Summer syllabus, OLLI at AU: The Heroine’s Journey

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: 4 Tuesday mornings, 9-45-11:15 am online,
Study Group 1620: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course:

We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.

Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)

Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):

Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2

Strongly suggested films:

Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one.
Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD

Kauffmann, Angelica, Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion

June 6th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)

June 13th: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

June 20th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.

June 27th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)

First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)

Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a 1001 Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):

Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.

Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)

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Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard): a gem of a historical novel & film

Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (from Il Gattopardo, Lucino Visconti, 1963)

Dear friends and readers,

This book represents a complete turnabout for me, and twice: I started the term regretting that I had chosen this book as not having enough story to it, as too reactionary, maybe static, and, before it was time to discuss it with the class, I fell in love with it as quietly subtly intensely active (though the most overt actions, the battles are off-stage), profound in its understanding of how politics works, encompassing in an epitomizing way of the history and culture of history from well before to well after the Risorgimento, but centering on one of its central phases, Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily. I had partly been influenced by my first watching of the film in the American version (cut down, and dubbed by others, except for Lancaster’s voice, which was his own), which on first blush (I now think I was so tired), I found so flat and stilted; but again, before it was time to discuss the film with the class, I had watched the whole of the Italian version (with all speaking Italian except Lancaster, and here he was dubbed), 3 hours and 40 minutes and was mesmerized, deeply affected. In fact I watched it twice, and then four different features about it, Visconti, Lancaster, the book.

Lampedusa was a great poet whose work emerges from a kind of exile imposed on himself; his novel as great historical novel which while presenting a version of the Risorgimento which many would say is wholly inadequate and reactionary, nonetheless stands up to scrutiny because of the scepticism and irony with which just about everything is viewed, the main character’s real intelligence and insight into everyone he meets, and his essential kindly humanity. It is often not mentioned that he fought in World War Two; he did live a life apart immersed in literary and art study, but he also experienced much of life — like Italo Calvino’s nun who goes nowhere. He presided over the decay and loss of his family estate, watched the world lurch through changes from the opening of the century to a decade after World War Two.

It is partly an autobiographical book because the prince is based on Lampedusa’s real great-grandfather, a learned, solitary (despite being surrounded by people), non-professional scientist when there was no such thing as a scientific profession and a rentier; he devoted himself to astronomy. Fabrizio is the book as he is the movie: his quiet, melancholic, ironic self fills its spaces; fundamentally he’s alienated from his society while belonging utterly to it – he belongs nowhere and is at its core. He lives just outside the rough and tumble of the world while being intensely aware of how it works. The prince’s nephew, Tancredi, is partly based on Lampedusa’s own nephew (minus the cold callowness) — his nephew has today turned one of the castles in the book into a tourist house, set in a beautiful landscape.

What we see in our book is a specific phase of the risorgimento: how it was experienced in the early 1860s and at and around Palermo. The book opens with our characters being told of the military come, Garibaldi at the head winning again and again, everywhere, sometimes fighting fiercely, others being welcomed in a celebratory spirit (Naples). Garibaldi is the great absent-presence of this book. He is never on stage but we hear about him all the time – Scott is a lot kinder and brings his world historical characters on stage, but Scott is not such a conservative as Lampedusa who didn’t want to dramatize Garibaldi as his presence would have contradicted the prince’s idea that all revolutions do is replace an old corrupt order with a new one.

I find the wikipedia article provides an excellent synopsis and phase-by-phase plot-summary. This is well put:

The novel is the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina,[3] a 19th-century Sicilian nobleman caught in the midst of civil war and revolution. As a result of political upheaval, the prince’s position in the island’s class system is eroded by newly-moneyed peasants and “shabby minor gentry.” As the novel progresses, the Prince is forced to choose between upholding the continuity of upper class values, and breaking tradition to secure the continuity of his family’s influence. A central theme of the story is the struggle between mortality and decay (death, fading of beauty, fading of memories, change of political system, false relics, etc.), and abstraction and eternity (the prince’s love for the stars, continuity and the resilience of the Sicilian people). In a letter to a friend, the author notes: “Be careful: the dog Bendicò is a very important character and is almost the key to the novel”. This heraldic emblem is the key to destruction, in the sense that ruin comes even to the dog.”

Jeffrey Meyers’s literary close reading in the Italian Quarterly is also suggestive: The Leopard is a richly symbolic novel from the first scene during the Rosary to the final moment when the carcass of Bendicò is flung out the window. The symbols form two categories: there are those which emerge and disappear only to be found later in a somewhat varied form, like a pattern of dolphins leaping through the sea. These may be called recurrent symbols, which only grow to their fullest meaning toward the end of the book, and through their very expansion advance the theme of the novel. Through repetition and variation they function also as leitmotifs and thereby effect a structural unity. The eviscerated soldier, the stars, Sicily itself, and Bendicò are recurrent symbols, woven like threads into the fabric and texture of Lampedusa’s art.

The second mode of symbols are used more conventionally; they occur and evoke a higher meaning only once. But these static
symbols often appear in an expanded moment which allows their meanings to reverberate through the novel and foreshadow the future. Prophecy is used structurally to link the present with the future and to give an air of predestined inevitability to important actions. The most successful symbols in this group are the series of objets d’art which illustrate and prophesy the love of Tancredi and Angelica….”

I love the houses, the wandering through the rooms of Tancredi and Angelica, how they get lost in the palace at Donnafugato, the highly ironic and despairing political scenes  — even if the mayor wins he lies about the count so that it should be unanimous; the cry of anguish of the progressive man that the prince will do nothing for the immiserated poor; then the luxury and delicacy of the ball itself, finally how gently the prince died — how he wanted to go. The gentle comedy.

I leave my reader to peruse the rest of these wikipedia articles (above, below, one on Lampedusa), and find and read the articles I cited in the comments

Lampedusa was motivated finally to write the book towards the very end of his life when he went to a literary fair and conference for the first time in many years and thought to himself I can do as well as these people – and of course felt he was coming to the end of his life – he was no longer well. He drove himself to finish it, and when he died, it had been rejected by a couple of the major Italian publishers. It’s sad to know he never knew of its publication nor the several short stories he wrote around the same time and readied for publication.

The initial reception was very mixed – to say the least. It was rejected and not until Eugenio Montale, a major poet, and Giorgio Bassani championed it, did it see the light of day as a book. Bassanio was not socialist and at one time was a fascist – so it was a political time-bomb. What happened was it sold phenomenally well. You can think of it as the Downton Abbey of its day.

Very slowly since it has gained much respect as a poetic masterpiece, psychological study of a particular kind of man at place in time, as a historical novel set in 1860 in Palermo where all around the main action slaughters are going on, and fierce politics – overheard by our prince and brought as news by his nephew, Tancredi, and experienced as a plebiscite where there seem to be (astonishing) no contrary votes.

In a kind of touristy essay – by a man who visited the cemetery in Palermo where the Lampedusa family is buried after he had read the novel many years before and once again – Richard O’Mara remarks that the Mayor we meet, Calogero, as the prince half-predicts, did found a Mafioso organization which still exists because when the Americans came in with their ambiguous Marshall Plan, they handed out a number of central positions to Mafioso agents.

The famous highpoint of the ball: the prince dances with his coming daughter-in-law

The film too did not initially get the respect it should have — because it’s a costume drama, and had star types at the center. But the sheer popularity of it won out. As with Hollywood movies when it comes time to give out prizes, they shower second-rate movies that were phenomenal successes at the box office, but later as the movie shows sustaining power, gains an audience, the film critics who count look again — or look louder. Over the years, this long unusual film for its time, Il Gattopardo, been studied and found to be immensely rich in dialogues, events, details, cinematography, and depth of emotion. It is also gently funny: the specifics of many of the characters make us laugh while we feel for them. It was filmed entirely on location, and use was made of real buildings, real churches, the Sicilian landscape, monuments, sky.

Again wikipedia did real justice to it. Here are some of my notes:

I was fully involved and discovered the movie to be (for 2 hours and 40 minutes) mostly a light comedy with melancholy undertones, with a simple story, focusing on the central male, the Prince played by Lancaster. He dominates the film and carries it — not an easy thing to do

Lancaster delivers a remarkable performance. The second star cast was Alan Delon and he speaks French so in neither version can you hear him. The one street battle scene (Garibaldi invades Sicily) is very well done, but at a distance and not long enough for the burden of meaning it’s asked to bear. The outlook is very anti-risorgimento with the political idea that the peasant world does not want to change; since we hardly see any we are not in a position to judge. The other idea that you have to permit change in order to keep things the same is acted out in an election presented in the film as useless. The class snobbery as in the book is not contradicted; there is no downstairs.

The scenes between the prince and a sort of hunting comrade and the middle mayor whose daughter, Angelica (Claudia Cardinale) the Prince’s nephew marries are among the best for understanding the characters and Visconti’s outlook (an aristocrat himself albeit a man of the left).

Beyond that the filming of the places is remarkable and the last quarter the film devoted to a ball whose different phases have different symbolic resonances — it reminded me very much of the balls in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind — we do glimpse that the nephew’s marriage is one of convenience, but as the inner life of his coming wife is downplayed and one of calculation — we don’t feel grief.

I like this comment about the ending of both book and film by Randy Boyagoda:

The novel’s appeal could be attributed to its beautiful prose (obvious even in translation), to its languid pacing, and to how it unfolds the many layers of intrigue and fidelity within a family and between a family and the people around them. But it’s this moment–the beginning of the Prince’s decline, and its rationales and causes–that makes The Leopard more than just another underappreciated classic. It’s this moment that makes it speak to the kinds of concerns we each have to deal with these days in our personal, professional, and faith lives … There is far more at play in the Prince’s Donnafugata dilemma than obvious irony and poetic social justice. Taken in the context of the whole novel, it is a superb evocation of what it means to be a serious person out of step with one’s time … What matters in each of these situations is accepting that you need to act for the greater good while also accepting the permanent possibility of a Pyrrhic victory

The last glimpse of Fabrizio as he walks home in the dark

Ellen

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Trollope’s The Warden at the Trollope London Society’s Online Group reads

Donald Pleasance as Mr Harding playing his cello (1983 Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater

Dear friends and readers,

Yesterday’s session on Trollope’s The Warden via the online Trollope London Society reading group, was particularly good. The talk was that pleasurable and informative I think I’ll re-watch — Eric Williams, the man’s name, a retired teacher, projected the warm feeling and picturesqueness of The Warden one comes away with. New people were there, 112 altogether for the session. This testifies to the popularity of this novella among Trollopeans. We’re having an extra session this coming Monday — Trollope’s birthday “party” Dominic called it.

Eric Williams’s talk brought out the central elements Nicholas Shrimpton’s introduction in the new World Classics Oxford paperback covers thoroughly in The Warden — the way the text is made up of layers of different kinds of discourses, and that some of these are realistic enough characters in a domestic story (indepth meditations within characters), but others are satiric (using caricature), allusive (literary references as well as political ones to the real world of England at the time, especially church and presspolitics, and the Crimean war), burlesque (mock-heroic language and the kind of roman a clef feel of the supposed three boys of the Archdeacon who are not boys at all but over-the-top depictions of specific church and politicians at the time). The card game at Eleanor’s party had a few paragraphs very like Pope’s Rape of the Lock where what’s happening in the cards becomes a felt event as if the cards were active beings. So Trollope is going through different layers of reality. This is apparently what Shrimpton was referring to when he called it an experimental novel.

Nigel Hawthorne as Archdeacon Grantly in debate with Mr Harding

The question is, Does it work altogether? or do sometimes the different elements jar?

Catherine Morland’s journey to the abbey, driven and teased by Henry Tilney (2007 Granada NA, scripted Andrew Davies)

This calls to my mind the problem for some people reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: on one level a young girl enters the world aka “le monde” (a 18th century trope); on another we have a gothic parody with the central female character, Catherine, a naif (a character as a satiric device). So does Catherine quite make sense? perhaps in NA too much is caught up in the central figure while in The Warden these different and contradictory kinds of things are diffused across the work? Yet in the later part of The Warden, there is an argument that Trollope’s satiric parody of Dickens’s sentimental radical protest novels go too far: for example, is does the hilarity of the absurdly exaggerated The Almshouse mirror too strongly and remain uncomfortably close to the novel we are reading called The Warden. Does suspension of disbelief break down?

I now say no.  That we must dismiss realism from our minds and Trollope’s style enables us to do this.

Since I’ve been reading and watching Agatha Christie’s stories (as books, as films) one of the central textural elements that makes The Warden a great work and Agatha Christie’s stories not is that the idyll in Christie is set apart; there is no world outside her villages (at least those I’ve read and seen thus far),and the village itself is presented in ways stripped of power structures.  In Trollope’s novella the story and idyllic surroundings are precisely embedded in the real outside world whose power structures are made transparent.  Consider the role of the train and London on the map in The Warden … So this layering and movement between types of characters is part of what made it a bud from which the whole series of the Barchester books could grow

Mr Harding wandering in the cathedral in the famous chapter, “A Long Day in London”, as he waits to see Sir Abraham Haphazard.

I feel I should add that insightful and informative comments were made after the talk. Only the talks are recorded; to encourage more participation and freedom of expressions conversations afterwards are not recorded, but sometimes add greatly to the experience. So one participant pointed out that although Trollope himself — or his narrator — seems to lean on the idea that John Bold’s intervention accomplished nothing much, and put at risk what the old men had (this is Archdeacon Grantly’s view); nevertheless a number of these egregious unfair distributions of inherited wealth in the church were re-arranged, or put a stop to, and there were genuine reforms. So a book like The Warden beyond being an unacknowledged Condition of England novel, also perhaps provided a spur to do some good. “You have to start somewhere.” I add that reform often comes top down, that is change is made in who holds onto the power by those in power and this too can bring improvement in people’s lives.

The wonderfulness of Alan Plater’s Barchester Chronicles, the 1983 7 part serial was brought up too — how beautifully it’s acted and how faithful it seems. How funny at times. The music and setting. For myself beyond Donald Pleasance, I just love Barbara Flynn as the plain spoken sensible Mary Bold.

Ellen

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DC Spring theater: an uneven King Lear; a downright dismaying Anne Karenina

The ensemble for King Lear: Patrick Paige as Lear, Michael Milligan as fool, Shirine Babb as Kent, Matthew J Harris as Edgar

The director and a few of the actors know the deep pessimism and agony of what humanity is, is the core of the play, that it is utterly serious, but the actors have been encouraged to demean and undermine it with coarse humor, and project its impact through the techniques of action-adventure noise & (for the women) sexy costumes

Amanda Assucena as Anna, José Pablo Castro Cuevas as Vronsky

So to sum up, this is a ballet which fails to tell in the most primitive terms the story of the book, caricatures the depths of the characters, leaves out much that counts that could have been used for dance, and emphatically ends on the worst of morals.

Dear friends and readers,

Nonetheless, far be it from me to suggest you should not rush out and see the King Lear (Peter Marks who never does stint praise) being performed at the Klein Theater in DC this spring: after 3 hours of it you will be moved, shaken, at times unbearably rivetted (when the Cornwall and Regan pluck out the eyes of Gloucester there is no flinching). Page has such a resonant voice and thoughtful dignified as well as raging compassionate presence, he probably matches any other performer I’ve seen (that includes Ian McKellen, 2018, and Anthony Hopkins, 2016, the fool played by the inimitable Karl Johnson).

As to the Joffrey’s Anna Karenina, the long central dance sequences of Anna and Vronsky finally making love, of upon marriage and exile from society, him becoming irritated and disdainful, and a later time of ecstasy after a vilifying social experience, a threesome of the two with Edson Barbosa as a raging Karenin probably go as far as dance without moving into pornography and violence can, to figuring the emotions of such encounters. But denuded as it is of everything else in the novel, I do advise rather taking in one of the excellent film adaptations, listening to the book read aloud, or, if all else fails, read the magnificently plausible book.

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I’ve put off writing about the first experience (I saw the Lear two weeks ago now) because I was unwilling to counter the ecstatic screams of praise I’ve seen nearly everywhere on King Lear as it seemed uncharitable. I was aware while watching this (often very young) company how hard they were working. They seemed driven to somehow affect the audience to some overt reaction, and when the three actresses playing Goneril, Regan and even Cordelia, became vulgarly raunchy, with coarse gesturing towards sex, I put it down to eagerness to believe that Shakespeare was not some “solemn dude” Other reductive gleefulness jarred but I do know that there are places where Shakespeare’s King Lear creaks — the opening triadic ritual, Edmund’s awkward self-congratulations, the chronicle-like war scenes near the close are felt and maybe it is salutary for glamorous mystification of audiences to come to an end. But now I know a number of the actors came from a training school or program run by the Shakespeare theater: the company was saving money by not hiring seasoned professionals.

So it is a simply highly uneven production. Patrick Paige is just superb in every way; he has all the nuanced feeling and depth of thought and anger and pathos one looks for and he carried the show. What a resonant voice he has. The actors playing Gloucester (Craig Wallace) , Edgar and Kent were best after him. Edmund (Julian Elijah Martinez) has some quiet sarcastic turns. Most of the others were either adequate or not at all. All three actresses (four by the end) playing the three daughters were either overdone or wooden (let me spare their names). Oftentimes the ensemble was just too noisy, or loud when they mean to be rousing.

Visual motifs that will stay with me: Lear and the fool behind him with a woolen hat and two battered suitcases — this recalled the Lear with Anthony Hopkins with him and the actor playing the fool walking about with a shopping cart and their things in it. The sets were at times inspired and the hard action, and wildness was done well. I’d say see it and get what you can; they work hard and mean well — the deepest feeling came out of the sequences on the heath, the abysmal poverty of the shack they find themselves in. It was terrifying the scene where Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out – done with driving flair; the whole audience was shuddering — a sense of how frequent in our world is torture. A couple of satiric lines over politicians seemed apt for today. A new inspiration was the quiet death of the fool. Hitherto the fool just vanishes in the text and all productions I’ve seen; in this one he dies of cold, and exhaustion and is covered by a tent blanket.

Near the denouement

The very ending scene of most Lears is what we are all waiting for. Page chose to speak the final famous lines over Cordelia’s body so quietly.

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Opening screen and set; intermission showed screen of snowing…

The Joffrey Anna Karenina is another matter. The reviews tell us to go because it’s such a prestigious company; it’s beyond me how the quality of the dancing is something apart from what is represented (we are told to refresh ourselves so as to understand what is faintly represented); and then there’s how these things are done. The point here is to explain what these reviews are avoiding saying.

I have now read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina three times (in two different recent and good translations) and listened to it read aloud superbly well by Davina Porter. I’ve watched at least seven different adaptations. I am aware of just how punitively Tolstoy regards Anna’s behavior, how much the book presents a patriarchal perspective, how it glorifies the holding to conventions (the Levin and Kitty story) and finally slides over the misery of Anna’s sister-in-law, Dolly, at the hands of Anna’s brother, Stiva (played most effectively by Matthew McFayden, 2012) and in Tom Stoppard’s script (2012) But it also shows how ambiguous and distancing is Anna’s relationship with her husband, how needlessly cruel Karenin is over the child, how impossible it is to live apart from a community who will not accept but deride you.

To even begin to get the meaning of this novel, one must have all three couples, and present them in equally understanding ways, which is what Tolstoy did. This Anna Karenina just about omitted the Stiva-Dolly story, and presents the Levin-Kitty story as if there were no downside (and there is in the novel). The Anna dancing scenes presented her too consistently and especially towards the end as simply a victim. Deprived of her son, she is available for kicking. We see her become a drug addict — so the pity that she is ostracized from company is lost. The company chose to have Anna’s death a horror gothic scene, and then turn to a complete joyous ensemble surrounding Kitty and Levin that was like something taken out of Oklahoma, with no sense of humor or boisterousness.

This comes early on; there is no period of doubt where Kitty is attracted to other men

I suppose the worst lack was the omission of the early scenes of Kitty and Levin’s romance take place on an ice-skating pond. I really (perhaps naively) expected some thrilling ballet over ice — or pretend ice. Just about every movie I’ve seen includes these scenes.

They did need to use pantomime for without it there was no understanding why Dolly looked so glum and Stiva useless, helpless. But I read the company is above that sort of thing. The first we saw her son was the scene where Karenin takes the child from her.

There was an effective moment with Anna seen on one side of the stage (in her slip) and Vronsky painting her on the other. They opened on the train station and Anna’s arrival, but her meeting with Vronsky over-rode anything we might learn of Stiva or Anna’s husband. In the closing her image was presented large with the doctor injecting her with some drug over the railway set. She looked ghastly all right. Then we saw her body naked made large on the screen. Maybe spare yourself.

Almost all the reviews show this scene of Karenin presenting Vronsky with Anna

I don’t say this company didn’t work hard and probably the dancing was superbly well done. But long live patriarchy silently screams this ballet. Watch out if you trespass. I went with a friend and we were moved to discuss how in the last couple of years women have lost such ground in the US, not to omit Islamic nations around the world. No woman in the US today should get pregnant: it is too dangerous for her. She said shows how the #MeToo movement is struggling to survive.

Nicola Paggett in the 1977 movie as she walks into the snowy world towards the end of the film; Stuart Wilson was Vronsky; Eric Porter as Karenin. This BBC production remains the best adaptation of Anna Karenina in English; it shows real understanding of the center people.

The Kennedy Center appears to be returning to what it all too often did before the pandemic: get in shows from elsewhere and rely on the glamor of names to pull audiences in.

Ellen

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All Creatures Great and Small: Season 3: new levels of grief and comfort and muted gaiety

A photo of Anna Madeley as Mrs Hall and Ella Bernstein as Eva Feldman, an evacuated Jewish child — done so as to evoke 1940s photos

“Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter…” (Anibundel of the first season playing providentially almost just as the pandemic hit)

Dear friends and readers,

This is my third season watching this latest and 3rd iteration of James Herriot’s series of books, All Creatures Great and Small, and, as was to be expected, the matter has taken further turns away from the book. I find not totally to my surprise that I never posted on the first season, only its Christmas special albeit in the context of the series, the original movie and Herriot’s books. I also never posted on the second season as a whole, only giving it honorable mention as among a series of fine women’s films for 2022. This third season I’ve gotten to the point that I watch it as appointment TV, Sunday nights at 9 EST, and then re-watch it on the computer (WETA passport) so as to understand anything I misunderstood and savor it! Indeed, I keep up with Samuel West on twitter about the series, and was glad/relieved to be re-assured it will be back for a fourth season, one which incorporates the realities of World War Two as sifted through its comfort-show lens.

Opening paratexts — not as witty and varied as those of the Durrells but the same sort of entrance gate …

I feel I should say something in praise of it, yet am held back (as I was in previous years) by my sense of its shamelessly softened realities that intellectually I do not fall for, but emotionally cannot resist. The promotional photo put out by the series after the airing of the Christmas special embodies the formula: they offer suggestions of in-depth trauma controlled and distanced by the story and characters’ good natures so as to push the watcher into near tears as we actually watch everything turning out well after all. Anibundel calls it pastoral perfection. Sometimes they can overdo it and in the third season there was more evidence of this, as for example, when they were paradoxically insensitive as they tried to appeal to too many contradictory cultural impulses as in the use of a Jewish evacuated child also to stand in for a Christian child opening her magical presents on Christmas day surrounded by patiently pretending adults. Most of the time they have tact and quick pace enough not to insist on an over-motivated improbable anxiety by Nicholas Ralph as Herriot (still ostensibly the central hero) when confronted by a bullying authority figure; Callum Woodhouse as the boyish Tristan pulls this off much better since at the same time Woodhouse has a presence which remains wryly humorous.

An adequate detailed summary with useful links

Caring care

For me what stabilizes the mix are the many tales of suffering animals, some of whom die despite what is depicted realistically as veterinary care. I can believe in these skeins and cry over people upset because their pets (in effect) need rescue. I must not be the only watcher for whom Mrs Hall is turning out to be as central a character as Siegfried Farnon (seen more fully as a hurt sensitive man by Samuel West previously played somewhat similarly by Anthony Hopkins). They are our caring parent presences. The women remain in their traditional subordinate roles, supportive of their men, while strong in their own right; class status remains respected, ethnicity (British Indians are now added to the black farmers, assistants and one wife we’ve seen).

Siegfried and Mrs Hall dealing with a problem cooperatively

Her finest moment, Episode 4: the reunion with Frederick

I admit up-front last night’s ACGS was over-the-top in two ways and in the third parallel story overdid it (egged the compound so we would understand the theme), yet it touched me intensely, I was in a state of anxiety waiting with Mrs Hall, worried Edward would not come (and when Mrs H returns home and sits down with Siegfried the first question he asks is, “Did he come?”), then I did feel bad for her at his awkwardness, but glad he brought out his accusations. To tell the truth, I’m with him; at the last moment as they walk along towards the train she blurts out “I panicked” — that’s about it. When she discovered he was stealing, she became frightened she’d be blamed, and she needed a place to live, a job. She thinks she loves him above all, but unlike  a parallel Dickens’s text where we are to accept at surface value what Mrs Rouncewell (Bleak House, who also gave up a beloved son to fit into the hierarchical society) says (Mrs R does not say she loves George above everything), there is enough there to show us the son is partly correct in his assessment of Mrs H’s loyalties. She put him in jail. The second story of the weeping older man with his dog who is all the man has in the world did make me cry — alleviated by the comedy (if you can call it that, it was strained) of Siegfried “training” another boy. It was really too much to have Rachel’s younger sister (I think of her as Rachel not Helen) leave school so we could see Rachel show how loyal she is to the child herself — again undercut somewhat by an awareness this is not the best decision — or only if the girl genuinely wants to stay in this small world, which has been made idyllic and which Herriot has chosen when an adult and after a superior education.

His most moving, Episode Episode 3: the backstory killing of all the horses in WW1 still in Siegfried’s mind, told very well by Judith Cheney, a member of Trollope & his Contemporaries @ groups.io

“Siegfried in a flashback memory of the end of WW1, Siegfried was ordered to put down all of the war horses which would not be transported back to Britain. The white or dapple grey horse he killed was the horse in the scene, he & other soldiers found a horse which had been whinnying in pain wounded on the battlefield. They rescued & rehabilitated it. These horse killings had broken S.’s heart & deeply affected him for the rest of his life. (Remember the racehorse episode back a season or two?)

The superior officer who ordered Siegfried to kill all the horses may have been the man whose horse he was now again being told to put down on the Seabright estate – from the dialogue: Siegfried to this racehorse’s owner, ” Oh no you don’t, you’re going to stay & watch it this time.” Siegfried is able to save this horse however, by his gentleness & mounting him bareback, he is able to gallop him off over the hill & thus prove him rideable, with time & proper handling & kindness.”

A couple of recaps told me that this kind of episode where the accent is on sorrow and lost can be complained about — and also that there is more of this in this series than is explicitly appreciated. One trick is to keep the depths in the backstory: we never experience what happened to Mrs Hall and Frederick years ago, and our account of it remains incomplete.

I should say now (about the fakery) — I’ve probably said it before — Yorkshire is NOT eternally green, the skies do not ETERNALLY shine. Beige, brown, grey, yellow — yes some sunny days but certainly not in most of the winter. This is Wuthering Heights country. Rain, cold damp, raw — one of podcasts from WETA about the program has a British person who knows better but never a peep out of her. Wintertime days are very short. Very grey. But nevertheless I love their brightly colored animated paratexts, for Christmas covered with white snow. Flaws include that Woodhouse is getting too old to play the awkward semi-innocent (!) male; and Rachel Shenton as Helen is not given enough to do. The gaiety of the show is supplied by this innocent or overtly young non-predatory male. He is so easily controlled by his new love, the British Indian young woman, Florence Pandhi (Sophie Khan Levy)

The dog is hers

The film story does not yet go overtly into politics, but with World War Two coming up, they cannot slide over the threat of Nazism and fascism; instead they render these things hintingly and as beyond everyone’s conception. I doubt they will ever come near the true explanations of the evil’s facets (as Foyle’s War did and does almost every time): the existence of hopelessness and the need to escape into worlds of destruction would astonish these characters as crazed nightmares are precisely the sort of thing this series is an antidote for. The characters all stand firm in their belief the world is fundamentally a good place. Good medicine is what they mean to offer for those who can enter into the wholesome comfort of bargaining that works out well for almost all.

This is more sheer fun than the show and captures something archetypal about each of the characters:

Ellen

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A tangent I can’t resist: Women Detective Stories

The author’s real name is Carolyn Heilbrun, the detective Kate Fansler

Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) of Prime Suspect fame

Friends and readers,

An interim blog: this is me thinking out a few semi-conclusions I’ve come to after a couple of months of reading books about women detectives (history, literary criticism, culture, feminist) and reading and rereading a few such books by men and women. As I’ve written on my Sylvia I blog, I seem to be going through something of a transition after living in this world without Jim for some 9 plus years. Part of this is I am liking books I used to not be able to read, and able to accept optimism and at least sympathize with (understand in a new way from an outward transactional POV) some conventional transactional pro-social-ambition perspectives.

To get to the point here, I find that I can’t resist reading and watching new kinds of material in the detective, mystery-thriller, spy genre kind, which I’ve come back to seeing as closely allied to the gothic. Not that I altogether rejected books with women detectives at the center: my first Internet pseudonym was Sylvia Drake, a minor character in Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy night, and my gravatar for my political blog is a small picture of Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane looking thoughtful.

From Strong Poison: she is supposed the murderer and this is in prison, she is talking to Lord Peter Wimsey (Edward Petherbridge)

The reading came out of my preparing for my coming The Heroine’s Journey course this winter. As you can see, if you go over the look, there is no example among my four slender book choices of a female detective novel. That’s because I couldn’t think of one slender enough for such a short course until I came upon Amanda Cross’s (aka Carolyn Heilbrun’s) Death in a Tenured Position. Most recent and older female detective novels are average size, say 350 pages (Gaudy Night is about this size) because often many combine a “novel of manners” (or domestic romance) with the detective formula. But I found it to be a central category because since surfacing in novels in the 1860s, the type has multiplied in appearances until say today there may be several TV shows featuring a female detective available all at once.

Although I’ve found dictionary-type books with lists and essays on women writers and their detective novels (Great Women Mystery Writers, ed Kathleen Gregory Klein, truly excellent; By a Woman’s Hand by Jean Swanson and Dean James, 200 short entries which have the merit of naming the author as well as the detective and offering enough information to give the reader a gist of what type of mystery fiction this is), it has been very hard to find any essay-like books treating just the category of female detective fiction by women writers. The nature of the material (influences, who’s writing what, movies as a group-creation) has led to many male writers putting female detectives at the center of their series, and many female writers putting male detectives, and these mixed gender creations (so to speak) are often superb in all sorts of ways.

One of my felicitous reading and watching experiences this past year was Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (both book and film), which features a private detective, Atticus Pund (spelt without accents) in a 1950s novel as part of an investigation into a parallel murder today by the old trope amateur sleuth, Sue Ryland in (presumably) 2021 — for its witticism, self-reflexive uses of the core fantasies, styles and yes multi-gender empathies.

Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville) is also intended to appeal to older unmarried career women (the spinster trope transformed & modernized at last)

But as there is a real, findable, and demonstable fault-line and difference between male and female writing, and films made by mostly men or mostly women, and visual art, and music too, and one of my aims as a teacher and writer is to keep women’s literature alive and make it more respected; I’ve been after just the books by women albeit in a multi-gender context. I’ve also tried to stick to films where the central author originally (or continuously) is a woman, and evidence shows women directing, producing, doing set design. The qualification here is all of these are shaped by the kind of detection mystery genre the book/film is written in. I’ve followed Andrew Marr centrally here; Julian Symons’s Bloody Murders is also indispensable.

I’ve come to a few tentative conclusions.

I agree in part with Kathleen Klein’s brilliant analysis (The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre) of the depiction of female detectives mostly in books, but equally by men and women that often these may easily be read and are in fact intended (when conscious) as anti-feminist (meaning the movement for independence and equality) portrayals from a male (in some eras on TV lascivious) POV.

This POV is on display in right now in the incessant arguments and brutal put-downs of Miss Eliza Scarlet (the ever patient Kate Phillips has played many an wholly abject woman, from Jane Seymour in the recent Wolf Hall, to Tolstoy’s hero Andrei’s long-suffering wife, the 2016 serial by Andrew Davies) by “The Duke” Inspector Wellington (the pugnacious, overtly insulting professional police detective played by Stuart Martin, doubtless chosen for his resemblance to the matinee idol type, Richard Armitage) who reiterates constantly a woman cannot be both a real or natural or happy woman and a detective; who needs strong men around her to protect her. Injury was added to insult in the most recent episode (Season 3, Episode 2) where a story was concocted whereby a mean and bullying ex-friend, Amanda Acaster, who repeatedly humiliated and nowadays derides her, is also used to criticize adversely Eliza’s character: Eliza is supposed now to have felt for Amanda trying to have a career using the same manipulative amoral tactics she did when the two were young. She is not charged though her measures were what encouraged a gang of thieves to use her restaurant as a front.  But look she surpasses Eliza in the Victoria sponge cake line. The costuming of the program shows some knowledge of the illustrations for such stories in the 1870s/90s, the music is very good, and lines are witty (though usually at Eliza’s expense) and I’d call the presentation stylish. I have spent this much time on it as it’s contemporary and its perniciousness extends to endorsing bullying and mocking non-macho males (Andrew Gower as a homosexual man controlled by his mother).

In many of these detective stories especially the hard-boiled type, and since the 1990s, the woman simply takes on male characteristics, and when she doesn’t and displays genuine female psychology, set of values, life experiences, and is as competent as the males and not just by intuition, by the end of a given book or series, we are to see she has not lived a fulfilled life, which must include marriage and motherhood. This is how Prime Suspect finally ends. In medias res, the female detective of whatever type is often allowed genuine common women’s lives characteristics and we see themes and archetypes familiar in women’s literature, e.g., recent film instance of the mother-daughter rivalry paradigm in Annika where the older heroine is divorced and lives with her teenage older daughter. There is now a line of disguised lesbian socially-conscious fiction, e.g., Val McDermid, seen in film recently featuring Karen Pirie played by Lauren Lyle, of Outlander provenance, dressed in unemphatically non-binary ways

But I don’t agree wholly with Klein (or others who write from her vantage). At the same time, the way out is not to trivialize and pretend to treat as playful amusement “the lady investigator” and her now many daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters, all the while lightly coming to the same conclusion as Klein, with some face-saving and genuinely rescuing qualifications. This is the vein taken by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan in their The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction: a very informative as well as insightful book; it covers amateur and private detectives as well as the spy genre, which Klein does not. Nor is it to ignore this aspect of the genre altogether: Lucy Worsley in her Art of Murder manages this, at the same time as she (curiously) denies that the mass audience for this kind of thing understands it as fantasy (that most murders are not solved, and when solved not by brilliant ratiocinative nor super-scientific techniques, but rather information from people involved) but out of a thirst for violence and fascination with death (this does ally it to the gothic).

What we need to remember is the history of the genre: it first emerges in the later 19th century when women could get jobs and income on their own, go to college as woman (usually women’s colleges). The whole larger genre of detective fiction develops its characteristics when you first have men hired in visible numbers and a real police force. So there were male models for male detectives but no female models for female detectives. This changes (Miss Scarlet and the Duke is quite a startling throw-back) post-World War II when women held on to their array of male jobs and began to be hired, however slowly, and to be promoted to managerial positions in institutions, including the police (Lynda LaPlante modelled Jane Tennison on an actual woman detective).

I suggest that the woman detective was an popular substitute for the “new woman” so distinguished by feminist literary scholars of the 1890s (which never achieved much popularity or was not lasting); she becomes liberated and a real woman as women in our western societies begin at any rate to achieve the right and education for financial and some real sexual independence. We see this in Horowitz’s Sue Rylands and I hope to show other women detectives from the post World War II era.

So as a follow-on from this framework, I hope from time to time to write blogs here when the writer is a male and the portrait less than really feminocentric; on detective fiction found in both books and films; and on Reveries under the Sign of Austen (when the writer is female and the work genuinely l’ecriture-femme, which includes for me a genuinely anti-violence, anti-war and pro-woman political POV, which by the way I do think Prime Suspect was and is: Gray Cavender and Nancy C Jurik’s Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. The victims in these shows are often women tortured by male violence, young children, including boys destroyed and warped by male pedasty, immigrants, mostly women working menial jobs desperately, and yes prostitutes too, and women who murder (including one semi-accidental infanticide) too.

First up for Austen Reveries will be Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position and, for this blog, the older masterpiece, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant investigates the character of Richard III)

Of course Josephine Tey was a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, and the photo is of Jennifer Morag Henderson who wrote an excellent biography

Ellen

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Outlander 6: Episodes 5-8: Trauma, Transgression and Betrayal; Crisis and Separation

Lord John Grey (David Berry, Episode 5, “Give Me Liberty)

Dear friends and readers,

I complete my account of the sixth season of Outlander (see Episodes 1-4: Processing Grief … ). I’ve been so enjoying the sixth season, I’m telling myself by mid-December I’ll try again to read or listen to The Fiery Cross and then go on to A Breath of Snow and Ashes, both of which I have as books by Galbaldon and as CD sets read aloud by Davina Porter.

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Episode 6: Give Me Liberty

Yet another basically reflective and retrospective episode. I was delighted to find that David Berry has returned. To my taste, he is the handsomest of all the male leads, and I’m “charmed” (really am) by the character. At one point he is wearing a lovely cream-colored outfit, but I could not find a still online of this scene.

This is another episode hard to disentangle and hard to replicate with the interweave so again I’ll just cover each thread. My framing will be the feature that comes with it: all about trauma and how trauma is affecting several of the central characters.

I had not picked up on how much Claire (Caitriona Balfe) is using ether – as one would a calming drug today. So at several points in the episode we her disappear after she takes a drug too. She sees and hears Lionel Brown (Ned Dennehy) as a haunting revenant.

Fergus (Cesar Dombey) is now traumatized because of his loss of his hand and the way other males and females too have treated him. During the episode he seems to disappear we are told after trading he began to work as a printer in one of the larger North Caroline towns, not far off from where Aunt Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy) has her estate. We also hear she is funding him, and what’s more he is again printing subversive pamphlets. He is for the colonialists in the struggle in which Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix) was involved. Just one line from her but strong (because Maria Doyle Kennedy is a very effective presence) that she misses Murtagh: she is helping the “side” Murtagh died defending.

Jamie, John and black servant girl

This then involves Jamie (Sam Heughan). He has given up being an agent for the crown with the Indians because he does not want to be a mole. Claire and Brianna (Sophia Skelton) have told him the British lose – this seems to figure in his thinking. Lord John Grey first seen in the episode talking to the British representative and vouching for Jamie, and at first Jamie lies to him, but then tells him the truth, and Grey then alerts a meeting of the Regulators (?) on time so all escape.

A subplot involves Roger still helping a widow and her child finish a house and settle in. Everyone is talking, Brianna is jealous or worried Roger is being dragged in. We see in part he is — he is also a man who hasn’t got a role in the world that fits him anymore. But by end of episode Brianna pregnant again and Roger has supplied another young man as a substitute for himself.

An as yet nameless young man (later we find out his name is Henderson) appears to be having an affair with Malva – very dangerous because of her fanatic and tyrannical father. She seems to court punishment by prostituting herself. A scene I did not understand at all – we see Malva is visiting what looks like a half-alive and half-dead rotting corpse. She slices off one of his fingers. This is creepy gothic. I know she is not to be trusted.

Lizzie serving, Brianna and Roger at the table

Lauren Lyle as Marsali in this season comes into her own, in the various roles we watch her play – soon she will be joining Fergus we are told.
Ian not much there if at all in this episode. Lizzie (Caitlin O’Ryan) grows ill with malaria (malarial attacks repeat themselves) and we see the two twin male servants care a lot for her.

At end of episode suddenly Claire hears a tune that comes from a later period. I could not place it, but then we see (it seems) perhaps in prison but at any rate from the back, someone with a jewel he stole from Jocasta’s necklace in his hand. Long black hair from the back? Who could he be? I have not guessed it.

So a lot going on, much of it inward.

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Episode 6: The World Turned Upside Down

Claire seeking out Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones)

Well at long last we are not quietly reflective and retrospective: this is a powerful deeply distressing and disquieting episode. Everything is turned upside down when Malva becomes pregnant and accuses Jamie of having sex with her repeatedly, liking it, and being the father of this coming baby! Before very long everyone in the settlement or on Fraser’s Ridge has been told about this. This happens about half-way through the episode.
It gets worse.

The first half of the episode is about a disease running through the settlement. Is it cholera? Bacteria carried in the water. Different people appear to have different diseases. Claire becomes very ill, and while Brianna is out, Malva and Lizzie meaning for the best (I’m not sure about Malva) chop off Claire’s hair until it’s very short. She recovers, but many die. Of course the 21st century watcher worries about the gossip about Claire as a witch.

Caitriona Balfe is more interestingly dressed than she has been in a few seasons. She has after all been in story about American pioneers. We see her in long skirts most of the time but now she dons a Napoleonic like long coat and a fine hat to cover her head. She visits Tom Christie to discover if he has the same disease she does, but the conversation goes badly. He walks her back though.

And now the shocking accusation. Christie with his daughter and son, Allan. It should be noted they are hardly ever apart and when I first saw them I thought they were courting. Claire had had a bad dream in which she thought she saw Jamie responding to one of Malva’s advances. She flees to a barn and Jamie follows after denying everything and throwing the Christies out. A confrontation ensues: Claire cannot disbelieve him but she is shaken: she does not belong here, neither do Brianna or Roger, all for love of Jamie. This does bring home to us how much they are giving up. But we see other moments where she and Jamie are missing Marsali and Fergus now. How Brianna is attached to her. Even Brianna is shaken because of her parents’ own unconventional relationship. He confesses the one night of love-making with Mary MacNab before he gave himself up to Ardsmuir prison.

Always generous, Claire visits (!) Malva and tries to talk with her but it is soon obvious it’s useless – Malva lies, calls Claire a witch, the brother backs her up. Claire gets angry and threatens Malva. Malva impervious

Malva morte

At the very end Malva is found with her throat cut, just dying or dead, and much to my horror, as Claire is the one to find her, Claire seeing how advanced the baby is (how big the bulge) performs a C-Section on her! (with a knife), of course now she cannot live; Claire pulls a tiny baby, but complete and it is just breathing and she works to resuscitate it, but it dies in her arms. I was terrified by this as I know she cam be blamed for a double murder! I gather it will take a long time in the book ( A Breathe of Snow and Ashes) before it is finally discovered who fathered this baby, and who did the murder.

This is violence enough. Very real. Very relevant to our world today (I’m thinking of women’s reproductive rights, what pregnancy is, the attempt to stop all abortions maybe even contraception &c&c in places in the US).

This is worrying for Jamie is gone off to the Philadelphia Continental Congress where he Is not chosen for a representative because his reputation now ruined. Back, we the whole settlement ostracize the Frasers and Mackenzies – Roger had been a central minister at the opening of this episode. Iain gets into fights on Jamie’s behalf; he goes to Claire and says he is the father for he did once have sex with Malva. Claire suddenly says that Roger came upon her having sex with Henderson (I wonder that was not brought out before or made public). Malva seems to be promiscuous – who knows who the father is?

Then Claire still suffering traumatic memories (Lionel Brown’s ghost and voice haunts her), takes some ether rather than answer the door. It’s Malva. She has a bad dream of Malva accusing Jamie and her. Wakening, she goes out to the garden and find there the dying Malva, and what I described above ensues. Claire is left crying with horror.

I finished reading the redaction of A Breath of Snow and Ashes in the second companion and find that Bonnet died in this book. What’s more there is a lot more military action going in. The film-makers have deliberately excised that stuff from both the 5th and now this season. The girl’s accusations and its results up to her death are there in the book more or less as told in the film. The title of the book refers to the season of winter, and I see at the end of the book the explanation for the brief obituary Brianna read, which brought her back in time is also revealed.

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Episode 7: Sticks and Stones

This one feels like a cumulation of all the episodes of this season dealing with trauma; Claire is now utterly caught up with murder of Malva.
Then paratext of song this season is “the Laird that is gone …”

Brianna and Roger wished “safe travels”

Begins with Mrs Bug suggesting Malva was never to be distrusted, but Claire insists she never thought that way about her. Mr Crombie first appearance.

They are all standing around the corpse: brother (I cannot find any stills of him) curses Claire and Jamie; how did you go out there with a knife; did they see anything at all; father does not want to give her a burial in consecrated ground; Jamie says they will bury the bodies at the Ridge. Claire insists she thinks of Malva as life and light not darkness

Claire’s bad dreams woven throughout: it’s the voice of Lionel which is the voice of guilt; the most traumatic of all her experiences beaten and gang raped. Knocking at door. She is using ether – trying to medicate herself but making herself worse; haunted Ian out searching, asking questions. It was a Sin Eater who was missing finger parts and we now realize that’s who we saw Malva cutting.

Henderson — a likely candidate for Malva’s baby’s father

Anecdote episode with Henderson come to complain about questioning; it emerges that Roger saw him having sex with Malva and he gets indignant
Voice goes over all Claire’s history and “betrayals” and lies from first season on, with angry protesting voices at her at the time; she left when she should have stayed; stayed when she should have left (Frank’s voice, Black Jack’s)

Brianna and Roger now talking about it, he says he will do the service; as this episode develops Roger becomes more and more explicit that he wants to be a minister – finally this can be his occupation in this era

Roger as minister at funeral

All finally take note that something wrong or different about Lizzie’s behavior, she is caught in lies; Josiah and Kezzie have vanished

Perry Mason thought of by Claire (she wishes they had him there): who could have, who had the motive, who has opportunity and Claire says me: she is beginning to think she may have done it, rather that she wanted to do it.

Nightmare with Malva banging at door, shock she awakens, lost her temper and threatened Malvina: I’ll fucking kill you; Jamies there to contradict, sooth; over voice: funny we saw we are just human when we do bad things, not good ones.

Who is she now after all the roles she’s played? (Claire thinking)

There are contemplative images of them — an older couple

Story of Lizzie and Beardsley boys emerges; Lizzie feels she has done nothing wrong; eventually handfast with them both.

Talk about killing; eating animals (vegetarian explained); Jamie says big difference when Roger Mac killed a man in self-defense and this murder of Malva
Claire: because I came here I changed things: whole history of all; it was because she desperately wanted to be with Jamie – she loved him

Funeral scene: Allan (the brother of Malva) accuses them both – terrible scenes in the church. Quieter by the grave Jamie not to carry coffin; Ian can.

Claire going crazy she feels; losing it; Jamie says she must not lock him out the way she did not allow Jamie to lock the world out after Wentworth. She says she’d do it all again.

Brianna and Roger now decided on this career for him, a minister (it’s what his adopted father was); it seems to demand they go to Edenton as a family; Roger upset at how child is being taught to believe people become ghosts.

All now quiet, they are making dinner, and the posse of the Brown gang arrive and demand to take Claire away as under arrest

Episode does center a lot on Jamie and Claire — we keep returning to them

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Episode 8: I am not alone

Jamie and Claire defending themselves early in the night

I put off watching this because somehow I found it so painful and anxiety-producing the first time round, but that was late at night and I watched it directly after S6, E7, Sticks and Stones. This time I could see reassurance set up by the end

The previously takes us way back: Brianna tells Roger she cannot tell if Jemmy is his. News of deaths of Claire & Jamie in a fire. Jamie gives Cherokees guns. Roger preaching sermon, he & Briana to Edenton so he may be ordained Presbyterian: this could be his fitting occupation. Your wife covered up to elbows in blood. The accusation. Brown: we have come for our wife to arrest her for the murder of Malva Christie.

A scene of 2 in a café modern eating fries … one a woman, cannot catch the other – slipped in …

The Posse comes, led by Richard Brown

They demand Claire, are Committee of Public Safety. Beardsley & Lizzie flee. A battle ensues. Men surround the house; Claire kills with rifle man who got in. Frees Jamie from crowd; they barricade themselves. Boarded up windows. House being destroyed by all out shooting. Brown found out Marsali killed his brother (Claire to Jamie). This is revenge, an excuse. Brown with a white handkerchief; they’ll go to Salisbury for fair trial; that’s the law …. Jamie shoots at them, they look like thugs.

Switch to Roger & Brianna and Jemmy. Talking of revolution; what’s happening in Boston; once Roger would dream to go, but now he’s here. I must think all be safe. They talk of how truths kept from them as children; she now accepts what happened … Back to house, Jamie and Claire fear firing of their house; by the hearth, with water, find food, Obituary says 21 January; this is May so they must survive. No plan. Outside men bivouac.

Roger and Brianna inside tent with child; beautiful love-making scene of comfortably married couple, laughter, she pregnant. This contrasts and compares to Jamie and Claire: condemned eat hearty meal; she’d choose cheeseburger &c (it sound like the meal we saw a opening still). Where is everyone? Ian? Lizzie? They remember the times he came near death, when she did. Fortune teller read his palm and it connected death with number 9. Jamie cites Prayer of Contrition.

Outside fisherfolk, Hiram Comb – come out, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live; they accuse him of killing Malva; Claire shouts hoarsely she was trying to save the unborn child and Jamie innocent. Accusation of revenge. Malva’s brother: you debauched and killed my sister. Scots people ride up with Lizzie but no go. Tom Christie arrives and manages a negotiation Witness and mediator. No reason you should not rest in your own bed. Frasers go back in. Guard set. Love-making that night. Knitted bodies. Jamie promises her this will not be the last time they see the house and environs.

Their last night — an expressive image

Daylight. They are in wagon. Shall I tend to their wounds? Christie brings her breakfast. No court at Salisbury; off to Wilmington; Tom Christie looking remorseful. Lizzie I am back, but she cannot help; Ian back but vanishes. People roused to throw stones. Calm reasserted

Brianna: are we there yet? They read New Bern Onion, Fergus printer. Poet’s corner – Marsali. Child has lice; they cut his hair and discover hereditary nevus like the one Roger has. So they are father & son.

Back to Jamie and Claire in wagon; Christie hanging round. Ian there, but not time yet. Don’t go away, lad I am with you Uncle.

Someone comes up; a man dies; Jamie brought out for drinking water: a trap, the rest ride off with Claire, shouting. Brown tells Claire his brother a lout but she is a murderer and he was his brother Mr Fraser sent to Scotland; Christie will not leave her, insists Jamie alive, he is there to protect her. Trip of fearful discontent.

Snap shot of Brianna and Roger still off with child to Edenton

Claire now over-voice: Tom Christie troubled; will not admit Jamie dead. Town (Wilmington) in bad shape. Corpse hanging. She is put in jail. Christie there: I would not have your deaths on my conscience. She is to trust him.

Switch to Jamie tied to post; just as someone is about to crush Jamie’s head, Ian’s arrow hits; we see him and Indians. All there, reassurance, and group now riding post-haste to rescue Claire (with Tom Christie protecting her). She (I) is not alone.

Finis for season — until next year when (we are told) there may be 16 episodes and then the series will come to an end. I have not included the more frantic and debilitating and humiliating seasons (Claire led by a rope, for example) because the over-all feel is stoical

Ellen

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Outlander, Season 6, Episodes 1-4: A Season of Processing Grief; from A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Brianna (Sophia Skelton) helping Claire (Caitriona Balfe) to bathe — after she is brought back to Fraser’s Ridge from gang-rape (Season 5, Episode 12: Never My Love)

How many times have I put my hopes, my fears, my secret longings into the hands of a Being that can’t see, can’t hear, can’t even feel. How many times have my prayers been answered? Time is a lot of the things that people say God is. There is pre-existing and having no end. There is the notion of a Being all powerful because nothing can stand against Time, not mountains, not armies. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of, all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And if Time is akin to God, I suppose that memories must be the devil …. (from script, the overvoice for Season 5, Episode 5, “Perpetual Adoration”)

Friends and readers,

I loved this 6th season, which, while it basically adapts freely A Breathe of Snow and Ashes, like Season 5, also brings together material from a later and earlier book and re-arranges everything to the point the overall feel is very different (a handy list for viewing all recaps and commentary on Season 5). It is also, crucially and astonishingly to me, strongly dependent on the viewer having become immersed before and being totally involved before you begin. I’d say almost all the episodes had long sequences that were reflective and meditative, remembering and re-processing as it were — so how does this rivet new watchers? There is but one feature and it is all about trauma. We hear from all the major actors/characters, the central scriptwriters (those here since the first season), where they talk of each major character in terms of how processing grief is difficult; everyone processes grief differently; it’s real, violent, volatile. They are searching for their identity, what is the way forward; their past holds them. Some terrible things have happened; is Claire Teflon? No. Jamie is giving her space and time to heal; she has nightmares .. the feature goes over each character but dwells on Claire, Ian (“The Hour of the Wolf”), and Fergus. I am telling myself I must go back and finish reading/listening to The Fiery Cross and then go on to A Breathe of Snow and Ashes.

I admit since I found the fifth and sixth Outlander books so muddled, so without forward thrust, that for much of the previous season and all of this one too I relied on The Outlandish Companion: Volume II by Diana Gabaldon

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Episode 1: Echoes (a straight recap with video clip)

Ardsmuir (New Craigmiller Castle)

Just a first impression, and w/o benefit of reading the source book at all. As I said a while back I got through only half of book 5 (The Fiery Cross); I’ve never opened book 6 (A Breath of Snow and Ashes). You are at a considerable disadvantage when you’ve not read the book in these sorts of film adaptations meant in part to be faithful and using the book for deepening. A brief read of some comments on Season 6 show Roger Moore back in central place (I imagine his movements away to other shows became fewer when the pandemic hit and much new programming delayed or cancelled but I could be wrong) and Gabaldon interesting herself to the point she says that much that she cared about made the transfer but not all; we are told the opening is not in the book but taken from elsewhere.

Certainly the opening was a surprise and to me a somewhat demoralizing one. We are back at Ardsmuir, way before Lord John Grey took over, not just after Culloden, but just after Jamie gives himself up (1753) – I did recognize the actor who played the first general. It is such misery and what we see is slowly Jamie asserting himself and the men gaining minimal rights. An ambivalent relationship emerges between Jamie and a man who is at the head of Protestant faction: Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones). I felt the loss of Murtagh and found that Duncan Lacroix is no longer in the cast at all.

Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire, 1773 (after flashback) dressed with attitudes which signify they’re older

Then we fast forward 20 years to 1773 and North America. I began more to enjoy it. I have to say that this episode reminded me of the opener in Episode 5: it moves slowly and is a gradual development of our favorite characters, showing us what they are at this point. I loved it but my feeling is if you are not already deeply immersed this may not grab you at all. Seasons 1-3 openers did, and Seasons 1-2 were especially exciting and melodramatic almost throughout. I grew to love 5, but I acknowledge others might not unless they were wrapped up in the characters already.

So basically Claire is slowly overcoming the trauma of the rape-beating; Jamie keeps close to her lest anyone attack her again; she is now inventing anesthetics but Brianna worries lest they be misunderstood and attacked again – part of the animus against Claire in Season 5 was her portraying herself as Dr Rawlings dispensing contraceptive information. And lo and behold there is Christie’s daughter, Malva (Jessica Reynolds), who seems at first simply a fanatic evangelical type sniffing around the “phosporus,” saying this is the stuff of the devil.

Yes Tom Christie turns up with his family; he saw the ad and wants to be part of the settlement. Jamie, a bit reluctant, nonetheless accepts them in. Tom is a tyrant to his family, and his son is going bad, partly a result of this repression and bullying. Marsali (Lauren Lyle) is pregnant again, but this time she has a bruise on her arm, and soon it emerges Fergus (Cesar Dombey) has become an alcoholic. She is deeply ashamed and he’s in denial: we are given clues some of this is the result of his having one hand and not being of service like the others. Problem here is this was not a problem before: he was always as active as ever (partly from Jamie’s influence but that’s not gone). Brianna and Roger (Richard Rankin) just there, in support (not given much to do beyond that). Young Ian (John Bell) active in hunting animals with bows and arrows; there is a conversation where he brings up the idea that perhaps Claire could help him change his destiny as he sees it with respect to his wife. This is the first we’ve heard of her explicitly.

Central scene is love-making, gentle and tender between Claire and Jamie – as befits this grandparent couple. Both of them have bad dreams or memories: Jamie’s shorter (of Ardsmuir) and Claire’s of the rape and beating. We see them as kind grandparents to Brianna/Roger’s children and one of Fergus/Marsali’s.

Plot-design of episode; governor’s aide arrives early to ask Jamie to become a chief crown agent dealing with Indians; he does not want to involve himself (as he refused in episode 5 – reminding me of Ross Poldark’s reluctance). The governor is going to tax the Frasers heavily for not agreeing to take on Indian tasks. But what happens is the threatening presence our enemy group (one must have a true villains) are what is left over the Brown gang, headed by Richard Brown (Chris Larkin), the brother of man who instigated the rape of Claire (hated her for helping his wife, his daughter) and whom Jamie murdered and returned in a body bag. The Browns demand that Jamie punish Tom Christie for stealing an object and Jamie is forced to whip him (we see a flogging of Jamie at the opening in Ardsmuir). Jamie hates this. Jamie now told Lionel (Ned Dennehy) will become the Indian agent. So at the end of the episode Jamie relents and takes the position as it would be dangerous for them, for the Indians, for everyone for such a gang to have power.

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Episode 2: Allegiances (another recap, this time with still, more evaluative)

Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones)

I’ve watched Episode 2 now and find that it’s making me very curious about A Breath of Snow and Ashes. I have the feeling the film team has done the same thing they did for Season 5, from (more or less) The Fiery Cross. They have picked a few of the episodes, and rewritten and rewoven them to fit a theme (or themes) across this season. Despite the re-appearance of Roger Moore’s name in key places (writing too), it has the quietude of the fifth season, with this difference, I am continually worried or feeling anxious about our six principals: Jamie and Claire; Roger and Brianna; Marsali and Fergus.

The threat is from the people Jamie has allowed to build and live in their compound (the religious ideas of Tom Christie are paranoid and aggressive, including an obviously misogynistic inspired distrust of Claire as a witch), and now the Indians that Jamie has (paradox this) become an agent to the crown (George III) to. Every doctoring deed Claire does is worrying, and now Brianna, matching Claire’s invention of ether, invented matches.

Still brings out the quietly comic feel of the operation

Story: it opens with Claire trying to mend Tom Christie’s more crippled hand, which she says she will have to operate using ether on. As in later conversations when Christie brings up the idea God doesn’t want him to have a good hand, Claire refutes this with secular and ironic understanding. Marsali’s pregnancy is quite advanced and Claire now with Malva (dangerous because Christie’s daughter-in-law) goes to take care of Marsali. The baby is near birth, but something is wrong, and Claire dare not do a C-section, for that would kill Marsali. Claire also gets out of Marsali, the bruises are from Fergus; they fight intensely over his drinking. Jamie deputies Roger to go get Fergus who is very drunk when Roger arrives, and Roger becomes disgusted and angry with Fergus, who finally agrees to come.

Fergus with Claire

A second thread moving through this is Jamie and Ian’s overnight visit to the Indians who are asking Jamie to ask the governor to give them guns, ammunition. Jamie consults Claire as to the future allegiance of the Cherokee and she says she doesn’t know as she did not read that far into American history: this Is part of a scene where they make love.

Back to visit to Indians overnight: a supposedly comic scene of two Indian women trying to have sex that night with Jamie, stopped finally by Ian speaking to them. Jamie will only promise to consider asking the governor.

Fergus comes and he is transformed (one hopes more than momentarily) to the Fergus we knew: sweet, loving, he begins to make love to Marsali, as enormous as she is, sucking her breasts. He says in the brothel they did that to help women give birth. All leave the couple alone, but and eventually hear the baby coming. We see Marsali giving birth with Claire and Malva on either side, also Brianna there, but when Fergus takes the child after a few minutes he is horrified (“nain” he cries and runs off): the child is perhaps a Downs Syndrome baby; Marsali loves it immediately.

The thread of the Christie group appears again with Christie building a church; and an old woman in the group dying. Roger is to be minister at the funeral and lo and behold she awakens momentarily. Claire explains this – a semi-comic, semi-deeply felt scene ensues with the old woman alive but dying still is what happens. Again the modern ideas that Claire brings to this endanger her in the eyes of these people. A little later Jamie comes up to their compound and queries this building of a church before houses; Tom Christie stands up for this idea, and Jamie appears to allow it as long as the new church is neither Catholic nor Protestant specifically but rather a meeting house for all – he refers Tom to the opening at Ardsmuir where he, Jamie, resolved constant fighting by joining the Freemasons and telling the others too and thus defusing religious conflicts.

Bree and Roger, playful

Brianna and Roger are seen having private time together with her hurt because over the meal they had just before Marsali went into labor, everyone thought good news was a new baby, when it was her invention of matches. Only Claire seemed to understand how important and convenient these are. It’s frustrating to Brianna that her abilities have nowhere to flourish. They talk of how they have decided to stay permanently and how they have been trying to have another child with no result as yet. We see Brianna a little later walking to stables where she meets Ian. She overhears him praying for a child he apparently had with his Mohawk wife. Ian is bothered by Jamie’s refusal to ask the Governor – a refusal that the Indians learned of and came to be angry over. Claire says if Jamie gives them arms, they could end up the Fraser’s enemy as the Frasers right now are on the British (not rebels) side. Ian says that nonetheless the Indians deserve weapons if they are to be endlessly displaced by these white colonialists.

In another scene (I’m not sure exactly where these all occur in the sequence) Brianna and Jamie sit on the porch together talking and cleaning their two guns. Brianna tells Jamie that Ian had a child who is probably still with the Mohawk.

A small later episode shows Jamie talking to Mr Bug about some supplies he is taking with Kessie to trade; up to them comes Mrs Bug and Lizzie (Caitlin O’Ryan) and we see that Kessie and Lizzie have a flirtation going on.

The episode concludes with Jamie writing a long letter to the governor (at first from some dialogue we assume it is to his Aunt Jocasta); late at night Claire comes out of the bedroom to ask about the letter. He confides to her he is going to give it to the Major (then with them) to give to the governor to ask for the Indians to have guns. She says I thought you were against this. He replies that he now realizes that Ian’s allegiance is to the Mohawk, to these Indians, and that he, Jamie’s, allegiance is to Ian so he will do as Ian asked him to.

Just about all these scenes are quiet thoughtful ones, filled with mood and complex feelings – even quieter and less overt aggressive action than Season 5. I find I have no trouble staying up and watching intensely, ever worried for everyone and caring about them. Snow on the ground showing it’s winter. The whole episode is beautifully photographed throughout.

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Episode 3: Temperance (detailed straight recap, emotional, with still)

Jamie offering Malva Christie friendship

I am now not puzzled altogether about the curious tone in which people who wrote about Season 6 when it was airing on Starz: the third episode is as oddly quiet, non-violent, non-active as the first two. Season 5 did have violence and action by the third episode – the fight with the Browns, then regulators versus the royal governor. The first sign we will have any is a newsletter that appears at the end of the episode telling of the Boston Tea Party. It’s not called that in the paper, but Claire refers to it that way. This is again a series of mostly non-violent incidents which are exemplary in different ways.

I looked at the summary of A Breath of Snow and Ashes in the 2nd Outlandish Companion and find it as unreadable as I found the last 2/3s of The Fiery Cross – there is no thrust forward but rather stories about our characters as they live an isolated life on Fraser’s Ridge. They are interwoven but again I’ll tell each incident or thread together as I cannot remember the order they are in as there is no weaving forward to some conclusion; they are self-contained. Another problem with these episodes is Jamie and Claire are too perfect, as are Roger and Brianna. The only un-exemplary character is Fergus – for Ian is also without any real flaw. I love them myself but recognize the incidents lack inner conflict. Yes, Claire carries on being haunted by images of Lionel Brown who insulted and raped her and uses ether sometimes to sleep. But that is not enough

By contrast, The Crown (Netflix series about British monarchy, 20th century) has shows Philip to be very flawed while we feel for him; and Elizabeth to be conflicted over how to behave towards him, angry and also torn in her role as queen.

So we have Tom Christie giving in and coming to have his hand healed – cut and re-formed and sewn the way Claire did Jamie’s hand – the man refuses ether (horrified by the idea) and won’t even bite on a piece of wood but reads aloud passages from the Bible with Jamie chiming in and holding him down slightly – he does scream from the pain. By the end of the hour (this time it is just an hour) he is healed, grateful, and takes away a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, saying he thought novels were evil until he heard Jamie telling aloud tales at Ardsmuir. Now he agrees they are forms of escape and distraction. However, when he reads the book, we look over his shoulder and see him reading one of Fielding’s many ironic passages about love, and he closes the book, and returns it with a note to the effect “this is filth” and he had thought better of Claire.

Another incident occurs when Roger sees a baby in a basket floating on the river towards a water fall and its death. He jumps in, barely saving it, all the while realizing a group of boys had done this. They include Germaine, Marsali and Fergus’s son. He is incensed at their idea this child is a demon – because it’s a dwarf. The boys are scolded fiercely and then required to turn up to Jamie who gives them the choice of touching a red-hot iron or the baby. They had also thought they’d be burned if they touched the child. Of course, they choose the child and find they are not burned, and the baby behaves sweetly.

Marsali (Lauren Lyle) spinning

Roger has become the minister of the place and we see him deliver a sermon against superstitions about dwarves using the Biblical story of Moses. Brianna seems to have built a spinning wheel, and we watch Marsali learning to spin fibre into yarn or thread. Brianna needs to be doing something too.

Marsali is not having much success stopping Fergus from drinking to excess all the time; now he blames himself for having such a child. He tells Claire how he saw dwarves treated in Paris – it sounds like the dwarves here are Downs Syndrome children. Claire says none of that will happen now for they will take care of Henri-Christian. Fergus wants to know what happens to the child after they all age and die. At one point the Frasers are collecting rent (in just the way of the Highlanders) and one couple find Fergus “stinks” and say he is responsible for his freak child. He physically attacks them. Later Marsali says to Claire, Fergus has promised to stop drinking; but when he comes home, he is drunk as ever. She throws him out and says she’d rather have no man than a drunk one. And later in the episode Jamie is out in the wood and from afar sees Fergus slash his wrist badly; Jamie saves Fergus, and there is a scene of traumatic talk, with Jamie the father hugging his son and when they return it does seem as if Fergus will reform and accept himself again and his new son.

Ian and Malva are striking up a friendship. I had mistaken and the young man I thought her husband is her brother — but there is an important hint here: they are behaving as if husband and wife. We are of course to see love blooming in Malva, but Ian seems attracted. Touching dialogues about what they believe, her father’s cruelty (in one scene we see the father whipping her now that his hand is fine), but she mentions that her father would be upset if she had a “lover” and it’s implied even more were he like Ian – Indian like, not Christian. Ian says he does not know what he believes.

Somewhat improbably Brianna builds a glorious spinning wheel. She needs to do something but it is Marsali who sits turning fibres into thread or yarn.
Lizzie makes an appearance at one point and again we see she is courted by Kezzie. She appears very happy in her position as working beloved servant-companion.

Christie tells Jamie and Claire his group of people have accepted the offer of the Browns to protect them – Claire tells Christie this is a bad move.
The end of the episode has Major Macdonald returning with the guns for the Cherokee, and bringing the newsletter about the Boston Tea Party. Claire says “the storm” (or war ) has started.

For my part I love watching it because I’m fond of the central six characters and worry about them.

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Episode 4: Hour of the Wolf (recap from an amusingly anachronistic POV, with 2 clips!)

Ian (John Bell) and his central rival, Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa (Morgan Holmstrom?)

Another quiet mostly retrospective and reflective hour — it’s curious that is the atmosphere because it includes a challenge and duel where one of two people could have been murdered. But no one is.

Ian’s Mohawk name was Wolf’s brother, and so the meaning of the title is episode devoted to Ian’s history, inner life, and watching him try to come to terms with what happened.

It opens with him remembering how he was initiated by rituals into the Mohawks, fell in love with girl whose name was so hard to pronounce, he called her Emily. They were happy but after the second bloody miscarriage, Ian was told the gods were against him being part of the tribe; Emily was given to the man called his brother, and he coerced into leaving.

Also early in the episode before they get to the camp, Jamie is giving Fergus the task of going with goods from the farm to trade for things needed, make money. Fergus is not drunk and says he knows what Milord is doing. Keeping him occupied. Jamie says he needs these things done, and as Fergus had said remembering their time in Edinburgh as printers, Fergus is a good businessman trader. Some of this was too didactic, but it’s beautifully acted and the film landscape and music and feeling is good.

These memories are prompted by a trip Jamie takes with Ian to the Cherokee to give them the guns. (Again as I’ve done before I am not trying to recap the episode because I’m not following the interlace. Some of the above is in a flashback Ian has when Jamie and he arrive at the Cherokee camp and discover Mohawks there, and (what a coincidence), just this brother who took Emily from Ian.

Before we get there Major (I’m not sure of this name) MacDonald has been at Fraser’s Ridge handed over these arms, and Brianna told Jamie that 60 years from now these Indians will be forced off the land — well after the revolution. So they will need these armaments. When they get to the camp, Jamie, now reflectively ethical, tells this to the chief. He explains his knowledge by his wife’s extra powers (so too his daughter). This is of course the cruel (infamous) Trail of Tears inflicted on these people during Andrew Jackson’s administration.

Another trader, a Scot, Alexander Cameron is there, and a fight erupts between him and Wolf’s Brother, and that’s the duel. Cameron cheats and turns to shoot before Wolf’s brother but Ian on the alert, shoots the gun (or hits it with a strong arrow), knocking it out of his hand. Wolf’s brother’s turn, but he does not kill the begging man, rather shoots in the sky. Ian acknowledges to Wolf’s Brother he can bear him having Emily (there appears to have been a daughter and be a son).

Back at Fraser’s Ridge, Claire is practicing her invented ether on Lizzie and Kezzie and Jo (I suspect the same actor plays these twins). It is worrying since Malva is watching, as her apprentice and she swears she will not tell the father, and looking at Claire’s notebooks, Malva appears not to take these as spells of a witch. Or so she says, but there is something insinuating about her.

At the close of the episode when Jamie comes home, Claire rushes to where he is, and in a barn they make love. The last still shows Malva watching them through a key hole.

Ian still has Rollo; in the previous episodes we’ve seen Adso drinking milk, sitting on the bed with Marsali …

What they must have done here is taken a group of incidents and meditations about Ian and drawn them together with knowledge of the coming wars against the Indians (the previous episode referred to the Boston Tea Party and heating up rebellion). Jamie again says she cannot be a rebel and Indian agent for the crown so he must give up this agency.

Upcoming: Episodes 5-8

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From one of the many moments of consolation, grieving, holding together …

Gentle and I hope forgiving and flexible reader, I realize two years have gone by since I blogged on Season 5, and going further back, all these blogs began in 2017 (3 years after the first season aired). What’s more at first I was putting them on my Reveries under the Sign of Austen (where many remain, except those here on JimandEllen). At first I deemed them based on a woman’s quintessentially woman’s historical romance, with a woman at the center, but then realized how many of the film team were men and how often every effort was made to create a male focus, so I also blogged here. Nowadays I’m here because the series is so popular, it seems to me to have a non-gender specific audience, i.e., both men and women (even if women are the greater number of viewers).

I confess to blogging less often and using the images I find on the Internet available openly instead of snapping my own as I watch. It’s easier, less time-consuming, and these are most of them images the film-makers have made readily available to the public.

I am doing my best and my dream is now that when I stop the teaching to write about the Outlander books and films, together with the Poldark books and films.

Ellen

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Indian Summers, Season 2, Episodes 1-5: Three years later

The first image we are confronted with: Aafrin (Nikesh Patel), not in a suit, but bare chested, typing a seditious pamphlet, with new Indian girlfriend, also a rebel against the British — he is somewhere in Bengal

Upon returning to Simla, now in the British suit, Aafrin is confronted by Alice (Jemima West), who has been coerced into accepting her abrasive sadistic husband, Charlie Havistock (Blake Ritson)

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been far more than a week since I last wrote about Indian Summers; more than a full month has gone by since I framed the series and summarized as well as evaluated the first half of Season 1, one of the finest series ever made, and its second half, a tragic and ironic denouement. In the series itself, it’s three years later, and we are startled to see as our first image, Aafrin, ever trussed up and respectful of the British, naked to the waist, living in what looks like a worn-down bedsit, with a Indian lover, Kaira Das (Sughandha Garg); he is typing a subversive pamphlet, which is about to be printed and distributed in the streets to stir up demonstrations as the possible new viceroy is due to come to Simla at any time. Aafrin looks hard, tough; he has been away from his parents for three years. Kaira is involved with a violent revolutionary we only glimpsed in the first season, Naresh Banerjee (Arjun Mathur).

We switch many miles and with Aafrin as our POV (he is our POV most of this episode) find Alice back with Charlie, the son she had fled with, Percy (Caleb Allen), a blonde toddler who we discover later is the reason she chose to stay with Charlie (so that she would not lose custody). We are soon immersed in the lives of the familiar characters whose circumstances appear to have changed far less.

I shall take it as propitious that I’ve not had time to finish this brilliant series with my readers — for in the interim, the queen (who would have been queen-empress as her father, George VI was king-emperor, if India had not achieved its independence before George VI died) died, Elizabeth II Windsor, causing what seemed the whole world to sit up, take notice, watch the official 10-days mourning of “a nation” and then see put on a spectacular ritual aired everywhere in the world on TVs, internet, cinemas, as a kind of last gasp of the Raj in spirit. And few as they were, we read and heard the voices of protest that called all this magnificent display so much hypocrisy, a vast disguise behind which the grossly unequal arrangements of colonialism and capitalism carried on, less unchanged than you might think (see the comments to my blog The Passing of Elizabeth II).

For myself I’ve determined I will do (if the OLLIs last) The British Indian Novel Take Two, having thought up four different novels/memoirs, books of essays (J R. Farrell, The Seige of Krisnapur; Kamala Markandaya, The Nowhere Man; Salmon Rushdie (nearly assassinated): Imaginary Homelands (a book of essays, columns, life writing); and Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowlands … . I have two 18th century epistolary novels & memoirs partly set in India and hope to get to them soon: Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, ed, introd E. M. Forster (!), and Phoebe Gibbes, Hartley House, Calcutta. Both by women. And found my copy of Emily Eden in virago about her time in India in the early 19th century, Up Country …

So you see I’ve carried on reading and thinking, and am glad to return to watching, remembering, coming to terms with this more explosive season than the first. Let’s dive in. The second season’s episodes have acquired titles.

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Season 1, Episode 1: Three Years Have Passed. While it seems so much has changed, more thought makes one realize the same patterns, the same emotional relationships and conflicts are being repeated. Again Aafrin is torn. After three years he has taken up with a revolutionary woman in Bengal, and the man who has a plan to blow up the club or the Whelan house – we are shown that bunch of dynamite immediately. And again Aafrin finds himself over his head. He wrote the seditious page, typed it and brought it to the printer, but then he is identified and we are left wondering whether Ralph knows or not. He might. Ralph again this cagey ambiguous character with Cynthia Coffin, looking out for him, a very vicious yet older woman. We see her with two helpers humiliating an Indian man who is trying to get into the club. He has to have a coat of arms. He has to study something and know it. She tells Ralph to send the old Viceroy home, Willingdon (Patrick Malahide) – he has a heart attack when a toy grenade thrown at him. She is gearing up for seeing Ralph become the next Viceroy He’s not sure how to grab the position.

Cynthia (Julie Waters) watching Ralph intently

Madeleine, complete with ayah Bhupi’s wife, and a baby girl in tow, follows Ralph now. The horrible Sarah (Fiona Glascott) is as horrible. ow we see her stealing flowers from the gardens of the house she once lived in but no longer does. She had gone to England to leave her son there, and when she returned found the Dalal family installed. She is enormously pregnant, and has thus trapped Dougie (Craig Parkinson), who has separated himself from Leena and is nowhere to be seen. Instead Sarah sits teaching on a throne, “lessons” which consist of asking the children absurd questions, and laughing at them when they respond with “wrong” answers. She berates and condescends to them. Only a few have left as her pregnancy necessitates their return to England. Dougie is as pliable and useless, grieving over the loss of his school. And surprise, surprise Adam now a young adolescent has been taken into Ralph’s and now the Havistock home as another boy servant; soon he will be joined by Leena (Amber Rose Reevah), who avoids homelessness just, as governess to Alice’s child. It takes half the season for Madeleine to realize Adam is her husband’s son, but his behavior makes it obvious to those who know

The Muslim reporter, Naseem Ali Khan (Tanmay Dhanania) is still sniffing about. Ian (Alexander McCleod) now running his tea plantation, thoroughly his own man, who has not forgotten Ramu Sood. Sooni (Asha Kala) cannot be far away, still politically involved but cannot get Aafrin to tell her anything. Worst off is Alice: returned with a vicious spiteful sadistic husband who denigrates and spies on her, passive, giving in (we learn he buggers her regularly to hurt her) He works for a bank and we will soon learn that Ralph needs this man’s money. Rowntree (Guy Williams going about with his policeman intruding in Indian houses and bazaars, no need for a warrant and arresting supposed culprits.

Kaira has little sense of self-worth …

Season 2, Episode 2: Black Kite (code name for Kaira, who will not survive). Now we note subtle changes from the 1st season; new characters and new emphases. To the credit of the creator-writer Paul Rutman, there is an attempt to give nuance to the character of Cynthia Coffin so she seems more vulnerable and less powerful –- while at the same time as nasty, bullying and ruthless-racist as she had been. Ralph Whelan seems softened because he too is more vulnerable: a Lord Hawthorne (James Fleet) sent from the UK and parliament is either there to himself take over the viceroyship or check out if Ralph is “fit:” Hawthorne is not “radical,” does not wanting really to share power with the Indians (Muslim or Hindu), much less hand power over. We see him respond to Alice’s coaxing that he tell Adam that he is Adam’s father . When Adam is given a copy of a child’s classic owned by her dead brother, Madeleine takes it back. At the same time Ralph is pushing Aafrin to find the terrorist who printed the pamphlets (he knows or suspects that the writer is Aafrin himself).

Aafrin is again like Alice, easily vacillates, easily blackmailed. We are shown more closely a male of pure evil for the first time (like Captain Merrick in Jewel in the Crown. Naresh Banerjee is a crazed terrorist, and when he is shot down by the British (using the excuse Rowntree believes Banerjee spread the pamphlets), Aafrin saves Banerjee’s life, but in ironic reciprocation Banerjee plucks Kaira back from the safety Aafrin had tried to send her to — as she has also been a mole for Whelan (she too has a son to protect). Aafrin had tried to placate the man, first finding a file to satisfy him (that’s an obvious thing Aafrin should not have done, it implicates him too) and when Banerjee uses the information to threaten Kaira as the Black Kite or mole Aafrin desperately says he fabricated the whole file. At this Banerjee coolly shoots Kaira through the head.

The count of those ruthlessly unfairly murdered thus far includes only Indians: Ramu Sood was the first; Jaya’s brother the second (in prison beaten and cut to death) – now Kaira Das. They will be joined by the end of the season when Leena is sent away to prison for 9 years after Hawthorne tried to molest/rape her and Adam, showing real fury, throws sets Hawthorne on fire – she takes the rap. The only white killed will be the moral minister, Raworth, white, is killed – by mistake trying to save a child from a bomb the child is wheeling about.

It’s the truly horrible Charlie who manages to needle Cynthia by calling her Mrs S, a char woman; we see how awful he is again, but this time accompanied by his giving Ralph a big check to keep that mansion up. Alice is unable to free herself, but still making gestures at Aafrin. Cynthia wants to get rid of Alice and urges her to go home (the way she did Madeleine), but Ralph, now more alert to this kind of thing, puts a stop to that. Cynthia also insults Leena when Cynthia sees that Alice has hired her (she was homeless, a beggar when deprived of the missionary job when Mrs R returned and became pregnant) and threatens her if she tells that Adam is Ralph’s son. Sooni’s role remains normative somehow: the mother wants to marry her off to a proper Hindu male and invites a woman friend/relative to bring her son to dinner; Sooni is resisting marriage, she wants to use her lawyer’s degree – it’s the most situation comedy storyline of the series.

Sooni, three years older …

Season 2, Episode 3: White Gods

One might be forgiven for thinking the series is turning into the story of Aafrin, as his trauma and behavior under terrific stress is central to the over-riding plot-design of this one. He is so deeply distressed by Nareesh Bannerjee’s murder of Kaira, and fear what he will do next, Aafrin, again on that same broken typewriter, writes a warning the man has a box of explosive bombs he intends to blow the club or someone’s mansion up with and its in a cave. He manages to persuade Ralph to take this seriously and send Rowntree and his men to search. Nothing is found, but the camera shows us it is in the bazaar. We can see that Ralph follows Aafrin’s advice because he believes Aafrin’s underlying motive is loyalty. Ralph as a character is and must be more self-contained.

Dressing the maharajah (Art Malik) for cricket (sly humor here)

A central scene is a cricket game where Aafrin is required to be umpire. Not easy for the spoiled Maharajah (Art Malik grown much older) whom Whelan is courting wanted to win. We meet this vain and amoral man and his mistress, Sirene (Rachel Griffiths), apparently actually from Western District of Australia (real name Phyllis).

A dinner at table reveals to Cynthia how ugly is Charlie’s humiliations of Alice and so she stops pressuring Alice to leave and to get back at him for calling her Mrs Sparrow provides a room for Aafrin and Alice to carry on. The stress of this cricket game, what he endures at the club (from his well-meaning benign father), and now this fulfillment makes him break out into hard sobbing. He had loved Kaira but cannot refuse Alice and the profferred English way of life she might take him into.

We see Lord Hamilton begin to chase Leena, that Raworth refuses to help her and his kowtowing to his wife again seen as coward’s way. Ralph is beginning to have his whole household treat Adam better, teach him things a Sahib should know … Madeleine watches this

Ralph Wheelan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) showing Adam (Dillon Mitra) something

I have omitted my favorite male character: Ian McCleod played by Alexander Cobb: I love how he trails around in an Indian version of a kilt, the relaxed atmosphere around him, the lack of phoniness, the friendship he is building with Sooni — they go together to investigate the place where it appears Bannerjee was “confronted” (it was the other way round) by Kaira and Aafrin, and where Jaya took lost her life too.

Ian relaxed, dressing comfortably for heat and work …

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For Episode 4: Empty Chair (clicking on comments) and Episode 5: Hide and Seek (ditto).

Ralph comforting Alice

The titles of the episodes are mostly ironic. This second season is not nearly as melodramatic as the first, but the politics and human relationships go deeper, have gone on for longer, and are at the end (Episode 10) harsh for many, yet accepted … At this point we are reaching the midpoint of a second volume of a novel.

Ellen

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OLLI at AU: Two Trollopes: Anthony’s Last Chronicle of Barset, Joanna’s sequels: Fall 2022 syllabus, online

A fall syllabus for reading Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset and Joanna Trollope’s sequels online at OLLI at AU: Barsetshire Then and Now.

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Tuesday afternoons, 1:45 to 2:15 pm,
SG 690: Two Trollopes: Anthony and Joanna: The Last Chronicle of Barset and The Rector’s Wife
10 sessions online (location of building: 4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20016)
Dr Ellen Moody

To begin the process of registration go to:  https://www.olli-dc.org/

Description of Course:

We’ll read Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, the last or 6th Barsetshire novel, one of his many masterpieces, once seen as his signature book. I’ve read with OLLI classes the first four; there is no need to read these, but we’ll discuss them to start with (the one just before is The Small House at Allington). His indirect descendent, Joanna Trollope, has recreated the central story or pair of characters, the Rev Josiah and Mary Crawley of the Last Chronicle in her Anna and Peter Bouverie in The Rector’s Wife in contemporary terms, which we’ll read and discuss in the last two weeks, together with her The Choir, a contemporary re-creation of the church politics and whole mise-en-scene of the Barsetshire series in general.

Required & Suggested Books:

Trollope, Anthony. The Last Chronicle of Barset, ed., introd, notes. Helen Small. NY: OxfordUP, 20011. Or
—————————————–——————————–, ed., introd, notes Sophie Gilmartin. NY: Penguin Classics, 2002. The Oxford edition is better because it has 2 appendices; one has Trollope’s Introduction to the Barsetshire series, written after he finished all six of them; and the other very readable about church, class, religious politics in the era.
There is a readily available relatively inexpensive audio-recording of the novel read by Timothy West reproduced by audiobook as 2 MP3s; an earlier one by Simon Vance, produced by Blackstone’s, also 2 MP3s. West’s more genial ironic voice is the one many people say they prefer.
Trollope, Joanna. The Rector’s Wife. 1991: rpt London: Bloomsbury, Black Swan book, 1997. Any edition of this book will do.
—————-. The Choir. NY: Random House, 1988. Any edition of this book will do too. We may not read this as a group, but I will discuss it.
There are also readily available relatively inexpensive audio-recordings of The Rector’s Wife and The Choir as single disk MP3s, read aloud by Nadia May for Audiobook. They are both novels well under 300 pages.

Trollope’s own mapping of Barsetshire

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. You don’t have to follow the specific chapters as I’ve laid them out; I divide the books to help you read them, and so we can in class be more or less in the same section of the book. This part of the syllabus depends on our class discussions and we can adjust it.

Sept 20: 1st week: Introduction: Trollope’s life and career. The Barchester novels. LCB, Chs 1-9

Sept 27: 2nd week: LCB, Chs 10-19
Oct 4: 3rd week: LCB, Chs 20-28

Oct 11: 4th week: LCB, Chs 29-39
Oct 18: 5th week: LCB, Chs 40-50
Oct 25: 6th week: LCB, Chs 51-60
Nov 1: 7th week: LCB, Chs 61-71
Nov 8: 8th week: LCB, Chs 72-83

Nov 15: 9th week: LCB, Ch 84. Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife, if you can, 3/4s of it, or the equivalent of Parts 1-3 of the film.

Nov 22: 10th week: Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife and The Choir. Trollope and the equivalent of Barsetshire today.

Suggested supplementary reading & film adaptations aka the best life-writing, a marvelous handbook & remarkable serials:

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography and Other Writings, ed, introd., notes Nicholas Shrimpton. NY: Oxford Classics, 2014
—————-. “A Walk in the Woods,” online on my website: http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/nonfiction.WalkWood.html
Gerould, Winifred Gregory and James Thayer Gerould. A Guide to Trollope: An Index to the Characters and Places, and Digests of the Plots, in All of Trollope’s Works. 1948: rpt Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987 (a paperback)
Joanna Trollope: Her official website
The Rector’s Wife, 4 part 1994 British serial (Masterpiece Theatre, with Lindsay Duncan, Jonathan Coy); The Choir, 5 part 1996 British serial (also Masterpiece Theater, with Jane Ascher, James Fox) — the first available as a DVD to be rented at Netflix, the second listed but in fact hard to find in the US

Lindsay Duncan as Anna Bouverie, the Mary Crawford character, first seen trying to make money by translating German texts (Rector’s Wife)

Boys’ choir taught by organ-master Nicholas Farrell as Leo Beckford (The Choir)

Recommended outside reading and viewing:

Aschkenasy, Nehanna. Eve’s Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition. Pennsylvania: Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Also Woman at the Window: Biblical Tales of Oppression and Escape. Detroit: Wayne State Univ Press, 1998.
Barchester Towers. Dir Giles Forster. Scripted Alan Plater. Perf. Donald Pleasance, Nigel Hawthorne, Alan Rickman, Geraldine McEwan, Susan Hampshire, Clive Swift, Janet Maw, Barbara Flynn, Angela Pleasance (among others). BBC 1983.
Bareham, Tony, ed. Trollope: The Barsetshire Novels: A Casebook. London: Macmillan Press, 1983.
Barnet, Victoria, “A review a The Rector’s Wife,” Christian Century, 112:2 (1995):60-63.
Doctor Thorne. Dir. Naill McCormick. Scripted Jerome Fellowes. Perf. Tom Hollander, Stephanie Martini, Ian McShane, Harry Richardson, Richard McCabe, Phoebe Nicholls, Rebecca Front, Edward Franklin, Janine Duvitsky (among others) ITV, 2015
Gates, Barbara. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes & Sad Histories. Princeton UP, 1998. Very readable.
Hennedy, Hugh L. Unity in Barsetshire. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. I recommend this readable, sensible and subtle book
Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930. 1985; Queen Margaret Univ College, Australia: Spinifex, 1997.
Mill, John Stuart, The Subjection of Women. Broadview Press, 2000. Online at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645s/
Rigby, Sarah. “Making Lemonade,” London Review of Books, 17:11 (8 June 1995): 31-32. A defense of Joanna Trollope’s novels.
Robbins, Frank E. “Chronology and History in Trollope’s Barset and Parliamentary Novels,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 5:4 (March 1951):303-16.
Snow, C. P. Trollope: An Illustrated Biography NY: New Amsterdam Books, 1975. A fairly short well written biography, profuse with illustrations and a concise description of Trollope’s centrally appealing artistic techniques.
Steinbach, Susie. Understanding The Victorians: Culture and Society in 19th century Britain. London: Routledge, 2012.
Trollope, Joanna. Her official website. A selection: Other People’s Children, Next of Kin, Best of Friends. Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire. 1983: rpt. London: Random House Pimlico, 1994.
Vicinus, Martha. Independent women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1930. Virago, 1985. See my summary and analysis: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/martha-vicinuss-independent-women-work-community-for-single-women-1850-1930/

Arthur Arthur Frazer, “It’s Dogged as Does It” (early illustration for Last Chronicle of Barset)

Artemisia Gentileschi, Jael and Sisera: in one subplot an artist, Conway Dalrymple paints a rich young woman as Jael

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