The Ovidians: Part 3

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Here is another excerpt from my novella, The Ovidians. Laurel, now 30 and a graduate student in classics, travels in search of solitude to write her dissertation, and stays with her mother’s best friend, who runs an incognito getaway for people seeking solitude.

The Ovidians: “Laurel at Thirty”

 On the train Laurel wrote in her diary:  Here I am, thirty years old, halfway through my life; no, wait, Mom lived to be, what, sixty-three? so I’m not halfway through my life. 

For the last two years, Laurel had been working on her dissertation in classics.  Her topic was approved, but she wasn’t committed. She did not want to be another of those women who analzyed the role of the girlfriend/mistress in Latin elegy, though ostensibly that was her subject.  And  though she’d love to write about cenae (dinner parties), hadn’t that been too much done?

And then the train rolled into the station without her coming to terms with her subject. She stepped out on the platform and tried to get her bearings. She wondered if she would recognize Lucy, who had been her mom’s best friend at their “lovely snob college” in Massachusetts. Laurel had not seen Lucy since Mom’s funeral several years ago.

But here was Lucy, walking toward her, waving her arms. Lucy was charming and absurdly colorful, with her vintage ’60s wire-rimmed glasses and her frizzy Pre-Raphaelite red hair fanned over the collar of her royal blue pea coat.  She immediately took control of Laurel’s suitcase.

“Lucy!  You’ve an adult!”

“I’m thirty.”

“Couldn’t be.  That would make me…  No!”

And so they laughed as they walked the few blocks from the station to Liz’s digs, which she called “the Tudor knockoff in the formerly posh neighborhood.”

 “I can’t tell if the neighborhood’s coming up or going down,” she confessed.

“Always hard to tell,” Laurel said.  She and Rob lived in a shabby but cozy Mission-style house with a view of a beautiful, if polluted, river. But there was also a homeless encampment practically in the back yard. Or rather, it was sometimes there:  now you see it, now you don’t, depending on whether the police had been there lately to clear it out.  Rob once hired some of the homeless people to be extras in a production of As You Like It. 

“Well, I don’t see any drug dealers on the street,” Laurel said. “That’s a good sign.”

“That’s their doing. The new neighbors.  They have connections,”  Lucy whispered as she nodded at an exquisitely-dressed couple in black coats, cashmere scarves, and $500 sneakers, who were lugging their garbage bins to the curb. 

“Who are they?”

“Fancy lawyers, of course.  The dealers cleared out after they moved in,” she said.  And then she stopped and gestured at a house.  “And here we are!”

The house was what Laurel called “rickety-cute”: it had good bones, but needed paint.  Inside there was lots of ’60s kitsch, including bead curtains (“Do you want to be a fortuneteller?”), a wobbly pink chandelier, an embarrassing Jim Hendrix poster, a fake Jackson Pollock painted by Laurel’s father, and a peculiar collection of papier-mache gnomes.  Why did the Baby Boomers hang on to so many hideous things? 

And then Lucy showed her to her room.  “This is gorgeous!” Laurel exclaimed.  It was a chic studio apartment with a roll-top desk, a fainting couch, a bookcase, and a queen-size bed with at least a dozen pillows.

“I’ll never leave this room.  Perfect for dissertation-writing!”

Lucy said, “Cherish your solitude.  Meanwhile I’ll socialize with the would-be solitude-seeker upstairs.” 

Laurel didn’t quite understand the set-up:  Lucy wasn’t running a hotel, nor was it exactly a bed-and-breakfast, but she had lots of friends, some of whom wanted incognito getaways, and she rented out a few rooms and one apartment so they could have perfect solitude for a tremendous price.   Somebody, and nobody knew who, had booked the top floor over Christmas, and had been given the run of the house.  She called herself Fritzi.  So far, Fritzi had spent most of her desperately-sought alone-time talking to Lucy and helping with the housework

“I was hoping you could run some of her errands,”  Lucy said.  “She’s charming and so lonely.  She likes chatting to someone who doesn’t know who the hell she is – whoever that is!”

Fritzi was demanding.  She sent Lucy out shopping ever day.  Once for a special teapot with an art nouveau pattern of garlands and flowers, which, Fritzi explained, wouldn’t do unless it was the same as the one in a picture she’d ripped out of  Country Living; then to the the Art Museum for the catalogue for a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition because Fritzi was “feeling too agoraphobic” to go in person; and the next day for a pair of pajamas that were essentially a sweatsuit – again from a picture in a magazine – but Lucy couldn’t find the designer pajamas, so she substituted 100 percent cotton sweatpants and a sweatshirt and put them in a special boutique bag she had saved for just such an occasion. 

“And then my favorite errand.” A second edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, which Fritzi said was her favorite book. The aged copy had allegedly been given by Lady Sitwell to a famous American poet who’d sold it to an antiquarian bookseller when she went broke.  It cost $50,000.

The local antiquarian bookseller, whose shop was called simply Draco, had the package tied up with a bow, all ready for Fritzi.

“The funny thing is,” Lucy said, “that Draco knows who Fritzi is and I don’t.  He was disappointed that she didn’t show up in person! I didn’t think I should  admit I had no idea who she is.”

Laurel couldn’t stop laughing.  She didn’t care who Fritzi was, but she did like shopping, so she would do her best. 

When Lucy left her to settle in, Laurel spread out her books on the bed and then fell gently into a nap while reading one of the detective novels from the shelf.  She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep.  It was that kind of sleep.  It was, without doubt, the best sleep she’d had in months. 

A few hours later, when Lucy knocked on the door and whispered, “Fritzi has invited Draco to dinner!” Laurel could hardly contain her glee.

And so she struggled out of sleep, combed her hair and pulled on a black knit dress over tights before clumping down the stairs to the dining room.

The Ovidians, Part 2

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 Hello, Readers! Here is another excerpt from my novella, The Ovidians. This is the story of the friendshiip of two women over a period of 40 years. The passage below describes the beginning of their unlikely friendship, which springs out of their reading of Ovid and their rivalry in Latin class.

The Ovidians, Chapter 2

Laurel was late for Latin on her first day at the new school. She glided into the classroom wearing as little as possible, disheveled from making out with a boy in the parking lot whose name, she thought, was Brad.  Later, she learned it was Timothy. 

She had excelled in Latin at many, many private schools, and was confident that she would, as usual, be the best in class, or “best in show,” as her mother Emma put it.  Emma regarded Laurel as a second Mr.Toodles, their famous prize-winning poodle.  The poodle had a tiny t-shirt:  MR. TOODLES RULES.

Laurel thanked God that Emma had not read John Stuart Mill’s autobiography – the dullest book assigned in an English class in the history of eastern boarding schools – because then she would have forced Laurel to begin studying classical languages at age 3. It would have turned her into an emotional dwarf like poor John Stuart Mill. who was depressed and unable to relate to anyone.

 Laurel may have been a well-bred poodle, who won the Latin Prize every year, but she was also a troublesome poodle: she had just been kicked out of her prestigious boarding school for being caught naked in a boy’s room with, obviously, a boy.

“And we weren’t even having sex!  It was just hot so we took our clothes off,” Laurel said indignantly.

“You’ve got to keep your clothes on now,” Emma snapped.

Laurel didn’t know about that.  She would wear whatever scanty outfit she felt like at this private day school in Illinois.  But now she sat down and flipped open her Latin book.  Mrs. B., the kind, elderly teacher, called on them one by one to translate lines from Ovid’s version of the Apollo and Daphne myth in Metamorphoses. 

At first Laurel was annoyed by a smart, fierce girl named Daphne who, instead of stumbling as she read the Latin aloud, actually read the lines in dactylic hexameters. It was just possible that the fierce girl would be her first new friend.

Then they pointed out all the jokes. Or were they jokes?  When Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne, he huffs and puffs, out of shape, while she runs much faster..

Daphne said, “I like the the silly repetition of Apollo’s use of the vocative and imperative: ‘Daughter of Peneus,  I pray,  Wait!’ and then a few lines later he varies the phrase with, ‘  Nymph, wait!”

Laurel added,”And it’s very funny when he goes on to say,  ‘I beg you, run more slowly and curb your flight, then I myself will chase you more slowly.”

“You both make good points,” said Mrs. B.  “And your interpretation of the text is splendid. Ovid is flexible, the most flexible and accomplished of poets. But his version of Apollo and Daphne is problematic.  Is it sunny and comical?  Or is it a tense, dramatic commentary on a woman’s resistance to sexual violence?”

“Daphne said, “Well, Cupid does shoot Apollo with an arrow of love and Daphne with an arrow of repulsion. But she is a mess, and I’ll bet she stinks, too, from all that running. And the wreath holds her rumpled hair ‘without law.’  That sounds unattractive. As for Apollo, he’s sweating and out-of-shape, struggling to keep up with her, so it is funny. “

“Hey, one thing I noticed,” Laurel said, “is that Daphne is turned into a laurel tree, so Daphne over there (she nodded at her competitor) is like the nymph, and I’m Laurel, the tree, so we’re doppelgängers.”

Daphne grudgingly laughed.  She’d hoped they’d be pitiless rivals, but now she, too, realized they’d be friends.  She said, “Poor Daphne!  What did it feel like to be turned into a tree?”

The bell rang, and the two best students left together.

There was, however, a setback in their friendship a few weeks later. One day, Daphne came out of the restroom into the dark hall and almost collided with Laurel, who was leaning against a locker making out with someone Laurel thought might be Kevin. 

“Jesus, it’s not like the whole school can’t see you,” said Daphne.

“Who cares?” Laurel asked.

“Your shirt is unbuttoned.”

Laurel silently took off her shirt and stood there in her camisole. 

“Do you want to be a sex object?” Daphne was appalled, though her own mother was a radical hipster feminist who encouraged her to bring home  boyfriends and would have considered Laurel’s behavior healthy. 

Laurel snorted.  “I am a sex object.”

Then the boy unbuttoned his shirt. Daphne dropped some books in her locker and stormed off to class,.

And then the principal came out of his office and told Laurel to put her shirt on.

Later Laurel apologized to Daphne for making her uncomfortable.  “My mother told me to keep my clothes on.  It’s kind of a thing.”

“Like a trope?  Like a pagan custom?”

“Mainly it’s a way to get kicked out of school.” 

“In that case, we should all take our clothes off.”

“Never mind,” said Laurel.  “This is one of those schools that expels no one.”

And then a boy walked past, leering at Laurel.  She gave him the finger.

“I’m many things,” she told Daphne. “But I refuse to be the school slut.”

An Excerpt from “The Ovidians,” My Novella

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Hello, Readers!  I have been busy rereading my novella, The Ovidians, and have decided to post this excerpt because some of you might be interested in the history and life-styles of leftist hipsters in the late 2oth century. And the characters are not based on actual people, but rather on ideas and events I noted while growing up on the periphery of “the Movement.”

From The Ovidians:  “Anti-Mass & Movable Type”

Writing has never been my No. 1 priority.  If I hadn’t borrowed one of my mother’s leather notebooks, I would never have written a word. If she hadn’t made a scene, I might have returned the notebook.  I told her I liked the pretty cover.   “You can get a pretty notebook at K-Mart,” she yelled.

There was a lot of yelling at our house. 

I often wonder if I’d have made it out of the darkness without the help of Tasha, my best friend Daphne Rochester’s mother.  Tasha took me in when Emma (my terrifying mother) dumped me on the porch while I was having a psychotic break.  I still feel the grief – desertion.

Tasha’s tall, narrow house was very different from our house.  It was furnished with shabby antiques (“heirlooms,” Daphne said), newspapers and magazines everywhere,  yellow legal pads covered with Tasha’s notes, and the scent of loaves of fresh-baked bread wafted from the kitchen.  But best of all, the house was always full of people: Democrats working for McGovern, underground newspaper writers, Women’s Center volunteers, NUC types – all the radicals. 

Tasha was a poet, a stay-at-home mom, and the managing editor of The Weekly Toke, an underground newspaper.  She had a printing press in the basement.  Movable type – pre-Xerox machine.  Daphne grumbled, “I am not a radical,” but helped out when Tasha fell behind and none of her colleagues picked up the slack.  Tasha also was kind enough to take in waifs and street people (“There’s room”), and allowed acquaintances to hold political meetings in the living room.

Daphne despised The Weekly Toke (“They’re amateurs!”) but I was awed and entertained.   It was eclectic and messy: radical editorials on the Industrial-Military complex; political cartoons; reviews of Bergman films; and various articles on current events.

There were meetings at the house every day, but Tasha rarely attended.  In fact she seldom left the kitchen, where she sat all day writing. During the worst moments of my illness, I cowered in a basket chair, but felt vaguely comforted by Tasha’s presence. She offered me slices of of homemade whole wheat bread and cookies  I remember the offerings mainly because I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t speaking, either.

Daphne was at school all day while I sat around being ill. When Daphne got home, she banged into the house and ran straight up the stairs to the attic. That was her bedroom, where she worked, read, and slept, and where I did, too, until I started going downstairs to the kitchen. The writers at The Weekly Toke teased Daphne about being Jane Eyre in the attic.

She corrected them. “It’s not Jane Eyre in the attic. It’s her boyfriend Mr. Rochester’s mad wife. If I’m anybody, I’m Mrs. Rochester’s mad daughter.”

I stayed in the background, dazed and slow. Psychiatry has improved over the years, but the pills were like trucks then.  The heavy dosage was supposed to calm you down.  Knocked out was more like it.  When I was awake, I could barely understand what anyone was saying.  And though there was talk therapy, I was not in a state to benefit from it.

It went on like this for two weeks.  Then Daphne decided to do something about it, “because the medical experts have failed you.” She consulted medical texts and decided to lower the dosage.  “Take half from now on. Get it?  You’re practically overdosing.”

Half a pill allowed me to stay up a few hours a day.  I watched Dark Shadows.  I listened to the Grateful Dead.  I reread Wuthering Heights.

On the fourth day, I went downstairs to get a glass of orange juice.  I sat in the kitchen in a sentient trance while the radicals argued in the living room.  And somehow everything I’d overheard while sitting beside Tasha in the kitchen kicked in and made sense.

They were talking about whether or not to publish Anti-Mass, an anarchist pamphlet, which had been published in undergound papers all over the country.

“You know, it might be too radical,” Tasha said cautiously.  “A lot of our readers are middle-class.”

“And that’s why we should publish it in the paper.  We should assert who we are,” argued Valerie, the angriest of the writers.

“Is that who we are?” asked Harry, one of the editors.

“If not, what are we doing?” Valerie screamed.

“Everything.  Politics. Peace. Human rights.”  Tasha’s voice got softer and softer.

“I’m resigning if we don’t publish it,” Valerie said.

Nobody said anything.  If only she would, I heard them thinking.  Yup. I heard voices.

Basically, Anti-Mass terrified me.  It insisted that you should live in cells (small groups, possibly political collectives) and withdraw from mass culture, not talk on the phone, and beware of agents!  There was already so much paranoia at The Weekly Toke; they were constantly worrying about agents. But Tasha did not take part in the arguments and withdrew gracefully:  “I have some writing to do.”

I picked up the Anti-Mass pamphlet and read it in the attic.  It shattered my dreams of a future as a happily married woman living in the suburbs. I threw it in the wastebasket.

And then Daphne came home, and we did our homework together.  Or rather, she did hers, and I did mine selectively, only Latin, my favorite subject.

After an hour of blissful translation, I asked Daphne, “Is Mrs. B. still letting us read Ovid’s Amores for sinful extra credit?”

Daphne cracked up.  At our private school we were known as the Ovidians, though nobody else quite knew who Ovid was.  Mrs. B., the Latin teacher, allowed us to read Ovid’s poems between units on Horace and Virgil. 

And we thought it was funny that we were named Daphne and Laurel, and that we were best friends.  In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the god Apollo falls in love with Daphne, a nymph who runs away from him and prays to her father the river god to save her. Fortunately Apollo was a slow runner, begging her to slow down, and Daphne metamorphosed into a laurel tree before he caught up. So modern-day Daphne was the nymph, and I was the laurel tree.  It seemed to make sense then.

I can’t explain it now, though. 

On Break:  The End of Thornfield Hall? 

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In my first post at Thornfield Hall in 2018, I wrote:

“Every writer reaches a stage in her career when he or she is fatigued or blocked.  She sits at an untidy desk and writes on an ugly gray computer.  For fun, she reviews small-press books nobody else will touch (her friend the literary magazine editor went to school with the small-press editor).

“And she has a blog, of course.  But she is tired of it.

“What to do next?

“I am experimenting with a new kind of writing (for me): “journaling” about bookish topics in a notebook.  After years of typing blog posts directly on a typewriter or computer, drafting by hand feels innovative.”

And here I am, eight years later, in a similar mood.

I have written with delight about books at this blog.  I have reveiwed and journaled about classics, out-of-print middlebrow books, collections of essays, science fiction, fantasy, biographies, and occasional new books. 

But my reading has changed, and I have changed. I still love the classics, but as far as new books go, I prefer non-fiction to fiction. (There are exceptions.)  Perhaps novels and short stories are not as polished as they used to be – I see the difference –  because  the electronic world has influenced literary style. If you compare novels written on a computer with those written by hand or on typewriters, you will see a difference. Some will prefer one, some another.

Anyway, I’ll post a notification if I decide (a) to return to Thornfield Hall or (b) begin a  new blog.

God bless! Thanks for reading! 

My Week of Two Time-Lines:  Margaret Kennedy’s “The Wild Swan”

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“And what’s her play like?” “Lousy. Period stuff. Crinolines.”

What’s happening, you may ask.  Why hasn’t Kat posted?  Is she wallowing in Robert Coover’s meta-fiction, or laughing over Betty MacDonald’s Onions in the Stew, trying to figure out which book is meta-, and which is humor – or are both both? 

Well, Onions in the Stew is on my bedside table. But here’s some more good news! I just read Margaret Kennedy’s amusing out-of-print novel The Wild Swan (1957), and enjoyed it very much. 

And I was astonished by its resemblance to Margaret Irwin’s Still She Wished for Company (1924), which I posted about here.  It’s obvious that Kennedy borrowed the two time-lines from Irwin’s best-seller, which cuts back and forth between the 20th and the 18th century. The Wild Swan is set mainly in the 20th century, with jaunts to the 19th.

The modern scenes are the most vivid. Roy, a cynical, good-natured young man who works in the scripts department of a movie company, arrives in Upcott village to research background and scout shots for a film about a neglected Victorian spinster poet.

When Roy tells his great-aunt May, a retired teacher in Upcott, about the film, she says, bemused, “I never heard anything so ridiculous.” In her view, a revival of Dorothea Harding’s work and reputation is absurd and unnecessary. Dorothea had been a popular writer of “very moral romances with historical or classical settings.” Her present reputation was based on some poetry discovered after her death.

Meanwhile, in the 19th century, Dorothea is depicted as an Emily Bronte-ish young woman who goes for long walks in bad weather and writes in a little shed by the river. Like the three Bronte sisters, Dorothea, her older sister, Mary, and cousin Effie, created their own fictional world as children and wrote stories about the dashing male characters they invented. 

Of course marriage shakes up the family. When Mary gets married, Dorothea must take on her role of housekeeper and caregiver of her fussy father, because there is no one else to do it. She also raises her mad, savage, mentally challenged younger sister, Katy, whom everyone else wanted to clap in an asylum. And on the side, Dorothea writes historical romances to support the household as the family funds decrease.

Kennedy’s depiction of a woman writer who supports the family by writing pop genre novels is empathetic. Like Dorothea, Kennedy knew what it was like to be famous: her novel The Constant Nymph became a best-seller, and she adapted it as a play. But Kennedy was a respected literary writer. There’s a there-but-for-the-grace of God feeling about her portrait of Dorothea. Kennedy graduated from Somerville, Oxford, in 1915, while Dorothea was an autodidact, smothered by Victorian values and female stereotypes. Ironically, Dorothea’s , books, scorned by her descendants, supported future generations of her family.

So is this a feminist novel? Well, not exactly. But there’s more beneath the surface than is at first apparent.

Margaret Kennedy’s books seem to go in and out of vogue. In the 2010s, Vintage Classics reissued some of her books, and I recommend  Together and Apart, a novel about a couple who separate.

The assignment of “brows” defeat me, but I think Kennedy’s novels are middlebrow. And The Wild Swan is a fun middlebrow read.

Out for Coffee: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Me

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“I need a cappuccino,” I muttered when I decided to take a break from reading a 19th-century American novel no one has ever heard of.  I did not take the book because the coffeehouse resembles a very dark convenience store; even if you sit by the window – actually on a platform in the window of what used to be a store  – it’s too dark to read.  

You might want to know what I am reading, though.   Have you heard of  Catharine Maria Sedgwick?  She is the kind of writer one reads in Women’s Studies, or American Studies, because her intriguing, fast-paced novels, mostly set in New England in the early 19th century, are read more for her ideas about women, class, and money than for style.  

In her fourth novel, Clarence, published in 1830, Sedgwick considers the definitions of family, wealth, and courtship. Mr. Carroll, a struggling clerk, inherits money from a miser, Mr. Flavel, after his young son, Frank, befriends Mr. Flavel at the market (it involves dropping oranges).  Later, Mr. Carroll’s daughter, Gertrude Clarence (Clarence was the real name of Mr. Flavel), claims she will never marry, and struggles to keep her head in New York.  It’s a bit like reading the novels of Edith Wharton or Conrad Richter, both Pulitzer Prize winners, only less well-written. 

Yet it is certainly well-written enough for me. I am loving it.

The following quote seems appropriate after the dark coffeehouse:

At his usual hour, Mr. Flavel retired to bed, but not to sleep – the strange and strong emotions of the morning had been soon subdued, and his subsequent reflection had convinced him they must be groundless.  These reflections were in daylight, when reason bears sway; but alone, in the stillness, darkness, and deep retirement of the night, his imagination resumed its ascendancy.

Monsters in Literature:  Catherine and Heathcliff

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Many years ago, though not that many years, I made a list of literary monsters. I scribbled it in an exquisite Japanese diary, which had nearly transparent pages, illustrated with delicate flowers. 

 Monsters are not real, I told myself – they stay on the page- and yet the list got longer.  This week I fell ill reading a Gothic novel -there’s always some virus going around – and I tossed and turned, couldn’t sleep, tried to nap in vain, sat on the couch listlessly. Finally I drank a lot of herbal tea and  recovered.

But the illness began while I was rereading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, a disturbing Gothic novel which I used to read as a romance. But I didn’t always revere Emily as I do now. When I first read Wuthering at 12 I was disappointed. I had expected Emily to be another Charlotte, and Wuthering Heights to be like Jane Eyre.

Penguin hardcover edition

Years passed. One night, when I was jittery about being alone, and stayed with a friend, one of her roommates gave me her copy of Wuthering Heights.  She pressed it on me because she considered it the greatest English novel, a novel about soulmates, about separated halves of one person, and Catherine leaves her soulmate Heathcliff because she is materialistic and wants the comforts of being a rich man’s wife.. 

I have read Wuthering many, many times. There is an unforgettable scene in which Catherine storms out of the kitchen, and locks herself in her room, furious because her husband Edgar drives away Heathcliff, her childhood friend and would-be lover, who had returned after many years away. Catherine accuses Edgar of cowardice, since he does not drive out Heathcliff himself. Instead, he sets some strong, stocky servants on him. Strong Heathcliff lopes away unscathed.

And then there is illness as metaphor. Because of the violence and the aftermath of her violent emotions, Catherine becomes ill, as tends to happen in Victorian novels.  And no one heeds her until it is almost too late, because the housekeeper does not believe her. So is the housekeeper the real monster?

Catherine and Heathcliff metamorphose into monsters.  Catherine had loved Heathcliff, with whom she grew up, but deserted him to marry rich, soft Edgar Linton. Heathcliff disappears, and returns many years later, never saying where he’d been.  But Heathcliff revenges himself on Edgar and Catherine by marrying, then torturing, Cathy’s sister-in-law, Isabella.  The revenge continues after Catherine’s death.  Yet Heathcliff is truly in hell.  At one point, he digs up Catherine’s grave.  Eerily, she has not discomposed.

There are many monsters in Wuthering Heights. The second generation, however, has a chance of redemption..

So what is a monster? Is it Frankenstein’s monster? Is it a psychological state? The word is derived from the Latin monstrum, which means “a divine omen indicating misfortune, an evil omen, a portent.”

It can also mean “monstrous man” (monstrum hominis) or “monstrous woman” (monstrum mulieris). And in Wuthering Heights, the monsters are human.

The gradual estrangement of Catherine and Heathcliff triggers monstrous behavior. But the arc of their story begins far back in the past.

A Charming Forgotten Classic:  Margaret Irwin’s “Still She Wished for Company”

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I wonder why it has taken me so long to find a copy of Margaret Irwin’s stunning historical novel, Still She Wished for Company (1924). I have never seen this cross-genre book at an American bookstore or library, and learned about it from a box of Penguin  postcards: one of the cards shows the cover of the old orange Penguin paperback edition.

This uncannily weird historical novel is laced with fantasy and elements of Gothic novels. There is gentle time travel, a decadent man’s eerie practice of mesmerism, and pop-up references to Jane Austen’s pragmatic love in Sense and Sensibility.  Many of the Gothic scenes are reminiscent of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories, Ellen Wood’s sensation novels, and Daphne du Maurier’s weird short stories.

At the center of the novel are two young women of different centuries.  Juliana is a bored young woman of leisure in the 18th century, who lives with her family on the elegant Chidleigh estate. Jan ilves in the 20th century in London, where she works at a job she hates in order to support her mother and sister. She is getting ready to take a long vacation in the countryside, near Chidleigh.

There is a link between the two heroines, who live briefly in the same place in different centuries. Juliana’s charming, decadent older brother, Lucien, uses techniques of mesmerism and hypnotism to make Juliana a conduit of communication to Jan. (The conduit doesn’t work very well.)   This isn’t a random use of magic:  Lucien has been in love with Jan for years.  It started with a series of dreams about Jan when he was a boy.

 What does happen because of Lucien’s magic is that Juliana and Jan find themselves walking into the past and/or future.  One day Juliana walks down the drive and wonders why the trees and flowers seen to have changed: she doesn’t recognize the flowers. And she is confused to see Jan, a woman in a strange frock coat, chatting with a casual couple oddly dressed (in shorts) who act as though they own the place. Jan asks them permission to wander on the estate. 

Jan only vaguely remembers her dreams of Lucien. Near the beginning of the novel, before we know anything about Lucien, she has a brief unexplained meeting with him.  Jan is huddled in a doorway during a rainstorm in Soho when Lucien appears suddenly. She finds him attractive, but threateningly intense, and is put off by his black cloak.  When he leaves to find her a taxi – and she doesn’t want to be picked up by a stranger – she instinctively walks away.  She found him almost brutal, as she tells her sister when she gets home.  But she did admire his confidence:  he didn’t care what anyone thought of him.

In another scene in the future, Juliana looks over Jan’s shoulder and sees that she is reading Juliana’s own diary, which is now dusty and crumpled.  And Jan has similar experiences when she walks on the drive, and wonders why it looks so different. Is she hallucinating? On a few occasions. Julianna and Jan do see each other through the windows at Chidleigh, but they are unable to speak.  And as Lucien becomes more and more unhinged and intense with his use of mesmerism (or whatever on earth it is), he is careless of the effect on Juliana. One night, Jan appears at at the window to warn her against Lucien. 

The novel has some dark scenes but it is partly a domestic comedy. There are hilarious dinner parties and card games. And Lucien, when not practicing magic, is the life of the party. 

And Juliana’s funny journal is a scream, and it certainly helps us relate to her. Her mother gave her the journal, saying it would be appropriate for a young woman to record her meditations.  Anyone who has no idea what to write in her journal will laugh at Juliana’s attempts. She decides to copy the system from a favorite novel: she makes a time-table for herself, like Clarissa, “the peerless heroine of Mr. Richardson’s great novel.” Then she “debated with herself the next item of ‘One Hour to visit the neighboring poor,’ to give them brief instructions and good books. There were no neighboring poor at Chidleigh.” That’s a problem!

Irwin is known for her historical novels, especially a trilogy about Queen Bess, but I wish she had written more about Jan in London in the 1920s in this one.

Nevertheless, this is such a marvelous read that I have put it on my “reread” shelf.  And this is the highest honor for a book.

Don’t Burn Down the Library of Alexandria

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The Library of Alexandria

I recently considered enrolling in a Ph.D. program in classics.  It is not, however, the optimal time to study classics. 

The future of classics is in jeopardy, Many colleges have eliminated their language departments. And this week one university has recommended the cancellation of the B.A. classics major, due to low enrollment.

Classics has never been about the numbers. The numbers are always low, and have been for decades. But there is pleasure and urgency in reading classics: Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and history shaped the Western canon and Western culture.

And we don’t want to burn down the Library of Alexandria, do we?

I looked at the jeopardized department’s website. Alas, it makes a case against its own department. There may be seven full-time professors- the website is such a jumble that I challenge you to sort them out – but there is a huge subgroup of affiliated faculty, with primary appointments in Biblical Studies (how many New Testament Greek classes do you need?), something called The Teaching Center, and Women’s studies.

Even I wonder why so many people are needed to teach so few students. But it may be the fault of the confused presentation wrought by the disorganized website: Other classics departments manage to separate the lists of professors and affiliate professors.

Visiting the website was a bit like reluctantly attending a retro-hippie-classicist’s rock festival, in which the late Jim Morrison would reappear to sing Catullus’s lyrics to the tune of “Light My Fire,” while Carly Simon would sing her own versions of Sappho’s lyric poetry and Pindar’s odes.

But “Where are the porta-potties?” That is always the question.

I sincerely hope, however, that the Deans, the professors, the students, the alumni, and rich donors organize to preserve the B.A. major in classics.

Mrs. Gaskell, Classics, and Me

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Mrs. Gaskell is in the canon now, but that wasn’t always the case.  Years ago, on a visit to my boyfriend’s parents, I was reading her unfinished novel, Wives and Daughters, which I’d bought at a university bookstore.

And then Somebody’s Boyfriend (I can’t remember to whom he belonged) mocked Mrs. Gaskell.

“What are you reading?” 

I looked over my glasses.  “It’s a rediscovered classic by Mrs. Gaskell, a Victorian writer.”

“Gotta be careful of those rediscovered writers.”  He thought it was a scream that anyone would read Mrs. Gaskell.  “It’s a con to sell books.”

I said coolly. “It’s a great book. Want to look at it?”

He did not take up this challenge.  He thought it was too, too funny.

This is the kind of interaction women used to have with men about women’s literature. The professors (mostly male then) were vague about women writers. Occasionally they’d teach Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. It was in Women’s Studies classes that you readSusanna Rowson, Kate Chopin, Tillie Olsen, and Dorothy Richardson.

I am a great fan of the liberal arts. I graduated with honors in School of Letters (a major long ago eliminated by the university), with an emphasis on classical languages.  I was so attuned to Latin that I won the Latin Prize.  But it’s when you start dreaming in Latin that you realize you’ve been enchanted by Roman magic.

And then I went to graduate school to get my M.A. in classics, a mystic, if rigorous experience.  I was elated by the strange sound and sense of lucid, mysterious Greek tragedy but I relate more to the exquisite Rpman poetry. In graduate school, I taught first-year Latin and Virgil as a T.A., then worked for a year as a Visiting Lecturer.

How can I explain the enchantment of the classics? In T. S. Eliot’s brilliant essay, “What Is a Classic?”, he vigorously claims Virgil’s Aeneid is the only classic in the Western canon. He believes the Latin language was at the height of maturity in the first century BCE, and Roman civilization at its apex during Augustus’s reign. 

And so I was devastated to read in a newspaper that the state university is considering cutting majors in six low- enrollment programs: classical languages, Italian, Russian, women’s studies, African-American studies, and applied physics.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. The university has hung on to classics for years, even when some eastern colleges eliminated it.

We don’t believe in signs in the yard, but I may be the first on the block with a SAVE THE LIBERAL ARTS sign.

To celebrate and promote the endangered classics, I am posting a link below to an essay I wrote in 2022 about Ovid’s two poems about abortion (Amores).  These are, to my knowledge, the first poems about abortion. 

https://thornfieldhall.blog/ovid-on-his-mistresss-abortion-2/