For all that: A Man’s Man by Ian Hay (1910)

I came across this novel in a second hand book shop a couple of months ago, and decided to give it a go, as I’d previously enjoyed a couple of Hay’s novels.

The edition I have was published in 1916, and you can tell it was during the war from the quality of the paper, but the book was first published in1910. It is still in print in the US on a POD basis.

Like many of Hay’s novels, this is romance from the chap’s point of view. We meet our hero, Hughie Marrable while he is still at university before fast forwarding nearly ten years for the main part of the novel. It’s one of those tiresome stories where the hero and heroine meet as children or young people before getting together later on. In the university interlude, the heroine appears as a child of twelve, the ward of Hughie’s uncle. This uncle advises Hughie to bum around the world for ten years or so rather than settle into a career, and certainly not to get married until he comes home – women having a dreadful habit of pulling a chap down after all. For a romance there’s a disturbing amount this type of misogyny, mainly from the uncle who is similar to the male authority figure in Knight on Wheels. After numerous adventures, some of which are described, Hughie returns, with a taciturnly Presbyterian valet in tow whom I can’t help but feel is there for comic relief. He is older and perhaps wiser which is just as well as his uncle is now dead leaving him to manage the heroine, Joey’s fortune until she comes of age. Of course everyone suspects Hughie of being after her money. There is a rather entertaining interlude where we meet Joey’s sister-in law, a plebeian female who was, before her marriage, shock horror, a music hall actress. Hughie, of course behaves as the complete gentleman throughout, and is in danger of being nauseatingly too good to be true. There is a neat twist at the end, but I’m not giving anything away when I say all turns out well.

The novel is interesting as an example of social attitudes among the middle classes at this time; Hay was a popular author, and I think we can assume the milieu of his work reflects that of his readers. Hughie is described as being a good judge of character when it comes to men, but not of women; Joey is entirely uninterested in money until prompted by the rapacious female she shares a flat with. This character while professing an interest in things financial is of course, being female, utterly incompetent. Again, Joey has no interest in suffrage, a topical point Hay throws in.

Overall, it’s a good example of its type, but I won’t rush back to it.

See also:
A Frivolous Narrative
Struck Dumb
Ian Hay

Heirs and Graces: Woodside Farm by Lucy Clifford (1902)

This is rather an odd romance; it doesn’t start out like one at all. The heroine is Margaret Vincent, a fact stated in the first line. But we hardly meet her until chapter five. The first four chapters deal with her parents – how they met, the years of their marriage, her father’s circumstances, and I can’t help but feel that were the MS of this novel to be sent to an agent or a publisher these days it would summarily rejected for not starting with enough oomph. And yet, this background is important to the story, because without it, we would not understand the events that follow. To summarise, Margaret’s father was the practically penniless younger son of a debt-ridden and extravagant noble family. His wife, a farmer’s daughter some years his senior, unaware of her spouse’s background.

The plot involves Margaret’s gradual introduction to the friends and connections of her father’s youth, including the spiteful ex-fiancée who jilted him on his declaring his agnosticism – she was the daughter of a bishop. Margaret herself is pursued, stalked even, by a local grocer’s assistant, determined to marry her although having ostensibly got to know the family to pursue her elder half sister, a female of unpleasantly fundamentalist outlook. One of the ex- connections takes a shine to Margaret, and she to him, however, the ex-fiancée has determined that he will marry her daughter, and sets out to put a spoke in their wheels. The twists and turns of the course of true love make up the rest of the story.

In Mr Garret the grocer’s pursuit of Margaret, I was reminded of the equally unpleasant pursuit of Hulda by her cousin Ivo in Cousin Ivo, by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, and also of the novels by Mills and Boon author Louise Gerard, although in the latter case, it was always the hero who behaved so unpleasantly.

I think there is also an echo of late nineteenth century pastoralism in the highly educated sophisticate finding sanctuary in a rural fastness only for his daughter to narrowly escape the corrupting influence of his ex-fiancée. Although of course, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that. The rural idyll isn’t that wonderful, and not all inhabitants of his former life are corrupt.

It’s worth a read, if you can find a copy; it’s not that hard to come across, but I wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to track it down.

Heiring off: Cousin Ivo, by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick (1899)

Another romance from the pen of this Anglo-German writer. Attentive readers who noted my previous post on this author will recall that she originally published this novel under a pseudonym. Like the previous Sidgwick novel I reviewed, this involves one of the main characters travelling to Germany where they Meet Their Destiny. In the case of this novel, it is the hero who is English.

The hero, Jem has suffered a Disappointment. His love has married a fat, elderly lord for his money. He immerses himself in work to Forget. He is a lawyer, and is sent by his firm to track down the relatives of a deceased German expatriate, to tell them something to their advantage. He does this and it turns out the heir is an heiress with whom he is quickly besmitten. Sadly despite being a lawyer, Jem’s finances are not what they could be, and being a gentleman he feels unable to ask the fair Hulda to marry him. She meanwhile is pursued by her dastardly cousin Ivo, who is determined to marry her and secure the inheritance. Naturally, all turns out well in the end but not without much heart stopping excitement.

The narrative is split between a first hand account by Jem, and Hulda’s diary, so we get to see what both the principals think about each other – as well as the inevitable misunderstandings that fire the plot. I was also interested to note the acknowledgement that in British society there was a developing uncertainty about Germany and immigration. This exchange early on, reflects this.

“Mr Berneck was a wealthy manufacturer. He left his native country at an early age and settled in ours.”

“It’s a way they have,” I murmured.

All in all, I enjoyed this book and it’s worth a read if you can find a copy.

A mere trifle: The Botor Chaperon, CN & AM Williamson (1907)

This was a curious book, part romance and part travelogue. I did wonder at one point if it had been financed by the 1907 equivalent of the Dutch Tourist Board.

Nell van Buren is an American of Dutch extraction living in London with her English stepsister Phyllis Rivers. An unexpected windfall in the form of an inheritance of £200 and a motorboat berthed in the Netherlands kicks off the action, and she determines to go for a cruise on the waterways in it. There she discovers the boat has been illicitly hired to an American, Ronald Lester Starr who is nevertheless keen to go with them. Providentially he is able to offer the services of his aunt, a middle aged Scottish lady of unimpeachable respectability as chaperon. The party is then joined by Nell’s Dutch cousin, Robert van Buren and his friend Rudolph Brederode, who acts as skipper. Eagle eyed readers will note that while there appear to be two heroines, there are three possible heroes, and much of the plot of the novel is taken up with working out who will end up with whom. Needless to say it all ends satisfactorily with a nice little twist that I didn’t see coming.

Each of the five principals has a narrative, written in the first person, and this enables us to see the depths of duplicity some of them will stoop to in order to achieve their ends. The novel is competently written, with fairly good characterisation, although it took me a long time to distinguish Robert van Buren and Brederode.

Sadly however, I got about half way through the book and put it to one side for several months before finishing it last week. The authors have let themselves get carried away with scenic descriptions at the expense of plot, and I did find the middle part pretty tedious. It picked up again later on and was quite funny in places, but overall I did not find it a great read.

The genre that dare not speak its name?

I attended a most interesting talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival the other day. It formed part of a strand named The Writing Business, and concerned romance fiction. Other talks in the strand focus on science fiction & fantasy, writing for children etc. The talk was given by Eileen Ramsay, a Scottish romance writer of whom I hadn’t previously heard, but then I read very little contemporary romance. She began by reading some extracts from a number of clearly romance novels and asked the audience if anyone could identify which books they were from. The quality of the writing varied, the purpleness of the prose varied, but they all involved a love story of some description. It turned out she had read us extracts from a modern literary novel, modern chicklit, great European literature (Anna Karenina), great English literature (Jane Austen), ‘classic fiction’ (DK Broster), and finished with some modern Mills & Boon. In simply listening to the extracts there was really no way of telling which was which. There are good books and bad books everywhere.

She made her point by showing us one of the new controversial covers that Headline are publishing Jane Austen in, and comparing it with the cover of a popular chicklit writer. Headline have taken a very calculated decision in using this style, in an attempt to make Austen appeal to readers who might never go anywhere near her. The packaging of a book is all about saying to readers, you like soppy love stories, then this book is suitable for you, you like serious fiction, then this book is suitable for you. I don’t necessarily disagree with this, provided the packaging does not exclude readers, which I think it does. For example, I look at the pink, girly covers of much chicklit and shudder, even though there could well be books in there that I might enjoy.

You can see what I mean here:

Ramsay then went on to ask why it was that unlike, say literary novels, which are judged on their own merits, romantic novels are judged as a group, by the worst representatives of that group. This Mills & Boon novel is poorly written crap, ergo, all romance novels are poorly written crap. It would be like saying, this literary novel is pretentious, incomprehensible drivel, ergo, all literary novels are pretentious, incomprehensible drivel. Not all genres are treated in this way; crime isn’t. Crime novels are judged on their own merits not as a category. Ramsay asserted that romance is the only genre that is treated in this way, but I think SF&F also suffers from this type of assessment, although perhaps not so much as formerly, and horror and westerns certainly do. I would agree, however, that romance fiction seems to be treated particularly badly in this regard.

It was an interesting discussion, although I fear, Ramsay was preaching largely to the converted as there were many romance writers in the audience. I think part of the problem is that much romance writing is very definitely written to a formula, and there seems to be an assumption among critics that this type of writing is, of necessity, bad. But I don’t that this is true; the underlying plot may be desperately formulaic, but the quality of writing can surely transcend this.

Although Ramsay never articulated the point, I did get the impression that there was an underlying assumption that this judgement of romance = bad, is because it is largely written by and for women. However if we look at the other genres I mentioned this argument becomes less easy to sustain.

I think I would come to the conclusion that while, in an ideal world, we should judge each book on its own merits, the stronger the formula about a way a book is written, the less easy it is to do this. And all books are, to some extent written to a formula. The way books are marketed does not help us make individual judgements, but I don’t see a way round that – we need labels to help us make a choice.