Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Writing

This is by George Clausen (1852-1944) , an English artist of Danish extraction. You can see many more of his paintings here.

The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I missed out on Lucy Maud Montgomery when I was a child, but happily discovered her a few years ago and gobbled up a number of her novels with great delight. I even wrote a short biography of her for Shiny. But I hadn't encountered this, which is actually one of the few novels she wrote for adults. I read about it recently on someone's blog and knew I had to read it. 

The Blue Castle is the story of Valancy Stirling, who is 29 and living with her controlling mother and first cousin, in a dull house in a small town. Everyone in her large extended family looks down on Valancy and makes her life miserable. She has been relegated to 'hopeless old maidenhood', and more than one of her appalling uncles never ceases to make hurtful jokes about the fact. But, despite her unremarkable appearance and shrinking manner

Valancy herself had never relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed little hope that Romance would come her way yet - never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine, and unsought by any man.

But Valancy, 'so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams'. For she has created for herself a beautiful imaginary place to which she can retreat in secret - the Blue Castle. Here she lives in comfort and luxury with her adoring lover, whose appearance and character have naturally changed over the years since she first dreamed him up more than half a lifetime ago. Her only comfort apart from this is the books she gets from the library by one John Foster, who writes with exquisite perceptiveness about the natural world of which Valancy herself is so fond. 

On this miserable morning when, to her relief a family picnic has been called off due to the weather, Valancy decides to visit the local doctor, to discover once and for all the cause of the frightening pains she often suffers from in her heart. As she fears, the diagnosis is terminal - she has only a year at most to live. This news, which she does not share with the family, precipitates her into taking drastic action. She announces that she is going to move out, and to care for a young girl who is dying of TB. Cissy Gay lives with her charming but wholly disreputable father, Roaring Abel, and has been ostracised by the community because she gave birth to an illegitimate child, which sadly died in infancy.

 The family is horrified by Valancy's decision, but living with the Gays is exactly the kind of life Valancy has always craved - she enjoys the freedom, the absence of the judgmental treatment she has had all her life, and starts to change her own habits, spending some of her savings on a new, pretty dress. She also begins a friendship with Abel's friend Barney Snaith, who lives in a house on a nearby island and is disliked and feared by the town inhabitants who believe, with no evidence, that he is a criminal. But Valancy likes him very much, and when Cissy dies, instead of moving back home as the family expects, she tells Barney of her short life expectancy and asks him to marry her, even though she knows he doesn't love her. 

Life on the island is everything Valancy has ever wanted. She and Barney get along extremely well, and her health and looks start to improve immeasurably. But just as her allotted year is drawing to an end, something happens to shatter the dream of happiness she has been living, and soon she is facing a miserable return to the life she left behind. Can things possibly end happily for her?

Well, you probably can guess that there's going to be a happy ending. I was pretty sure there must be, but there were still a couple of twists I didn't see coming, and despite my optimism I found myself whizzing through the final pages hoping like mad that I was right.

I'm so happy to have discovered this novel. It gave me hours of intense pleasure. Yes, on one level you could call it an escapist fantasy, but though Montgomery writes in her usual, beautifully simple prose, and though there's more than an element of wish-fulfilment here, the novel never stretches your credulity. Valancy's anguish at her desperately unhappy home life and the miserable future that stretches ahead of her, 'a solitary little withered leaf on a wintry bough', is something that must echo the feelings of lonely single women of any era including the present, and her slow blossoming - which clearly includes, though never spelled out, her discovery of her own sexuality - is beautifully conveyed. I loved every minute and was really sorry to finish.

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Second Sight by Sally Emerson

I’m always in the market for a reprint, so when the publisher offered me this one, I was pleased to accept, despite the fact that I’d never heard of Sally Emerson. Perhaps you have, though. It turns out she is a distinguished living author, travel writer and compiler of anthologies. Her six novels appeared, to great acclaim, between 1980 and 2001, and are now being reissued as forgotten classics by Quartet Books.

Second Sight  was Emerson’s first novel, published in 1980. This is the story of fifteen-year-old Jennifer Hamilton, the only child of an academic author father and a mother who runs a successful restaurant. Sarah Hamilton is gorgeous, exuberant, adored by all, and totally amoral. The novel begins with Jennifer running down to the restaurant one late evening in search of her mother, and being met by a shocking sight:

From the top of the stairs she had an aerial view of a burly man lying between the legs of a naked woman. He leapt off, leaving Jennifer with the momentary but unforgettable sight of her mother spreadeagled, a sacrificial victim, over one of the low, obviously strong, drinks tables. The mat of public hair, the nipples, the red distorted face all jumped out at Jennifer. She gasped. So did Sarah. Sarah cascaded off the table, shouting ‘Switch out those fucking lights now.’ 

That her mother has affairs is not news to Jennifer, and clearly her father is also aware of the fact, though he manages to continue to adore his serially adulterous wife. For Jennifer, though, struggling with her own emerging sexuality, this experience is deeply upsetting and confusing. But worse is to follow. Sarah soon moves on from the unattractive middle-aged man Jennifer caught her with, and becomes involved with Paul, a beautiful young architect who has moved into a nearby flat. She has always managed to avoid emotional involvement with her string of lovers, but much to her own surprise becomes obsessively bessotted with the handsome, cold-hearted young man. Paul, however, starts to take an interest in Jennifer, who is torn between powerful attraction and horrified shame.

 All this sounds as if it might be a racy and sensational novel, but it is as far from that as could be. It’s an extraordinarily perceptive depiction of what it’s like to grow up and find oneself in a world in which sexual feelings arise and have to be dealt with. Sensitive, intelligent and thoughtful, Jennifer is deeply troubled by Paul and his cool willingness to continue to sleep with her mother while simultaneously making overt sexual advances to herself. All this was superbly done. I have to admit that there was one aspect of the novel that I found slightly less satisfying, and which in fact gives the book its title. Jennifer is a highly imaginative girl, very studious and introspective, and she's developed a fascination with two literary figures from the past: Aphra Behn, the 17th century poet and playwright, and the poet Shelley. She spends a lot of private time communing mentally with them, and eventually meets a rather curious elderly psychic who, she hopes, will set up a seance where she can contact Shelley in person. He does actually manage to conjure up a very dear friend of Jennifer's, who tragically died in an accident a couple of years earlier, and concludes that Jennifer herself has psychic abilities. All this is quite interesting in itself, but I couldn't quite see what it added to the overall direction in which the novel was going, though perhaps the fact that in the end Jennifer decides not to pursue the possibility of contacting Shelley acts as an indication of her growing maturity?

This is really just a quibble, though. Sally Emerson writes beautifully and has a wonderfully clear understanding of the way peoples' hearts and minds work. I've since read a second one of her novels which I'm going to be reviewing on Shiny soon, so watch out for that. And I look forward to reading more by this talented and fascinating author. 

Woman Reading

This very charming painting is by Louis Émile Adan (1839-1937), a French artist and illustrator.

The Deepest Grave by Harry Bingham

This is the sixth of Harry Bingham's Fiona Griffiths novels, and if you haven't read them yet you really need to get onto it as soon as possible. Fiona is without doubt one of the most fascinating characters ever to hit the world of contemporary fiction. She's clever, feisty, attractive and extremely weird. For Fiona has a rare condition known as Cotard's Syndrome, which causes its sufferers to believe that they are dead. Years of treatment have enabled her to function more or less normally in the world, but the condition is liable to flare up at any time. And this happens with a vengeance in this latest novel, when Fiona befriends Katie, a young PhD student, who is in the early stages of motor neurone disease. Something about the presence of a dying woman seems to set Fiona off. But, as always, she doesn't let it interfere with her investigative skills - for Fiona is a Detective Constable with South Wales Police.

In fact Fiona first meets Katie through a mystifying case she is called out to. A distinguished woman archeologist has been found decapitated, with three ancient spears stuck in her chest. Together with Katie, who is one of her students, she's been working on a dig at a site which has strong connections with the story of King Arthur. Indeed, both at this site and at another in north Wales, artefacts turn up which seem to prove that, far from being a mythical character as is generally believed, he actually existed. Soon a historian with links to this discovery is also murdered, and Fiona is on the hunt for someone who claims to have Arthur's actual sword. Excalibur.

 If you think all this sounds a bit too good to be true, never fear - there's a tremendous twist somewhere in the middle of the novel which takes us off in a very different, and much more contemporary direction. As always, Fiona is somewhat at odds with her employers and ends up putting herself, Katie, and even her own father and sister into grave danger. But it's not giving too much away to say that she solves the mystery and lives to fight another day.

There's so much to love here. Beautiful, tragic Katie is, as far as I can remember, the only woman friend Fiona has ever had, though she is very close to her younger sister Kay. Both of them get caught up in the dramatic events that ensue towards the end of the novel. Her father - actually not her birth father, but the man who found her and adopted her as a baby - plays an important part too. Ironically, he's a criminal, though he claims to be retired, but here he appears as a wonderfully regal and powerful figure who actually saves the day. Regular readers may hope that the secret of Fiona's origins may be closer to being revealed, but alas we have to wait for a further novel for that. The novels are set in Wales, and the wild landscapes that figure here come vividly to life. Altogether this is great fun and exciting too, and I loved every minute of it.

Girl with Book

This is Mary Lapsley Caught, painted in 1916 by John Butler Yeats (1839-1922), whose son was of course the celebrated Irish poet William Butler (W.B.) Yeats.