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A Miscellany of Book Reviews in and out of Genre...

Cross-comparing Claire Clairmont's journals and letters with Mary Shelley's letters and Byron's journal and letters, at least up to the terrible events of 1822. It's frustrating because I need Shelley's letters and journal, which I will seek when I go back east later this month; not to be had here in California, at least not that I can find, maybe old bookstores back there will reveal a copy. Shelley is the anchor-point, for all these remarkable people.

But there are fascinating discoveries to be made, even so, especially for the reader who was a teen and young adult during the throes of the 'sixties' (which actually were the early seventies) when the winds of change were supposedly blowing. Well, Mary, Claire, Shelley, and to some extent Byron were very much aware of their own winds of change. (Though Byron appears to have become more conservative as the others reinvented themselves.) One marvels at the boggling innocence of these teenagers setting out to discover the delights of the road just as Napoleon's horrible wars were ending--Waterloo yet to come--without realizing the human cost. No, they were seeking poetry, renewal, human greatness. At least Shelley was; Mary is harder to read, and Clair paid lipservice to the ideals, but she really wanted to be with a famous guy.

The price of fame haunts them all, as they age--those who live. Shelley and Byron die young, prisoned forever in romantic memory (Shelley's image so whitewashed and retrofitted even the drawings of his were changed); the women have to struggle with the fallout, Claire to be a governess for most of the rest of a long life (and her travels are fascinating) Mary to write anonymously, keeping her lip buttoned so her one remaining son is not denied his heritage by a miserable old relative who seems to live forever; she is rejected by her own society, and betrayed by her closest friend who also wanted fame above all. What they tried to do, how they did it, what they saw, experienced, how they reacted, the price, the discoveries, the memories, are endlessly fascinating.

Previous Reads...

March 2000 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman

The separate spheres view of life in the 18th century in particular was probably necessary in order to shift perceptions of what was important to dig out of attics and archives and study. The focus has usually been the eternal rehashings of king/prime minister/ Parliamentiary carousels, or economic development (Marxist scholars). Until Braudel and his French quantifiers started looking at cemetery stones and baptismal records and counting up demographics, no one paid much attention to what the female half of the population was doing. Then feminist scholars got into the act, making 'women's work' a separate-but-equal sphere, a little like a Le Guin novel.

But, while I've enjoyed much of the endeavors of more recent female scholars (what I get hold of, which I know is a minescule portion of What's Out There), the separate spheres concept made me increasingly impatient. The implication is that what women did was as important as men, it just wasn't leading governments, or considered important. Okay, sure, I'm with you. But the concept itself sort of hangs there, forcing an artificial view on readers just as the old style of history did, in which women weren't mentioned much at all, unless they were queens or famous courtesans. The idea being that women carried on separate lives largely invisible to men. When one reads letters of both men and women of the 1700s, just for example, one discovers just how much influences was going both ways, despite the forms.

Sidestep. One of the things that I've been wondering about for years was the shift in Whig politics during the seventies and eights; these wealthy landowners who favored the Revolution to the extent of adopting the Colonists' colors of buff and blue. Something changed there, and it eluded me when I read contemporary accounts--and later histories. ADDED LATER: I thnk some of the answer lies in Horry Walpole's letters.

Well, another side quest has been my effort to find a good account of the inmates of Devonshire House. I hate those peeking-through-the window salacious bios that just go on and on about who was sleeping with whom. So I regarded Amanda Foreman's bio of Georgiana Spencer with a skeptical eye, even after it won some award or other. But I finally thought what the heck, and was I glad I did. Bingo. Not only did she do a decent job with their lives (it connects up with other good stuff about Fox and Pitt and the Lennoxes, etc, that I';ve read over the years) but she stepped out of the 'spheres' thing to =finally= connect the Whig changes.

I don't think male scholars have seen how the hostesses changed politics at the times. There'd always been something missing, and this book seems to make the connection at last. The dinners, the Whig 'uniform'--all that was her idea. She made the Whigs popular by combining their political ideas with fashion. Nobody I've read has seen that! And what a lethal combo!

So then I get Amada Vickery's THE GENTLEMAN'S DAUGHTER, and whoop, there she is, dumping the spheres concept out the window in order to examine the lives of country gentry in the midlands. Hotcha. I love it when the reading gets exciting.

(Inbetween I'm working through Goldsmith's surprisingly engaging THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. The family goes through Jobian sufferings, but the sly, humorous tone with which Goldsmith describes their doings keeps it a comic novel. Frex, when the family gets lots of extra relatives showing up for free meals, if the Vicar doesn't want a return visit, he loans them something... I can also see how some of the humor utterly bypassed the earnest fifteen year old Fanny Burney, who read it as a 'new novel'.)

November 1999: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Reading the 18th Century novel is very much like riding a rambunctious horse. Actually, bowling along in a carriage; 100 years later, Eliot and the great Victorian novelists who were living with the noisy, fast, smoke-gouting trains would write with nostalgia of the grace and quietude and elegance of carriage travel. But the 17th Century novel depicts it as it more likely was, with is heat, travel-sickness from the jolts, and frequent breakdowns and overturns.

Matthew Bramble, his spinster sister, and his well-bred niece and nephew, and their servants, set out from Wales to travel all over England and Scotland. Along the way they encounter many odd characters, and as they write home to friends about their adventures, the reader gets an agreeable picture of the action from several points-of-view. Funniest are the spinster sister's letters, with their Freudrian misspellings, and the even more unintentionally bawdy and scatological gaspers of Ms. Jenkins, her maid.

Duels that go awry, savage essays on hypocrisy in high society and about how fast cities change and become unrecognizable (and about the taste for speed with which city drivers carron their vehicles through London streets), about filthy germ-spreading habits in supposedly healthful spas, will whipsaw the reader between remote concerns and contemporary reactions. Smollett also writes himself into the story, as do 18th Century authors, and he doesn't forget to villify current writers, politicians, and other leaders against whom he has a grudge-- and likewise to drape in flattering terms and oblique names his friends.

The group finds one Humphrey Clinker, an earnest young man with a religious bent. When he first drives for the family, his butt is hanging out of his rags, and the maid comments that she rather likes the sight. At the end, he turns out to be Bramble's long lost natural son, there are three weddings, and everyone is happy-- with some very odd marriage customs described.

It's a deliciously fun novel, a vivid picture of England and Scotland at the time, and an excellent insight into how the times were changing toward modernity even then. Smollet's interests range between a vast and fascinating number of subjects: marriage customs, courting, medical technology (or lack of same); politics; the roads; the history of language (a good bit is when two characters are discussing how the words in Shakespear's plays have changed meaning); food; the strange justice system; education; and, of course, the dangers of travel.

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