Poldark 3:3-4: the difficulty of returning to material 20 years dormant ….

George (Jack Farthing) and Elizabeth (Heida Reed) overhear Sam and his “flock” singing (Episode 3)

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) looking down thoughtfully, worried — her care, her concern, all her activities show her to be the conscience of this episode

It would take too long to analyse the creative stirrings and conflicts which decided my change of course … it may have been my absence away from Cornwall at that time, which was one of the factors conducive to the return to the Poldarks — Graham in Poldark’s Cornwall

Friends and readers,

I regret to say I was not able to watch Episode 4 for even a second time of this third year of Poldark films, and I can’t come near Episode 5. I’ve a DVD copy of episode 3 and uncertain memories of the new episode 4. If the BBC would allow non-UK residents to pay the license pay (in effect support the network), I would be delighted to; but I am given no opportunity as a US computer, to support these channels. A quick summary of the central trajectory of Black Moon as it evolves from its hard opening on George and Elizabeth waiting for the birth of Valentine: Ross still cannot get himself to join a corrupt Parliamentary outpost of a gov’t. Ross and Demelza are invited and go to two different powerful political establishments; we see her holding her own. I also wanted to see if the new Horsfield team reached Ross’s rescue of Enys (and as a bye-product, Hugh Armitage) from the French prison, the return home to Caroline and Demelza, and a new let-down after Ross does not take two different offers of roles in powerful organizations (local Justice of the Peace which had been Francis’s and MP under Bassett’s auspices). The Black Moon is the first Poldark novels not to end on a reconciliation of Ross and Demelza; here it’s Aunt Agatha cursing George because he forbids her a birthday party, and sowing seeds of doubt about Valentine’s parentage, and Elizabeth’s perhaps not early parturition.

What cannot be too often stressed is 20 years went by between the first four Poldark novels (Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan) and the second three (The Black Moon, The Four Swans, The Angry Tide). Much life and change has gone by for Graham; he is now not an outsider trying to break into literary society; he’s at some of its centers in London. In this novel Graham is struggling to get back into his material, to bring his characters back to life after 20 years of life’s experiences for him. A good deal of The Black Moon is taken up by politicking with society — reflecting Graham’s own life in the literary world in the between time. No longer is this a story of two people who don’t fit in, their turning to one another and away from their Cornish societies. It’s not a private story at all; as a historical fiction, it is about the intertwining of public and private life.

Demelza, Zacky Martin (Tristan Sturrock) and Sam Carne (Mark Frost) disappointed because George is now refusing to honor Francis’s promise

Demelza’s words bring out how the thriving of a community is the central ideal/norm of this new mini-series

The church Francis (Kyle Soller) promised them

Grief this structure is being allowed to corrode and vanish ….

The weakness felt in both mini-series adaptation is the film-makers want to keep Ross and Demelza at the center as they are the most sought-after popular characters (so they feel) while in Black Moon the Warleggan group are frame. They also don’t want complicated scenes of politicking; both series seek to simplify what happened and give us but one politicking salon. What to substitute? Alexander Baron’s scripts show how in 1977 the expedient was to bring forward the small scale invasion of Ross and his mining-friends into France, Ross coming near senseless execution, and do these swiftly with intense suspense, action, excitement. Both mini-series show how and why methodism is seen as a radical threat to property-owners and the powerfully-connected. They both keep Drake’s mischievous plantings of frogs to torment Warleggan.

But they both marginalize the core of the three books: that Ross gradually learns he cannot be free, and must take responsibility. Instead in both George’s paranoia is played up so he begins to believe that all that occurs on his property which he can’t control (and comes out of the methodists, and Drake’s affair with Morwenna) is set up against him has been engineered by Ross. By Ross’s having refused the position, he leaves his fellow Cornishmen and women at the mercy (but George has none and no sense of justice) of a cold ruthless corrupt tyrant. Horsfield has added scenes showing George to be an utterly corrupt MP and Justice of the Peace: knowing the son of a powerful man has been arraigned for brutal rape, George makes ground for himself by accusing the girl of perjury; we see him transport starving people who killed one bird. Horsfield also brings out much more strongly and early that Elizabeth is horrified by George’s behavior, put off by her own child (by Ross) and cold to the baby; and to live with herself in this condition, resorts to laudanum (Godey’s Lady’s Drops were very popular in the later 18th and early 19th century — what pain-killers were there?).

Shots of several swans together threaded through signal that material from The Four Swans is in this episode — there are now five, including Verity

She has added Verity to the mix (who is marginalized in this later trilogy so that Caroline becomes Demelza’s close friend): in the new Poldark Verity provides a contrast to Elizabeth in her genuine fulfillment and love of her child; she provides a reinforcement of Demelza and Caroline’s fears that neither Ross or Enys will ever come back when for a time Verity is led to believe Captain Ramey’s boat was shipwrecked (this latter wholly made up by Horsfield). Demelza provides contrast to Verity and Elizabeth too: she is developing into her own woman, making decisions about the property and people while Ross is gone.

Ross (Aidan Turner) and Tregirls (Sean Gilder) at Callais

I thought as a whole Horsfield’s additions were justified; the way she presents George and Elizabeth so starkly is theatrically effective, and she does keep and match the sublime and touching scenes of Drake and Mowenna falling in love at the seashore and delving caves while Geoffrey Charles bonds strongly with Drake. Here they are as they meet, intensely happy over the coming few hours together:

Geoffrey Charles (Harry Marcus) — the most forward

Drake (Harry Richardson) — catching up,a little gingerly

Morwenna (Elise Chappell) — not far behind, and self-contained, remaining “proper”

I also thought very effective the way Horsfield and the actor developed Sam’s character and his slowly creating a congregation for himself, and then when George will not honor Francis’s promise to give Nanfan and other dissenters a place for worship, finding through his sister on Ross’s land another building. On the other hand, Horsfield too much buries the central thread of these three books: Ross’s bringing himself to act centrally in his world through office. But she does have him brooding about not going and makes a big fuss about how evil George is, so this thread may become major by episode 5.

When I’ve gotten more material, namely on DVDs episodes 4-5 at least, I’ll write a longer blog taking the art of the two mini-series into account. I am pursuing my book project and have read a series of non-Poldark novels and seen two superb non-Poldark films (Hitchcock’s Marnie, and The Walking Stick). I expect to write a blog on these books as a group (The Little Walls, The Walking Stick, Marnie, The Tumbled House; Greek Fire) and how Graham’s work seems to lend itself to development in film. I’ve two to go: After the Act, and Angel, Pearl and Little God (almost made into a movie starring Marlon Brando), and then I’ll try a few short stories.

While there are stretches which show the same man wrote the suspense stories as the Poldarks: the use of a loner who gradually emerges as part of the central group (this is a LeCarre motif too so perhaps part of the suspense novel’s tropes); both Poldark and non-Poldark books have the action-adventure risks of theft, of disobeying central laws and getting away with it (or not). Nonetheless, Graham’s travel books and articles on Cornwall general and autobiographical, writing about his writing, need to be treated separately — as also his sheer life-writing. The genre he was writing shaped everything he wrote so they can almost seem works from a different man. (One way he differs from DuMaurier beyond the masculinis perspective is she remained in this historical-romance in Cornwall genre.) Perhaps I should call these not non-Poldark books but non-Cornwall ones (though some of these suspense stories are set in Cornwall). Cornwall is key.

A Cornwall estuary

Ellen

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Poldark 3:1 & 2: again changing emphases, bringing out sense of community

Halse (Robin Ellis) and Ross (Aidan Turner) discuss the death of Ray Penvenen (John Nettles, a man of integrity, conviction, but also rank, thus standing and considerable wealth in land) (3 Poldark 2)

“Many years ago I wrote four novels about the Poldark family and eighteenth century Cornwall. After finishing them, the modern world [and suspense novels intervened]. Eventually the idea of writing another book about them came to be something not really open to serious consideration. But sometimes the totally unexpected occurs,and one day, for no discoverable reason, it became necessary for me to see what happened to those people after Christmas night, 1793 … to return to an old mood was as much of a challenge as creating a new one. The Black Moon is the result” — Winston Graham, Author’s Note prefacing The Black Moon)

There are three sets of dates: One for the time the novels were written by Graham (the first four 1945-53, the second three 1973-77), one for the time they are said to be occurring (1783-1793, 1794-99 respectively) and now two sets of dates for the film adaptations which mirror the 40 years apart eras they are filmed in (first series, 1975-78, 2015-2017).

“That part of his character [Ross’s] which made him so critical of authority also worked against himself. The same faculty which questioned the rightness of the law and the lawmakers was sharp to keep his own actions under a similar scrutiny … ” (Graham’s The Black Moon, towards the end of the book)

Friends and readers,

How unexpectedly fitting. I begin my series of comparative blogs on the new and older Poldark films a day after Graham’s 109th birthday. On his blog, Robin Ellis (once Ross Poldark) announced June 30, was Graham’s birthday: he had been born June 30, 1908, Victoria Park, Manchester, where his one historical novel not set in Cornwall, Cordelia, written 1949, takes place.

Winston Graham, 1945, around the time he wrote The Forgotten Story and Ross Poldark (thanks to Jim Dring)

Ellis has not been permitted by history, his fan base, and his later career to dismiss his role as Ross, even if he wanted to, which if he ever did (and he must’ve) he has long given up.

Robin Ellis, recent promotional shot, Truro

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

Aiden Turner as Ross first seen in the new series

Robin Ellis as Ross, coming home to Demelza (and Jud) from the wars in wars, early scene in older series

These blogs are based on the mini-series as now aired on BBC. This first is on the first two episodes, adapted from The Black Moon and imitating some of the previous mini-series (especially the way the Morwenna-Drake love scenes on the beach are done). I compare them to the older series, for which I provide summaries and evaluations in the commentary and both to the fifth Poldark book, The Black Moon.

I begin with the second episode of the third season of the new Poldark (2017), Ellis is again in the new series, and a pivotal moment. Now he is Rev Mr. Halse (Robin Ellis) in the scenes from The Black Moon (5th Poldark book, 1794-95). Ellis as Halse is given role in the book given to Ralph Allen Daniel (a real local landowner, magistrate at the time), an offer in The Black Moon to become Justice of the Peace (in this latest mini-series episode an MP, a very different role, not local). Ross, wrongly he realizes (ever so slowly), partly because the profoundly vindictive, punitive, reactionary capitalist George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) takes the powerful position (including tax and fee rates, punishment, legal procedures).

We can measure the distance of the first four Poldark books (written 1945-53, Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan) from this trilogy written 20 years later, (1973-77, The Black Moon, The Four Swans, The Angry Tide), upon which the third and two seasons at least next must be based. In the second Poldark series, Graham chooses to realize truly historical characters (not just invented ones), linchpin capitalists and great landowners, Tory (Lord Falmouth, from mother’s side a Boscawen) or Whig (Sir Francis Basset, later Lord Dunstanville). Not fantasy figures at all. And in both episodes Ross is deeply conflicted over what he has done in the past, and what he should do for the future, and at the close seems to have decided retreat into his nuclear family and friends is the best right option. He will discover that he is wrong here.

Ross and Demelza (after credits and wild scene of Ross stopping Elizabeth from going over a cliff) reflecting on their way of life: she wants to know if he is avoiding thinking about something

He will not let her see inside him, and tells her, she, on the other hand, thinks too much (he means aloud)

The pace of the Poldark world novels has calmed down in the second realization. Graham says in Poldark’s Cornwall, it was “like breaking into a sound barrier.” It’s a lot slower, far more attention to the particulars of politics in the 1790s in Cornwall, London and France. And that is part of the difficulty both mini-series had to deal with. They somehow have to get some of this new matter in. One can see this in the new realization which is far more consciously political. Yes the newer Poldark mini-series is again much more melodramatic than the older, without comedy, literally closer to the books, using cinematographic techniques, montage, interwoven juxtaposition and parallels a lot more than the older series. And a strong depiction of a community, a way of life. But both fill in matter, the 2017 even more so. For example in the newer series, added to Elizabeth giving birth, and all the mortal dangers that brings, Debbie Horsfield has dramatized the death of Ray Penvenen

Caroline Penvenen Enys (Gabriella Wilde) grieving over her dead uncle (from sugar sickness, i.e., diabetes)

and the death of Demelza, Drake and Sam Carne’s father — both referred to at the opening of The Black Moon, but not made into parallel episodes.

Much less is doing in The Black Moon than had been happening in the previous four novels. So Horsfield and before her the great Alexander Baron (the scriptwriter for the first four episodes of the 1977 Poldark, he was a fine novelist and wrote many BBC screenplays for powerful mini-series in the 1770s, especially for Dickens and the 1983 Jane Eyre) invent, they fill in, they don’t get to Elizabeth’s childbed with Valentine until Episode 2, which scene opens The Black Moon. Horsfield also has her characters commenting on the action, reflecting on their behavior and choices, with a (to me) odd didactic effect. Baron’s older series had to deal with the problem that the dramatization of Warleggan had so departed from the book that Trenwith was supposed burnt down and Ross gone for a couple of years fighting in France (they have to bring Ross back, invent a new house, explain who Aunt Agatha is), but there is a skilfull sophistication of dialogue, very novel-like, more subtly suggestive so Agatha in the older series (Eileen Way) really needles George (Ralph Bates) slowly, spitefully, something the new Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) with her relationship with Elizabeth (Heida Reed) is only said to be doing.

I’m not going to recap this year, but leave my readers to read one of the many that turn up on TV blogs (more probably in the autumn, when PBS broadcasts a probably much re-arranged and somewhat abridged version of the third season), even if they are snarky and trivializing or downright mocking (see one, and two). Rather I’ll evaluate selectively in terms of the previous series, attending to how both connect back to the books. In comments I’ll detail the plot-design and events of the 1977 series (click for Episode 1 of the 1977; and click for Episode 2, much more briefly) since they were not recapped originally and are of great interest.

I hope to stir the reader to return to the older series and also read the books. Here are my two blogs on Graham’s Black Moon: Re-entry, Land, politics, love and coerced marriage, religion and revolution; Violence the basis of this order.

My first response is as all previous encounters: I think how this not as good as last year (in this third season the dressers of Ross are back to allowing him to have utterly unkempt hair), and neither as effective, uncompromisingly like the books in spirit, as the 1970s films. Yet — as in previous encounters I admit Horsfield is following the general story and at moments more literally true, elaborating seriously on what is in the books. The 1970s equivalent did not show Elizabeth trying to get rid of the child or bring on parturition, and crudely or melodramatically as Horsfield had the actors clash (Turner as Ross just happens to be on a cliff where Elizabeth seems to be trying to throw herself over); these are incidents George half-glimpses in the book whose significance he fails to understand. It is made pointedly clear in episode 1 that Ross and Demelza (Elinor Tomlinson) believe Elizabeth’s second baby’s father is Ross. Ross cannot resist hanging around Trenwith; after the baby is born, we see him running frantically on the beach to calm himself, bending over in twisted ways frustrated that he can do nothing for this son; Demelza justifies her returning to see her father die despite his abuse of her because there is a special bond between father and child which must not be ignored. Horsfield is developing cores of the books:

I’ve read that Horsfield and Co are not eager to go on to Books 7-12; if so, they are making an implicit fuss about the possible fathering of Valentine by Ross to little purpose. She has added in episode 2 that Elizabeth does not like her new baby, will not hug or soothe him (Verity notices how cold she is): this is not true of Elizabeth in the books: she may favor Geoffrey Charles, but she loves both her sons and shows concern, solicitude, tenderness towards both (far more than she ever did towards Francis her first husband, or George now). Ross’s indifference towards his son, leaving Valentine to endure the mistreatment of George, the stepfather reaches a tragic and twisted climax in Bella (Book 12). It is all over the new series’ nuances, from Ross’s concern, to his guilt, to Demelza’s warning, in the pointed talk about who the new baby resemble, George’s overdone pride in his “heir.” Graham’s Black Moon is quiet about this until near the end when driven by Warleggan’s cruelty to her, Aunt Agatha suddenly rouses his suspicions in a way never to be undone. The 1977 film only hints at this in Prudie’s suspicions that this eighth month baby is a ninth money one (Episode 2) and Aunt Agatha’s final revenge when George forbids her party and she details what a eighth month baby should be missing (which Valentine is not missing).

first shot of intensely sincere Sam, by his father’s bedside

Sam’s (Tom York) religiosity brought out far more. Both were much more melodramatic than the previous series and sometimes look like travel ads, and there is not quite the need for Turner to charge across the landscape regularly. These lead to implicit silliness, but much is good. The Morwenna-Drake (Harry Richardson and Ellise Chapppel replace Kevin McNally and Jane Wymark, whom Richardson and Chappell resembles) scenes are very well done and touchingly done at length. Horsfield brings out how radical politically the two brothers are — somewhat unconsciously

Morwenna and Geoffrey Charles — on the beach, by the seashore

The sweet Drake will lead them into mysterious caves

What she has done that is interesting and new in an original way is reverse events we are shown. The emphasis in the book is on the Warleggan household — partly Graham was feeling his way back after a 20 year hiatus. We begin and end there in The Black Moon. Alexander Baron filled in far more of the Nampara household, but he did not try to rearrange so consciously, and kept Ralph Bates and Jill Townsend to the fore in the story. Horsfield makes a strong effort to show that Elizabeth is learning to dislike George very much (she does not in the earlier series as she is with George in his reactionary hierarchical attitudes, equally resentful of the Carne brothers, though reasonable and judicious). Horsfield is characterizing the era culturally, giving us a sense of what farm life and mining again (the second episode opens on the mine as so much of the first two seasons did) was like.

Verity and Elizabeth

Agatha saying goodbye to Verity — Verity brings out the best in everyone

We have Verity (Ruby Bentall replaced Norma Streader) added (she begins to become a minor character in the second three novels and disappears altogether in the later ones) and her baby, and when it’s thought that Dwight has either drowned or been killed, Verity is led to believe her husband’s merchant ship was lost in a storm. This is another attempt to reinforce by inventing parallels, in this case (I felt successful) because of the power of the actress’s presence (and our memories of Richard Harringtno as Captain Blamey from the previous series). I liked this quiet prosaicism and thought it was carried out mostly by Eleanor Tomlinson in her role as Demelza. I find regrettable Horsfield seems to feel she must characterize the revolution as senselessly violent, and give strong anti-liberal thought talk to Ross and the new Sir Francis Bassett (John Hopkins) at Bassett’s political salon.

There is strong acting, especially among the older actors: John Nettles’s death as Ray Penvenen is to be regretted as he was such a force on the screen; Ellis is again pitch perfect as Halse (he has a real feel for the era). John Hollingforth as Captain Henshawe, Richard Pope as Pascoe. Among the younger actors, Luke Norris (replacing Richard Morant) as Dwight Enys is utterly believable when called to help Elizabeth give birth, married to hard Caroline (politically at any rate), and in closing brief shots seen aboard ship, using overvoice to pen his letters to Caroline, captured, escaping, and then doing what he can to relieve the suffering of the other victim-prisoners in the French prison.

Luke Norris as Enys at the moment of capture

The new series is luxuriating in the number of episodes (10, 60 minutes each) they have been given for 2 and 1/2 books (The Black Moon and The Four Swans will be covered this third season), while the older one was held to a strict four episodes of 45 minutes, with one extra for each of the three novels (they covered all three in 13 episodes). This might account for the more meditative and reflective quality, with more invention of back stories not in the book in the new series, but it is surprising how much the older series included, and they did not drop characters as is now done here.

Since Phil Harris as Jud was not used as comic or subversive foil the way Paul Curran had been, now dropped with little explanation, he is not missed as much as he would be. We’ve never had the moderating Nicholas Warleggan of the book (and older series, presented as a man who is diplomatic and prefers to be honest), only the cutthroat sneering [uncle] Cary (Pip Torrens). There is still little comedy.

The Warleggan (Jack Farthing) of this first two hours is over-the-top in his egoism, drive to ape “his betters” and chip on his shoulder; he is in effect a fool, ruining his own marriage by his coldness; by contrast the Warleggan of the older series (Ralph Bates) was motivated by a passion for Elizabeth, and more inward genuine complicated feelings. The new series again wants more nudity among the males so we are “treated” scenes of Sam and Drake swimming in the nude — without much motivation.

But interestingly (to me) in both mini-series Ross is taking something of a back seat, is in his soul in retreat as he is so conflicted over what he has done in the past and what his future should be. That is why he rejects Bassett and the Rev Halse’s offer. I just wish (as have others) that Horsfield didn’t feel it necessary for Turner to charge across the landscape on his horse, or make him use frantic gestures to signal inner frustration. Graham’s idea seems to have been to keep Ross as private a man as he, Graham, was.

Final scene (episode 1), she melancholy, he withdrawn apart

Ellen

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Trollope’s Golden Lion of Granpere: an unusual sunlight

Marie and her uncle, Michel, in daily life together (F. A. Fraser, the original illustrator of Golden Lion)

Dear friends,

For a few weeks on Trollope19thCStudies we’re reading two of Trollope’s novellas, The Golden Lion of Granpere (written 1867, serialized 5 years later) and Dr Wortle’s School (written 1879, serialized 1880). From the sparse commentary on Golden Lion (my chapter on Trollope’s 14 novellas in my book, Trollope on the Net is one of the rare published criticisms of the story, Chapter 4, pp 95-96), and its infrequent mention, I fancy it is truly one of Trollope’s lesser known fictions. In general, Trollope readers much prefer his long (and very long novels), and I know I was unusual in defending these books as in many ways as interesting as the longer ones, just using a different set of artistic techniques. While I wouldn’t claim Golden Lion a masterpiece, after we finished reading and discussing (about 4 to 5 of us), I want to call attention to it as like other of these novellas and some of Trollope’s stories, it’s a sort of experiment and in this case offers (mutedly but there) a daring insight into human psychology. In brief it presents the story of a father, Michel Voss, who tries to prevent his son, George, from marrying as servant girl in the house, Marie Bromar, because he the father has become so attached to her, he cannot bear to see his son replace him. In this novella, although there is no overt incest, Trollope quietly explores incestuous feelings (as Michel looks upon Marie as a kind of daughter) as in others he explores other verboten areas of human psychology under pressure.

What has happened is George and Marie have more or less grown up in close proximity and fallen in love. The rationale Michel uses is that his son has no right to want to marry Marie until he has created a thriving establishment; although not voiced this way, Marie is also a servant girl (rather like, as one member of the listserv, Diane Reynolds pointed out, Sonya in War and Peace) and George ought to marry someone more in his class; the father waxes intensely angry, driving the son to leave immediately to take over the management of a nearby inn not doing very well under the management of a widow, Madame Faragon.

The qualification here is neither Michel nor his wife, treat Marie as an inferior; Michel shows delicacy towards her feelings (he looks upon Marie’s defense of her love for George as “gallant” and “made notes of it in the notebook of his heart,” p 20). He then sets about to find her a fine match and he does in the person of a successful linen-dealer, Adrian Urmand, who is (from point of view of status) condescending when he agrees. I had not paid sufficient attention to Urmand last time either: another member of our listserv suggested Urmand has gay traits (small, a “dandy,” dressing elegantly and, though the word is not used, effeminate, not masculine, not forthright, physically there in the way of Michel and George). Urmand in fact never cares deeply for Marie; he leaves after the engagement calmly to wait until she’s ready; his pride has become involved when he agrees to engage himself publicly to her, and he would give her up when he reads her letter telling him she does not love him, but that the putative father-in-law insists he must not lose face and come back and claim the fulfillment of the engagement. Last time round I saw mostly the Oedipal struggle between father and son; this material is mined for much more than that.

Michel, the father, telling George, his son, he will protect Marie from George

Trollope said of this novella it was written on the pattern of Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel (written 1865 and 67, published 1866 and 67 respectively), both of which have had strong defenders, including Henry James. Trollope insisted Nina was a better book than The Eustace Diamonds. It does not end tragically (as does Linda, a Clarissa story, and as Nina almost does), but it may be said to support the point of view Prof Jim Kincaid argued for in his brief intervention in the recent Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, where Kincaid suggests that Trollope “can be read as a tragic novelist,” who chooses plot-designs which most of the time don’t end in tragedy, and whose mood is part of the comic low-mimetic mode, but nonetheless participate in the same Dionysus-like emotions we find in tragedy and skirt tragic insights into the human condition (“Trollope’s Tragedy,” pp 137-41), in this novella’s case I’d say the same kind of perverse violations of human emotion engineered by social and economic norms Richard Holt Hutton found in An Eye for an Eye. Using 3rd person indirect discourse the narrator and Michel towards the end realize how perversely Michel is behaving: working hard to send Marie away to live with Urman when he’d be himself desolate without her, the household without its central vital spirit (he does say he “won’t have her hurried,” chapter 9, p 116), knowing (though denying) that she does love his son, and himself loving that son, and preferring him to Armand. Pride, a desire to control everyone else, to be seen to be master, and as (so he says more than once), Marie’s “keeper” (Chapter 18, p 227) drives him on.

Another aspect of its quiet power and Trollope’s originality comes out when one compares it to Lady Anna (a marvelous book, recently adapted into a play, my essay on it in my book is Chapter 7). In Lady Anna (written 1871, serialized 1873), one of Trollope’s medium length novels, Lady Anna rebels against her mother and just about everyone in her world to insist on marrying Daniel Thwaite a tailor to whom she has engaged herself. She has been told that her status as a lady is tenuous, and her mother insists that for the mother’s sake who has sacrificed so much for this daughter, she, Lady Anna, must marry someone who is (if she is legitimate which is questionable) her cousin, and lord (like Urmand, very handsome) in order to secure that status as well as hand the family money over to a male heir who comes from a branch of the family relatively without funds. When Lady Anna finally defies her mother, she does this on principle: she stands up for her right to choose for herself, for her identity and past and memories. She makes an ethical argument intended to free herself of her mother’s control (see Chapter 41 especially, “ten times again did she tell herself that were she to yield now, she would be a slave for life,” p 434).

One of the small vignettes: Marie writing her letter

Marie makes as forceful an argument, only in accordance with the deeply sexual angle Trollope is exploring, she actually insists on her right to marry for love, and not to be forced to marry someone she does not love (which in context does refer to going to bed with the man). First Marie (Chapter 18 of Golden Lion) and then George himself (Chapter 19) accost Urmand (and Michel) on the grounds how dare he insert himself into a situation where the girl does not love him. Urmand is an intruder; hovering over this is an idea that such a marriage would constitute a form of (however muted) rape. Michel explodes with his usual word, “nonsense;” and she will love Urmand after a while, but she insists on a sexual right, on her right to choose who she will know passion with. (Quite different grounds from Lady Anna, grounds the great Solicitor-General and other lawyers who become Anna’s friends might not have agreed so readily with as an ethical principle of liberty and identity.)

For me the fascinating aspect of a number of these novellas, the first two of which Trollope (Nina and Linda) insisted on publishing as by anonymous, is how they break taboos through the exploration of a brilliantly-conceived and then delved dilemma. Critics have famously (well among Trollopians it’s famous) why Trollope at the height of his career (he was the author of the Can You Forgive Her? publishing The Last Chronicle of Barset at this time) suddenly want to try himself out again, court failure again. Trollope offered as an excuse that he wanted to see if he deserved his great reputation and if his books were selling so well just because of his name (brand is the word used today). Was this some self-flagellating gesture, masochism? Perhaps he wanted to publish a different sort of book — one not Anglo-Protestant and upper-class centered? And indeed Nina takes place in Prague, Linda in Nuremburg. Trollope attempts lovingly to create a world of French bourgeois Catholicism bordering eastern France and Germany in Golden Lion. He does not go in for nuance, but large general paradigms in a kind of thick ethnography (the same kind of feel is found in his short stories taking place in French inns, for example, “La Mere Bauche” which ends in a tragic disaster).

I’ve thought he wanted to obscure his name because in many of them he dares to deal with questions of central psychological interest for his period in ways that might disquiet and offend readers. In the second novella we are going to read on Trollope19thCStudies, Dr Wortle’s School, Trollope warns the reader early on he has an unmarried couple and if the reader doesn’t like this, the reader should stop reading right now (close the book and go away). Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite has rightly reminded many readers of James’s Washington Square; Kept in the Dark (also very late story, written 1880, published 1882) is a tale of seething intense sexual anxiety and possessiveness (darker even than the central story of He Knew He Was Right); The Fixed Period is a Swiftian Orwellian satire, where a law decrees that people aged 67 must be deposited in aslyums and the next year killed. Even the old stand-by which most Trollopians know so well was remarkably daring in its references to real living church officials and attack on unmerited sinecures, the whole church caste system.

A beautifully shaded and lined illustration of George and Marie’s reconciliation

To return to this neglected (at the close) sunlit tale. Perhaps it’s neglected because it does end in a comforting way. If this were Cousin Henry (perhaps an even less known novella than Golden Lion) Urmand’s diffidence, sensitivity, hurt pride, and withdrawal would make everyone behave with strong contempt towards him. Not so in this story. As we all agreed, by the end the characters all behave justly towards one another, and throughout the tale too Trollope is utterly even-handed, generous in his treatment of them. It all ends in a picnic no one wants to go to, but is engineers to soothe the wounded ego of Urmand — who all agree has been “ill-used.” Michel does love his son; if Madame Voss is somewhat grated upon by Marie (after all she is much younger than her husband and did not marry for love and has accepted her lot), she yields (as so many of Trollope’s characters in these novellas will not) and never quite brings to the surface her jealousy of her. Madame Faragon wants the savior of her inn to be able to marry Marie.

This can make us overlook one area of thought and feeling which is not resolved away at the book’s close. A priest is hauled in to bully Marie into marrying Urmand by insisting she is deeply sinful if she refuses to marry Urmand. Urmand is Catholic and George Protestant. M. le Cure makes the mistake of equating deep sinfulness with obedience to Michel Voss (and himself). Marie sees through this at once as transparent unfair manipulation, false equations. She reminds him that the marriages he is talking of were made for money. At one point Trollope tells us Marie is a “better hypocrite” (Chapter 13, p 153) than most around her (ironically), but it’s really more that even if she half-agrees to marry Urmand and be a “good wife” to him, she never loses sight of her real feeling which is “that she loved another man” (Chapter 9, p 103). She agrees only to please her uncle; her uncle’s demands, her uncle’s pressure, her uncle’s feelings are what she most attends to throughout the tale; the original illustrations to the tale emphasize this relationship.

Marie and Michel, like to go on long walks together and talk

Overlooked, unemphasized but here is one of Trollope’s motifs throughout his books: religious hypocrisy. The priest is behaving as badly as the Proudies who also manipulate religion to inflict an abusive power; and he never does back away, only disappears. A sidelight here is how frequently in Trollope’s lesser known novels he can also present a deeply sympathetic portrait of a Catholic priest (the first and most moving in The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Trollope’s first and a tragic novel).

As I argued in my book, but here for different reasons, I think this is a fine novel by Trollope, and have written this blog to recommend it to readers who have not read it and suggest rereading to those who have. Among the older forgotten studies of Trollope that would illuminate this book is L. J. Swingle’s Romanticism and Anthony Trollope: A Study in the Continuities of Nineteenth-Century Literary Thought. The novel turns Arcadian in the close but it uses lyrical rhythms in many passages of description throughout; at the same time Trollope shows a real interest in ecology in this book. In its happy ending the characters are enabled to follow an inner innate nature and find contentment in life.

Ellen

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2 Poldark 10: Reconciliation and Forbearance — Finale for now

Ross (Aidan Turner) and Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson)

Elizabeth (Heida Reed), Geoffrey Charles (unnamed) and George Warleggan (Jack Farthing)

She’d say life holds only two or three things worth the having, and if you possess them the rest don’t matter, and if you do not possess them the rest are useless (Graham, Warleggan, Bk 4:Ch 5, p 439; repeated in screenplay but attributed to Ross rather than Demelza, screenplay, 70 INT, pp 578-79)

Dear friends and readers,

[Note: this blog assumes the reader has read Graham’s novels, viewed the 1970s mini-series, and is interested in the art as well as content of the books and this older and the new 2015-16 mini-series. I don’t re-cap, expect the viewer to have seen the film, understood the story, and remember it generally.]

So we come to the end of the second season of the Debbie Horsfield’s new Poldark and Winston Graham’s powerful fourth novel, Warleggan. I was powerfully moved by the new finale, which remained close in most respects to the book, but have to admit I was equally deeply engaged by its counterpart in 1975, Jack Russell’s Episode 16, whose events moved so far from the book so as to present a different story, but whose sense and spirit were a theatrically Jacobin version in spirit of the book (rather like Jack Pulman’s Episodes 3 and 4 related to the conclusion of Graham’s first novel, Ross Poldark). I burst into tears at the 1975 version, not just because Demelza’s beloved dog, Garrick, is shot by Warleggan’s thugs, but at some wrenching of me within as Ross (Robin Ellis) and Demelza (Angharad Rees), continue fiercely to tear at one another.

I didn’t cry during this second iteration because I have a hard time accepting one of the changes Horsfield made: in Graham’s book and in Russell’s rendition, well before Ross’s last visit to Trenwith to talk with Warleggan and (in the book) Elizabeth, Demelza makes the difficult effort to forgive, accept, and let her love for Ross come out and respond to him again so that they could have gone to bed again (Bk 4, Ch 3, pp 413-414 — he feels he will wait until she will feel no reserve once again). In Warleggan they do quarrel angrily in the last scene (over very different and woman’s way of seeing his conduct and his refusal to acknowledge her understanding of what happened is just too), such that they nearly break up as they nearly do in Horsfield’s version (Bk 4, Ch 7, pp 460-66). In my view Graham stopped writing the series for 20 years because he had reached such an impasse, with Ross still at least longing for Elizabeth to acknowledge an ex-love (she won’t, now that he never turned up after the rape, left her pregnant, and she has had to marry a man she doesn’t love and who she knows doesn’t love her, she hates Ross), and Ross and Demelza reconciling themselves to the reality of conflicting emotions they must live with. But Horsfield and Eleanor Tomlinson’s Demelza reached a point of bitterness, sarcasm (she jeers at Ross — “What it is to be married to such a great man!”)), spite in her eyes, hate in a visit to Elizabeth (not in the book)

Demelza confronting Elizabeth

Elizabeth: ‘Why have you come?’
Demelza: ‘I thought ’twas to tell you that I hate you. That you’ve marred my faith and broke my marriage. That I envy you. for the passion you roused which Ross could not withstand. That I pity you … But now I wonder what do any of it matter? what you did — what Ross did — cannot be undone. And you both must live with that. But I need not.

and reluctant grudging silence even in her last scene with Ross, her eyes so narrow, her face so pinched, that I felt alienated from the character I had bonded with. I found it just so painful that she did not seem to value Ross, invest her whole being there (the way I had with my husband and have imagined Demelza does in the book). A part of my deep joy in the novels is the character of Demelza as imagined by Graham and she is never hateful with fierce looks of spite; never stalks anyone. I can respond better to open hurt than rigid withholding of the self and resentment. Horsfield’s conception and Tomlinson’s acting makes deep pyschological sense, but I could find little to comfort myself with here. I felt for Aidan Turner as Ross, remorseful, trying to be honest (she says he is not honest when he is), and clinging to her (Horsfield gives Graham’s Demelza’s words to him (see above). In the long feature to the DVD of this second season, Jack Farthing remarks that the series “is not a museum piece,” but treats of issues, presents characters of direct contemporary relevance today. In book and this episode she does sow doubt in Ross’s mind that she just might have gone to bed with MacNeil (Henry Garrett) and the scene of Ross’s anger at this in this episode’s penultimate scene is word-for-word from the book and very good (and not in the 1970s version where Demelza never moves away from Ross at all), and she does threaten to leave with Jeremy, but in the last pages of the book and here on the cliff again does not.

Agatha has nearly the last words of the episode as she tells Elizabeth she has made a pact with a devil and warns the baby may come in February (9 months after May 9th, the night of the rape)

For the record the changes in Demelza are not the only way Horsfield departs from the Warleggan (perhaps, some would say, modernizes). Some of the material comes from Black Moon (Book 5); so too George’s attempt to part Geoffrey Charles from Elizabeth in Black Moon, Elizabeth’s fuller realization her coming baby might be Ross’s – she suspects, worries but the realization comes later. Here it comes at the close from Aunt Agatha’s (Caroline Blakiston) insight; entirely new (not in book, not in earlier series) is the way Horsfield has developed the relationship of Agatha and Elizabeth. Agatha functions in the way the fool did in Elizabethan drama: she tells Elizabeth truths Elizabeth doesn’t not want to hear but knows in her heart. In Warleggan she realizes George has married her as a trophy, is not manageable or comfortable to be with as Francis, but it takes the time passing in Black Moon for her to see she has married a mean bully in George.

The mob scene is the invention of Jack Russell. There is none in Warleggan (as Pulman invented the idea that Charles Poldark took a needed £300 from Ross after he borrowed it from Pascoe, and Horsfield changed that to Charles trying to bribe Ross to leave). Horsfield has not allowed this natural result of enclosure and destroying the tenants’ houses to move into open riot, murder (the crazed lonely Paul Daniel is shot through the chest by Warleggan in 1975), nor allowed Trenwith to burn down, but the episode does give us a theatrically effective rendition of the rage the tenants and all around Truro George’s behavior is causing. Having Trenwith burn down in the older series made havock with Black Moon and Ross and Agatha’s deep resentment and George’s exultation to be in Trenwith. I object to the new way it’s done where Horsfield far more blames the workers (as a foolish group, not a starving deeply wounded people with nothing to lose) but the new episode gives Ross a chance to redeem himself by stopping the riot and appealing directly to Demelza to come home with him. He has come for her.

Demelza climbing up in front of Ross once more

Jack Russell has Ross called to war to join his regiment (this is anachronistic), so that at the close he leaves Demelza with Jeremy; there is nothing like this in the book — for the very good reasons Pascoe (Richard Hope in this version) and Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) in the new episode tell him not to: he needs to be there to develop his thriving tin business, to keep up his family. But Horsfield picks this up too as theatrical; he joins Dwight in London after the disillusioned Dwight (he has been told wrongly that Caroline has engaged herself to a Lord Coniston) has signed up, but cannot get himself to leave. Horsfield conveys the ominousness of war through having Jeremy play with toy soldiers against the larger background of taverns, and men readying themselves. There is much less romance to it than there was 40 years ago.

The two friends reunited

Much was done very well –- and the parts that were closer to the book finer in conception, subtler, making more true sense than what Russell concocted (see my account in the comments). In general throughout both seasons 1 and 2 of this Poldark and the whole of the previous, where the writer is closer to Graham, the series is better. As so common, it opens with Ross and (now) Henshawe, Paul Daniel all working at the mine. Only now Demelza is not there; she is not helping but acting out the “elegant” lady, walking in the meadow. We move to Trenwith where George is having Francis’s picture removed, placating Elizabeth with a dual portrait of them in its place(by the “celebrated John Opie — “oh George,” says the fool, “you spoil me”), all the while thinking of how he may part her “reasonably” from Geoffrey Charles (a good school you see) and plotting with Tankard to shoot people on sight who take the hitherto public right of way, and by the next scene seeking to wrench from Ross the shares he paid Elizabeth for from Wheal Grace while they were worthless. In this second scene, Elizabeth lurks by the door and does realize for the first time that Ross had tried to help her, but after a ferocious physical battle where Ross tries to burn George, and he has his men eject him after smashing his face, she seems to side with George. Jill Townsend’s Elizabeth was cooler, assessed George better (as does Graham’s), knew she was caged upon marriage.

Townsend’s face hardens as she realizes George will not keep any of his promises (to take her to London, to provide her with a great lady social life ….)

Reed is ever soft: the scene ends now with her telling her boy, George will be his papa now — the child is not impressed

The Dwight and Caroline (Gabriella Wilde) scenes and especially when John Nettles as Ray Penvenen is there are very well and carefully realized. Nettles is a fine actor, and a deeply appealing uncle, who conveys complex feelings: we have the scene where Dwight tells him he has “the sugar sickness” and will not get better by altering his diet (no wine) but may prolong his life.

I cannot warm to Horsfield’s conception of Caroline as a shallow egoistic heiress slowly growing up; by contrast Judy Geeson is shown as genuinely caring for the beaten down impoverished Rosina Hoblyn:

Jack Russell’s Caroline hires Rosina as her maid (very anachronistic). Neither is quite Graham’s conception: Graham’s Caroline is a hold-over from the gay witty lady of Restoration comedy, and becomes humanized through her flirtatious relationship with Ross, friendship with Demelza and her ambiguous marriage to Dwight (she does emasculate him somewhat, and in the later books he holds himself apart). But there is something touching about Wilde’s behavior, how she holds her body, when Ross comes to thank her, and brings her back to Dwight (she stands there looking more penitent than ever seen before). It’s pure romance:

I was moved when after the lovers’ night together, she returns to her lonely uncle to care for him.

I also warmed to the added scene of Verity’s (Ruby Bentall) childbirth: her step-daughter has now sofened towards her; the whole scene is not literally in the book but a fair extrapolation. And it gives Horsfield a chance to have the sympathetic Verity try to talk Demelza into accepting and forgiving, into remembering, believing Ross does love her — and not to let go of that.

Verity is dropped from the books, marginalized as a character from the time of Black Moon on. In Graham and the 2nd season of the 1970s Poldark (1977-78), instead Demelza’s great friend becomes Caroline Penvenen Enys. I hope Horsfield changes that, and keeps the sister-friendship up as she has developed the aunt-niece relationship of Agatha and Elizabeth.

Turner in one of several scenes between him and Demelza where he is reasoning with her, trying to apologize, to explain himself.

I thought Turner superb in the episode: it was a hard part. He had to be didactic and explicitly say moral things left to interior thoughts in the book and he did it very well. I found him very appealing throughout. He has become this complicated character thoroughly, driven, with many conflicting loyalties, rightly fiercely protective of everything good which Warleggan would blight. Given the present horrible things going on in the US where a man has taken power and is inflicting pain and deprivation on the majority of Americans, treating non-whites as semi-criminals (they are not safe in the streets anymore), having immigrants snatched up and deported to anywhere, prosecuting parents, increasing private prisons (shown to be cruel to prisoners), Ross Poldark is now an important hero for our time in a way he has not been since the 1940s when he was conceived as an antidote to the barbarism and nightmare war of mid-century Europe. His finally striking out at George, meaning to kill him almost unless stopped is another moment of understandable rage for the character who is emerging as flawed but meaning and doing well often (exemplary in most ways). Farthing is acting George as he is in the book (and as Ralph Bates acted him in the 1970s), we see the banality of evil, cold selfishness, no care for anyone but himself and those he deems extensions of him. I regret they dropped his father Nicholas as a semi-moral villain, slightly comic, amusingly acid (Allen Tilvern); we are in an era where there is no room for comedy and so we have the icy relentless Cary Warleggan (Pip Torrens).

A telling repeat image in this episode is that of people writing letters to one another; we see George writing, and and switch to Ross writing and back again:

There are scenes of signing, Dwight leans down to sign his return to the navy (as a doctor aboard a ship), Ross nearly signs, he takes documents from Pascoe to London. George is continually among his documents, looking at them (as was Ralph Bates in 1975). No longer boxing and fencing with someone, but attacking the world through ownership and lawyers.

Not a museum piece as Farthing said.

I aim to reread the coming novels, Black Moon and The Four Swans this summer and am now eager for the third season and for all twelve novels to be adapted into this film adaptation. I also hope they will keep the same actors when after The Angry Tide, the series must move ahead ten years to The Stranger from the Sea. As with The Pallisers (where they age considerably) or I, Claudius, I would enjoy seeing the actual presences grow older and change and endure on.

The working mine the set-designers keep to

In Maureen Turim’s book, Flashbacks in Film, on history: she makes the point how Hollywood films seem always to tell a political or historical story through the story of individuals; one must. Her philosophical criticism is that this must distort realities, especially as often the film-makers choose exemplary characters and of course they get to chose what example they want to present, and often provide a happy ending. One way the history film can get past this is the use of flashback, montage, retrospective, wide far shots, the characters remembering: well at the close of Poldark on the cliff and in the returns to the symbolic buildings, Trenwith, Nampara, the village, that’s precisely what the film-makers are suggesting.

Next up: Outlander, the second season, when I’ve finished War and Peace. Just now I am watching in a row all the Anna Karenina movies, and especially loving the 1978 13 part BBC mini-series written by Donald Wilson, the same man who wrote much of the 1967 Forsyte Saga. Keep hope alive, my friends, keep hope alive. And I will be writing on books too.

Ellen

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2 Poldark Episodes 6-7: Mourning, Fierce Struggle to Survive; Rescued from Ambush

Ross (Aidan Turner) missing Francis (Episode 6, scripted Debbie Horsfield, directed by Charles Palmer)

Verity (Ruby Bentall) missing Francis

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson, there is a also a close-up parallel to Verity)

‘The longer I live,’ Ross said, pulling his brows together painfully, ‘the more I distrust these distinctions between strong men and weak. Events do what they like with us, and such — such temporary freedom as we have only fosters an illusion. Look at Francis. Was there ever a sorrier or more useless end or one less deserved or dictated by himself, or more unfitted to the minimum decencies and dignity of a human being? … to miss help by the space of an hour … It is always what I have resented most in life: the wantonness, the useless waste, the sudden ends that make fools of us, that make nonsense of all our striving and contriving … (Graham, Warleggan, Bk 2, Ch 1; repeated by Horsfield)

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza accepting a gift of stockings from Ross, whose debts have been paid by an unknown benefactor (end of Episode 6)

He leads her to the bed. Tentatively, as if expecting her at any moment to deny him, Ross pushes up her skirts till they’re above her knees, till her legs are bare. She shivers involuntarily. She has not felt the touch of his hands like this for so long. Now, with infinite care, he puts on one of the stockings, gently rolling it up from her ankle until it slips just above her knee. Then, with the utmost delicacy and patience, he ties it with a garter. She is trembling. She has almost forgotten to breathe. Her face is so close to his now. She waits for him to pull back, to take the other stocking and put it on, but instead his hand begins to slide further up her thigh. He looks into her eyes, as if seeking her permission. Without a word, she consents. His mouth finds hers. They kiss hungrily. Eventually, reluctantly, they pull apart.

ROSS So you are not to be rid of me, my love.
DEMELZA So I am not to be rid of you, my love.

He pulls her towards him and they devour each other.

Dear friends and readers,

In my last blog on the new Poldark I concentrated on Debbie Horsfield’s scripts. For this I am continuing of 2 Poldark 4 & 5: to recall it: Ross decided to abandon Wheal Liesure as worthless, struggled to set up a yet new business with Francis (Kyle Soller) and Henshawe (John Hollingworth) as his partners based on the hope of copper in Wheal Grace. They are harassed and hounded by George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) and his mole Tankard (Sebastian Armesto), and lose Francis to accidental death. Caroline Penvenen (Gabriella Wilde) rejected Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) as insufficiently ambitious, and returned to London. Now I study the mini-series most frequent kind of pictures, the mise-en-scene and discover it mirrors our fraught era of a hard world where individuals struggle to survive, where the world intrudes, invades, exerts surveillance. The story line and scenes feel like an elaboration of the images, but the three and the script all come together seamlessly.

Aidan Turner as Ross setting off to town

Watching a film is primarily a visual experience — moving pictures with sound. One way to understand a movie is what image is perpetually repeated in different versions. In an brilliant older film adaptation of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (scripted Simon Grey, directed by Pat O’Connor), it was of the painter jumping on his scaffold or coming down and/or painting. Across the whole movie. In Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility from Jane Austen it was Elinor (Emma Thompson) comforting Marianne (Kate Winslet) or them arguing half-bitterly. Well an image in the new Poldark almost nowhere to be found in the old is of (Aidan Turner as) Poldark seen from the back trudging wearily into town, intent on trying to do business, or defend himself, or cope with something (on the way to his banker or lawyer or buying things). Again and again it’s him the single figure from the back, and he’s small, contra mundi in effect. But he is not so much against the world as often it is accompanied or prefaced by bad news: someone has framed him, is out to get him, his mine collapsed. This is the image of the paratext of him from the back facing the ocean, i.e., the universe. The lone man.

This image of grim, stalwart determination of Ross confronting the world is a response to our time. It is a deeply sympathetic one since he is trying so hard and means so well. In the one instance I remember Robin Ellis as Ross filmed as coming into town — for the assizes where he was accused of inciting a riot, we see him from the side among people.

The images of Demelza and Ross making love are far and few between even in the first season; in the second they are even rarer; the one which ends episode 6 is found in Graham and both are there to signal an interlude of hope and the strength and joy it brings when Ross finds his bill strangely met (and he gives £600 to Elizabeth to try to make her both independent of Warleggan and tied by gratitude to him). The repeating images of Demelza in the new Poldark are of her doing housework, working in the fields, in her garden, over her wash, caring for her baby, aiding Turner, cooking for him, and only sometimes sitting down with him to eat and drink, bringing food and drink to the miners — far far more of them than anything sexual. This was not at all true of Angharad Rees as Demelza. In the earlier episode Prudie (Mary Wimbush) did much of the cooking, there were few baby or housework scenes. The 1970s Demelza went out to visit others more, flirted more with the predatory Lord Brodugan, with Captain MacNeil (Douglas David) had if brief or just preludes, there were far more frequent indications of, and love-making scenes (in the light).

I so loved Graham’s and the 1970s’ Ross and Demelza because they never bickered, no tension for real between them, she is presented as increasingly hurt at Ross’s reluctant slow moves towards Elizabeth: Ellis speaks an inward speech about how Demelza is deeply part of the rhythms of his existence (not in the book). I feel and bond with Rees as Demelza as she presents herself as finding her identity in Ross and giving in to him while he doesn’t consult her — that is Graham’s book’s view. The stocking scene in the book and 1970s is part of an erotic thread, more deeply touching (for me), but as interlude of freedom in 2016 it fits the new series’ conception.

The new Demelza is as hard working and earnest as her Ross, she is there listening at home, involving and asserting herself far more in Ross’s business decisions (or trying to); when in town, she looks disheveled at times, weary, intent on her business, seeing Elizabeth so gussied up, she winces. I admire her, bond with her, understand she is tough and surviving but there is much less pleasure in her existence.

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

Ross discussing the mine with Elizabeth (Heida Reed), the boy Geoffrey Charles on his lap

I found Episode 6 (which more or less corresponds to Episode 14 in the older Poldark series) very strong, and like another strong episode from the first season, 4 (early scenes of the marriage of Ross and Demelza, his confronting others, her avoiding others, the friendship with Verity, and that first family Christmas), very close to the book. In the Ross-Demelza-Elizabeth triangular story, the difference is the insertion George continually; in 4 to 5, he was buying out the company stock; in 6 and 7 he is either half-seducing, half-threatening Elizabeth (if she will become his mistress he hints, now Francis is gone, all debts will be forgotten, he will do all he can to help her), or he is undermining her will and confidence. In these scenes the outer world intrudes on, invades the house, no one is safe from a predatory hard society.

George filling up the door space, the POV has him looming over the household women: when no one is there, he needles and insults Aunt Agather (Caroline Blakely) urging her to die, and manipulatively flatters Elizabeth’s foolish mother (Sally Dexter)

The images of Ross and Elizabeth at first distant (as in the visit to the mine above), show them physically grow closer each time he visits, until there is a seeming reversal when he becomes so engaged with smuggling he has little time for her (though when he shows up it’s all close-ups as they begin to acknowledge their continuing love). Again the world is difficult: yes, it’s illegal (and Demelza is angry at this turn of events to support the mining, at Trencrom’s gradual insertion of his goods into their house, Ross going out himself with the men), but if he doesn’t do this, how is he to get the money the world requires?

Trencom (Richard McCabe) insinuating himself

A woman can’t sweep her house in peace …

The older episode presented Caroline (Judy Geeson) and Enys (Richard Morant) as independent of all relatives (the uncle not seen much), all outside pressures except his own conscience leading him to care for patients (the 1970s Rosina is beaten by her father, her doll set on fire out of spite), but our modern pair have to contend with an aggressive uncle who (as in the book) invites Enys over to (very like Lady Catherine de Bourgh over Elizabeth Bennet) to try to intimidate and bully him out of marrying someone “so above him.”

The angry uncle Ray Penvenen (John Nettles)

Dwight dignified, holding his own, but hurt

No scene like the one above occurs in the 1970s — it is in the book, but unlike the book, this new pair seem never to forget obligations which continually get in the way; in the 1970s the main problem was Enys’s idealism; but here it’s also (as in the book) Caroline Penvenen’s ambition, sense of what is due her. The earlier pair are powerful over those they aid; here they are subjects themselves.

The older Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) was cool, ambitious, attracted to Ross sexually but not as soft and loving as Horsfield’s Elizabeth, not as vulnerable. Our new Elizabeth (Heida Reed) wants to be with Ross at Christmas, and it is Verity who tells her this would be intruding. The new Elizabeth goes to Cardew, Warleggan’s house, because she’s lonely after she has so virtuously kept herself apart; the 1970s characters are not afflicted with loneliness for society which gives them a hard time.

Final invasive presence — though very well-meaning, what can he do as a mere banker, subject to George as creditor, as owning a bill — is Richard Hope as Pascoe, reminding, warning, telling Ross he is working against himself in this way and that. But Ross insists on integrity insofar as he can. The elimination of the genial rascal father, Nathaniel Warleggan and turningthe uncle Cary (Pip Torrens) as a sheer bad guy is one of the episode’s flaws (it’s not realistic): in Graham Cary sneers at George for wanting this older widow when George could have younger prettier, richer, higher ranking, more fertile girls. In this series (not the 1970s and not the book), we are shown our debtors come to the creditors to pay the bill

As to the interweaving art, this (like 4 in season 1) does not have the rapid juxtapositions of several stories; it allows scenes to develop more slowly: the briefer ones where we are reminded how the characters miss Francis are at least true to the book. Warleggan is about the effect of the deaths of individuals on lives left. Graham’s idea is each individual life matters: we should not throw away poor individuals, indebted people, lame people, and Francis with all his flaws was an important part of everyone’s life. I thought that was beautiful in the book and it’s in the 1970s and in Horsfield. What is added is a mirror of our times: the Trump era, in the UK years of left centrist capitalist and now hard Tory rule.

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A shot of swans might be Horsfield anticipating a book to come (Poldark 6: The Four Swans)

Episode 7 shows the same emphasis of a hard intrusive society which the characters must have courage to deal with as they can’t seem to do without it. The story and scenes correspond to some of the older Episode 15 (I will hold off on the summary until we get to the new episode 8 so the reader may compare the rape scenes), but since Horsfield has so many more episodes for the two books (in the 1970s it was strictly 4 episodes of 45 minutes a book; Horsfield has 5 episodes of 60 minutes a book) she expands the material significantly. As good as Episode 15 is, in comparison it is necessarily an outline and suggestive of the treacherous ambush, discovery of the informer (Charlie Kempthorne), Dwight’s failure to meet Caroline for their elopement at midnight because he must warn Ross and the men by lighting bonfires high on the mountain, so as to enable him (and Demelza come down from the roof) to return to the house with the soldiers in it and hide in the cache.

The main sweep of the episode — or overarching threat — is the collusion of the policing prevention men, embodied in Vercoe, and his alliance with Captain MacNeil (Henry Garrett). So we have state law, larger entities coming in, the courts again. The first scene of POV Vercoe and MacNeil on the top of a hill looking down with a spyglasses at Trencom talking quietly with Jud (Phil Davis).

The motif of surveillance seems very 2016.

Ross with Henshawe and Paul Daniel (Ed Browning)

This new Episode 7 has far more development in detail of the story than the earlier, including more on the finding of Mark Daniel (Matthew Wilson, now bearded, half-mad with his isolation, near beggary), the disappointment of Ross and Henshawe using maps to discover the supposed copper that Francis saw was what Mark Daniel thought copper:

Again the motif of Ross coming into town, this time with papers and maps of the mine. Papers are presented throughout the episode, Dwight at Vercoe’s sees the connection between Kempthorne and Vercoe later in the episode because Vercoe’s son has a drawing that reappears in Kempthorne’s house. When Ross has returned without a hope of copper (but now they are thinking perhaps there is tin there and now need money to blast) and goes for another round of smuggling, MacNeil is at the ready, and sends his men to keep Demelza and Prudie in the house: they are the surveillance group. She has to claim she needs to go to her child vehemently to escape this watch. This corresponds to scenes of Caroline with her uncle at night: he loves her, but he has his eye on her and is trying to keep her from Dwight (he does not know of the afternoon trysts)

Far shot

We have Dwight’s cure and palliation for Rosina’s lameness so we see the good he does (he does not bleed her which Choake would):

The inward secondary stories are more elaborated: especially the scenes of Caroline come back from London, and now willing to compromise with — their story is moving, with his conflict, his wanting to practice his profession with people who need him, his dislike of sneaking away, of living on Caroline’s money.

Warleggan continues his pressure on Elizabeth through Tankard, making her nervous about money, and now physically frightened: sending Tankard with stories to scare her, sending men to dig tin on her land and having Tankard tell her that’s legal. She now feels forsaken by Ross; sends letters but Prudie (Beatie Edney, almost a companion to Demelza by this point) does not send them on, pockets them. As in the book and the 1970s Warleggan wants to marry Elizabeth as much to spite and to triumph over Ross (we do not feel any love, only cold pressure), but in this one Elizabeth is responding to a personal need, a fear of what’s out there beyond the house, while in the 1970s she grows angry and (feminist motif) wants herself to have fulfillment with pretty clothes, interesting society (she has only Aunt Agatha with her ominous tarot cards).

Landing beneath the fire — not yet seen

The new episode is very effective in the same places the old one was — Dwight’s firing the hill, but this time there is a re-launch of the boat. The realization of Zacky Martin and Jud that it’s Kempthorne and their going out to find him. (We do miss the ancient justice ritual of the older episode 15 with the fierce punishment of throwing Kempthorne off a cliff. Here, as i the book and more realistically, Kempthorne is just found dead on the beach and we never know who killed him. Suicide (given his fierce struggle to kill Dwight) is improbable. Finally the shooting scenes on the beach, Demelza in time to reach Ross so he comes into the back part of the house into a cache in the library is (like some Zorro episode — but it is in the book)

I’m not sure the quicker pace of the older episode was not better than the new one because in this new one the actors strained to emote as well but the new one is more realistic, fuller, has depths of different struggles going on at once the first lacks, all allowed by a greater amount of time, but also out of a different stance towards reality across the new Poldark films. We do have moments of Ross and Demelza talking, embracing, coming together, even a glimpse of Demelza on the piano, for a moment quiet which is not death or surveillance.

But 2016 is a much harder time and the new Poldarks address themselves to that, mirror that, show us characters coping with that. The kind of ambition the 1970s Elizabeth displayed (found to some extent in Graham) has no place in this new humane show: I love the new Poldarks for dismissing what seems shallow, self-indulgent, utterly materialist today even if also in or all the more because in 2016 this selfish set of values reigns strongly out in the real world and other dramas in cinema and TV. The only major character who displays it in 2016 is George Warleggan. He seemed to justify himself in the first season as coming up in the world, but his underhanded manipulative bullying methods, his continual sword-playing and boxing with a paid opponent (the repeating image for him) shows us he is one of the world’s pest leaders — it is fitting he is a banker.

Time out for instructions to buy a bill so he can squeeze Ross out of life some more …

Ellen

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My edition of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde has been published!

Charlotte Smith (1749-1807) by George Romney (1792)

Sonnet 69 from Elegiac Sonnets

Written at the same place [where refugees land], on seeing a seaman return who had been imprisoned at Rochfort

Clouds, gold and purple, o’er the westering ray
Threw a bright veil, and catching lights between,
Fell on the glancing sail, that we had seen
With soft, but adverse winds, throughout the day
Contending vainly: as the vessel nears,
Encreasing numbers hail it from the shore;
La! on the deck a pallid form appears,
Half wondering to behold himself once more
Approach his home. — And now he can discern
His cottage thatch amid surrounding trees;
Yet, trembling, dreads lest sorrow or disease
Await him there, embittering his return:
But all he loves are safe; with heart elate,
Tho’ poor and plunder’d, he absolves his fate!

Dear friends and readers,

Although I’ve been putting my blogs on historical fiction set in the 18th century, both in film and in novels on this blog (e.g., Poldark and Outlander), and have now and again put teaching 18th century texts (Fielding’s Tom Jones) and enjoyment in reading and viewing arts and music and books of the era, I’ve kept scholarship in the area in my Austen reveries blog. Hence I’ve not posted much at all about Charlotte Smith, a consuming interest (in her life) and love (for her poetry and some of her novels) in my life now for many years (see More First Encounters).

Charlotte Smith was a great and profound poet in the later 18th century, the mother of romanticism (with Wordsworth a father, and Radcliffe, mothering the Gothic), and an absorbing original novelist. I attended the second conference devoted just to her at Chawton House Library in Hampshire this past October, gave a paper on her as a post-colonial writer, and after a five-year effort published the first affordable paperback scholarly edition of her second novel, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake.

The purpose of this blog is to encourage anyone interested to buy it at Valancourt Press, which will take you to Amazon, and its occasion is a wonderfully thorough and insightful blog by the novelist, literary critic and publisher, Tyler Tichelaar:

Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde: A Missing link between Romanticism and the Gothic, to which I append my comment and then some:

I didn’t sufficiently emphasize in my introduction the book as a romantic novel, though I did talk about the poetic landscape and how (from contemporary reviews and a contemporary almost immediate French translation), it seems what most struck people. We have to remember that Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest was first published in 1790, the same year as Ethelinde, and The Mysteries of Udolpho came four years later. So this novel was a revelation. In the sequence where Ethelinde goes to her father’s tomb, she anticipates and imitates the haunted gothic of Victorian fiction. I probably didn’t think of the romantic connections because it’s a rare novel by Smith where she does not include any of her poems. Maybe because she thought she’d created poetry in words enough with the landscapes. I agree with Robert the book does not feel very Burney-like, Smith is so corrosively angry in her satire on awful characters. But I feel certain all these women read one another. I also forget Smith’s novels became part of the Jacobin novelists of the 1790s too (Rogert Bage’s Hermsprong, Thomas Holcroft, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman) and Walter Scott wrote a long beautiful perceptive appreciation.

Valancourt has brought the book out as a hardback. I conclude it’s selling well — for a book of this sort. The publisher & editor has indicated to me he’s not really interested in going on to publish another by Smith: his business seems to have begun by concentrating on publishing rarer older gothic and Victorian novels (out of copyright) but in the last few year more contemporary and gay novels have been added to the list. If he should change his mind, I think I’ll ask for a payment this time 🙂

Several Smith novels are available as Broadview Press editions, e.g. Celestina; Kentucky Press, e.g. The Young Philosopher. A couple others are available in good facsimile reprints but no notes and no introduction, no bibliography (e.g., The Banished Man, about war-torn Europe and France from an emigre’s perspective). Montalbert is in one of these reprints of ECO texts where there are four tiny pages per page, but you can buy it cheaply. Even The Romance of Real Life is available in an OCR facsimile.

Marchmont is now the only novel by Smith not available in an affordable edition. It was Marchmont I and the publisher spoke as an alternative to Ethelinde when we first discussed the project, and I probably chose Ethelinde because it’s historically more important (see above — it was a revelation), and I’d read part of Ethelinde. And yet Marchmont is a powerful book — it has this extraordinarily frank depiction of a debtor’s prison (anticipates Dickens) and makes use of a terrible siege in France, Toulon, and so calls attention to the reality that the “terror” of and many of the early directorate’s actions were a reaction against invasion from other capitalist-royalist national leaderships with their armies and the complicated politics within France. Trollope’s La Vendee is about the counter-revolutionaries in the countryside.

Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War

To a wild mountain, whose bare summit hides
Its broken eminence in clouds; whose steeps
Are dark with woods; where the receding rocks
Are worn with torrents of dissolving snow;
A Wretched woman, pale and breathless, flies,
And, gazing round her, listens to the sound
Of hostile footsteps:–No! they die away–
Nor noise remains, but of the cataract,
Or surly breeze of night, that mutters low
Among the thickets, where she trembling seeks
A temporary shelter–clasping close
To her quick-throbbing heart her sleeping child . . . (1797)
from Smith’s The Emigrants

Smith deserves to given her rightful place in the literature of the era and be read for pleasure by more modern readers than the usual academic specialists at long last. I’m so glad Valancourt made an appealing compact edition.

Ellen

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Outlander 1:10 & 11: babies & witchcraft accusations; again the question of genre

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) nursing an abandoned neonate (called a changeling), 1 Outlander 10 (By the Pricking of My Thumb)

Jamie: Been looking all over for ye.
Claire: I met Geillis Duncan on the road.
Jamie. She told me where ye were. It’s dangerous to be out here alone, Sassenach.
Claire: Don’t tell me you believe in fairies and changelings and all that.
Jamie: It’s not about what I believe. These people, they’ve never been more than a day’s walk from the place they were born.
They hear no more of the world than what Father Bain tells them in the kirk on a Sunday. And for the parents of that child, it might comfort them a bit to think it’s the changeling that died. And think of their own child, healthy and well, living forever with the fairies.
Claire: Take me home.

Claire explaining her small pox vaccination scar before she goes on to tell she is “from the future,” 1 Outlander 11 (The Devil’s Mark)

Claire: I was born on October the 20th in the year 1918. That’s 200 years from now. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?
Jamie: I hear you.
Claire: You think I’m raving mad, don’t you?
Jamie: No. No, I believe ye, Sassenach. So I dinna understand it a bit, not yet. But I trust you. I trust your word, your heart. And I trust there is a truth between us. So whatever you tell me I will believe ye. Can you tell me more?
Claire: I was a combat nurse in the British army.
Claire over-voice: Before we left the church, she [Geillis] said to me, “1968.” I told him everything. The whole story came pouring out of me like a cataract of water over a broken dam.
Jamie: Tell me again about the, uh the stones.
Claire over-voice: I didn’t realize how badly I needed to tell someone, anyone, until that moment.
Claire back to Jamie: The Scots never had a chance.
Claire over-voice: He listened.
Claire to Jamie: Thousands were killed at Culloden.
Claire over-voice: He didn’t understand it all, but he listened.

Friends and readers,

Among the few pleasant and unresolved escape pleasures of this past two (politically potentially disastrous) weeks, I’ve carried on reading Bowden’s Descendants of Waverley, Sarah Waters’s The Daphne DuMaurier Companion, an essay by (with me) a favorite woman poet, Anne Stevenson, on Gabaldon, and best of all both watching the series yet more and listening to an unabridged Gabaldon’s Outlander text read aloud by Davina Porter.. It may not seem to the reader or viewer of the mini-series and books the most urgent question is, What genre do this text and film belong to? and yet this question is the one that most intrigues me, for if I could answer it, I would know what to look for as central to what I am reading and watching.

The book seems to me to fall into the historical romance category. It is woman’s erotica; the density, accuracy, and centrality of historical events which are the groundwork of the historical novel are not here. There is no political vision. At the same time we are seduced into a seemingly densely realized historical period, regional setting, tribal identities through an identification worked up between us and Claire, the heroine, and (as we are allowed inside his mind, the POV is often his) or us and Jamie Fraser. The mini-series reaches out through the fantasy of the time-traveling motif, and continual time-shifts and parallel and contrasting characters now and then to offer (as these two episodes do) an ahistorical gothic exploring psychoanalytically innate experiences of female life presented as cultural regional curiosities and how societies have based their continuities on these while savagely punishing (hating) women for their power. Individuals caught up in an individual woman’s fate — be it husband, lover, child, sister, friend, patient — are driven to protect, control, and rely and bond — with the heroines. As part of interludes in the book we are invited to delight in historically particulars of the past presented as sensual, fascinating, delightful, or just strange on the one hand (picturesque) and terrifying on the other, especially the brutal violence accepted it seems by all. I know from reading Wallace’s Digging the Dirt how earlier fossils and skeletons from medieval times often show frightening harsh physical treatments wreaked on bodies (the corpse of Richard III is not unusual in this regard).

The two episodes have complicated plot-designs. In episode 10 Claire and Jamie are each, partly apart from one another, trying to manipulate Black Jack Randall’s Jacobite patron and protector, to write a letter which will exonerate Jamie from a charge of murdering a British officer; this involves Jamie in a dangerous duel with members of other Highland clans. At the same time, Claire finds herself thrown in with Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek), another “healer” whose own husband Geillis poisons to death. Dougal Mackenzie (Graham McTavish), brother to the Laird, and she are in love, she is pregnant with his child, and his wife has died. A seemingly unrelated sub-plot turn is Claire’s finding out about rituals used with pre-mature, non-thriving, disabled infants: they are abandoned to die using the asserted illusion that the faeries have taken away the beautiful normal baby to live forever in paradise and left this faery changeling to die in its place.

The mother watching, one of Claire’s accusers

Now having read the book I am aware that when married to Frank who in Dragonfly in Amber we learn could not sire a child Claire not knowing this longed to have a biological child; barring that, to adopt. Claire’s attempt to nurse the baby back to life give Laoghaire the opportunity to include her in an accusation that Geillis is a witch, and since Jamie has been commanded to accompany Dougal to his ancestral estates (it does not feel as pat as this in the telling, reading or viewing of the mini-series), when appointed witch-hunters come to take Geillis to prison, there is no one to stop them also taking Claire.

Episode 11 is the more quickly told though it is core material, what the previous episode exists to bring us to, and the very gothic historical romance drives towards again and again. Geillis and Claire endure a trial for witchcraft, as each charge is made by another half-hysterical female witness, bribed underling, or woman-hating priest Ned Gowan (Bill Patterson), the gentle-hearted but intelligent lawyer defends them.

Much shrouded in darkness

However, since the population and jury are throbbingly eager to whip and then “burn the bitch” (reminding me of the crowds salivating around Trump), Ned eventually loses the argument. Another in the nick of time rescue by Jamie, too late to prevent any flogging, and helped along by Geillis providing distraction with her small pox vaccination site:

and sudden confession (prompted by Ned in a conference before) that she seduced Claire and is herself pregnant with some devil’s child. She is hauled out with her belly heaving (she may not be burnt as we are told pregnancy precludes burning), but with at least a quarter of the over an hour episode is left for Claire to tell Jamie at long last where she has come from, how, who she is. The sequence where Claire attempts to account for her experience to Jamie is riveting, all the more so as most of what she says is off-stage implied (as it would be repetitious for us to be told what we have been experiencing for 11 episodes.) In terms of time in the episode, the telling needs little (as there is simply an indication through montage she has told what we have witnessed for 11 episodes); the emphasis is on Jamie’s reaction: at first shocked, he does believe her makes him an intensely sympathetic male.

He all nobility and self-sacrifice (as males in certain kinds of women’s romance often are) curses himself for having beaten her when she was just trying to get back to her husband. All magnanimity he leads her to the head stone to travel back; she almost does it in front of us (as we hear the wind rise), but he pulls her back. He then says he “wasna ready.” He will go further off by himself and wait all night. If she does not return to him, he will know she returned to her time-home. We watch as she almost does go to the stone, but now she draws back suddenly. As dawn emerges and we see his fire, we are not sure the POV is her, but it turns out to be. It takes all night for her to decide (but decide she does) her home is no longer England anywhere 1945 but Lallybroch 1743. Her first words are those she used as a nurse after she had taken care of a WW2 man: “On your feet, soldier.”

Paratext for each episode

Sing me a song of a lass that is gone Say, could that lass be I? Merry of soul she sailed on a day, Over the sea to Skye. Billow and breeze, Islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun. All that was good, All that was fair, All that was me is gone. Sing me a song of a lass that is gone Say, could that lass be I? Merry of soul, she sailed on a day. Over the sea To Skye

What I stress for this evening are the “fantasias” projected during the thread Geillis appears in. Outlander, the book, opens with a Claire whose tone reminded me of Lockwood in Wuthering Heights: supercilious, half-ready to quietly mock her scholarly husband with his interest in antiquarian archeaology, Claire’s tone is transformed to one of emotional engagement with that very past she didn’t want to hear about. The poetics and dramaturgies of slow juxtaposition and doppelgangers come in to play in the film episodes. The film version drops all this, and makes each venture into the past, each juxtaposition earnest and serious and magical.

Bowden seems to feel the writer’s apprehension of the unknowability of the past is central to all these linked genres, and I’m trying to see if it’s the core here too. In her book Claire is ever sceptical and utterly uninterested in books unless they concern her immediately. She seems to have no ambition beyond the female immanent. So she would have no drive to make her adventure public; she would not want to shame Frank over bringing up Jamie’s daughter. Bowden says the finest historical fictions undermine their own bases: that may be true of the Booker Prize kinds of fictions. I know the unknowability of what is being reported is central to Graham’s The Forgotten Story (a Cornish tale set in 1898) and Graham Swift’s Waterlands (what should be reported as history of all that occurs or is said to?). It is at times in Gabaldon’s novel almost a ghost story where the narrative takes comfort in the stone and flesh and physical reality of the people around her.

Bowden says also the all three types make the historical period and/or setting a character in the book. The historical fiction drives to recreate, the historical romance to exploit, gothic to undermine. I love periods embedded in periods, utterly different takes on what has happened from different narrators. Again and again the historians of recent historical fiction, historical romance, gothic, science fiction confound their types. I want in the reviews and blogs I write and teaching I do to distinguish in order to vindicate historical romance, a woman’s genre (except when of the action-adventure chivalric hero type in Lorna Doone for example), with feminized heroes, and distinguish the types to understand the function they play in people’s lives. Why do I love the Poldark novels so and am so engaged by the realization in films?

Bowden’s idea seems to be we can unlock and understand the power of historical fictions and romance by seeing them as part of a literary and imaginative community continuum. I know there are neolithic stones all over the British Isles. Still standing today are 1,500 castles in Scotland (History Today, 66:11 [Nov 2016], 35. I feel the power of the writing that gets all this down and responds to it is what’s important and we can unlock the power, unpack the sources by acknowledging the drive in these fictions into verisimilitude, probability, enough complex inwardness in the characters and a mystical longing to get back into the past

Frank (Tobias Menzies) and Claire among the stones

Ross (Robin Ellis) and Demelza (Angharad Rees) walking away along the Cornish beach at the conclusin of Poldark‘s first season (1976)

So, the question is, according to Bowden, not whether the Outlander series of books is historical romance, and the Poldark series, historical fictions, but “what kind of world is brought into being here, what thematic topoi,” what (I add) the situation of the speaker? More largely, what our historical situation today and how does it relate to what is presented? how we do feel about history today? Gabaldon’s book is frivolous, the narrator uses a supercilious faux cheerful tone, but she is drawn into erotic historical romance (unsurprisingly) with modern candour and (surprisingly) a post-colonial stance in the history part of her formula.

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From the film adaptation of The English Patient

I’m now set to teach three Booker Prize historical fiction at the OLLI at Mason this fall (J.L. Carr’s Month in the Country, Ondjaatje’s English Patient) and am thinking of “doing” “The World of Daphne Dumaurier” there in the summer (including King’s General). Tonight I was reading in the third Book of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and should reread Rose Tremaine’s Restoration and re-watched the last two episode of Andrew Davies’s 2016 too-thin film adaptation of War and Peace. It’s all about death, the past in the present, and as I listen to Davina Porter reading Outlander aloud and hear Claire rejoicing to feel she is surrounded by hard stones, and the people around her thick flesh-and-blood, I find myself wondering if Outlander and its predecessors are ghost-stories, and Waverley and its progeny politicized history.

Ellen

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