The Land of Nowhere

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho. I think I had gotten myself saturated with genre romance by the time I got this one. It was good at being another one of these, but I don't know that I have much more to say about it.

The First Mrs. Mollivar, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. I've previously written about Edith Ayrton's excellent and underappreciated novel The Call, based on her family's experience in the suffrage movement, about a young woman scientist balancing research, activism, and romance in her life. The First Mrs. Mollivar is the only other one of her books available as an e-book (most of them are in the public domain but haven't been digitized). Like The Call, one of the major themes here is the challenge of an independent-minded woman trying to make the necessary compromises in a relationship while retaining her spirit.

The thing about reviewing this book in the modern day is that the first thing one has to say is that Daphne Du Maurier did this premise better in Rebecca. But The First Mrs. Mollivar is from 1904, and apart from being about a newlywed who finds her husband's house to be haunted by the spirit of his first wife, it's very different. Valeria, the protagonist, is not an ingenue, but an older working woman, the underpaid, overworked secrectary of a Charitable Organization. At the start of the book her job, not to mention her responsiblities to her motherless teenage niece, has driven her pretty much to burnout, and so it's not so surprising that when she runs across an old sweetheart, she accepts his proposal because she would like to have someone to look after her for once. Unfortunately, this marriage turns out to be a terrible idea as Tom Mollivar, while well-meaning, is incredibly stodgy and conservative (he thinks that George Eliot is inappropriate reading for a Sunday), and Valeria hates the house that he inherited from his ex-wife, and feels obligated to retain along with the servants. Valeria does her best to take this all in good humor -- her internal narrative really gives energy to the story. Here's a bit of her wit, when her fiancé insists that she can't visit him unchaperoned before the wedding:

I should require an extremely antiquated chaperon.

"Young maids have old maids at their backs to blight 'em
And old maids have older maids and so ad infinitum."

What a dreadful thing to be the final chaperon -- the parasite of propriety!

I'm also a fan of the teenage engineering student who has a crush on Valeria, and who steals the scene every times he appears.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte. I saw this mentioned somewhere and on an impulse picked it up from Gutenberg. Only afterwards did I realize that the Gutenberg version is an "expurgated" version -- in the second edition, after Anne's death, Charlotte Bronte edited out the bits with the most inappropriate behavior, and most later editions -- So I would recommend tracking down either the original 1848 edition (available on Wikisource, though I'm not sure where to get an ebook) or a modern unabridged version based on the 1848 edition. Unfortunately I did not do this myself and haven't had the patience to go back and compare all the changed bits!

But anyway I am glad I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, it was extremely readable and compelling, and has given me many thoughts. I do now feel like Dude Watching With the Brontes misses the mark a bit -- in Tenant the most dangerous men are the charming, high-spirited ones, and brooding is potentially a good sign that the man in question has gone sober and/or found a conscience, and may yet reform. And Gabriel Markham, our narrator and endgame love interest, definitely becomes more brooding over the course of the story!

Like any Bronte book, the strength of this is in the spirit and character of the heroine, and Helen is pretty great! Even if it is a bit disappointing, that, after having been introduced as Badass Artist Single Mom, she turns out to be pretty much a paragon of Victorian morality apart from having made a bad choice of husband and then leaving him. But she's so well characterized, and keeps on getting to be badass as she clings to her inner moral compass, that it never becomes Too Much.

Confounding Oaths, Alexis Hall. Another romance narrated by Puck! I have only just started this, and I've written a lot already, so I will leave it for next week.

The Call, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. Re-read, so I knew what was coming.

Ursula Winfield is the sort of character who some might be inclined to call a Mary Sue: she is a brilliant chemist despite having left college to research full-time in her home lab, from an upper-class family and with enough of an inheritance in her own name that she doesn't have to worry about being disowned, a natural public speaker, and good-looking in every respect except that she's not blonde and has better things to worry about than her appearance. I'm not so inclined: I adored Vesper Holly growing up, and Ursula is a more human, flawed, and rounded character -- if "rounded" is the right word for someone who throws herself headfirst at everything she cares about -- anyway, Ursula is the sort of protagonist that I'd expect to see in a Courtney Milan novel or similar, and it's neat to see a version of it written in the early 19th century.

At the start of the book, she probably thinks the biggest problem she has in life is that she has to leave her lab to chaperone her flirtatious mother on outings. But really, her main problems are loneliness and living the sexist society of pre-WWI England.

Suffragette stories, especially British ones, resonate now because the basic themes of moderation vs. militancy, respectability politics, appeals to reason vs. emotion, how people become radicalized, are still very relevant to modern social justice movements. But it's also comforting to know that the suffrage struggle at least had a happy ending (though I expect Ursula to get back on the social justice warpath once WWI ends and she realizes that womens' suffrage does not magically make everything better).

I have more to say about this novel, but I'll leave it for later as it's getting to be bedtime.