Returning to Trollope (among other authors, reading/writing/teaching topics)

Trollope’s Lady Anna (from a cover for facsimile print-out)

Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding playing his violin in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles)

“It is useless to suppose that social distinctions have vanished” — Virginia Woolf, “The niece of an Earl,” from The Common Reader; a propos of Lady Anna, I quoted this as epigraph to my chapter on Lady Anna in my book

Dear friends and readers,

Let this blog signal that I am on the road to recovery. About two weeks ago I began to re-immerse myself in Barsetshire, preparatory for a class I hope to teach next fall (Making Barsetshire). I started rereading Hennedy’s Unity in Barsetshire, a wonderful — perceptive, well-written — old-fashioned close reading literary study I can’t recommend too highly. I began with the novels at the same time with my favorite Dr Thorne (“assigned for my online NYC and Beyond online reading book club)

Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne in the 2015 ITV Dr Thorne

St
Stefani Martini as Mary Thorne

— and watched Alan Plater’s Barchester Chronicles, which captures the complicated comic and grave tones of the books. How glad I am I discovered Trollope sites and friends on the Internet in the 1990s. These changed and enriched my life. I had promised to do a talk on Lady Anna for the online Trollope reading group I’ve attended faithfully when the pandemic began (March-April 2020) and told myself I didn’t need a typed copy to do it.

I also told myself typed lectures were not required to teach again and that a way to begin again without exhausting or straining myself was to repeat some favorite courses. I would finish the women’s detective novels course I had begun and return to Trollope’s first major successes, the Barchester books.

So I began rereading Lady Anna (about which I wrote one of my chapters in my book, Trollope on the Net). It was hard to do: I kept rereading passages I didn’t realize I had read; I had to outline the book as I went to get a picture of it in my mind). I found I could not write at the same level by hand; I had to type — arduous and slow process as my fingers wanted to touch type, but couldn’t. The left fingers were especially beyond conscious control. But with the help of my book, and memory, I achieved another version of “The lady ought to marry the tailor!”

I delivered that talk today to the online Trollope Society Reading group, although this computer was not attached to the internet. Laura was here, and attached the new laptop she had made into a semi-clone of this (she had moved onto it all but the movies & website materials) found here to the three screen set-up for herself to work for WETA from, and I sat down at it. She got it to work (including sound from zoom), and all went splendidly. The kind people welcomed me back. I have now put the paper on academia.edu, and the chairman of the society has now put the video of my talk on the London Trollope Society. I link it in here from YouTube as I have done my previous talks:

And here it is with the text beautifully laid out on the Trollope Society website:

Lady Anna – Chapters 25-36

My paper-talk outlines in succinct manner the core themes, characters, and suggests the nature of the art of the book by focusing on the key penultimate installment of the novel. Here it is linked completely in:

Lady Anna: “The lady ought to marry the tailor!”

My syllabus for the fall for an online course I’ll call Making Barsetshire was also approved today

This will be a course on the origination and development of Anthony Trollope’s first cycle of novels, published between 1855 and 1866 (six in all). Barsetshire was not a planned series but evolved over time to become one. We’ll read the first three, The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Dr. Thorne. By 1857, Trollope came to see they were one imaginary-realistic county with its peculiar mix of themes, places, and recurring characters. The class will be asked to view outside of class, two marvelous film adaptations, Barchester Chronicles (1982, BBC) and Dr. Thorne (2015, ITV). We’ll explore how these relate to mid-century Victorian England and modern TV serials, our own era today, and Trollope himself

And now I’ll return to Hennedy’s book, Unity in Barsetshire before subsiding delightfully into another episode of the fourth season of All Creatures Great and Small, my next topic here (the books & the three iterations on film).

One of Constable’s depictions of the cathedral in whose “purlieus” Trollope said the idea for The Warden came to him

Ellen

Hemorrhagic stroke

Dear friends and reader,

Here’s why I’ve not posted for weeks: I wrote this to a literary women, Anne Boyf Rioux, in answer to something she wrote to me on her substack newsletter: I had had sent one of my foremother poet postings: Muriel Rukeyser

Foremother Poet: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Very unfortunately since I last wrote on this substack newsletter, I had a stroke (Jan 30th, 20240) and now find myself painfully trying to recover. Among the abilities I seem to have lost is typing. I have many ” side” problems like this (insomnia, constipation); centrally I cannot walk w/o a walker and am in danger of falling. I’m physically weak. Where I was for many years (until Jan 29), a rapid touch typist I cannot get my left hand to type anything but slowly and inaccurately. I have been trying to get access to therapy for typing, and as yet have failed. I discover Kaiser might not have such a service. I am again waiting to see — now next week. They provided therapy at the rehab (I was in one for a few weeks) and now at home; but hardly enough. I discover I don’t have medicare but medicare advantage paid to Kaiser– and nothing else. I find nothing on the Net; if this new offer by Kaiser is another sham, I shall try AARP, but feel I will again confront no living services. I’m told of complicated software I probably cannot operate without an at home teacher. It is a kind of death for me.

To a friend at Olli at Mason:  I can read and this isolation is bad for me so I am going to try to teach a mini-course online (4 weeks in June at OLLI at AU), using all I had created at that last OLLI at Mason. Going to try to do a Trollope talk using handwritten notes. I walk a little better but still need a walker and in danger of falling. I signed up for women’s rights class and the Sayers during summerat Politics and Prose (though they are pricey) online

I can read. I can write with my right hand

Ellen

Dickens’ problematic melancholy text, Little Dorrit: a large still book

Phiz (Hablot Browne), “Little Dorrit’s Party” — the chapter where we accompany Amy Dorrit and Maggie who walk, sit, and sleep on the streets all night long …

I pretend to-night that I am at a party … I could never have been any use, if I had not pretended a little … Three o’clock, and half-past three, and they had passed over London Bridge. They had heard the rush of the tide against obstacles; and looked down, awed, through the dark vapour on the river; had seen little spots of lighted water where the bridge lamps were reflected, shining like demon eyes, with a terrible fascination in them for guilt and misery. They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit, happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to ‘let the woman and the child go by! … This was Little Dorrit’s party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy morning. — Bk 1, Ch 14, “Little Dorrit’s Party”

Dear friends and readers,

I must not shirk writing about my listserv group’s reading and discussion of Dickens’s magnificent masterpiece novel, Little Dorrit, which we began mid-October 2023 and have just concluded this past week, early January 2024. It is one of several such astonishing partly because so long works of art to appear in the mid- to later 19th century in Europe: they include Dickens’s own Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina; Trollope has several, Balzac, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi. The type continues into the 20th century. I’m not eager to write about Dickens’s because there is a problem with it, recognized early on.

While it sold well (as did all Dickens’s novels), before the end of the century, the consensus was it was the “weakest” of Dickens’s novels! How can this be? Shaw was the first to counter and then override the condemnation by showing Dickens’s voiced view, is deep clearly articulated understanding of how society’s and gov’ts and institutions operate to keep a egregiously snobbish, greedy, lazy upper class (aristocracy and the very wealthy merchants and landowners just before) the only rich who control everyone else for the benefit of these specific individuals. We move from entities created in order to Do Nothing, to Thwart Anything Being Done, to keep Society dysfunctional for most, to the marketplaces of capitalism, from the smallest to the supposedly largest institution and ritual is laid bare before us. The epidemic disease is a fixation with getting as much money as possible and then spending it as ostentatiously as possible. Dickens’s characters are fitted into the lowest of echelons (debtor’s prison) to the upper middling (bankers) and we see how impossible it is for any one or any group of people to begin reforms until there is a change of heart among powerful so profound, they’d almost not be the same people any longer. I strongly recommend Helen Small’s edition for Penguin – her notes on everything you do need to know about London circa 1850s, explanations of the prisons, reprints of Dickens’s first drafts are essential.

When Mr Dorrit cracks, becomes confused and thinks himself back in the Marshalsea when in Venice, and quickly dies, and then Frederick out of grief and inability to carry on w/o him, is one of the book’s unbearably moving moments

“The night from which no one returns” — Phiz

What’s wrong with all this? Nothing. I loved those chapters for their content, as I did the use of imprisonment as a central trope of our lives in the book, the hatred in the book (if not quite honored in his own favorite characters) of worshipped rank, oodles of money, performative false manners, petty egotism, capitalism; I loved and bonded with the good Amy Dorrit (ever shouldering all the burdens of the lives of those she loves, exploited, berated!), the ascetically virtuous Arthur Clennam (who retreats from all forms of profit), was amused by and entertained into accepting many of the well-meaning floundering around them. I have nothing against the soul-wrenching and withering (murdering) of the bad major characters, Mrs Clennam, Mr Dorrit who, poignant as he is, he makes himself a terrific burden on others; these parents utterly ignorant their real impress on their daughter and son.

Trilling says there is too much use of cliché for shorthand, too much resort to generalization and abstraction; it won’t do to to have the narrator or story-teller to locate themselves in some non-personal will in which Dickens is seeking for and has some of his characters searching out for: Peace. Dickens explains too much, a muted despair seeps through the book. We miss the sardonic and sharp witted irony in the narrator of Bleak House, here oddly muttered of Bleak House — Sergeant George, Tulkinghorn, Inspector Bucket. The book lacks precisely what Andrew Davies claims for all Dickens novels in his prologue to his episodes: exuberance, buoyancy, crazy humor, excitement, bizarre characters, continual veins of vividness; sexual passion and violence imitated or parodied. This is what Davies introjects into the matter.

Claire Foy and Matthew MacFayden extraordinarily superb as Amy and Arthur

Why is the book so slow moving, over-wordy, dare I say indecipherable at moments, boring at others? because (I think) Dickens is himself tuning his anger to fit the melancholy and mourning of his hero and heroine; he keeps himself at a distance to provide cool appraisals. Characters like Mrs Clennam, Mrs Gowan, Mrs Merdle, Casby — from evil to abrasive to callous — are put forward for nakedly painful contemplation. There is more pity for Mr Dorrit, more poignancy in his longing in the first half of the book, and adamantine refusal in the second to be respected, not despised. Think of Frederick Dorrit’s hesitancy. There’s nothing funny here. Bleak, grim, extreme mortification (like when Amy Dorrit tries to Clennam for paying Tip’s debt so he won’t be put in the prison)

************************************

Amy and Tim Courtney as Mr Dorrit — just pitch perfect especially in his mad phases

I’ve written (at some length) about the wonders, beauty, intimacy, “corrections” (Davies’s word) and improvements in Davies’ Little Dorrit (also Bleak house — vast worlds, and the mistakes of Edzard’s Little Dorrit) where I also tell the stories (details found most concisely at wikipedia)

In this blog I will therefore bypass most of the novel to talk of the ending where a veil is finally drawn aside to show us what was the profoundly inhumane violation that started all the action — Arthur’s 20 year separation from his family and England and his return and determination to find out what is the truth about his mother’s vile business and make reparations — for what, he finds sort of, may be finds out at book’s end.

At the core of this book remains an unnamed destroyed young woman, Arthur’s mother, whom Arthur’s father, Mr Clennam, married in some clandestine way (perhaps the ancient handfast vows) who Arthur’s uncle cast aside to override with a marriage to the religiously crazed and vindictive second Mrs Clennam (we never learn her first name). The unnamed woman ends up imprisoned in a lunatic asylum, tortured by burning and freezing techniques, and (what else could she do) dies. We are told a ghost haunts the nightmare Clennam house. Arthur was brought up in a continual round of punishment so he should not become like his mother …

Something similar happens in other Victorian novels: for example, Scott’s Heart of Mid-lothian. How many people talk about it as the story of a young woman, Effie, whose illegitimate baby died being born or was still born and is now accused or infanticide and about to be murdered by the state. No, it’s the story of Jeannie Deans and her heroic walk to save Effie, and Effie is presented as shallow, narrow, vain, almost deserving what happened to her because she did have sex outside marriage.

Sue Johnston is a central witness to what happens in Mrs Clennam’s house, especially the machinations about a will where money was left by the uncle who ended the first clandestine marriage of Arthur’s mother and Mr Clennam and overrode it with the second firmly legal marriage of Mrs Clennam to him. This uncle most improbably leaves a legacy to Amy’s uncle, Frederick, because he played such beautiful music to the unnamed woman at some point; this money is upon Frederick’s death to go to his brother’s youngest daughter. (Tus does Dickens’s go into convolutions to make his plot-design come to a compromised end). This is of course Amy — one of the witnesses is Affery, who all novel long is subject to the painful physical abuse of her husband Flintwinch and lives in terror of him. She is so browbeaten she has learned to think what she sees with her own eyes is a dream. Sue Johnston plays the part with just the frenetic anxiety and loss of selfhood such a person might evince:

But this makes no real sense. If Frederick had inherited money, why did he not share it with Mr Dorrit; why does he not tell Amy? It’s these kinds of utter contradictions that point to the book’s story weaknesses. What the point in Dickens’ mind seems to have been is to show this abused woman, this terrified good soul.

Another abused woman is Tattycoram, a mulatto orphan whom Mr and Meagles rescue from an institution, but cannot be made to understand they should treat her with consideration and respect, not make her work at the beck and call of their “Pet” daughter, give her the dignity of a human name (Tatty is a nickname one might give a cat). St the close of the book she must return all apologies and abjection to be taken back. Miss Wade who has a similar story of alienation from family but has become distrustful, embittered because of rejection, mistreats Tatty out of her own distorted nature. Little understanding is accorded Miss Wade.

A single scene between these fine actresses, Freema Agyeman as Harriet, Maxine Peake as Miss Wade, suggests more of their inner lives than Dickens can

Why did Dickens bring them up — in order to castigate them? This resembles the unnamed woman who is never done any justice to but at the end of the novel has her story covered up for the “good” of Arthur, his peace of mind. What?

A whole continuum of women deprived are slid over: the breathless agonizingly desperate (for something to do) Flora, not acceptable to Dickens as fat (like the wife he deserted), mentally child-like Maggie, who follows Amy about everywhere … Standing up for herself — by taking on the world’s values, we have Amy’s sister, Fanny, whose power is limited to what she can earn as a dancing girl unless attached to a male with money. I omit the villainesses. The only (inexplicably) jolly woman in the book is Mrs Plornish with her kindly husband also of limited power. The corresponding tender-hearted men include John Chivery, his father, Pancks (the rent collector who like Affery turns on his oppressor at book’s and movie’s end).

None of these characters drive the plot-design, where nothing much happens. For examples: the Dorrits are broke; the Dorrits are super-rich; the Dorrits are broke again. Pet (or Minnie), an apparently mindless child-woman brought up by the emotionally incompetent Meagles marries a petty sadist, Gowan himself, whose mother spends the book looking down on the unfortunate girl. Mrs Merdle with her large bosom covered with jewels goes bankrupt after her husband kills himself rather than be exposed as a fraud, embezzler, forger; she snubbed Fanny, Amy’s sister, now Fanny snubs her. Clennam rescues the inventor Doyce to set up a business for him, and then Doyce rescues Clennnam from imprisonment for going bankrupt. Pancks collects and then refuses to collect rent. Tatty leaves the Meagles for Miss Wade; Tatty leaves Miss Wade for the Meagles. Chivery’s heart is broken when Amy prefers Clennam. At least there is no reversal as if it were a fictional story. Have I omitted anything? Humor from the terror Cavaletto fears of Rigaud, a blackmailer and murderer — the great knot in the money angle of the book is Rigaud’s blackmail of Mrs Clennam. The book itself feels like a backdrop or nightmare apart and is still. You are entertained by moments of encounter and reversals.

Anton Lesser as Merdle (equivalent of Trollope’s Melmotte) meeting Emma Pierson as Fanny Dorrit holding her own

This is part of the book’s “problems”: it lacks a driving forward force.

***************************

The book will teach you about the political and economic and social worlds around us today — anatomize or disclose the stupid heartlessness, and socially dysfunctional social systems we must live in today. Sudden insights into terrible aspects of the human character in much variety. Ditto — conveyed by dialogue as much as direct invective. There are extraordinary descriptions of all sorts — from prisons to the Alps, aching beauty caughtm then real streets, buildings, countryside A sudden cascading of characters’ activities which tells us where everyone is. The very ending is transcendent.

They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.
— the marriage at novel’s end

The book is also filled with unsolved problems — Dickens can carry on at such length only when he has an external plot-design based on outward suspense that truly interests us, e.g., Bleak House. He has not confronted his own buying into central mechanisms for keeping some groups in society miserable, especially women.

Ellen

Winter Solstice: Ghost and Christmas stories

A photograph of the snowy Yorkshire Dales (light cover of snow), 2023 (from All Creatures Great & Small)

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past few years I’ve made a habit of writing Christmas blogs — on movies I’ve seen, Christmas specials of TV series, books or stories read, or as a theme in a long-running TV series (e.g., “Christmas in Poldark“). I suspect I’ve written too many, of which too many were overlong (just type in Christmas in the “search” box to the right side at the bottom). Well, this year I have but one thus far (and may not have another), the ghost stories I read recently in a Politics and Prose online course with a professor of British literature, Victorian specialist, Nicole Miller. I enjoy ghost stories, and myself taught them for about 3 years at George Mason, and know she partly chose the topic as appropriate to Christmas time – she also teaches a much longer-length one at the college where she is (presumably) tenured. The telling of such stories is presented by people today as having been prime entertainment during Christmas in the 19th century, the first era of our present commercialized Christmas increasingly centered on family and friends.

John Millais, “Christmas Story-Telling,” “Christmas Supplement,” London News, 20 December 1862

On our Every-Other-Week online Trollope reading group (hosted by the London Trollope Society), we may be said to have almost suffered through one of Trollope’s rare failures, “The Two Heroines of Plumpington”. I say almost because the story was rescued by the hard work and absorbing information the speaker bout the story, Chris Skilton, brought to and out of the story. He showed how autobiographical it slyly is, and its themes of class, ambition, money. After he finished people in the group immediately began to talk of problems or flaws in the story.

I offered the idea that writing Christmas stories was such a trial for Trollope, such a struggle to pull off, because Christmas stories have since the inception of this custom been associated with or outright ghost stories, and nothing was further from Trollope’s robust and sceptical temperament — than either the prevalent type, unnerving, uncanny, often with a malevolent revenant, come back to haunt indiscriminately whomever is unlucky enough to enter their imaginary; or the type Dickens seems to have been the first to invent, in his The Christmas Carol, where benign presence (or presences) come down from somewhere determined to retrieve the past, and redeem the present of some suffering wronged or wrong-full person. Is not this It’s a Wonderful Life, even if 20th century disbelief seems to demand a being no-one credits for real, an angel who looks anything but? Clarence, we all instantly remember, needed to be promoted — what a mid-century American comic take for the sake of probability.

Henry Travers as Clarence (It’s a Wonderful Life)

Miller’s was a very rich course; we met for 2 and 1/2 hours for three sessions (each staying over an extra half hour) and read some interesting (some of the best) stories by Dickens, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. I’ve written about The Turn of the Screw here (as “the problem of moral panic”), and several of the Edith Wharton’s on this blog, Austen Reveries and the gothic section of my website (see Reading … Winter Solstice, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,,” “Afterward,” “Mr Jones,” as well as Dickens’s “The Signalman: the trauma of technology.”

Before each of the three discussions about the individual authors, Prof Miller held forth on ghost stories themselves, or some aspect of them related to the author we were exploring that session. It seems the form was especially reveled in by British and American authors; and may be said to emerge archetypically from fear of shadows (all sorts) in our homes, accidents and traumas surrounded by an atmosphere of the new large cities, phantoms from newness, unknown “strange” people, eruptions from people’s pasts, the old (haunted houses), the new (scientific discoveries, psychical research), dread of death and the dead (seances). M.R. James (see my blog on recent film adaptations to be found on YouTube) singled out reveling in spectacles theatric, evoking from the mind psychological allurement of dramatic interaction, strong literary high quality (your language must be powerful and precise), frightening and short. The reader must be complicit; the author creative and original. The ghost and Christmas story is bound up with our reaction to winter, the cold, the darkness, change. The story that ends with redemption offers balm to our anxieties over time, non-integration of ourselves (we are left out, left behind), a saving of a desolate soul. This is a view I agree with.

**************************************************

The book I used to read Dickens’ ghost stories in is Peter Haining’s Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens, Franlin Watts, 1983, with original (Phiz) illustrations. They are too small to make the nightmare impact intended. I read a number of them and was impressed how the pattern we find in Dickens, of a withdrawn man transformed by an experience of the supernatural recurs; similarly, that Dickens was himself sceptical of the reality of ghosts, despite the Christian providential nature of his paradigms. Near the later part of his life he while traveling with Ellen Ternan and her mother was involved in a disastrous train crash, and the trauma of that is translated into “The Signalman.” Scrooge resembles him in life in numerous ways — which has also been pointed out by others.

Alistair Sim as Scrooge on Christmas morning, fairly hysterical with relief as well as cheer

Since so many of us have heard or watched A Christmas Carol, and (I assume read about it), I shall keep this section brief (see my blog on how I cried and cried the last time I watched). The famous opening rivets us. Insistence on how Marley was dead. All is dark, bleak, Scrooge a withered utterly selfish sardonic alone old man. The clock tolls throughout the story: there are many bells. The uncanny and inanimate come alive. The point (as in other stories in this volume) is to reform, transform Scrooge. The air he travels through with the “Ghost of Christmas Past” is filled with phantoms. A Blakean world of the dispossessed. “Christmas Past” is presented as a child-like old man. We see the boy abandoned. We see how little it literally cost Fezziwig to make cheerful scenes for all. Christmas present is the ancient Green Man turned sardonic. A cornucopia of delights. The famous boy and girl, Want and Ignorance — wretched, abject. Then the last fear of death. This phase continues modern desolate scenes — like the lighthouse in the storm. Amber colored. Scrooge cannot face that he is not mourned, that he is erased, his things stolen. Then when Scrooge awakens and it is only the next day and he feels he has time to change, the intense joy.

An illustration from a volume of Dickens’s Christmas stories, 1867: The apparition, more in the mood of “The Signalman”

By contrast, the deeply darkly haunted nature of “The Signalman” and by the end how little explained. This comes right out of Dickens’s own traumatic experience of a vast train crash, where he played the part of a hero, rescuing people at risk of his own life. Prof Miller thought Dickens’s fiction itself as a whole altered after this incident. The man isolated by technology; given no chance to educate himself and live among men due to his class. The earlier stories in the volume are yarns, the later ones sceptical.

**********************************************

A still of Michelle Dockery as the awestruck governess, maintaining some calm (Sandy Welch, 2009, framed by a story of an unjust imprisonment of an apparently disposable woman)

For Dickens, much of the class time was taken up by “A Christmas Carol,” which is a literary gem, perfect masterpiece and she hardly got to “Signalman,” so she avoided “Turn of the Screw” until near the end — incurring resentment I felt among some of the people in the room who were there to discuss this never-endingly intriguing (ambiguous) novella. I learned that the misogyny has gotten so bad that some people regard the governess as wholly a liar, now living in an asylum (thus degrading her utterly and making the manuscript inexplicable), which explained to me for the first time why Sandy Welch’s 2009 Turn of the Screw is framed by showing us the governess put unfairly into an asylum while the inset flashback story has the children in utter collusion with the evil ghosts (there all right).

Quint and Miss Jessel from the 2009 film

Flora — look at the child’s face

When first published, it was rightly seen as capable of being interpreted as a governess caught between two deeply harmful corrupting spirits and susceptible yet still partly innocent (unknowing fully) children.

For Henry James, though I had many of the stories separately in decent editions with introductions and notes, I bought the recommended copy (sold by Politics and Prose too), Ghost Stories of Henry James, Wordsworth edition, 2001, re-issued 2008, with an introduction by Martin Scofield. The book also includes James’s prefaces to all the stories but The Turn of the Screw, and his musings/introduction to The Turn of the Screw. Scofield is very helpful. An early story, “The Ghostly Rental,” surprised me by unnerving me. I began to have the kind of inward fears of myself that M.R. James can provoke. James has the power of sudden single powerful words to make the reader feel a ghost is suddenly caught on a page. There are moral lessons in “Sir Edmund Orme” (against bad actors), and stories that hint at Bluebeard and Medea paradigms (murderous men, vengeful women). There is a coolness here; he undermines beliefs in family love, is himself almost anti-children — who are seen to be collusive and alienating in stories beyond The Screw. In one story, not a ghostly one, a novella, The Other House, James has a group of people murder a child and get away with it. After that I could not read James for years.

For Henry James, Miller concentrated on “The Friend of the Friends,” where the friend is no friend to two others, and in the story’s end does all she can to keep them apart (out of jealousy) and “The Jolly Corner,” where the corner is a site of telepathic unnerving doubles, signaling death, as well as a portal to an imagined world where James could overcome his revulsion a reality, and invent richly. The conceit of the “The Friend of the Friends” are the two targeted people each had a parent who died and appeared to them at the moment of death. They are obsessed with meeting but somehow something always comes up to prevent the encounter; until at the death of the woman they do meet, and our narrator believes this enables them to meet ever more. In both stories we are in a thicket of dreams and events that are like the forest of fairy tales. I liked the way she talked of “The Jolly Corner” to make it an explanation of James’s obsessive themes of life, living having passed him by, missing out on being another admirable self, life as an adventure because the need for a sense of security makes the narrator withdraw to seeming safety, but leaving his conscience haunted. Alice Staverton in the story, the childhood friend, could stand in for Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Jodhi May as the governess is the victim, if herself neurotic, of Colin Firth, the exploitative master, in Nick Dear’s rendition

*****************************************

From the edition I was reading, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Scribner, 1973, illustrations Laslo Kubinyi

The third and last, the Edith Wharton session seemed to satisfy everyone — equal time given to about 6 stories. Prof Miller saw Wharton as pulling together the theorist, personal experience, a cultivation of art, with a real feel for the uncanny. Her ghost stories are mostly post WW1 (though they can be set back in early modern and 18th century times) and are a reaction to that calamity as well as her study of Freud exploration of the irrational inner life. Dickens is writing Victorian and Wharton 20th century ghost stories, with James bridging the two eras. Yet the characteristics of each are not predictable by era: in James the ghosts erupt from within people, are their terrifying other selves. I should not omit sceptical humor in Dickens (especially from Scrooge), and how quietly good M.R. James is at this

In one filmed story of M.R. James, a character needs binoculars in order to see the ghostly castle

Wharton’s stories are of severe female oppression/ imprisonment, of people haunted by dead people, some of whom remove a beloved from us. In “Kerfol” (see the above illustration) an early modern woman is kept alone as in a cage and each time she finds a companion in a dog, the dog is slaughtered; “Mr Jones” reveals a similar story that occurred 2 centuries ago, with a vampire controlling two women in the mansion in the present day, seemingly idyllic. These stories are filled with places women must flee from. “Pomegranate Seed” differs in being aligned with the myth of Persephone, only now Persephone is a dead wife who writes letters to her husband now married to our heroine, letters which deprive him of life’s blood, he himself goes grey, feebler, and eventually, like the husband in “Afterward” disappears. I remember how when I first read them, they made me feel dread I would lose Jim similarly. Well I’ve lost him, but not to a ghost. Like James, some of these stories are intended to baffle us, with the ghost visible only to the seer. “Fullness of Life” an early, and “All Souls” a late story both concentrate sheerly on the inner life of the protagonist, so there is little left of the Victorian gothic furniture, not even revenants for sure. Gentle souls, hounded, abandoned in a sinister silence — “Afterward” has the heroine for the rest of her life in that still house in the library room with some “horror” she feels is there forever after. This is like the person who sees these accusatory eyes after he has done some morally reprehensible (if not criminal) deed.

From “Afterward:” this is before the woman has lost her husband but has premonitions, glimpses a ghost from the old house’s parapet

As with Dickens and James, but more so (more stories) Wharton’s ghost stories have been filmed marvelously well, in her case by the BBC in the 1980s in a series called Shades of Darkness, produced (naturally) for Christmas. “Bewitched” becomes a vampire-witch story as Eileen Atkins as the grim central heroine (reminding me of the close of Ethan Frome) demands the men in the room drive a stake through the heart of a dead woman said to be appearing to and harassing her worn husband.

*********************************************

I’m probably not doing justice to the three classes or the stories: nowadays my notes are scarcely readable: my hands cannot hold a pencil tight enough and write the Pitman forms precisely accurately enough to read back all that I am trying to get down — my hands are the ghosts of what they have been. Still I hope I have said enough that is understandable that might lead my reader to read some of these stories and see the movies for yourself.

It’s not true that such matter must be short; the very best I know of are novellas, and if I had the courage, I’d do a course in these five: Margaret Oliphant’s Beleaguered City, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Susan Hill’s Woman in Black, and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly. All but one (Beleaguered City) have been filmed, all but one by a woman,and two of these (Hill House and Woman in Black) have produced the two most frightening the memorable (as in leaving me with nightmare images I am afraid my mind will call up — Hill House, Robert Wise, 1960; and Woman in Black, 1993 BBC). I’d be grateful to any reader of this blog who can cite further novella-long brilliant ghost stories.

Pauline Moran as the terrifying “woman in black,” a woman deprived of her child, who goes about snatching other children — I actually still fear seeing this image at the other end of a room late at night

We have seemed to move away from Winter Solstice or Christmas. So we return to our respectable or seasonal acceptable topic briefly. So why are so many a typical Christmas story also a ghost story? Because as the year closes in, we want to retrieve time, look for redemption for ourselves, but also remember the past with all its pain and loss and seek a way to express this most deeply. We do not look for moral lessons, and pace Trollope, are not longing for stories of charity and forgiveness as such, but only as the latter theme (forgiveness) works itself into what has been so harmful for us across our lives. For the rest of the year the delving into the atavistic parts of the human psyche, condition, experience, Kafka-like (see Jack Sullivan’s little book on ghost stories as “elegant nightmares”) is what ghost stories do.

After all this I cannot say “Merry Christmas!” but I can wish for us all, after the nervous laughter has done its distancing work from the experience of the ghost story (how we ended Miller’s class), hope for us all that the experience of retrieval and redemption Dickens dreamed up and Frank Capra re-caught again will be the one we know.

Now I ask my readers to forgive me: I am very sad this year; the death of my beloved female cat, Clarycat, has made this year, this Christmas, one where I am feeling the years’ losses and wish I could be haunted by her out of her loyal love for me.

Clarycat missing us, photographed close-up during one summer time away for Jim and I

Ellen

The Free State of Jones: a remarkable Civil War & Reconstruction film you must not miss

Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) and Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw): he has gotten for her an alphabet book

Dear friends and readers,

As is so common with me, I’m a few years late on this recommendation, but perhaps the year 2023 is more in need of this humane, intelligent, deeply-felt — and gripping, entertaining historical war film about US slavery, racism, and class privilege and deprivation. The film studies how human bonds develop, and how weak these can be against social norms, no matter how perverse and violent, when enacted and enforced by the legalized violence owned by high caste, rich, and ruthless elites. At each turn of the story I found myself recognizing analogies in my own experience of life and the lives of others I’ve seen all around me for lo these 77 years. The outline of the historical events, the general personalities of the characters, and specific events are historically accurate. Two main sources are Victoria E. Bynum’s Free State of Jones, and Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer’s State of Jones.

We move across about 15 years in the life of Newton Knight, whom we meet as a medic in the Confederate Army in 1862, and take leave of sometime after 1876, when he and the band of people, black and white, after many years of successful rebellion during the civil war, formed a community together in Mississippi with the intention of living a good life, undergirded by real human bonds and find themselves utterly victimized to the point many die, others flee. In the last part of the film the new civil rights (including the right to vote) are under fierce relentless (and more or less) successful attack by the old Confederate establishment, its laws and regime of terror and fire  — through lynching and firing of men, houses and lands performed by the Ku Klux Klan.  This historical story is punctuated by a story occurring 85 years later in the same area of Mississippi, where Newton, and his partner, Rachel (he could not marry her)’s great-great grandson is on trial for having illegally married a white woman. The latter part of the first sentence of this paragraph and the second one of the film’s last 11 years, have taken up proportionally far more space than the heroic uncertain and radical experience of the years 1863-1865 in the film. The central 2 to 3 year span of the film’s central development is well told in detail literally by the wikipedia article dedicated to the film

Sally (Jill Jane Clements), roadhouse landlady, abolitionist, facing questioning by military police

What’s omitted is the film’s clear and convincing “ideological focus” on the shared interests of black enslaved people who flee from their chattel servitude and poor and middling disenfranchised whites. The real Newton Knight and our well-played hero (kind and zealous) organized and inspired a guerilla army of black and white men and women (and children) who gradually (from an initial flight and life of a small band in a difficult swamp terrain) took over for themselves for what seems to have been a couple of years a sizable area in Mississippi where the confederate army could not come in and seize food, money, people. Newton is an ordinary – and intuitively ethical — man radicalized by circumstances. He forms real friendships with a group of escaped slaves including the significantly equally morally committed Moses Washington (Mahershala Ali), and holds onto his previous ties with a very few fellow white farmers. Early in the film, he becomes estranged from his white wife, Serena (Keri Russell) and over its course forms a loving partnership with Rachel, an enslaved woman working as a nurse in a nearby plantation. We move with him, and these other characters and further individualized people involved (like the abolitionist roadhouse landlady, Sally [Jill Jane Clements] and her black servant George [Troy Anthony Hogan] with his lieutenant’s hat and glasses) through a remarkable series of events, which expose the hypocrisies as well as the realities of the Confederate and Federal armies. For example, Sherman will not condescend to recognize Knight’s army as a legitimate force, and does not send them desperately needed arms and cavalry. At the close of the war, the enslaved people do not get the mules and land they were promised, but instead the white owner of the vast property by swearing an oath returns to control and profit from it and their labor. The film enacts believable human responses to some of the most important legislation of the war.

But it is no treatise. We are on our “guys and women’s” side as they fight back and kill back, bond, help one another. Wee experience real abrasion, foolish delusions (men in the army believe Hood’s promise if they surrender to let them have their farms and not hang them which latter he does immediately), see where women are sexually abused — but, as the New York Times critic, A. O. Scott (whom I quote here) says, “cruelty” is not turned into “spectacle.” Their talk and stories convey visual historical lessons Howard Zinn (author of often banned The People’s History of the United States, one of the film’s consultants) probably rejoiced in. Eric Foner was another; Martha Hodes, author of an award winning study of interracial sexuality was another. Newton’s way of voicing values like what you grow in the ground is yours, and “we kind of are our own country” is succinct, effective; the film’s didacticism is achieved with tact. We become very attached to the characters as during their time running their own small state, they experience better lives, partly through a rise in status among themselves, and I found myself intensely upset when at two of my favorite male black characters are murdered — for registering people to vote, voting, living with pride and dignity. Its ambiguous proud double ending — Newt and Rachel, with Serena come back to live nearby live out their lives on their farm in Mississippi, but under very tough circumstances; the great-great son goes to jail for defying the marriage prohibition — and sad song at the close stirred my heart.

Again Newt (McConaughey) and Moses (Ali) in a meeting house, explaining everyone (all males) who are citizens have right to vote

At the same time though much shorter in time span, the last 11 years where our “friends” are treated so unjustly and try to fight back clutch at our minds as we remember incidents in the political world we live in and (as I said above) perhaps incidents from our own lives. For myself how I once went long ago to try to get advice on going to graduate school, and was disbelieved by a bullying woman (I still remember a huge cross she wore across her huge bosom) who wanted proof of my average and then sneered at my ambition as a girl from a free college. I compared some of the moments towards the end of the film to the 2019 Great March of the Return in Gaza where Palestinians were murdered, maimed by the hundreds as they attempted to resist the brutal occupation and blockade by the Israeli armed state.

The acting was quiet, not overdone. Episodes are not ratcheted up to be a continual series of overwrought tremendously noisy and flash scenes. We really see how our rebel friends turn a funeral into a successful believable ambush; we see them pour the deadly “shot” (nails in bags) into the canons and fire. The film in this reminded me of Glory. Also a Peter Watkins documentary-like film on Culloden — a true masterpiece. It’s better than Glory in showing how horrible the mutilations of battlefield death and destruction of bodies are. In these scenes it’s anti-war. The landscape is beautifully filmed’ there are beautiful colors captured.

Gary Ross directed and was one of the two writers of the screenplay; the project was a labor of dedicated love, took 10 years to achieve, and had a hard time obtaining the funds needed. It is not a story the Lost and Glorious Cause, nor alternatively, a Fervent Abolitionist War, but rather how a rapacious, exploitative and deeply class- or rank-based society enforced a war, and how hard and often frustrated (and punished) resistance to this by a group of ordinary people could not last against the power of legitimized and/or accepted deadly humiliating violence. And yet these individuals hoped and lived on. Life itself is vindicated.

Again Newt (McConaughey) and Moses (Ali), this time riding into town to get back Moses’s son from a form of re-enslavement as an apprentice — this and other sly moments are filmed so as to look like Gone With the Wind or other conventional civil war movies

Another worthwhile review beyond Scott’s is by Richard Brody (again of the New York Times) who cites as one of the film’s flaws its thinking about slavery. Ann Hornaday (Washington Post) who also, while praising the film highly, complained it tried to do too much, and is a story of a white savior. Knight is not a savior, and because a film story focuses on whites does not mean it is not radically sympathetic to black people. Indeed there seemed to be among the reviews a desire to cut the film down to size, almost a resentment of its “noble” goals. These aims made it “stilted” according to the “review aggregator” of Rotten Tomatoes. For one explanation of why it is not remembered in the way it ought to be, see David Walsh of Socialist World Website. I especially liked Kevin Levin of the Daily Beast) whose idea it was that people could do with a little history. Many reviews here.

I loved many of the smaller moments: when Newton and Rachel enter the plantation house (now emptied of the fled family) and go up to the master bedroom where there is a beautiful bed, and Rachel tears up as she feels the mattress made of “feathers!” I felt her sense of proud surprise it’s she who is going to use this bed now with a chosen husband. I liked when Hood (Thomas Francis Murphy) sneered at a vindictive lieutenant that he is not going to hunt out a few renegades in a swamp to satisfy the lieutenant’s outraged dignity (those are not the words used). I particularly admired McConaughey who succeeded in a role difficult to put across persuasively today. The trick was the actor played the actor as someone who lived on the level of pragmatic reciprocation the people he had to deal with did, and had a script which allowed him to recognize verbally who were his friends’ friends and who their enemies. His angry rallying speeches (scroll down to last image) were great fun.

Listen to and watch the enthusiasm and raison d’etre of Victoria Bynum on writing her book:

Ellen

Anatomy of a Fall …. directed, written by Justine Triet, produced Marie-Anne Luciani

Sandra Huller as Sandra Voyter

Friends and readers,

I rush to write this brief review lest Anatomy of a Fall, an independent film leave the theaters before my reader can find time to see it. I was prompted myself to rush out partly because it was given such rave reviews and a friend urged me to go, citing the many prizes/rewards. It has been acclaimed by reviewers who views I respect — and others too.

More it was/is described as a mystery thriller, complete with gripping trial where a woman is accused of murdering her husband and setting the death up to look like suicide. I saw no detective cited but decided this was down my alley of endeavor for these last many months to see and understand why so many detective fictions/films with women at the center or written by women are so popular right now. The opening plot-design: a man falls from a high terrace, apparently a suicide, becomes the center of a murder accusation: that the wife threw him down; their relationship has been strained since their son had an accident in which his eyesight was badly limited, during a time when the husband was supposed to be taking care of him.

No surprise that I discovered the point of the courtroom drama was to offer opportunities for flashbacks and impassioned testimony by our heroine, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) against a ferocious predatory prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), whose accusations were endlessly laced with unacknowledged misogynistic slurs depicting her as a promiscuous (with other women no less!), a neglectful mother more interested in writing her books than home-schooling her child, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) as the long-suffering victim, the husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) does — as well as renovating the house he bought for them in his home-town, cold to said husband, violent. The riveting matter comes when she (and we) discover that he tapes her far more than he admitted and these audio/videos are played in front of us. Then we see/hear her slap her husband, hear him break glass, punch the walls frantically.

The son

What made it fascinating is that Sandra was not presented as a saint; she had acted the way the prosecutor claimed (affairs, looking out for her own career); she also (it turns out) blamed her husband for an accident to their boy that happened when the boy was left with the husband’s care: an accident that severed his optic nerve so he will never see well again. She shows a rare honesty in her intelligent defense of what she did, and anger at her husband for coercing them into leaving London for this retreat. She thinks he has reached a writer’s block and has been finding, inventing obstacles to get in his way. It fits into the best of these thriller/mysteries where the depth and interest is in the unfolding of the couple’s relationship to one another and to their son. It uses conventional tropes: the boy’s relationship to his dog, Scoop, becomes central to the outcome of the trial. Also important is her friendship with the male defending lawyer

The aim it seemed to me was to show a woman’s real life and expose how the court rules as well as attitudes of mind of prosecutor, judge, and populace are against her. The judge is a deeply unsympathetic (I felt towards the defendant) woman. Her team, the defense lawyer, Maitre Vincent Renzi (Swan Arlaud) and woman defender, Maître Nour Boudaoud (Saadia Bentaieb), seem continually stymied, ruled against. I won’t give the verdict and what happened away but would like to reassure my readers that the film is feminist, anything but misogynistic because of her deeply charged determination to tell the truth because she does believe it will rescue her. The film urges you to live your life in the way your nature intended; and shows you an instance of somehow who tried to live for real, managed some soaring (and writing of books) and yet remained pragmatic, practical, disillusioned about everything all but her son and her work (writing).

I loved the final scene of her lying down on a couch, her arm over the dog’s body in an embrace the dog nudges into.

This is a contemporary woman’s film, showing how transformed the genre of mystery-thriller, once a sina qua non for macho stories, with evil femme fatales at the center, or in the 1930s sleuthing spinsters — to dramatizing aspects of the hard lives of women today.

Ellen

A. S. Byatt has died: some honest thoughts in praise of her books

Friends and readers,

A. S. Byatt or Antonia Susan Drabble Duffy (1936-2023) died yesterday, and I want to remember and to praise her work tonight. I direct the reader to the NYTimes obituary which gives the bare facts of her life’s chronology, concise general information about her better known books and famous or celebrity-type autobiographical “information” about her (her quarrel with her sister, Margaret Drabble). Penguin is somewhat better as their obituary tells you how she built her career: through her job/position with Chatto and Windus. This is very like Jenny Uglow who morphed a long career with Chatto and Windus into a far more successful (from the point of view of her readership and the quality of her books) long (in both sense of the term — her books are long and the list of them long) series of brilliant biographies and histories.

Unfortunately when I was reading Byatt’s books avidly, studying them minutely, scrutinizing them by the inch, I was using Write (WRI) files and tonight I have failed to be able to convert these to rtf or txts or word documents. As usual, I don’t know what steps I am omitting. So quite a large number of files from the 1990s are lost to me.  I cannot therefore provide details on her style or the structure of her booksor names of characters.   Here is what I remember.  They tell of how I fell in love with her Possession, A Romance, and among other things, drew a calendar or timeline as well as outlined the interlace of past and presents in the book. I taught it once to a very patient class; looking back I wonder how many of them read the book, a few loved it the way I did and I found some long-saved student papers about it. I loved the long epistolary sections, the journals, the description of Brittany.  I knew and know still it is no feminist book, and its woman’s art is like that of Outlander, perhaps even more compromised. Its innermost heroine, Ellen Ashe, has been too terrified of a man’s penis to allow Randolph Henry Ashe, the book’s historical hero, a gentle tender Victorian poet who combines traits of Ruskin, Browning, Tennyson and G.H. Lewes, to ever fuck her. The phenomena of women’s lives are put before us through several heroines in the past and present. The central Victorian heroine, Christabel LaMotte, is modelled on an amalgam, a composite of George Eliot crossed by Charlotte Bronte, with her poetry and isolation making her a Christina Rossetti and imitator of Emily Dickenson.

Another Pre-Raphaelite cover though the story is set in contemporary Britain (for some this might be their favorite novel)

I went on to read another novel I’ve never forgotten, Still Life, written just before Possession, the first book I ever read which described a woman in labor. It gripped me to the last stunning page where our heroine turns into a still life. I tried to convince myself I loved Angels and Insects. I was able to read a great deal of its first novella, about Tennyson’s grief over Hallam’s death as a jump-off about the Victorian obsession over omnipresent death; and of the second novella, a rewrite in some ways of Austen’s Persuasion, a book also bout “the” Victorian obsession with atheism and death, this time with seances.  But much of both of them were written in such dense and abstract prose, I could not understand her meaning. The unreadability of this one for me is also found in The Biographer’s Tale (whose hero’s name, Phineas, suggested an Anthony Trollope connection) where the fascination for the author was the relationship between photography and the real presence of people.  I could never get into The Children’s Book at all. Babel Tower, another interlaced romance (following upon Still Life) was readable, just, but The Whistling Woman (the next in a Fredericka Quartet)  with its extraordinary accomplished woman who nonetheless, is the center of a terrifying violent sexual scene with an abusive husband, and moves into a feminist phase, defeated me. Very frustrating.

Byatt had a French phase: one of the stories is about a teenage girl studying Racine; another Proustian

I had a repeat experience with her short stories: the first volume, Sugar and Other Stories was filled with stunning contemporary stories. I remember one was about an old woman living alone and thus old women as such; “The July Ghost,” was a transfer of her intense grief at the sudden death of her 11-12 year son in a bike-car accident into a powerful ghost story. But as she went on, these short texts also become dense, this time with archetypal imagery, where one was required to parse them rather than read them. They turned away from any realism, and were like paralyzed frozen pictures.

Earlier today I was thinking about her non-fiction narratives because I have been reading one very great one, John Sweet Wood’s The Sewing Girls’ Tale — about a rape in later 18th century New York City, how this morphed into a trial where class came before gender, and then a riot, an attempted suicide, a cause celebre in newspapers of the time, a civil suit &c&c.  One of these earlier Byatt narrative non-fictions, UnRuly Times, centers on Wordsworth and Coleridge as real men and poets, as telling more truths about their sex lives than the traditional biographies — and also their personal relationship to their radical politics (insofar as they were radical). I still remember the scene of Dorothy Wordsworth weeping on a couch as in another room her brother, William, and his wife, Mary, were in bed together. Byatt thinks Dorothy and William were lovers (as do a few other Romantic scholars). In her non-fiction narrative books the quality stayed the same as far I can tell, but she didn’t write many.

Now I wonder about these covers — what audience do her publishers think her books appeal to?

Again, I loved her Imagining Characters, a series of conversations with Ignes Sodre about 6 women writers, to wit, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and less centrally Iris Murdoch (about whom she wrote a book), Willa Cather and Toni Morrison (perhaps today I could try to read that). The final conversation is about the relationship of the characters in specific novels to their reincarnation in films, which has some of the most insightful remarks on these writers and adaptation I’ve read. But when I dipped into her literary essays in Passions of the Mind, I discovered them to be very good, but more conventional, the sort of writing you would expect from a Leavisite (her first book was a wooden imitation of D.H. Lawrence). They represent a falling off from Imagining Characters. Much more interesting are her series of lectures, History and Fiction (as she wrote narrative history and historical fiction), though there she finally gave away why finally I couldn’t go further with her (nor she with herself): she looks to “fathers” and “forefathers” as predecessors, with the only women allowed in mainstream 19th century women, two very veiled angry ones (Murdoch and Cather) and Morrison (I do believe because the later novels are so difficult to understand and thus attracted Byatt).

What happened to her, what the explanation for her turning away from an imaginative fictional exploration of the woman’s matter she began with, I do not know. I can’t read the postings and notes I made at the time. Now in 2023 if you look at the list of her books you see a general falling off in the mid-1990s, and a silence for 20 years. I once heard her speak about George Eliot and she talked like she had marbles in her mouth, and was too eager to make her intellectual points — it was on one of those features on DVDs, this one Andrew Davies’s marvelous film of Middlemarch (1994). The one authorized biography by Richard Todd I have tried is discreet to the point of being useless except as the kind of traditional literary criticism which eschewed all disquieting political or autobiographical truths. I see her as a privileged person — the middle class intellectual Yorkshire home, went to the best schools, met her peers as a writer. She says she felt isolated in these places, alone, did not fit in.  I will say her sister, whom I’ve written about in my Reveries Under Austen, Margaret Drabble seems to me to have fulfilled her gifts far more steadily and fully. We are told the girls were rivals for their mother’s love and Margaret won repeatedly.

Tonight I wish I had time to try again with The Whistling Woman

In her older years

She was an extraordinarily gifted fictional writer, and for a few years produced a couple of literary masterpieces in the genre of romance fiction, and some fine works of interpretative scholarship. In the early 1990s before I got onto the Internet and was able to reach other people, she made my spirits soar with the beauty of her prose and the passion of her feminine anguish, yearning, hard experiences (these mostly in the first volume of short stories). I felt less lonely with the woman who could write Possession; she seemed to love the books I did, and she reached for an underbelly of the sexually distraught that I have known. Perhaps I should place her in the Austen Reveries blog, but I think she might have preferred this one. Seemingly impersonal. Her official website is devoid of words, offering only enigmatic book covers. Like Ellen Ashe and Christabel LeMotte from Possession, what was she unwilling to tell of. In Still Life there are so many characters phoning crisis centers but we hardly ever hear a resolution of their crises.  Its heroine also ends in stillness or death.

Ellen

Some accurate important books on the history of Palestine &/or Israel

1947 Map of Palestine: from National Geographic

Friends and readers,

Being of an intellectual disposition, as I have watched with distress and horror the unfolding massacre in and continuing destruction of Gaza and step-up of illegal settlements of Israeli and displacements of Palestinians from the West Bank, I have been wanting to read a good book on what happened in 1947 and 1948. I had read years ago a historical novel, Tolstoyan type, which tried to explain how the Israeli army managed to destroy most of the Egyptian air force in June 1967, leaving its army open to successful attack.

In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, is not at all pastiche, but very contemporary in language and feel. Soueif mentions Tolstoy as her master. Here she is retelling what she suggests is the crucial war of the century, and how the betrayal of Egypt (its defeat) was engineered with Britain’s help, and fostered by some of the elite of Egypt too.

The Egyptian authorities deliberately allowed Israel to strike first in that war and so gave it the opportunity to destroy the Egyptian air force. Having wiped that out, it was relatively easy for Israel to win the war. Soueif indicts the incompetence & rivalries between different Egyptian people in power but what is striking to this reader is how she is careful to include someone saying to someone else, the Israeli planes are on their way a day before June 6th; that is June 5th. I remember how nervous the other character became, fearful that if Egypt hits first, Egypt will be the aggressor, blamed, and then the US will outright attack Egypt. But the US has not been in the habit of attacking other countries along side Israel whom Israel wants to destroy in some way.

This idea that Egypt dare not defend itself from Israel’s surprise attack because of fear of US retaliation emerges as false since what happens is the surprise attack not only pulverizes Egypt but allows the rest of Egypt’s army to suffer horrendous casualties. Whole units wiped out. It is really implied this was collusion of some sort — could it be that those in authority were thought to want a capitalist order to replace Nassar’s open socialism — remember he nationalized or wanted to nationalize the Suez canal. He was replaced by Sadat a pro-US person (pro-capitalist).

This is the Israel-Palestine proposed before the 1967 war: had this remained the boundaries of these “states” what happened this past month would not have.

It would seem there was a sizeable body of violent people ready to shrink (take away, steal) the Palestinian lands much further, and they were aided by the “western” capitalist countries (US, UK) and Egypt

If you want to read a summary of this, look at Marilyn Booth on In the Eye of the Sun, in World Literature Today 68:1 (1994):204-5.

It seemed to me though, it was no use to go back partially, to these various steps whereby the colonialists took more and more land until the tiny Gaza and vulnerable West Bank were formed; what happened originally in that first crucial expulsion of 500 plus villages. Well that’s where Amy Goodman supplied the historian: Ilan Pappe who has written several books, the most important being The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. It is a very expensive book; something like $9 for a kindle but a real book well over $140. I found on sale an MP3 set that will be coming by mid-November.

But since I have to take into consideration my reader might not him or herself want to read or listen to 400+ pages, and myself couldn’t wait, tonight I can share two reviews, and an early draft of Pappe’s book and summarize all this for you. The two reviews are Seif Da Na’, a review of Ethnic Cleansing (&c), Arab Studies Quarterly, 29:3-4 (2007):173-79; Uri Ram in Middle East Studies Association Bulletin of North America (MESA), 41:2 (2007):164-69; the draft is an essay by Ilan Pappe himself, in effect a first draft for the early chapters of his book, “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 36:1 (2006): 6-20.

What Pappe shows is it was not a war which displaced and turned 800,000 Palestinians into refugees, but a carefully worked out plan, based on minute detailed studies of the Palestine land, so that all the buildings and families and people in the villages could be rooted out by intimidation, outright violence, execution, sometimes in a blitz-like strike. A forcible expulsion; he names names, describes the whole of the operation. It is chilling. I have read of something similar in a review I did of an earlier pitiless extirpation and expulsion in Northeast Canada, of the Acadians (Christopher Hodgson).

There is much more to be learned from Pappe: I could afford (for $18 as a hard cover) his The Biggest Prison on the Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories [=illegal military continual operation]. Here he takes you through the various phases of a 75 year history of expulsion, pogrom, with the intervening wars and the attempts by the US, UK and other EU style “western” countries to get the Palestinians to accept a stasis two-state solution, which it’s hard to say if they would have accepted but Israel itself never wanted that (and thus helped build up Hamas against Arafat).

On the matter of this book (life in the “occupied territories”) I recommend (thinking of what is happening today), rather another short piece, this one published in the New Statesman, by John Pilger called “Children of the Dust (in the paper copy),” 28 May 2007, pp 26-28, online to be read. After you read let me suggest the key number to remember tonight is 40% of the people living there are children under the age of 15. Of those who survive, the rates of trauma are 99%. 6000 Palestinians are imprisoned by the Israelis. Pilger is also a post-colonial fine documentary film-maker

As Pilger says, the way most news organizations in the “west” treat the situation is utterly one-sided, in effect misrepresenting who is victim, who aggressor; but being this intellectual I went further than individuals out for their immediate self-advantage and various groups’ censorships (via media channels and control of people’s jobs), and looked to see what was the education about Palestine and Israel like. I found another excellent article (this is almost the last I will be recommending tonight!), Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, with the somewhat unappetizing, nay unpromising title, “The Fallacy of Academic Freedom, and the Academic Boycott of Israel,” The New Centennial Review 8:2 (2008), “The Palestine Issue,” 87-110.

A good deal of Knopf-Newman’s article is dedicated to showing how “academic freedom” in universities is only for those who hold the “right” positions at a given time. What else is new? As a long-time adjunct I know it’s a cover-up for justifying tenure, which used to function as closed union shops insofar as those without tenure are concerned. What should not have surprised me and did (I didn’t know) is education in Palestinian history, going way back to the 19th century, Palestinian studies, schools, books have been rigorously suppressed: schools destroyed, attempts at colleges unfunded.

This reminds me of Black American studies in the US. But because it’s familiar does not mean it is unimportant.  The Israelis and others have prevented the accumulation of a solid basis of unbiased Palestinian history to study and with which to teach generations of people and to build from. Knopf-Newman brings out parallels with South Africa when an apartheid state.

As a feminist I cannot leave out women writers: I came across a review by Samar Attar of Women under Occupation: Fadwa Tuqan and Sahar Khalifah Document Israeli Colonization” Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe. Lanham: UP of Amer, 2010. The book is a collection of brief memoirs and cycles of poems. What is the experience of women in such a place — with their children, their lack of access to jobs, education, medicine, their vulnerability to rape. One of the surprised here is this book helps account for the oddity that Christian fundamentalists in the US are so vehemently pro-Israel: they support the colonization of “the Holy Land” for their own vision of worship, the Bible. Violence and prisons are a norm of everyday life; stories of torture (and torment); the trope of a Wandering Palestinian is common.

Colonial archeologists conspire with the invasion authorities, desperately trying to find ancient Jewish monuments under the rubble only to prove to themselves that they — the migrants/warriors from Europe— are not strangers in the land, rather their Palestinian victims are. But after the shock of the invasion, the defeated narrator soon recovers her senses. Her colonizer can prevent her from crossing the border, but will never be able to destroy her imagination …

The poetry is deeply bleak, melancholy, despairing. I know about the lack of archaeological evidence from reading Digging the Dirt by Jennifer Wallace.

Which gets me to my last very short article: Donna Robinson Divine, a review of Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Palestinian Thought, 1882-1948. This takes us back to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, where Zionism seems such a humane ideal, so innocent in the mystic character of Mordecai. Divine suggests that from the very beginning (well before 1917) buried in Zionist texts is the aim of transferring the Arab majority at the time inhabiting Palestine “elsewhere” and replacing them with a unmixed Jewish group of people. In order to find this out, you do have to study older documents in libraries; you need schools and centers to study.

So this is what I have to tell my readership tonight as to what they could be reading of use, essays and books of strong ethical eloquence.

Update: 12/18/2023: Final result: What does it mean to erase a people? its culture, identity, past, & aim at destroying future: From The Guardian

https://tinyurl.com/tw5pu2s8

Ellen

The Sixth Commandment

Timothy Spall as Larry Farquhar and Anne Reid as Ann Moore-Martin

In the comments, for comparison: When Harry Met Sally! — how to be a prisoner of genre and not care, two hours of it, and while below is how to use and transcend and stay within a genre …

Dear friends and readers,

I confess I have succumbed to watching nightly different movie stories from the vast array of mystery-thriller, spy, and now “true crime” stories that fill the streaming and mainstream channels of what passes for major TV and computer entertainment fare. My excuse has been I’m studying this genre and finding it worthwhile. If needed, beyond books and essays, there are excellent documentaries on the form, among them, Andrew Marr’s, which I summarized here some years ago (!)

Well about a week ago I found myself reading my daughter’s (full disclosure) blog-review of the coming British films available on American TV and channels and was drawn to one of her colleague’s discussion of The Sixth Commandment Timothy Spall is one of the great character actors of our era (e.g., Mr Turner),and I was interested because Sarah Phelps, the script-writer is a woman who has made Agatha Christie adaptations that are much better than the original books. I’d noticed Saul Dibb as the director of fine films too. Anne Reid I first saw as the housekeeper and Sergeant George’s mother in Andrew Davies’s Bleak House; then she held her own throughout the recent Sanditon as one of Jane Austen’s harridans whom Davies gave more humane depths to.

But I was not prepared for how stunningly moving and humane this one is. As art and deeper message, this serial is about as good as any film you’ll find anywhere. Lucy Mangan (in The Guardian) replays the themes Lucy Braugher discussed (just above) for PBS, only with greater subtlety and appreciation of how this differs from most of these “true crime” stories: the emphasis is not only on the victims and their families and friends; the movie accords intense respect towards the frail elderly repressed and lonely homosexual man and the naive elderly unmarried woman attached to her niece and her dog. It takes us beyond categories many people might be likely to turn from, or ridicule: It is “harrowing” (as Mangan says) and perhaps I feel a little uncomfortable in recommending what might seem morbid or voyeuristic matter (which I have to admit seems to be part of many of the more contemporary of these violent and sometimes frightening or anxiety-producing genre shows) but here the point is to remember what these real people were. It is form of honoring them.

Eanna Hardwicke as Ben Field when taken into custody

It is also to show us what evil is, that a man (or woman) can be evil: malevolent, at core malicious, predatory, and perceptive about other people’s needs, Ben Field (Eanna Hardwicke) is also central to why this film is important: it does not psychoanalyze him into a figure we can sympathize with, but leaves us with an Iago-like character. The trial scenes are fascinating because this seeming religious man boasts about what he did to these people. Some of the reviews that have been harsh have been angry at the attention paid to this cruel man but they have misunderstood or underestimated the full purpose of the film-makers. Louisa Mellor (Den of Geek) is one of those who does justice to the terrifying Field (who wanted to humiliate and play with these people beyond killing them)

Other cast members or characters add quietly to, or thicken the terrain. Peter’s brother and sister-in-law are played by Adrian Rawlins and Amanda Root, and we watch a slow build-up of suspicion allayed, and then increasing horror and profound anger as they realize what happened to their beloved friend. Conor MacNeill, the masochistic friend or scout-stooge somehow under the power of Field, adds intense pathos but also dread. The ferocity of Ann Moore-Martin’s niece (apparently orphaned and very close to her aunt), Annabel Scholey as Anne-Marie Blake, whose marriage almost breaks up as she lashes out at everyone because of her own guilt in not rescuing her aunt in time to save her life. Possibly this shot of Rawlins and Root as ordinary people captures something of the quality sought for these surrounding characters.

There was a slow careful build-up of tension, worry that something is wrong here, and when at the close of the first episode we realize that Ben has been lying and has now gotten the property and probably murdered Ben, the second part has to draw us in in a new way: we are led to see what’s happening through Anne-Marie’s deep distrust and attempts to take action against Ben. We are upset when before she dies, Anne is so angry with herself, ashamed of how her vanity and need led her to be taken in. The third episode we are eager to see Ben arrested so are watching as the detectives in the police procedural fashion gather evidence, and finally have enough. The fourth we are on edge lest the jury decide wrongly.

I feared Ben would topple the unsure Peter — and thought to myself, he won’t for he wants the money …

Andrew Marr is determined to make a case for respecting this form of novel and film. Possibly the finest use of a film like this is it does that. Look at the stills of the two actors playing Farquhar and Moore-Martin: we have lost these precious people. All these melodramas are socially realistic stories, where writers, as Val McDermid says, are tackling “the terrible things that happen in the real world.” They lead us to address death and violence through a complex moral dimension provided by the author. The different consolation that modern detective fiction offers (as opposed to older fiction say pre-ancien regime), Marr contends, is found in the individuals willing to bring to light to stop some horrible behavior on our behalf (ultimately): the good and caring man or woman who is the detective, police officer, the lawyer who carries the weight of bad world on themselves, often at the expense of living a life of their own, or because they haven’t managed to integrate into the social history we are experiencing. Our beloved Foyle, Peter Wimsey, Jane Tennison.

This one does differ from Marr’s archetype because the detectives play a secondary role, do not emerge as individuals any more than the brilliant lawyers who expose Ben Field do. The camera, the impersonal POV replaces this individual. Ann-Marie is told at the end that it was she who started the action that eventually put Ben Field behind bars. I wonder if part of the effect of this story is dependent on their not being this reliable person who tidied everything up with ease. After all, until the last moment, detectives and lawyers were worried sick, the jury would produce a verdict of not guilty, that Field could have maneuvered them into respecting him and dismissing his victims. They find Martyn “not guilty” and surely he did know what was going on. After 19 hours the “guilty” verdict of murder for Ben Field was an intense relief to me — I did not read what had been the conclusion of the real trial. The actor looked puzzled as if he could hardly credit he was going to be punished, put away for a long time (36 years minimum).

A seeming police photo

The landscape also did not seem to figure as centrally to the effect of the story as in most. Possibly this is due to its not having been a novel, but my understanding is that Wallander (which I’ve begun to watch and both Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hiddleston have engaged me) was invented as a series of films, and surely the bleak desolate river-scape of the stories’ backdrop is as central as England’s green and pleasant land is to Foyle (in the town of Hastings by the sea) or the many places Wimsey explores (from the fens, to Yorkshire, to Scotland, to central London). But then because it seemed so ordinary it is less escapist and like Susan Hill’s Various Haunts of Men (a book that gave me anxiety nightmares about my house being on the first floor and how easy it would be to break in) I could identify all the more with Peter Farquhar and Anne Moore-Martin. I was made nervous by a gardener I hired sometime ago and was much relieved when he finally stopped coming round after I told him, no more.

It is probably paranoid to imagine Ben managed to poison poor Rosie who dies during the story and might have been hostile to such a constant visitor …

Is there anything here which I can especially put down to the program having been written by a woman? a certain sensitivity to the nuances of private domestic life? the very vulnerability of elderly people: no one here is a macho male type, young and handsome, muscled, except of course Ben. Her work includes A Very British Scandal, with its deep pity for the poignant homosexual low status man (Ben Wishaw), almost done in by the brutal MP (Hugh Grant) …

Ellen

Our brief London season this September: Mark Rylance as Dr Semelweiss; My memories of London theater with Jim; PS on DC theater

Mark Rylance (promotional photo)

Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers in Private Lives (Ambassador Theater, London)

A not atypical play in DC theater: good older plays are now retro …

Friends and readers,

My third and final blog on Izzy and my adventures in Oxford and London this past September. We were there so I could give a paper on Trollope and Women at Somerville College, Oxford for the wonderful London Trollope Society.

My criteria for the excellence of Dr Semelweiss was Izzy and I must’ve been up for 19 hours in a row before we got to the theater; we exhausted ourselves finding it and had had no dinner, the beautiful theater had small seats and while we could see very well we were high up in the auditorium. And yet we stayed awake the whole time.

It’s an important subject for our time: in the US with the Dobbs decision, women are again in mortal danger if they become pregnant. A religious belief has taken over the legal reality, and the insistence there is a separate baby inside the woman from time of conception means that in some US states she is allowed to go as near death as possible before saving her when something goes wrong either with a fetus, or a developing neo-nate late in the pregnancy. She is treated as a potential criminal by these same states’ court. The motivation is a combination of misogyny and hatred over sex; what the anti-abortion people are looking for too is to end the right to contraception so it’s compulsory pregnancy if you have sex and your body becomes pregnant. The history of women and childbirth is a fraught and frequently tragic one.

The play is about a doctor who understood the large percentage of deaths of women in childbed in hospitals was due to no one washing their hands. Midwives at home knew to do this, but, as presented in the play, male doctors felt insulted. This is probably a simplification, but we see that Dr Semelweiss lacks the social skills to navigate the competitive institution he is part of, and eventually he is put in an asylum when he becomes hysterical because no one will heed his advice. He is so quietly poignant that I found him riveting. Because we were far away I cannot comment on other performances as despite Amanda Wilkin as his wife, Maria, emerging at the play’s close in a final eloquent speech. I love moral plays when done right.

The play is not presented realistically: we have a chorus and group of dancers, all women, who represent women dying in childbirth over the centuries, and they intermingle with the dramatic scenes. His wife becomes pregnant during the play too. The reviews have been mixed: David Bennet in Variety; Andrzej in Time Out; Kate Kellaway gets it right at the Guardian

****************************************

I cannot tell a lie and we did not see Private Lives though I longed to. As luck would have it, it was sold out for the one night (a Wednesday) we could have gotten there. I might have tried alone on the Thursday, but Izzy was against yet a third night out, and I can no longer trust my immediate memory to navigate myself in a strange city. I can’t use the google maps on my phone as navigator the way she can use hers. Here is Victoria Segal for The Sunday Times. I’ve read a couple of others and watched some YouTube video clips.

Of course I should have bought the tickets ahead of time, but I felt we could not know for sure where we’d be or how my hope of seeing my friend, Rory, and also meeting with Dominic Edwardes, the generous-hearted chair who has been so supportive of everyone’s talks for the Trollope Society on-line reading group would make for a schedule.

Confession: I have always found Private Lives boring, the way I find Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest boring. They seem set up as displays of frozen wit whose emotional depths are kept at a distance and I hoped these two wonderful actors (who I’ve seen acting marvelously in films many times) would finally bring the text a living depth. But Segal’s review makes me doubt they actually did overcome the artifice. I probably would have loved the “retro” aspect of it; I find I do not like contemporary theater productions when they are too contemporary.

I think I’m sad I didn’t go because I wanted to see the theater itself. I loved being in the Harold Pinter theater, the Victoria and Albert Hall, and wanted to renew my acquaintance with a third theater if possible during this week. There was Pygmalion that night at the Old Vic, but Izzy would not hear of it.

I have such cherished memories of Jim and I going to great theatrical productions now and again when we were in London. Probably the Old Vic stays most vividly in my mind because there we saw Alan Bennet’s Wind in the Willows a fine production of Jim’s favorite book from childhood, with an actually dying Jeremy Sinden as Toad in the closing lonely scene. Jim loved it. We saw James Norton in R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End in The Duke of York’s Theater one summer evening 2011. Here the play and the actor remain with me; here’s Lyn Gardner for the Guardian.

Last we must’ve gone to the National Theater complex at the Thames almost every time we came to London in the years between 1997 and 2005, where we really did come regularly to England each summer for Jim to join with a team from the 5 English speaking countries of NATO to plan, test, and discuss present and future problems. We’d stay in a Landmark Trust renovated building and eat in (so that the money he was given for eating out paid for Izzy and I to be with him).

Cloth Fair in Smithfield, London, was the place we stayed in most often

Ellen