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shewhomustRecommended by mrissa, who says:
My reaction was rather different. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, or that I wouldn't recommend other people to read it: but why I want other people to read it has nothing to do with sharing the love, and everything to do with being able to have conversations about but is she really saying that ..? and but is this supposed to be a GOOD thing... and I can't quite bring myself to believe in ... It is, like its narrator, smart and witty and not to be taken at face value.
Take that opening sentence, for instance: "How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters..." Yet this introduces a novel about a lot of sisters, who live with their mother, and the governess (any one of a sequence of governesses) of the youngest sister, and other servants who remain invisible. It is, despite the lingering presence of Father (deceased) a very female household. The three surviving Brontë sisters and their brother collaborated on a mythology which included, but grew beyond, the real-life figure of the Duke of Wellington (their father remained aloof from this game); the Carne sisters and their mother maintain a Saga which weaves real life figurea (an actor, a pierrot, a high court judge) into the imagined doings of characters based on their dolls and their dog. Am I overstating the parallel here? Possibly, because I am very uneasy about the incorporation of real people into the created narrative which dominates the daily life of the household, in a kind of real-people fanfic, and I don't know how the author is inviting me to take it. There may be clues in the way the plot develops, which I am not about to spoiler: but there may also be clues in the invocation of the Brontës, so very prominent up there in the title. Then again, the narrator - middle sister Deirdre - is a writer, a journalist working on a novel: and there's a passage where she talks about characters getting out of the author's control, and the omagined becoming real, which is all very meta. Other ways in which characters can be both real and unreal include the reader's relationship with fictional characters (like those sisters so summarily dismissed in the opening paragraph); and then there are the ghosts...
It took me a couple of chapters to get my bearings, inasfar as I ever did get my bearings. At first I had to keep checking back to work out who was - well, not only real, but really present: is this the governess, or a doll? (It was the governess.) Given the previous remarks, we'd better conclude that this book kept me on my toes - and that while this is a good thing, I am not at all confident I've got it right...
Back tomrissa:
This is true, and all credit to Ms. Ferguson for it. But being British and of her time, what she does smack you with is the unavoidable consciousness of class. I'm not sure what she's saying about it, but she certainly lets you know it is there. Deirdre is not a snob - or if she is, she is snobbish about matters intellegtual, or aesthetic; as a journalist she has access to unexpected places, and os friendly to those she meets there. And yet - but I won't say any more. Read it yourself.
mrissa, who says:I have been trying to figure out how to talk about this book, because I love it so much, and yet it has one of the best-constructed plot twists I have ever read in my life, and I really want everybody else who reads it to have the chance at the experience of "oh yeah, I see what she's doing here...OH WOW I DID NOT SEE WHAT SHE WAS DOING HERE" that I had reading it.
My reaction was rather different. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, or that I wouldn't recommend other people to read it: but why I want other people to read it has nothing to do with sharing the love, and everything to do with being able to have conversations about but is she really saying that ..? and but is this supposed to be a GOOD thing... and I can't quite bring myself to believe in ... It is, like its narrator, smart and witty and not to be taken at face value.
Take that opening sentence, for instance: "How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters..." Yet this introduces a novel about a lot of sisters, who live with their mother, and the governess (any one of a sequence of governesses) of the youngest sister, and other servants who remain invisible. It is, despite the lingering presence of Father (deceased) a very female household. The three surviving Brontë sisters and their brother collaborated on a mythology which included, but grew beyond, the real-life figure of the Duke of Wellington (their father remained aloof from this game); the Carne sisters and their mother maintain a Saga which weaves real life figurea (an actor, a pierrot, a high court judge) into the imagined doings of characters based on their dolls and their dog. Am I overstating the parallel here? Possibly, because I am very uneasy about the incorporation of real people into the created narrative which dominates the daily life of the household, in a kind of real-people fanfic, and I don't know how the author is inviting me to take it. There may be clues in the way the plot develops, which I am not about to spoiler: but there may also be clues in the invocation of the Brontës, so very prominent up there in the title. Then again, the narrator - middle sister Deirdre - is a writer, a journalist working on a novel: and there's a passage where she talks about characters getting out of the author's control, and the omagined becoming real, which is all very meta. Other ways in which characters can be both real and unreal include the reader's relationship with fictional characters (like those sisters so summarily dismissed in the opening paragraph); and then there are the ghosts...
It took me a couple of chapters to get my bearings, inasfar as I ever did get my bearings. At first I had to keep checking back to work out who was - well, not only real, but really present: is this the governess, or a doll? (It was the governess.) Given the previous remarks, we'd better conclude that this book kept me on my toes - and that while this is a good thing, I am not at all confident I've got it right...
Back to
mrissa:... There are things about it that are astonishingly sweet and some that are astonishingly weird, and...wow, yeah. It is from the early 1930s, and there is at least one place where the ambient anti-Semitism of the period shows up in passing in the text, but in general it is not going to smack you with a lot of racist idioms while it's rattling along doing its thing.
This is true, and all credit to Ms. Ferguson for it. But being British and of her time, what she does smack you with is the unavoidable consciousness of class. I'm not sure what she's saying about it, but she certainly lets you know it is there. Deirdre is not a snob - or if she is, she is snobbish about matters intellegtual, or aesthetic; as a journalist she has access to unexpected places, and os friendly to those she meets there. And yet - but I won't say any more. Read it yourself.
