The Rector and The Doctor's Family - Margaret Oliphant

A couple of years ago Desperate Reader read all of Margaret Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford &, ever since, I've been collecting copies of them which have, naturally, never left the tbr shelves. Eventually, I moved the first book in the series, The Rector and The Doctor's Family, from the tbr shelves to the tbr pile & now, at long last, I've read it.

This first volume is actually a short story & a novella & it sets up all the themes for the Chronicles to come. In The Rector, we're introduced to the small town of Carlingford. The new Rector is about to arrive & everyone is curious about him. Will he be Low Church like the last Rector (who scandalised polite society by preaching to the bargemen at the canal) or will he be High Church? More importantly, will he be single? There are several unmarried ladies in Carlingford & the marital status of any new arrival is of paramount importance.

Morley Proctor has been a fellow of All Souls for the last fifteen years and, if it had been left to him, he would be a Fellow of All Souls still. However, he has an elderly mother & he feels it his duty to provide a home for her so he has accepted the living at Carlingford. Mr Proctor soon discovers that he is not suited to the duties of a parochial clergyman. His sermons are stiff, but, more importantly, he doesn't know how to talk to people. He is shy and finds it difficult to relate to his parishioners. When he is called in to comfort a dying woman, he has no idea what to say & watches in embarrassed mortification as young Mr Wentworth, the curate of St Roque's, rescues the situation with practiced ease & real feeling.

Mr Proctor is also aware that he is seen as a matrimonial prize & his mother is urging him to marry. Mr Wodehouses's two daughters, the elder known only as Miss Woodhouse, is nearly forty, mild & kind. Her young half-sister, Lucy, is beautiful & wilful, & seems to have young Mr Wentworth at her feet. Mr Proctor is dazzled by her beauty but also aware that he is as much out of his depth with Lucy as he is in every other aspect of his life in Carlingford.

As The Rector sets up the ecclesiastical themes of the series, The Doctor's Family introduces us to another part of Carlingford society. Dr Edward Rider is a newcomer who lives in a less fashionable part of town. He can't rival old Dr Marjoribanks who has an iron grip on the leaders of Carlingford society so he sets up his practice at the other end of town. Dr Rider is a dissatisfied man as he has a burden, an albatross around his neck - his slovenly, drunken brother, Fred. Fred occupies an upstairs room & is a blight on the doctor's life. He has returned from Australia, with no money & no prospects. He has also neglected to tell Edward that he left behind a wife & three children. When Fred's wife, Susan, arrives in the care of her very capable sister, Nettie, Edward's first thought is horror. To have Fred around his neck is one thing but a sister-in-law & three children to provide for is just too much.

Nettie, however, has other ideas. She has a little money of her own & has spent her life looking after Susan, who is a peevish, spiteful woman. Nettie takes lodgings near St Roque's for the family & spends her life looking after the children, trying to keep up Susan's spirits & bullying Fred into better behavior. Edward is fascinated by Nettie & begins visiting, even though it means he must also see his brother & his family. Edward falls in love with Nettie but she realises that if they married, Fred & family would have to come along as well. She knows that Edward would never be able to tolerate this. He's a dissatisfied, grouchy man who is quick to take offence & jump to the wrong conclusions. Seeing Nettie walking with Mr Wentworth sends him into a paroxysm of bad temper although he has no claim on her & no right to be upset by her friendship with another man.

Nettie is such an interesting character. She is a good young woman who is very sure of herself & bears her responsibilities with fortitude. The fact that her family are less than grateful for all she does for them bothers her not at all. She tries hard to discipline & educate the unruly children & treats Fred like a hopeless invalid which he resents. Edward is grateful that she has taken the family off his hands but also feels guilty that he doesn't do more to help. Nettie's sense of herself is bound up with her sister & her family & she only begins to resent her position when her own happiness looks threatened. Mild Miss Wodehouse had tried to warn Nettie to think of herself more, but had been ignored.

But now the time predicted by Miss Wodehouse had arrived. Nettie's personal happiness had come to be at stake and had been unhesitatingly given up. But the knowledge of that renunciation dwelt with Nettie. Not all the natural generosity of her mind - not that still stronger argument which she used so often, the mere necessity and inevitableness of the case - could blind her eyes to the fact that she had given up her own happiness; and bitter flashes of thought would intervene, notwithstanding the self-contempt and reproach with which she became aware of them.

As Desperate Reader says, these books can be compared with Trollope's Barsetshire series as the themes of Church & society are common to both. The Rector and The Doctor's Family can be compared with The Warden & Barsetshire Towers in the way they set up the themes & characters of the whole series. However, Margaret Oliphant brings her own sensibility to the stories she tells. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote the Introductions to the Virago reprints in the 1980s & these are well worth reading to get an idea of the context of the novels. The essays have been reprinted in A House of Air, a wonderful collection of essays & reviews by Penelope Fitzgerald which I'd recommend to anyone who loves reading about books.

Margaret Oliphant wrote for a living. She worked to support her husband, sons, brothers & other assorted family members. I couldn't help seeing quite a lot of Oliphant in Nettie & maybe Oliphant had experienced that selfish ingratitude from her own family that Nettie experiences. Sometimes I couldn't help having a little sympathy with Fred as Nettie bullies & bosses him but, where would Fred be without her? Although as Margaret Oliphant wrote in her Autobiography, she often wondered if she did the wrong thing propping her family up all the time. Would they have saved themselves if she hadn't been there to do it for them? I had that same thought about Nettie as Edward Rider did when he tries to persuade Nettie to leave them & marry him.  It's a question that Margaret Oliphant struggled with & maybe tried to work through in her fiction. As Penelope Fitzgerald writes,

Mrs Oliphant creates a moral atmosphere of her own - warm, rueful, based on hard experience, tolerant just where we may not expect it. One might call it the Mrs Oliphant effect. In part it is the 'uncomprehended, unexplainable impulse to take the side of the opposition' which she recognized in herself and Jane Carlyle. It is the form that her wit takes, a sympathetic relish for contradictions.

I'm looking forward to reading more of the Chronicles of Carlingford.  

There's a copy of The Rector and The Doctor's Family available at Anglophile Books. 

So I Have Thought Of You - the letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

After reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Bookshop, last weekend, I picked up this volume of her letters that had been sitting on the tbr shelves since it was published over two years ago. I’ve spent the last week equally fascinated & frustrated by it. Fascinated because I enjoyed listening to Penelope Fitzgerald’s voice. Her dry humour & wit, so much a part of her voice as a novelist, is no less evident in these letters. Frustrated because of the way the letters have been edited.

The editor is Fitzgerald’s son-in-law, Terence Dooley. The letters have been arranged by correspondent, rather than chronologically. So, all the letters to her eldest daughter, Tina, are followed by all the letters to her daughter, Maria. The reader jumps from the 1960s to the 1990s, with stories retold in slightly different ways, according to the correspondent, every 50 pages. There is no timeline to get a grip on where we are in Fitzgerald’s life or what was happening or even which book she was working on. A timeline might not have mattered if there had been adequate footnotes.

This is my main problem with the book. The footnotes are scarce, erratic & completely arbitrary. A footnote at the beginning of each chapter identifies the correspondent & their relationship to Fitzgerald. Then, you’re on your own. I suppose you wouldn’t be reading this book if you weren’t already a fan of Fitzgerald’s work. But, sometimes the only clues to the novel referred to is the mention of the setting – Italy (Innocence), Russia (The Beginning of Spring) etc. Many events & people are passed over in silence but some people always rate a footnote. Colin Haycraft, Penelope’s publisher at Duckworths, always rates a footnote, even though, after the first few mentions, we could probably have worked it out for ourselves. However, the lack of footnotes, while irritating, didn’t stop me reading the letters.

There are several significant gaps. All Fitzgerald’s papers, including letters to & from her husband, Desmond, were lost when the houseboat the family lived on sank in 1963. There are no letters to her son, Valpy. Still, there are enough family letters to get a sense of her love of family life & the sometimes desperate poverty she struggled with.

I especially loved the letters written to publishers & editors. Fitzgerald spent years working on the research for a biography of the novelist L P Hartley, best known for The Go Between. She knew Hartley & wanted to write the biography before everyone who knew him was gone. However, the more she talked to people, especially Hartley’s sister, Norah, the more she realised that she could never write the book in Norah’s lifetime. The things she found out about him would have hurt his sister too much. She was also politely obstructed by other friends, including Lord David Cecil, who didn’t want Hartley’s passion for him to be exposed,

And then Lord D insists that Leslie’s life was completely happy. He added that his life was completely happy, and that he can’t remember ever being unhappy. I asked him whether LPH wasn’t heartbroken when he got married and he said, well he did seem upset, but I asked him to be best man – as though that made up for it! But he’d never seen Leslie unhappy, he repeated. I said, has it struck you that Leslie was happy when you were there, and not when you weren’t, like sunshine and shadow? Lord D looked rather taken aback. (To Francis King 29 October 1979)

Fitzgerald eventually gave up on the idea of the biography. She also had to give up on the idea of writing about Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop, because no publisher was interested. The Bookshop encouraged & published the work of several early 20th century poets. It was a minor but important part of the literary scene of the period. Fitzgerald was persistent in her approaches to any publisher she knew but to no avail. She didn’t waste the research as she wrote a wonderful biography of one of the poets, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Charlotte Mew was a minor poet, a lesbian who had some very tortured relationships & whose career spanned the late 19th century until the 1920s,

...worse still, I’ve just sent you another letter about Charlotte Mew – I can’t help it, it keeps coming over me as they say, I still feel her life is interesting in its way – and she did write at least one good poem, how many of us can say that? (To Richard Ollard 16 July 1982)

Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore & she was also a judge on several occasions. I can’t resist quoting this as I have the same feeling about so much modern fiction,

I certainly wish I hadn’t taken on the Booker judging this year. I thought it would be a nice sedentary occupation, and after all I have done it before, but I’ve definitely gone downhill since then and I think books have got longer – I’ve only done 35 so far (I keep counting them) so 100 more to come, and already there’s hardly any floor space left in my little room. Also, I drop off to sleep almost immediately when I start to read them – it’s becoming an automatic reaction. (To Maryllis Conder 7 May 1998)

Listening to Fitzgerald’s voice as I read the letters sent me back to the collected essays & reviews, A House of Air, published in 2003. This is my favourite of all her books, which probably isn’t the best thing to say about a novelist. Like Virginia Woolf, I prefer the essays & letters to the fiction. Fitzgerald reviewed widely & she wrote introductions to many novels, including J L Carr’s A Month in the Country & the Virago reprints of Margaret Oliphant’s novels. Looking through the index of A House of Air, there are also chapters on Barbara Pym, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edward Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Mew, William Morris, Rose Macaulay & M R James. I’m looking forward to Hermione Lee’s biography even more after reading the letters.

The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Bookshop, is being read around the blogosphere at the moment. As I mentioned yesterday, Cornflower has chosen it for her bookgroup & Dovegreyreader has just reread it as well. Darlene at Roses over a Cottage Door has also reviewed it. The Bookshop is a novel about injustice & unfairness.

Florence Green, a middle-aged widow living in Hardborough, a seaside town on the East Anglian coast, decided to open a bookshop. She has bought the Old House, a 16th century property that has been left to slowly decay for some years. Hardborough is an unfriendly, unhelpful place. The polar opposite of Miss Read’s Fairacre & Thrush Green. This is a very bleak, if blackly comic, view of small town life. Everyone knows everything you do or are planning to do & they usually have some mean spirited reason for hoping that your plans fail. Local bigwig, Violet Gamert, has other plans for the Old House that don’t include Florence’s bookshop. She wants to have an Arts Centre hosting music festivals like Glyndebourne. She puts pressure on Florence to sell the House before the bookshop has even opened but Florence refuses to change her mind. Florence has made a formidable & determined enemy.

The bookshop opens to modest but steady sales & Florence even starts up a lending library. Unfortunately the company she rents the library books from sends a lot of dross for every bestseller & all her patrons only want to read the latest life of Queen Mary which is on loan to the slowest reader in the community. I found this painfully funny as I thought about the number of copies of the Twilight books & Stieg Larsson thrillers I buy to satisfy the never-ending reservation queues. Florence hires an assistant, 11 year old Christine Gipping, who works after school. Christine is very organised, opinionated & quite blunt about where Florence is going wrong. The House also has a poltergeist, the locals call it the rapper, whose ominous taps, raps & crashes reach a crescendo in a terrifying scene when Christine & Florence are powerless against its force,

The battering at the window died to a hiss; then gathered itself together and rose to a long animal scream, again and again.
‘Don’t mind it, Christine,’ Florence called out with sudden energy. ‘We know what it can’t do.’
‘That doesn’t want us to go,’ Christine muttered. ‘That wants us to stay and be tormented.’
They were besieged. The siege lasted for just over ten minutes, during which time the cold was so intense that Florence could not feel the girl’s hand lying in hers, or even her own fingertips. After ten minutes, Christine fell asleep.

When Florence asks advice of the town recluse, Mr Brundish, about the literary merit of a new book, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, he advises her to stock it & she buys a huge quantity. In any other book, the local moral arbiters would have been shocked by the contents of the book & wanted it banned. In Hardborough, the local shopkeepers are angry because Florence’s shop is now so busy with eager readers coming from far & wide to buy Lolita that their shops are suffering & the pavement is blocked by queues of shoppers. Gradually, Mrs Gamert’s subtle campaign, backed by her power in the community, has its effect on Florence. It culminates in a ridiculous exchange of letters combining legalese with absurdity when the local Schools Inspector has been informed that Christine is working illegally,

To: Mrs Florence Green. The Old House Bookshop
The Education Authority’s Inspectors have examined Christine Gipping and have required her to sign a declaration of truth of the matters respecting which she was examined. Although there is no suggestion of irregularity in her school attendance, it appears that consequent to the arrival of a best-selling book she worked more than 44 hours in your establishment during one week of her holidays. Furthermore her health safety and welfare are at risk in your premises which are haunted in an objectionable manner. I quote from a deposition by Christine Gipping to the effect that ‘the rapper doesn’t come on so loud now, but we can’t get rid of him altogether’. I am advised that under the provisions of the Act the supernatural would be classed with bacon-slicers and other machinery through which young persons must not be exposed to the risk of injury.

This book made me angry & despairing at the petty-minded nastiness of this small community. There’s no graffiti on windows or fire-bombing the premises or nasty things pushed through the letterbox. Just a continuous campaign of persecution by a powerful woman against a powerless woman who wanted to do something as harmless as open a bookshop, a symbol of enlightenment desperately needed in Hardborough. Not that Florence ever saw her bookshop that way. Penelope Fitzgerald is such a powerful writer. She sets up the community in the first couple of chapters & paints a picture of the inhabitants in just a few words or one scene. She never lets sentimentality get a look-in. Christine is as mercenary a child as you’ll ever meet & Florence herself is honest & straight with no self-pity.

All Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are short, compact & complete, whether she’s writing about early 20th century Russia in The Beginning of Spring or WWII London in Human Voices. I still have a couple of her novels unread & in a way I don’t want to read them because I don’t want to get to the end of her books. I also have her letters, So I Have Thought Of You, & I think I’ll be reading them sooner rather than later to get some insight into the woman she was. Hermione Lee is writing her biography (there's a wonderful article by Lee about her research here) & that will be a biography to savour.

My Reading Week

Well, I’m back at work (although not in the British Library like the librarian above from Getty Images), the weather has been hot & humid & I feel as though I’ve hardly read a word all week. I have though, I’m halfway through The Highland Lady in Ireland. I’m enjoying Eliza’s Irish adventures but I may take a break from her over the weekend & pick up something else. I’ve also been listening to The Secret of Father Brown by G K Chesterton on the way to work. I read some of the Father Brown stories eons ago but I’ve never gone back to them. After listening to the first two stories in this collection, I’m still a bit lukewarm about them. Father Brown is such a gentle, unobtrusive character that I’m finding it a bit hard to get excited about the mysteries he solves. The narrator of this collection is a bit somnolent too. Still, I’ll persevere.

You may have seen the devastating floods in Queensland on the news. The same unusual weather pattern has brought lots of warm, moist air down to Victoria from the north & it’s been very humid all week. We’ve had over 70mm of rain as well. The rain has stopped in Queensland & has cleared here as well & the humidity should be gone by Monday. This weather is making it hard for me to settle & I suppose getting back into the routine of work isn't helping either!

Then, Abby surprised me by killing a bird & bringing the body into the house for me to find. She’s 16 years old & hasn’t caught a bird for a very long time. She’s lived with me 5 years & before that she lived with my Dad & she hadn’t caught a bird since she was a very young cat. My sister says she’s going through her second childhood & reliving past glories but I hope this was just an isolated incident.

I have been enjoying playing with my e-reader though. Elaine’s post on Random Jottings expresses my feelings exactly. I will never abandon the physical book (or codex as it’s now being called) but, to be able to download out of print books by Elizabeth Von Arnim, E M Delafield, Wilkie Collins & Arnold Bennett FOR FREE is such a luxury. I’ve downloaded over 30 books in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know when I’ll get around to reading them but, with groaning tbr shelves like mine, what’s a few more unread books? I’ll get to them one day.

Last night I started reading The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. It’s really a reread as it was the first Penelope Fitzgerald I read many years ago. Cornflower has chosen it for her next bookgroup so it was a good opportunity to read it again.  Dovegreyreader is also embarking on a reread of all Fitzgerald’s novels this year & she started with The Bookshop as well. I’m enjoying it very much so it may be the right book to cure my reading restlessness.