites. Is this the place to remark also that although Biddy's Secret is subtitled "A Romance of the Abbey Girls" (and where was I reading that one reason why the original edition is hard to find is that EJO's publishers felt it was written for an older audience?) it is less concerned with Biddy's love-life than with Maidlin's coming of age, as she copes with the conflicts that result from it. Maid of the Abbey is more of a romance than Biddy's Secret.
6. But what does she owe to that other red-headed orphan, Anne Shirley?
7. I am grateful towolfinthewood for pointing me to Georgina Boyes's The Imagined Village from which I learned that Joy was not alone in believing that traditional arts and crafts needed to be taught to the folk.
8. Though oddly, Maidlin seems almost to be applying this description not to Biddy's willingness to marry at least partly for advancement, but to her willingness to settle for the wrong marriage when an even more advantageous match was within her grasp. The end of the book suggests that she may yet achieve this.
Now read on: as I did, starting gently with a re-reading of The Abbey Girls in Town, but this time in the original edition rather than the abridged version. This - and
gillpolack's comments - made me curious about Biddy's Secret and I ordered a copy, but while I was waiting for it to arrive I read Stowaways at the Abbey, one of the 'retrospective' titles published later but dealing with the earlier life of the characters. By now my copy of Biddy's Secret had arrived, so I read that, and followed it with Maid of the Abbey. This stuff is addictive.As I said at the time, I hadn't been aware that my Children's Press edition of The Abbey Girls in Town had been extensively abridged. To that extent, the editing has been deftly done, a paragraph here and a couple of lines of dialogue there, but in removing material that doesn't move the story forward, it removes much of the description of the folk revival which is for me one of the great attractions of the series (and of this book in particular). More to the point, these are details which the author deploys to guide the reader's interpretation of events. For example, very early in the book Ruth muses, as the train carries her towards London and the cousins she has yet to meet, on Mary's letter, which had described her new interest in dancing. The Children's Press edition does not use the more specific terms: the country dances which make Ruth's mother and aunts wistfully recall dances they had danced in their childhood1, and "something she called 'morris'" and the dancing with swords which Ruth thinks could surely only be for men "and yet Mary seemed to imply that she had watched girls learning a sword-dance?" This is interesting in itself, but it also sets out a distinction between country dance and morris which illuminates the scene at the dramatic heart of the book. In another redacted passage, Ruth returns to the unsuitability of women's morris:
'But it is for men, Mary! Why do you people try to do it?'In this light, Joy's behaviour at the children's dance demonstration which Mary organises at her request is worse than thoughtless. In dancing at all she is showing off; in failing to acknowledge Mary's work she is inconsiderate and ungrateful; but her choice of dances also shows an insensitivity to her material. Ruth thinks: "Somehow that morris seems out of place! It's a children's display. The morris is so different! Showy isn't the word; but - well, it's so strange and wonderful; won't it put the country dances rather into the shade?" I will return to this point.
'Because we can't help it,' Mary said feebly.
Given the patchiness of my knowledge of the Abbey books, I found plenty of interest in Stowaways at the Abbey. Fourteen year-old Jen is stranded at the Hall while Joy and Joan have measles, and has various adventures, one of which is of the type I associate with my memories of these books: she finds out more about the history of a treasured possession, and this makes a link betwen the Abbey and the Hall2. Jen's 'husband' Jack comes to share her quarantine3. I don't know what to make of that 'husband': the two are great friends, but their relationship is sensible, practical - it is around Joy that the emotional temperature rises4.
Which brings me back to the Devine family. Almost the first thing we learn about Biddy and Mary is that they are not well off, and must work for a living: Mary "had to go to work in an office every day, while Biddy went to college to prepare herself for a similar post." We don't learn much about Mary's job, although it was her introduction to the Abbey girls (Jen came into the office to have some typing done): it doesn't satisfy her and it doesn't interest her. But it is never suggested that Biddy might aim higher, might have a vocation for teaching or nursing. In the course of The Abbey Girls in Town Mary writes her first book, and has it accepted by a publisher, but this is not the route by which she escapes from the office: in the later books she has become Joy's secretary, resident, presumably salaried, with allowances made when she needs time for her writing, almost but not quite part of the family. If Biddy is to follow in her footsteps, how should she set about it?
The Abbey Girls in Town is told throughout from Ruth's point of view: she is a cool and perceptive observer, though it is Mary's book. Biddy's Secret likewise starts with Ruth, but soon shifts its focus to Maidlin5, though whom Biddy's secret is discovered. In the six years since her first appearance, Biddy has been following the career path planned for her. There is an understanding that when Maid comes into her inheritance, Biddy will return to be her private secretary (as Mary is Joy's, presumably). In the interim she is working in France, and Joy speaks approvingly of her progress: "She went out as a junior English clerk; she's now private secretary to the head of the firm. She has done splendidly." But Joy doesn't know Biddy's secret, which is that she has married into the firm - married not the son-and-heir, but the scapegrace nephew, who has abandoned her and decamped to South America. Maidlin sees Biddy's position as tragic, and the tragedy is that Biddy realises too late that she has chosen the wrong man, and might have had the right one. "And there was that fatal desire to succeed at any price which was the flaw in Biddy's character."
gillpolack takes this as a feminist issue. She says: "This morning I finished reading the latest Abbey girls reprint. It's wrong for a woman to be ambitious for herself and if one is so inclined then errors of judgement get made and the results are dire. Perfect selfishness and petulance is always fine, as long as one is senior in the pecking order. And these are the lessons I learned from Biddy's Secret. The whole folkthing was empowering in so many ways and Oxenham documents that beautifully, but she also documents the terrible sadness of being a woman in a restrictive society. She documents it and promulgates it and celebrates it."But Joy's behaviour is not treated as "fine". Indeed, three of these four novels might well have been titled 'Joy Gets It Wrong Again'. I embarked on this re-reading of books I had read as a child with the Chalet School stories very much in my mind as a point of reference, which may be why I assumed that the much-loved character who presides over each successive new arrival must be in the right. On the contrary: Joy Shirley is not Joey Bettany6, and her kindness and generosity are balanced by repeated acts of thoughtlessness and unkindness. Is there a suggestion that these are two sides of the same coin, that Joy gives unstintingly so long as she feels things are within her gift? She cannot stand back and allow Mary to take centre stage or, later, accept that Maidlin has grown up, and it would be kinder to accept her offers of help. Already in The Abbey Girls in Town she is the lady of the manor (though not yet of the Manor); from the Hall she has established a variety of artisan industries and charitable establishments, holiday homes for East End children and "overworked city girls", country-dance classes and a weaving school (with pottery to follow as soon as she can find a teacher)7. Joy is generous and means well, but her sins are the sins of entitlement. Even in Stowaways at the Abbey, when the (retrospectively) much younger Joy makes herself dangerously ill by catching a chill while feverish, she reasons "if Joan can talk through the window, why shouldn't I?" Her thoughtlessness, her temper, her blindness to the feelings of others are always forgiven, but are shown as requiring forgiveness, though not always as explicitly as Biddy's 'flawed character'.
What I think Oxenham does document and promulgate and celebrate is wealth and all its works: the narrative nowhere concedes that Biddy, who has grown up in a small flat on her sisters very limited earnings, and whose only hope of material comfort is to be able to pay her own way, might have some grounds for her "desire to succeed at any price"8. Compare this to Ruth's reaction to Joy's good works in her village: "...seeing it all and all Joy's varied interests [she] could not wonder that she shrank from the thought of leaving it; but wondered rather at the downright honesty which had prevented Joy from grasping at the chance of securing it to herself by a marriage so very suitable." Joy gets full credit for every scruple - and then in the end the narrative allows her to make that suitable marriage. Ruth herself, likewise, at the start of Biddy's Secret, runs away from a proposal which is seen as "suitable" - and is rewarded by another, more welcome, proposal.
How restricted are EJO's heroines in their career choices? It's probably worth underlining that although marriage - and the motherhood which invariably follows soon after! - trumps any other career (Ruth knows without having to be told that Joy's attempts to construct a village idyll would have to be abandoned if she married - as her cousin Joan has done - a man who took her away from the Hall), it is often preceded by work. Even Joy, with her second marriage - to a musician who seems content to make the Hall the base from which he travels extensively - discovers new work, writing songs. Creative work is widespread, and available to both rich and poor: Mary writes books; Maid sings - primarily in oratorio - as does Lindy Bellanne, who will be an operatic soprano. These artistic successes should perhaps be classified as ambitions rather than career plans: they are not presented as realistic ways to make a living. Weaving is a suitable and practical occupation for women - Joy sets up a weaving school in the village, the Pixie has her workshop with its beautiful fabrics and handmade dresses - and Rosamund also weaves.
Dressmaking is a skill which can be expected of every competent housewife, or can be exercised professionally. The same is true of cookery: it is a traditional feminine occupation, and characters prepare breakfast and tea, buttered crumpets and midnight feasts for each other; but the bulk of the cooking in these books is done by professionals. Maid of the Abbey has an interesting ambivalence towards women who cook for a living. The narrative opens with Anne Bellane, a trained cook who has been working in a cakeshop in which she has a small share, but the shop has now failed. There's a world of nuance in that training, in that (small) part-ownership. Received as a guest at the Hall, a beneficiary of the Abbey girls' largesse, she is socially superior to the resident cook, Susan Spindle, who has committed the appalling crime of visiting her small son in the village and bringing measles back with her: "I could wring Susan Spindle's neck" says the gentle Maidlin. (Later - much later - she is forgiven, and Maid concedes that Joy, who has a baby boy herself, will know how much Susan wanted to see her baby. Joy has left her baby boy in New York with his nurse, to rush home to the twins.) Anne takes charge as cook in this emergency, and ultimately agrees to become Maidlin's cook. The book also features visits to the Rose and Squirrel "the tea-shop kept by Rosamund's young Aunt Elspeth". Keeping a tea-shop is a respectable occupation, but - as Biddy's Secret makes clear - waitressing is not entirely proper.
I have so far encountered only one 'Abbey girl' who plans a professional career: in Stowaways at the Abbey Jack says that she intends to follow her father into medecine. Is this evidence that her character is seen as somehow boyish? Or is is rather that this 'retrospective' volume was not published until 1940, later than its place in the narrative would suggest? In Maid of the Abbey (1943) Lindy's transformation into Miss Belinda the nursery governess suggests that music's gain is teaching's loss - but the less glamourous profession is never mentioned. This is all suggestive, but the sample is too small to be significant - there are many more books in the series.
1. The Abbey Girls in Town was published in 1925, Girls of the Hamlet Club in 1914; the English Folk Dance Society was formed by Cecil Sharp in 1911. Are Ruth's mother and aunts remembering some pre-revival dancing? Who knows...
2. Does this story, inserted retrospectively into the overall narrative, deliberately anticipate Jen's marriage to one of the brothers from the Hall? Or is the cast of characters just so entangled that such echoes are inevitable?
3. Quarantine plays a part in the plot of Biddy's Secret, too - and it is central to Maid of the Abbey. There is probably a paper to be written on 'Measles in the work of EJO', though the explanation is probably no more exciting than that it provides an excuse to group her characters as each narrative requires, bringing them together or keeping them apart.
4. Jack's - Jacqueline's - nickname Jacky-boy is surely a song reference (as the Abbey girls' use of Mary Dorothy Devine's full name refers to the name of a dance).
5. And Maid of the Abbey is as much about the Bellanne sisters as it is about Maidlin's love story. The titles are repeatedly subverted by the narrative: though the reason may be no more than the commercial advantage in promoting the new title through its link with the established favourites. Is this the place to remark also that although Biddy's Secret is subtitled "A Romance of the Abbey Girls" (and where was I reading that one reason why the original edition is hard to find is that EJO's publishers felt it was written for an older audience?) it is less concerned with Biddy's love-life than with Maidlin's coming of age, as she copes with the conflicts that result from it. Maid of the Abbey is more of a romance than Biddy's Secret.
6. But what does she owe to that other red-headed orphan, Anne Shirley?
7. I am grateful to
wolfinthewood for pointing me to Georgina Boyes's The Imagined Village from which I learned that Joy was not alone in believing that traditional arts and crafts needed to be taught to the folk.8. Though oddly, Maidlin seems almost to be applying this description not to Biddy's willingness to marry at least partly for advancement, but to her willingness to settle for the wrong marriage when an even more advantageous match was within her grasp. The end of the book suggests that she may yet achieve this.
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no subject
Date: 2013-04-09 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-09 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 09:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 09:37 am (UTC)The rôle of those without private wealth does seem to be to receive the charity of those with, doesn't it? It's very odd...
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Date: 2013-04-10 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 03:57 pm (UTC)The teachers of Miss Macy's school don't play a large part in the books I've read - but then I've read such a small sample! Are they presented as respectable professionals, would you say? (I'm thinking that the treatment of Miss Macy in Girls of the Hamlet Club is friendly but not uncritical, and that she is judged as an equal.)
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Date: 2013-04-10 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 12:25 pm (UTC)It totally got to me as a child that the cook didn't have her children with her, but had to go to the village to visit. Service was more important than family in one class, and family came ahead of everything in another.
It was never about pure feminism for me - that was the angle I commented on though, because I was just making a passing "I was reading this" comment.
I, too, need to read Auchmuty.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 04:49 pm (UTC)Susan leaves her child in the village; Joy splits her family between home and New York. Given modern assumptions about children's resentments of new partners, new babies, her decision to leave behind the daughters of her first marriage to swan off with her second husband and the new baby sounds like a recipe for disaster.
But I can't quite believe in Susan Spindle's baby: does he turn up again in other books? Here he's just a plot device to bring measles to the Hall. EJO can't even bring herself to sacrifice Susan's curious name, and has to explain that she married a relative.
Service was more important than family in one class...
Except that in Stowaways, Susan's devotion to her brother is indulged.
Feminism and class and the requirements of plot, not to mention modifications as time passes and the series progresses - I quite see that this is too much of a tangle to be dealt with in a passing comment. I didn't mean to make this a You Are Wrong and I Am Right deal - I found your comment useful because it made me think about the things you weren't saying. I find her handling of class / money issues so very distinctive!
And don't start me on the division of Maidlin's character into her artistic Italian side and her practical Northern side...