THE THORNFIELD HALL NEWSLETTER

Summer 2024, Issue 1

The Podcast Debacle

“We have 2,000 books. Let’s start a podcast,” I said.

It was 90 degrees, I had drunk three Diet Cokes, and was over-caffeinated. It’s like the pollen count, only it’s soda-related. I’m not a fan of podcasts, but the blog has a podcast feature, you see. And anyone can make a podcast, yes? My husband was in the middle of a Simenon, and absent-mindedly said, “Yeah,” and when I said, “Let’s call it 2,000 Books,” he absent-mindedly repeated, “Yeah.” He had not heard a word I said! As a wife, I know these things.

And so I found the newsletter feature.

The Thornfield Hall Newsletter may appear bimonthly.

A Summer Idyll

Every year I reread Dorothy Van Doren’s The Country Wife (1950), a collection of charming essays detailing her summers on a farm in Connecticut.. Dorothy Van Doren was a journalist, novelist, and an editor at The Nation; and her husband, Mark Van Doren, was an English professor, writer, novelist, and critic. Both are virtually forgotten today.

The book is not about their lives as writers. It is about living in the country. Every year they spent four months with their two sons at the farm in Connecticut. Van Doren has a delightful sense of humor about the idyll of country life, countered by scratches form berry-picking and the odious ritual of canning vegetables.

The problems begin before they leave New York. Mark does all the packing himself. He crams four suitcases into the car with tennis rackets, books, records, typewriters, and other paraphernalia. But a few items are jolted loose during the drive, and Dorothy observes that, though the suitcases are stable., “The typewriter table, however, wedged on its side above the piles of books, has moved slightly and one of the legs is threatening to pierce my ear to my brain.” And then of course there is a flat tire. A typical family outing!

At the farm her husband pursues his hobby of carpentry from dawn to dusk. One day he drafts her to assist him in building book shelves. Soon she is covered with sawdust and varnish. She writes, “I am sick and tired shelves. I wish shelves had never been invented. Much better to put books on the floor, or for that matter, who wants books? We’ve got thousands of books and hundreds of shelves and – how in heaven’s name did sawdust get inside my shirt around my waist?”

Fans of Gladys Taber and Betty MacDonald will enjoy this book. Dorothy Van Doren is not laugh-out-loud funny , but her gentle humor is soothing and delightful. Disappointingly, her essays fit the template of the ‘40s and ‘50s women’s memoir. She writes beautifully but is very modest, and presents herself as a harried but affectionate wife and mother, never mentioning her job. Her books may be too quiet for modern times, but her voice is wry and vigorous, and it is a shame that The Country Wife is out of print. There is a sequel, The Professor and I. .

The Least Famous Bronte

Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey is a quiet novel, but the first part of The Tenant of Wildfell is practically silent. The second part of the book flames into Gothic nerves and passion, but the farmer Gilbert Markham’s narrative about falling in love with Helen Graham, a mysterious artist who moves with her young son into Wildfell Hall, is stilted and strained: one might conclude that Anne can’t write men. What she can write is male monsters like Helen’s alcoholic husband, Mr. Huntingdon.

But as soon as I got to Helen’s diary, t was hooked. Helen made a bad decision when she was young by marrying a handsome alcoholic, without understanding the signs of his addiction. She has to work incessantly to protect their son from his influence. She also avoids the grossness of Huntingdon’s decadent friends. He will not divorce her, though he is having an affair with a woman who is as loose and hard-drinking as he is.

The diary is about voice, voice, and voice. Helen is a strong woman and a fierce mother who teaches herself to paint so that she can run away with her son and make a living as a painter. Although the language is plain, we recognize a parallel between Helen’s vigor and moral sense and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. Critics point stress the similarities to Emily’s Wuthering Heights, but I do not see them. Emily Bronte is a poet, Anne is a good storyteller. I do agree that the initials are clever: Helen’s house, Wildfell Hall, has the same initials as Emily’s Wuthering Heights. A sisterly joke?

Am absolutely loving this and am lost in it for hours at a time.